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State your case: How well do you know Florida?
By Craig Pittman, Times Staff Writer
Published November 23, 2007
7th annual Florida Quiz
Board up the windows and check your emergency supplies. It's that time again. No, not hurricane season. Something scarier - presidential campaign season.
The election is a year away, and some candidates have already begun sticking to Florida like love bugs on an 18-wheeler. (Oh, hello again, Rudy! No, go ahead and take that call from your wife . . .) But some of them don't seem well-versed on the issues that matter to us (oil drilling in the Everglades? huh?)
A flock of candidates will descend on St. Petersburg on Wednesday for a debate, so this seems like a good chance to find out whether they know much about the Sunshine State other than how many electoral votes we have (27, at least until the Supreme Court says otherwise).
1. Many of Florida's 67 counties are named after politicians (like Sen. Samuel Pasco), developers (like Barron Collier) or soldiers (like Gen. Robert E. Lee). Orange County is one of the few named for something else - but originally its settlers called it something more reflective of their living conditions:
A) Stinkymuck
B) Mosquito
C) Rattlesnake
D) Hotternhell
2. Florida covers how many time zones?
A) One
B)Two
C) Three
D) Depends on who's counting the votes
3. One Central Florida city boasts that it has so many spiritualists that it is the "Psychic Center of the World." The city is:
A) Cassadaga
B) Cassaba
C) Castillo City
D) Callmecrazy
4. Gov. Charlie Crist has spent his first year in office hanging out with Hollywood stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Brad Pitt and Robert Redford. But so far only one Florida governor has been cool enough to appear in a James Bond movie. Name him. BONUS QUESTION:Name the movie.
5. Who was Billy Bowlegs?
A) Florida State's first Heisman Trophy winner
B) Santo Trafficante's favorite button man
C) A Seminole Indian chief
D) The visionary inventor of the roadside souvenir stand
6. A famous architect designed Florida Southern College in Lakeland. He was:
A) Howard Roark
B)Addison Mizener
C) I.M. Pei
D) Frank Lloyd Wright
7. The state wildlife commission voted this year to increase protection for the lowly gopher tortoise. In the 1930s, though, the slow-moving critters were considered fine dining by poor Floridians, who called them:
A) Hoover chickens
B) Turduckens
C) Possum on the half shell
D) Almost as tasty as fricasseed manatee
8. True or false: Jimmy Buffett was born in Key Largo.
9. Florida's oldest sinkhole, now a tourist attraction, is:
A) The Devil's Millhopper
B) Beelzebub's Divot
C) The Floridan Aquifer
D) Jimmy Hoffa's Final Resting Place @ Epcot
10. Not long after Rosa Parks sparked the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott in Alabama, a similar bus boycott began in a Florida city. It lasted a year and ended with the bus company, its profits declining, persuading city officials to rescind the ordinance requiring segregation. Name the city.
11. In the 1920s, a famous writer who loved fishing in the Florida Keys was among the first to preach the idea of "catch-and-release." The angling author was none other than:
A) Ernest Hemingway
B) John Dos Passos
C) Zane Grey
D) Kilgore Trout
12. True or false: In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Florida law that required prayer and Bible readings in public schools as a way to promote "good moral training, of a life of honorable thought and good citizenship."
13. Many readers of Patrick Smith's novel A Land Remembered praise the multigenerational saga for encapsulating the Florida experience. The name of the family whose exploits Smith chronicles from the Civil War to the 1960s is:
A) The Bushes
B) The Ewings
C) The Riches
D) The MacIveys
14. The first female Death Row inmate to be executed in Florida since 1848 was:
A) Aileen Wuornos
B)Laura Upthegrove
C) Judi Buenoano
D) Katherine Harris
15. True or false: Although it draws relatively few visitors, at 1.5-million acres Everglades National Park is the largest national park in the country.
16. In the 1960s, when Walt Disney was quietly assembling the 27,000 acres of Central Florida that would someday become the Magic Kingdom, his representatives bought up property using such obviously fake names as:
A) M.T. Lott
B) Donald D. Uck
C) E. Ticket
D) Michael Eisner
17. When CIA agent E. Howard Hunt recruited four of the Watergate burglars from Miami, he picked people who had worked with him on another covert operation that went badly awry. Name it.
18. In 1990, a South Florida rap group called 2 Live Crew made headlines nationwide when the members were arrested by Broward County deputies on obscenity charges. At the time, the lead singer went by his version of a Star Wars character's name. He wanted to be called:
A) Li'l Darth
B) Bubba the Hutt
C) Luke Skyywalker
D) Yo-yo-yo Yoda
19. True or false: In 1970 an oil field was discovered in Florida that for a time ranked with Alaska's Prudhoe Bay.
20. Three of these four famous people died in Miami. One didn't. Pick the one who died somewhere else.
A) Bob Marley
B) Al Capone
C) Jim Morrison
D) Maurice Gibb
Quiz Answers
1. B. From 1824 to 1845, Orange County was known as Mosquito County. Since there are no longer any commercial citrus groves in Orange County, perhaps it's time for a new name - Outletmall? Sprawlville?
2. B. Two. Most of Florida is on Eastern time, but when you cross the Apalachicola River, you enter Central time. The line splits Gulf County, so the main courthouse in Port St. Joe is on Eastern while a satellite courthouse in Wewahitchka is an hour behind.
3. The answer is A, Cassadaga. But you psychics knew that already, didn't you?
4. Republican Gov. Bob Martinez, the former mayor of Tampa. BONUS: He played a Key West customs officer in Licence to Kill, 1989.
5. C. Bowlegs fought in the Second Seminole War, then went home to the Big Cypress Swamp to grow bananas. One night in 1855, Army surveyors hacked his banana plants to bits "because they wanted 'to see old Billy cut up,'" historian Gail Clement wrote. The incident led to the Third Seminole War, which lasted three years. After his granddaughter was captured, Bowlegs surrendered. During the Civil War, he joined the Army he had once fought, serving as a Union captain.
6. D. In 1933 Florida Southern's president, Ludd Spivey, sent a telegram to Frank Lloyd Wright asking his help creating a "great education temple in Florida." Wright took 20 years to plan and build the campus. On his frequent visits, according to the school's history, "Lakeland residents would turn out to see him in his preferred attire which often included a flowing cape, beret or pork pie hat, and carrying his walking stick."
7. A. The name "Hoover chickens" was a snide reference to Depression-era President Herbert Hoover, whose 1928 campaign promised a chicken in every pot. ("Possum on the halfshell," by the way, refers to armadillo a la roadkill.)
8. False. Though he is now Florida's most famous tropical troubadour, the king of the Parrotheads was born on Christmas Day 1946 in Pascagoula, Miss.
9. A. Geologists say the 120-foot-deep Devil's Millhopper in Gainesville formed nearly 20,000 years ago. Early settlers used gristmills with a funnel-shaped "hopper" on top that held the grain. Because fossilized bones and teeth were found at the bottom of the sink, the settlers said the sinkhole was a millhopper that fed bodies to the devil.
10. Tallahassee. In May 1956, Wilhelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson, students at Florida A&M, got on a city bus, paid their 10-cent fare and sat in the white section in the front of the bus. The driver ordered the women to move to the back of the bus. They refused and were arrested, charged with inciting a riot, thus initiating a yearlong racial confrontation that ended with the city commission's capitulation.
11. C. Zane Grey, a former Ohio dentist who became a bestselling author of Westerns such as Riders of the Purple Sage,held 10 world saltwater fishing records and was the first to catch a 1,000-pound marlin on a rod and reel.
12. True. The case was Chamberlin vs. Dade County Board of Public Instruction. The Florida Supreme Court disagreed strongly: "To say that the vast majority of students in the Dade County public school system are to be foreclosed of the privilege of living a few moments each day with the words of the Bible, the greatest of all literature . . . because a minority might suffer some imagined and nebulous confusion, is to approach the ridiculous."
13. D. Smith's novel begins with Tobias and Emma MacIvey settling in a hostile Florida wilderness in 1858, follows their son Zecheriah as he begins to acquire and clear the land and then ends with their grandson, Sol, who becomes a real estate speculator.
14. C. Judi Buenoano was nicknamed "The Black Widow" by a Pensacola prosecutor because she collected more than $240,000 in insurance money from the deaths of her husband, her son and a boyfriend. She was executed in 1998. (Wuornos, the famous serial killer, was No.2, executed in 2002.)
15. False. The park, established by President Harry Truman in 1947, is the largest east of the Rocky Mountains. But it is dwarfed by the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska, which covers 13.2-million acres.
16. A. The name M.T. Lott (empty lot, get it?) also appears on one of the windows of the "businesses" that line Main Street in Disney World.
17. The Bay of Pigs. The four from Miami were Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Rolando Eugenio Martinez and Frank Sturgis, and the fifth burglar was James W. McCord Jr. of the Committee for the Re-election of the President. When they were caught breaking into Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel, one had Hunt's phone number in his pocket - a slip that led to the unraveling of the whole conspiracy.
18. C. Luther Campbell, a.k.a. Luke Skyywalker, and the other two members of 2 Live Crew were busted during a performance at Club Futura in Hollywood. Powered by the controversy, their album As Nasty As They Wanna Be zoomed up the sales charts. They were acquitted by a jury that barely refrained from laughing during the testimony.
19. True. The Humble Oil Co. and the Louisiana Land and Exploration Co. discovered what is now known as the Jay Oil Field about an hour north of Pensacola, among farms growing cotton and peanuts. Between 1970 and 2005 the field produced 417-million barrels of oil.
20. C. Though Jim Morrison was once arrested in Miami, he died in a bathtub in Paris.
Scoring
Give yourself one point for each correct answer, including the bonus question.
21 right: Feel free to skip our January primary and proceed straight to the nominating caucus.
15-20: Very impressive, Sen. Edwards - and what a lovely haircut, too!
10-14: Nice try, but get your campaign bus off the interstate and go visit some voters on the back roads.
5-9: Hey, do your homework or we'll send you back to Law & Order.
Fewer than 5: Oh well, there's always 2012.
Times researcher John Martin contributed to this story.
[Last modified November 21, 2007, 17:18:18]
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