Let Yer Freak Flag Fly, Florida!

January 25 is National Florida Day.

Two of my brothers have retired to the Sunshine State, and they keep inviting me to come down for a visit, which I have half a plan to do. The origin of this post lies in the fact that all my vacations tend to be busman’s holidays; my Yankee work ethic demands that something USEFUL is always happening, even on vacation. So I started to lay out a talk about several things I find interesting or worth celebrating about the state. And then I realized how silly that is, since nobody needs or wants me to do that! So I share it here, in the same spirit as my recent post on New Jersey. (I have no particular plan to do all 50 states, btw! Though surprisingly few states aren’t interesting enough to rate such a treatment. For real!)

And anyway Florida can use some props, now more than ever since “Florida Man” is the new Boogie Man. To the rest of the country Florida has come to seem like an open air mental asylum, a place where meth heads bite people in the face, drunks wrestle alligators, and sink holes swallow up trailer parks. Mar a Logo is there, and it’s where Carole Baskin keeps her tigers. It’s also the home of NASCAR and Spring Break, which you must concede are guilty pleasures at best, and if you want to get all up in my grill defending them I’ll be glad to direct you to the nearest short pier upon which to take a stroll. (Because I never said I was above enjoying either of those two past-times, only that they’re guilty pleasures. And I’m getting pretty damn tired of knee-jerk internet outrage about fundamentally jokey matters). Anyway, in sum and in general, sometimes it seems that Florida is the most likely Ground Zero for the events predicted in the Book of Revelations to manifest themselves. Though in the opening beats, who would notice?

Yet there are several elements of Florida history and culture that ought to be very interesting to the show biz lovers who read this blog. And — and? We are now at the century mark from the famous Jazz Age land boom that made Florida what it is today, so this where we will begin…

By rights, I ought to hate Florida for a reason I haven’t mentioned yet: its success as a resort came at the expense of MY part of the country. The chronology goes like this: around the Gilded Age, train travel made seaside resorts and playgrounds out of regions a little outside of NYC. These included my beloved Coney Island, as well as Long Island (where I currently live), all the way to Rhode Island (where I’m from). Then, towards the turn of the century, new rail lines extended further south into Florida, opening up beaches that were even more attractive, and — still better — warm year-round. Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot (1959) is a nice depiction of what it was like down there in the ’20s: folks got to Miami by train, and stayed in big hotels very much like the ones in the northeast. Another good movie to watch in a similar light is Preston Sturges’s The Palm Beach Story (1942). The process continued throughout the 20th century, and accelerated with the advent of air travel.

The ad shown above documents the famous Land Boom of the early 1920s that represented an early peak in this steady period of growth. Around 1924 is when it peaked. Movie actor Thomas Meighan (who owned one of the most fabulous mansions in Great Neck) lost his shirt trying to create a new development down there he hoped would be the “Great Neck of the South”. Fans of the 1929 Marx Brothers movie The Cocoanuts have experienced a satirical send-up of the craze. Hundreds of buyers and investors were persuaded to bet on the growth of the region without knowing all of the facts, e.g., that a lot of the state is made up of swampland, and the state gets slammed with hurricanes every few years. Of course neither the geography nor the meteorology of Florida are uniformly terrible, which is why it has managed to prosper in spite of all.

We will now spotlight some specific regions that interest your correspondent in particular:

Sarasota

Something else Florida stole from New England. In 1927, the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus changed its winter quarters from Bridgeport (P.T. Barnum’s home city and pet project) and moved it to Sarasota, where it has been for almost a century. Meanwhile, Bridgeport has never recovered since. As will happen, the presence of Ringling resulted in an expansion of circus culture in the town. Ringling operates a circus museum, and there is also Circus Sarasota as well as a Circus Arts Conservatory there. And nearby, this:

Gibtown

The famous retirement community of sideshow freaks (officially known as Gibsonton). Its famous inhabitants included Grady Stiles (a.k.a. Lobster Boy) and his family, the conjoined Hilton Sisters (who ran a fruit stand), Bill Durks “The Man with Three Eyes” and his wife Mildred, the Alligator Skinned Girl, World’s Tallest Man Al Tomaini and his wife legless Jeannie Smith, and dozens of others. At one time the town featured the country’s only post office with special height-adjusted counters for little people, and liberal ordinances about the keeping of exotic pets, such as elephants. Naturally, the community came into being after circuses started wintering in the state. Since Freak Shows (ones that specialize in the born different, at any rate) are mostly a thing of the past, that element of Gibtown has died out. But Gibson remains the home of the International Independent Showmen’s Association and Museum (which keeps sideshow memory alive) and the town also hosts the country’s largest annual carnival convention.

Movie Studios of Jacksonville

Little known fact! From roughly 1907 to 1917, Jacksonville was home to several silent movie studios, in most cases the winter facilities for major studios still based in New York and New Jersey. Thanhouser, Kalem, and Lubin all had movie plants down there. Lubin’s (known as Lubin South) was later bought by the Vim Comedy Company. One of its stars was a young Oliver Hardy, which was how I first learned about it. There was also the Eagle Studio, later known as Norman Studios, which made race films. Its facility still stands, and has become a museum. Obviously, the studios all moved away from Jacksonville when everyone figured out that Hollywood is an even better year-round location: not just warm, but dry, and hurricane free.

Miami

Well, of course. Miami first became a resort, as we mentioned above, starting in the 1890s, expanding with renewed vigor in the 1920s. In the ’40s came the nightclubs like Copa City, where acts like the Ritz Brothers, Josephine Baker, and Mickey Rooney played, giving Miami a new glamor not unlike that of Las Vegas. The Fontainebleu Hotel arrived in 1954. Fans of Jerry Lewis know it from his 1960 movie The Bellboy. Jackie Gleason became the town’s biggest booster. He loved it so much he built a TV studio there in the ’60s, just so he could shoot his weekly TV show there.

Weeki-Wachee Springs

Though I have been a huge fan of Mermaids and Mermaid Culture for over 30 years (thanks to Coney Island’s Mermaid Parade), I didn’t learn about Weeki-Wachee Springs until I saw the documentary Merpeople (2023) last year. The Weeki-Wachee Springs attraction opened in 1947 — it was the first resort to offer shows featuring women wearing fish-tails, swimming and dancing in underwater tanks.

Cape Canaveral/Kennedy Space Center

NASA’s launch facilities on Florida’s Atlantic Coast were naturally a major point of interest for me in my boyhood, when I used to watch those Apollo launches live on television. They’d been in operation since the dawn of the space race in the ’50s. The sitcom I Dream of Jeannie is set there, and — even sexier — so is Doris Wishman’s Nude on the Moon.

Cape Coral Gardens

This one is strictly my own trip; you don’t have to come along if you don’t want to. Cape Coral provided the setting for one of my favorite movies The Fat Spy (1966), perhaps the only beach party movie to be shot in Florida (on the Gulf side, no less) rather than California. Most of it was shot on local beaches but the climactic scenes were shot at Cape Coral Gardens, a botanical attraction known for its scenic footbridges. In the film it’s the supposed location of Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth.

Orlando

Good on Walt Disney for locating his second major theme park on the east coast in 1971, and for making it even more fabulous than the first. And then posthumously magnifying the magnificence with the futuristic Epcot Center in 1982. Meantime, Sea World had been established in 1973, interfacing with nearby Busch Gardens (est. 1959). Universal Studios opened their own second theme park in Orlando in 1990. Of course the coming of the Disney Parks helped kill Coney Island, however, so there’s that.

Of course, if what scientists tell us is true, the entirety of Florida may become another sort of theme park before many more decades pass — Water World. As sea levels rise, I picture that peninsula getting slimmer and slimmer. All the senior citizens will be retiring to house boats, I guess, and eventually ALL of Florida will be the Keys. That’s when the Mermaids of Weeki-Wachee will swim out of their tanks and commence their benevolent and enlightened thousand-year reign. I know all about it because I read it in the pages of The Sun and the Weekly World News, which were published in — wait for it — Boca Raton, Florida. God damn, what a crazy state.