Forehead-slappers and barkers at the moon went nuts a few weeks ago when everyone’s favorite conservative financial rag, The Wall Street Journal, cited the University of Florida as the best public university in these United States. Not to demean UF, which has been bouncing around the Top Ten for years, but the WSJ is owned by Rupert Murdock of Fox News fame, who is a great pal of Florida Governor Ron the Con DeSantis, who could use a nice boost. Governor Ron is trailing his creator, Donald Trump by the length of the Oregon Trail in their battle for the Republican nomination for Big Cheese and his prospects grow grimmer by the day.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Siobhan and Bill have been prowling the local wilderness looking for an available homestead for friends with limited funds, not a simple task. Like most of Florida, Marion, Alachua and Levy counties are overrun with property seekers of every stripe throwing real money in all directions looking for a place to call home. We pulled up at a modest residence with a usable mobile home just off Williston Road in Micanopy about 15 minutes from G’ville and three other needy customers followed us down the driveway. In our own Fairfield neighborhood, a Colorado woman just paid $495,000 for a four-acre lot with a small house and a tiny hay barn that was barely worth $100,000 five years ago. Realtors call us frequently, begging for a deal, any deal, on our place, which is great fun for Siobhan’s employee Julie Osborne, who has taken to asking for sums worthy of the Palace of Versailles.
All of this to say that Florida, despite killer hurricanes, the Red State Blues, social diseases raging through The Villages, crazed Scientologists, alligators in your birdbath, sinkholes under the living room and universal recognition as sharkbite capital of the world, is more popular than ever. It’s got the fever, it’s hot, it can’t be stopped, the hills are alive with the sound of trailers. As the holidays near, all roads lead to Orlando or Daytona or South Beach. People are moving here from California and Bombay and the Firth of Forth and nobody’s talking them out of it.
Coastlines eroding from giant storms? So what. Rising waters in the streets of Miami Beach? We’ll get canoes. They’re coming and there’s no stopping them. Pretty soon the entire populations of Michigan and New Jersey will live in the Sunshine State. Close the door, they’re coming in the windows! Georgia, would you please take some of our leftovers?
We live in a paradise that has fire ants which can actually kill you. We have scorpions and spiders, and pythons bigger than dinosaurs. We have the infamous Interstate 75, which makes the traffic in the Mad Max movies look like a day on the carousel. We have summer months where you can fry mutton on the sidewalk and deranged citizens who toss alligators through order windows at the drive-thru. Nobody cares. They can’t wait to get here and join in the fun. Mickey lives here, right, and he’s no fool.
“Where the hell else can you go where someone will pay you to dress up like Goofy? asks Eddie McNamara, a Tulsa transplant now working at Disney. “This is the best job I ever had.”
“I came down for the Spring Break scene and stayed for the Hard Rock Casino,” reports professional gambler Frank Scuderi of Hollywood
“Everyone wants to date a mermaid,” smiles undersea dancer Marilu Hendricks of Weeki Wachi Springs.
“You got everything here,” testifies Al from Asbury Park. “You want beach, you got Anastasia Island or a million other choices. You want springs, cave-diving, nature, you got north Florida. You want college and pro sports, you got the SEC in Gainesville and three NFL teams. You got raw beauty in the Keys and Everglades. You want corrupt politics, you got Tallahassee. It’s a cornucopia here, you got everything.”
But long-time High Springs resident Farnell Cole says it’s simpler than all that. The small-town songwriter smiles, leans back in his chair, hoists a glass and says “When other folks say “blizzard, we Floridians think Dairy Queen.”
Where else can you go to the beach on February 14th? No, Greg Barriere, it only counts if you get out of the car.
A Short History Of Early Florida
Back before the days of Arthur Godfrey, interstate highways and air-conditioning, nobody lived in Florida except crazy fools like Ponce de Leon, who was looking for the Fountain of Youth in St. Augustine. Noone can say whether he found it or not because a few years later one of the rambunctious local natives shot a fatal arrow through his thigh and even the Fountain of Youth has its limitations.
That didn’t stop Hernando de Soto from coming to Florida in search of Indian gold. Hernando and his boys wandered around for four years with no luck, then headed west, bound for Mexico. De Soto barely made it to the Mississippi River, where he died in misery in 1542. They named a car after him, though.
In 1559, a yahoo named Tristan de Luna led another attempt by Europeans to colonize Florida, establishing a settlement on Pensacola Bay. His encampment was soon set upon by Republican reactionaries and poor Tristan was forced to flee to Havana, where his parents owned a night club.
Despite the lack of success by these Spanish conquistadors, their stories fascinated Europeans. In 1562, the French Protestant Jean Ribault explored the area and two years later fellow Frenchman Rene Goulaine de Laudonniere established Fort Caroline at the mouth of the St. John’s River near present-day Jacksonville, so now we know who to blame for that blight on humanity.
The successful French adventurers lit a match under the Spanish, who promptly dispatched Pedro Menendez de Aviles to St. Augustine, where he set up shop on 1565. It turned out to be the first permanent European settlement in the United States and we might be singing his praises if Pedro hadn’t offed all the French settlers. Two years later and still in a snit, the French sent Dominique de Gourgues to St. Augustine to recapture the town and kill all their soldiers.
The British gained control of Florida in 1763 in exchange for Havana. Good deal, huh? The English had ambitious plans for the state and split it into two parts—West Florida, with it’s capital at Pensacola and East Florida with its capital at St. Augustine. The two Floridas remained loyal to Great Britain throughout the Revolutionary War but Spain captured Pensacola from the British in 1781 and in 1784 regained the rest of Florida as part of the peace treaty which ended the American Revolution. So why aren’t we all speaking Spanish these days? Oh, that’s right—we are.
Important Dates
1845---It’s official; Florida becomes the 27th state.
1861---Hold that thought; Florida secedes from the Union.
1878---Tourism dawns at Silver Springs when smartypants local Hullam Jones glues a window to the bottom of his rowboat and invents the glass-bottom boat.
1883---Florida gets railroaded. Henry Plant lays tracks on the West Coast, Henry Flagler on the East. Stuckey’s stores sprout up along the train routes and a new era of Florida travel begins.
1913---Joe’s Stone Crab opens in Miami Beach before it’s even a city, becomes world famous.
1928---The Tamiami Trail opens. Nobody notices.
1931---The first year of Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale. Nobody notices.
1953---Arthur Godfrey Show packs up its ukuleles and moves to the Kenilworth Hotel in Bal Harbour. People in Iowa suddenly discover Miami.
1959---Fidel Castro takes over Cuba. Everybody in Cuba moves north.
1960---Glendon Swarthout writes Where The Boys Are, celebrating Spring Break in Fort Lauderdale. Attendance quintuples, pregnancies mount.
1960---Surfside 6 TV show begins broadcasting from a houseboat across the street from the Fontainebleau Hotel. Show lasts a mere two years. Larry King’s WIOD radio interview program takes over houseboat.
1961---Goober falls off hotel balcony in Daytona Beach during Spring Break. Everybody keeps drinking.
1961---Cape Canaveral sends its first manned vessel into space.
1963---Interstate 75 opens in North Florida. Governor Farris Bryant waves starting flag from roadside tower and screams, “Gentlemen, start your engines!” Pandemonium erupts and continues to this day.
1963---Bill Killeen moves to Florida, starts Charlatan magazine in Tallahassee. Deans cringe. Larry King invites Bill down for an interview.
1966---Marie Killeen visits Florida, sees her first roach at Breakwaters Hotel on South Beach.
1966---Steve Spurrier kicks field goal to beat Auburn, wins Heisman Trophy.
1966---Pamme Brewer poses nude in Charlatan. Walter Cronkite and CBS News crew visit Gainesville for raucous trial. Brewer wins, en loco parentis rule scrapped nationwide.
1967---Subterranean Circus opens in Gainesville. Hippies celebrate, everyone else runs for cover.
1971---856 poisonous snakes and a camel escape from Will Thacker’s Underground Zoo in Gainesville.
1971---Children east of the Mississippi go berserk as Walt Disney World opens outside little Orlando. Siobhan Ellison quits after one week as official greeter at Tomorrowland.
1984---Miami Vice starts up shop in Miami and spurs an Art Deco revival. Intrigued Europeans flood South Beach, spurring a topless tanning outburst. Breakwaters Hotel quadruples rates and calls Ortho.
Pretty quiet since then.
People like Florida because there’s never a dull moment here, even in Dunnellon. Things happen in the Sunshine State that don’t occur anywhere else and everybody finds out about them because we have a thing called the Sunshine Law, which makes public records available to any pseudo-journalist with a home-made ID. Otherwise, how would we know about the following?:
A Florida man named Wesley Dasher Scott, 40, was busted on a marijuana charge in Pinellas County. While being strip-searched at the P.C. Jail, Scott pulled three syringes from his rectum, but claimed they were not his. “Maybe he’s just covering his ass,” smiled the sheriff. “Who uses his butt as a medicine cabinet?”
Things were even weirder than usual at the Gainesville Walmart on a recent Monday night when a late-arriving customer barged through the wall of the store driving a large excavator he had stolen earlier that evening. “I’m a little embarrassed,” said the unidentified culprit, “I accidentally took down a few power poles in the southwest part of town on the way here and now I’ve probably lost customer privileges in my favorite store.” Think nothing of it, pardner, you’re among friends.
Sometimes you just want to go to Hooters. One Jonathan Hinkle, 28, was so inclined but low on funds so he cleverly called 911 dispatchers and told them he needed a ride to the Merritt Island restaurant because his grandmother had just suffered a stroke in the parking lot. Deputies searched unsuccessfully for three hours before finding nana at a Bingo hall where she was on a winning streak and wasn’t leaving. Hinkle was arrested on charges of misusing an emergency number and slapped in the pokey for closer inspection.
You can’t take your movies too seriously. A Pensacola man did just that recently after viewing Back To The Future convinced him that all he had to do to time travel was drive his Dodge Challenger fast enough. When he woke up, he was still in 2023, having crashed into a strip mall and seriously damaging three businesses. “I guess I didn’t go fast enough,” the perp speculated.
Finally, there’s the matter of farting in bed. There seems to be a blight of it in Florida, so no wonder Dawn Meikle, 55, of Port St. Lucie got perturbed when her husband kept mining for gas all night long. Elbowing didn’t help so Dawn resorted to kicking, punching and scratching, and a full-scale battle broke out when her husband attempted to restrain her. Hubby received ample cuts to the neck and chest and had his shirt torn open in three places. Mrs. Meikle was arrested and charged with domestic battery. “I’d do it again,” she said. “The bedroom smelled like a Chinese fish market. My jail cell was a step up.”
Florida, Land of 10,000 Flakes and counting. If you’re seriously disturbed or you just like a good pickleball game, come on down. We can always use another sucker.
That’s all, folks….
