| By Author | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Title | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Language |
|
Download this book: [ ASCII ] Look for this book on Amazon Tweet |
Title: Sun Hunting
Author: Roberts, Kenneth L.
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Sun Hunting" ***
SUN HUNTING
[Illustration]
[Illustration: President Harding, an occasional sun-hunter, slices one
into the palmettos on one of Miami Beach’s three links.]
SUN HUNTING
Adventures and Observations among the Native
and Migratory Tribes of Florida, including the
Stoical Time-Killers of Palm Beach, the
Gentle and Gregarious Tin-Canners
of the Remote Interior, and the
Vivacious and Semi-Violent
Peoples of Miami and
Its Purlieus
By
Kenneth L. Roberts
Author of _Why Europe Leaves Home_
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
COPYRIGHT, 1922
BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1922
BY THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
_Printed in the United States of America._
PRESS OF
BRAUNWORTH & CO.
BOOK MANUFACTURERS
BROOKLYN, N. Y.
TO
JUAN PONCE DE LEON
WHO FOUND IN 1513
THAT FLORIDA WASN’T ALL IT WAS
CRACKED UP TO BE
BUT WHO LIKED IT WELL ENOUGH
TO GO BACK
THIS BOOK IS APPRECIATIVELY
DEDICATED
CONTENTS
BOOK ONE
THE TIME-KILLERS
Chapter Page
I Of time-killing in the French and English
manner--and of ancient and modern American
time-slaughterers 3
II Of the passage from winter to summer in one
day’s time--and of the habitat of some rare
specimens 8
III Of the peculiar differences between two sides
of a lake--of money odors--and of the
questers after Charley Schwab 13
IV Of the apotheosis of the bicycle--of the uses of
wheel-chairs--and of the mental activities
of chair-chauffeurs 18
V Of the telegram-expecters--of the date-guessers--and
of the statistic weevils 22
VI Of the changing of clothes--of the way they
wear ’em--and of the females of the dress-ferret
species 26
VII Of the fascinations of the beach--of the sand-hounds
from Odessa and elsewhere--and of
prudes and stylish stouts 30
VIII Of the Three Day Suckers--of true smartness--and
of the Buckwheats and the dead line 36
IX Of the smartest thing in Palm Beach--of large
amounts of money--and of the Old Guard 41
X Of those who wish to crash into society--and of
those who furnish the palpitating society
items 47
XI Of the Alibi Window--of the trick flasks and
canes--of drinkers frail and fat--and of one
conception of simplicity 50
XII Of nuts in the Coconut Grove--of Bradley’s--of
the relaxation and amusement of the
Beach Club-fellows--and of gambling in
general 55
XIII Of the divergences between Bradley’s and
Monte Carlo--of the idiosyncrasies of the
little white pill--of the oddities of fat players--of
time-killing pastimes--and of the wisdom
of Dionysius the Elder 62
BOOK TWO
THE TIN-CANNERS
I Of January in the North--of the winter pastimes
of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Walnut--and
of a penetrating chill 71
II Of a pronounced change of scene--of a daring
game of chance amid tropical scents--and
of the gloating of Charles Walnut and Herman
Blister 75
III Of migrants and migrations--of the true sun-hunter
and his desires--and of his uniform,
and his fluent assortment of equipment 79
IV Of the Tin-Can Tourists of the World--of immigrants
and other unsupervised and unsolicited
visitors, national and local--of cheap
skates--and of the reason why tin-canners do
not abound in Palm Beach 87
V Of portable bungalows--of the rheumatic dairyman--of
the little ole truck--of simple
pleasures and low expenditures 96
VI Of Mrs. Jarley, the original tin-canner--of the
two schools of tin-can thought--of the hard-boiled
bachelor with the condensed outfit--and
of folk who ride on the backs of their
necks 103
VII Of the migrant from Marion--of his fears--of
land at a nickel an acre--of sand fleas and
sand spurs--of loneliness and honeymooners--and
of the doctor who was run to death 110
VIII Of the marvelous sitting ability of the tin-canners--of
the parks in which they sit--of
the horseshoe bugs and the checker and
domino beetles--of the delicate movements
of a celebrated horseshoe tosser--and of the
International Horseshoe Club 115
BOOK THREE
TROPICAL GROWTH
I Of the enthusiasm of all growing things in
Florida--of paw-paws and prospectuses and
perfect thirty-fours--of fiends in human
shape--and of the watchfulness of the natives
for insults 125
II Of hotel rates--of mosquitoes--and of the
outcry against the Shipping Board for daring
to mention Europe 130
III Of palm trees--of varieties of fish--and of fruit
and liars and Baron Munchausen 134
IV Of Miami and of tropical growth--of the growing
of a shingle into a bungalow--of the
population of Miami in 1980--and of the
pronunciation of Miami 137
V Of real-estate dealers--of the large handsome
salesmen--of noisy auctions--of absolute
and unabsolute auctions--and of prices for
every pocketbook 143
VI Of subdivisions, wise and otherwise--of landscape
atrocities--of small farms and farmers--and
of fascinating strawberry and tomato
statistics 150
VII Of the suspicious stories concerning the mango--of
the pet mango of the Miamians--and
of its superiority to other things 156
VIII Of the Everglades and of the two seasons obtaining
in that damp locality--and of grass,
fancy and otherwise 161
IX Of the old Miami and the new Miami--of differences
between Miami Beach and Palm
Beach--of the scenic possibilities in floating
coconuts and the activities of John S.
Collins 165
X Of the arrival of Carl Fisher in Miami--of
Fisher’s feverish imagination and violent
dreams--of the despair of Fisher’s friends--and
of the evolution of a jungle 172
XI Of expensive expenses and heated ice-rinks--of
lily on lily that o’erlace the sea--and of
the boneheadedness of most of the human
race 178
XII Of one-piece and two-fifths-piece bathing suits--of
the Honorable William Jennings Bryan
and his activities--of bootleggers--of the
sanctimonious Haig and Haig boys--and of
rum in general 183
XIII Of Florida fishing--of the tigerish barracuda
and the surprised-looking dolphin--of the
unconventional habits of the whip-ray and
the varying estimates of Cap’n Charley
Thompson--and of the conservative raving
of the Miami prospectuses 191
BOOK ONE
THE TIME-KILLERS
SUN HUNTING
CHAPTER I
OF TIME-KILLING IN THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH MANNER--AND OF ANCIENT AND
MODERN AMERICAN TIME-SLAUGHTERERS
People who have any time to kill are usually filled with a deep and
intense desire to kill it in some spot far removed from their usual
haunts.
This desire is not so much due to their wish to avoid making a mess
around the house as it is to the peculiar mental obsession known to the
French as “homesickness for elsewhere.” French society has been
afflicted for years with a passionate desire to be somewhere that it
isn’t. A Parisian with time to kill aims to move up to the clear cold
air of the mountains where he can kill lots of it. When he gets to the
mountains, it suddenly occurs to him that possibly he might find a
little more time to kill at the seashore, where the eye may roam at will
across the boundless and unobstructed waves. So he moves to the seashore
and at once begins to suspect that in Paris one can find more weapons
with which to cause time to die a lingering and horrible death. So he
moves back to Paris, where he once more hunts restlessly for other means
to kill time. He has the homesickness for elsewhere.
The English, too, have it to a marked degree. All Englishmen who have
incomes larger than two hundred guineas a year own tea baskets with
which they go off to distant heaths or popular woods on bank holidays
and week-ends for the purpose of killing time and burying it with the
appropriate funeral exercises. They are all the time running up to the
moors for a bit of rough shooting, or over to Switzerland for a bit of
sheeing, or off to a country-house for a bit of punting or
Scotch-drinking, or down to Brighton for a week-end. An English week-end
is sadly misnamed, inasmuch as it usually consists of Friday, Saturday,
Sunday and Monday, with a bit of Thursday and Tuesday thrown in for good
measure.
Of late years, the American people have been growing increasingly
proficient at time-killing. Forty years ago, the average American,
confronted with a little extra time, didn’t know what to do with it.
Usually he took it into the front parlor and sat around on haircloth
furniture with it, and became so sick of it that he never wanted to see
its face again. If he felt within him the primitive urge to take it
somewhere and kill it, he hesitated to do so because the roads were bad,
automobiles hadn’t been invented, and the South was only regarded as the
place where the Civil War started. Distances were great. Few people
cared to travel, because it was generally believed that a person who
absented himself from business more than one working day out of every
five years was a loose, dangerous and depraved character. One of the
most exciting things to do forty years ago was to put on a striped
flannel coat and play croquet on the front lawn.
To-day, however, America has caught the germs of “homesickness for
elsewhere” from the French and English. Florida has been reclaimed from
the swamps and the Indians, the small automobile has been put within the
means of stevedores, cooks, second-story workers and moderately
successful story-writers, and golf trousers may be worn in western towns
without causing the wearer to be shot. A road is cursed fluently by an
automobilist if it is bad enough to get his wheel-spokes muddy. The
business man who can’t knock off work for two or three months a year is
regarded pityingly as being either a back number, feeble-minded, or a
poor man. All of these things being so, Americans with time to kill can
take it farther from home and kill it with more thoroughness than any
other people on earth. They go into their time-killing with more energy
than do Europeans. The European is usually content to do his
time-killing within three hundred miles of home. The American is never
content unless he can travel from fifteen hundred to three thousand
miles, and wind up with an orgy of time-killing that would make a
professional executioner look by comparison like the president of a
Dorcas society.
CHAPTER II
OF THE PASSAGE FROM WINTER TO SUMMER IN ONE DAY’S TIME--AND OF THE
HABITAT OF SOME RARE SPECIMENS
It is in Florida that the American time-killer may be found in all his
glory; and the largest, most perfect and most brilliantly colored
specimens are to be found at Palm Beach. It is at Palm Beach that one
finds the very rare variety measuring twenty minutes from tip to tip.
One can best understand why it is that winter-bound northerners select
Florida as the scene of their time-killing by following in their
footsteps and boarding a Florida-bound night train in a northern city
during a heavy blizzard.
Early the next morning, when one disentangles the bedclothes from his
neck and elevates the trick shade of the sleeping-car window after the
usual severe struggle, one finds that the snow has nearly disappeared.
The eye is wearied by the flat plains of North Carolina, relieved only
by negro shanties and scrub pines. By afternoon North Carolina has
merged into South Carolina. The flatness continues with unbounded
enthusiasm; but there is no snow and the air is milder. The pines are
marked with peculiar herring-bone gashes, whence flows turpentine, the
painter’s delight. Piney odors, vaguely reminiscent of tar soap, sheep
dip and cold-remedies, float through the half-opened windows. Later that
evening, as one returns to the dining-car to recover the hat which one
has forgotten in the excitement of tipping the waiter, one hears
frequent shrill frog-choruses from the pools beside the tracks. By
midnight one is ringing for the porter to tear himself from his slumbers
among the shoes in the smoking compartment and start the electric fans.
One’s rest is troubled by the heat and the increasing shrillness of the
frog-choruses.
On the second morning the rising sun discloses a limitless expanse of
flatness, dotted with occasional palm trees and covered with a scrubby
growth of near-palms or palmettos. The sun is hot and red. A black
ribbon of asphalt road parallels the railroad; and at intervals along it
appear flocks of flivvers nesting drowsily among the palms and the
tin-can tourists. There is plenty of glaring white sand, and plenty of
stagnant water. The air is full of swallows, and an occasional pelican
flops languidly alongside the train, gazing pessimistically at the
passengers.
The traveler perspires lightly and marvels at the thought that it was
only night before last when he slipped on a piece of ice and got half a
peck of snow down the back of his neck. He remembers that it is a great
and glorious country--a fact which his contemplation of the antics of
Congress had caused him to forget.
Occasionally the train flashes past little towns sitting hotly in the
sun and sand among a few orange and grapefruit trees. This is Florida,
and the land looks as though it were worth about a nickel an acre--just
as it has always looked until some one develops it and begins to sell
off corner lots at a paltry five thousand dollars apiece.
Around breakfast time--a mere thirty-six hours since the train emerged
from its northern blizzard and snow-drifts--the train crosses a
shimmering strip of blue water and comes to rest beside a hotel that
seems, at first glance, to be at least ten miles long. It stretches off
so far into the distance that people up at the other end appear to be
hull-down. In reality it is only about half a mile long, and only about
five hundred times larger than the Mousam House at Kennebunk, Maine.
On the station platform are women in satin skirts, gauzy waists and
diamond bracelets. Young men in white trousers dash up and down the
platform on bicycles. The air is soft and balmy. Palm trees stretch off
into the distance in every direction. Wheel-chairs, propelled by
dignified-looking negroes who sit on bicycle-seats directly behind the
chairs and pedal vigorously, move hither and yon in a stately manner.
Through the palm trees one catches glimpses of white yachts riding at
anchor on blue water.
A wheel-chair stops at the edge of the station platform. In it are
seated a dignified gentleman in white flannels, and a gracious lady in a
satin skirt and a sweater covered with neat lightning effects in red,
green and orange zigzags. One wonders whether this can be J. Pierpont
Morgan or Charley Schwab. Then one hears the gracious lady whisper
excitedly to the dignified gentleman: “Do you suppose that’s Charley
Schwab or J. Pierpont Morgan over there?” and hears the dignified
gentleman reply in a hoarse undertone: “Shut up, or they’ll think we’re
boobs!”
This is Palm Beach, the very center of the winter time-killing
industry.
CHAPTER III
OF THE PECULIAR DIFFERENCES BETWEEN TWO SIDES OF A LAKE--OF MONEY
ODORS--AND OF THE QUESTERS AFTER CHARLEY SCHWAB
Palm Beach is a long narrow strip of land which is separated from the
mainland by a long narrow body of water known as Lake Worth, and by a
sudden increase in living expenses. On the mainland side of Lake Worth
is the rising young city of West Palm Beach, where one is not afraid--as
he usually is in Palm Beach--to offer a storekeeper or a newsboy a
nickel lest he should regard it as some strange, unknown foreign coin.
West Palm Beach is full of ordinary people who are unacquainted with
wheel-chairs and think nothing of walking two or three blocks, or even
as much as half a mile if the necessity arises. They frequently get
along for days at a time without spending more than two dollars and
eighty-five cents a day.
West Palm Beach has the same sort of climate that Palm Beach has, but
the air of the place is somehow different. At Palm Beach one has the
feeling that he is breathing the very same air that the world’s greatest
bankers and society people are breathing, whereas over in West Palm
Beach one doesn’t know or care who has been breathing the air. That is
why so many people find the Palm Beach climate very invigorating, but
always feel that the climate of West Palm Beach leaves them a little
weak and tired.
Palm Beach, then, is a long narrow strip of land with the ocean on one
side and Lake Worth on the other. The largest hotel, which has room for
thirteen hundred paying guests at any one time, fronts on Lake Worth;
while the next largest hotel is directly across the narrow strip of
land, fronting on the ocean. In between are golf links, and roadways
edged with palms and avenues of towering, feathery, bluish-green
Australian pines and simple little cottages that couldn’t have cost a
cent more than forty or fifty thousand dollars, and modest little shacks
that might have set their owners back half a million or so, and
club-houses and bathing pavilions and more palms and broad white
roadways and men in white flannels and women in diamonds and perfumery
and clinging gowns--and more palms.
Over everything there is an odor of money. Every breeze that blows is
freighted with its rich, fragrant musky smell; and every person that one
encounters on the street or in a hotel lobby seems to be about to spend
a lot of it or to have just finished spending a lot of it. Some people
seem to like the odor and some don’t seem to care so much for it. Some,
in fact, seem from their expressions to think that this money-odor has a
great deal in common with smoldering rubber or asafetida.
The impression that Palm Beach is bound to make on any newcomer is one
of general discomfort. Everybody seems to be staring critically and
curiously at everybody else--due, of course, to the fact that almost
everybody hopes or suspects that everybody else may prove to be Charley
Schwab or Percy Rockefeller or E. T. Stotesbury or one of those
prominent society people who part their names on the side.
People who enter and leave the hotel dining-room don’t seem to know what
to do with their hands. They pretend to an embarrassing ease of manner,
which leaves everybody acutely conscious that they are very uneasy. The
people at the tables can’t keep their eyes off the people at other
tables. The hotel lobbies are congested before lunch and after dinner
with persons who have no interest in any scenery except that which other
people are wearing. Although the beach at Palm Beach is many miles in
length, all the bathers, near bathers and bather-watchers cram
themselves each noon into a few square yards of beach and watch one
another like a gathering of lynxes.
People dawdle along the palm-fringed avenues and stare at one another
blankly and questioningly. People sit self-consciously in wheel-chairs
and look searchingly at people in other wheel-chairs. Bicyclists wheel
languidly along the white roads and gaze intently at every one. “Are you
Charley Schwab?” each eye seems to ask mutely. “Are you one of the
Stotesburys? Are you anybody?”
CHAPTER IV
OF THE APOTHEOSIS OF THE BICYCLE--OF THE USES OF WHEEL-CHAIRS--AND OF
THE MENTAL ACTIVITIES OF CHAIR-CHAUFFEURS
Palm Beach is the heaven of the bicycle. In other parts of the world it
has sunk in popular esteem until it is little else than a conveyer of
telegraph boys and an instrument for the removal of skin from children’s
knees. But in Palm Beach it shares with the wheel-chair the honor of
being the chariot of wealth and beauty.
Flocks of bicycles are parked beside every hotel entrance. Broad and
flawless sidewalks are reserved for bicycles and wheel-chairs. The
pedestrian who sets foot on them does so at his own risk, and is more
than apt, if he does so, to have his coat driven several inches into his
back by the front wheel of a bicycle.
There is no bicycle costume. Beautiful lady bicyclists wear anything:
rakish sport clothes, fragile afternoon gowns, flowing costumes with
long capes, and more extreme evening gowns. Large numbers of girls
persist in bicycling while wearing tight skirts, so that the general
effect is somewhat similar to that of a pony ballet made up as messenger
boys.
On side-streets, one frequently sees the almost forgotten spectacle of a
frail débutante learning to ride. On the dance floor she would float
along as lightly as a tuft of thistledown. On a bicycle she wabbles
heavily and helplessly from side to side, collapsing at intervals
against her instructor with all the crushing weight of a California
Redwood.
The wheel-chair is the favorite Palm Beach method of locomotion, and it
is the only form of exercise ever taken by many Palm Beach visitors.
Many old inhabitants claim that wheel-chair riding is excellent for the
liver, and devote at least two hours to it every afternoon. The negro
chair chauffeurs drive the chair along by vigorous pedaling, and the
alternate leg stroke gives the chair a gentle side to side motion which
acts as a mild massage on the occupant. Two hours of such exercise is
considered to be about enough by the most conservative Palm Beachers. It
is their belief that the persons who ride for three hours run a great
risk of over-exerting themselves.
The chair-chauffeurs, in addition to possessing tireless legs, are
usually supplied with a vast fund of knowledge. This is most desirable;
for many visitors speak to no one except the hotel clerks, the
news-stand girls, the waiters and their wheel-chair chauffeurs during
their entire stay. It frequently happens that their chair chauffeurs are
their only guides, philosophers and friends; so the chauffeurs find it
very valuable to be fairly familiar with all Palm Beach estates, to have
a comprehensive grasp of the flora and
[Illustration: The living-room of the Everglades Club, smart and
exclusive retreat of Palm Beach’s smartest habitués.]
[Illustration: Bradley’s, the Monte Carlo of America.]
[Illustration: The Casino at Palm Beach, where the photographers catch
the society favorites reading from left to right.]
fauna of the south, and to be conversant with all financial and social
matters appertaining to the old-timer. They have also found that a frank
exposition of their own philosophical meditations on men and things will
sometimes arouse the interest and stimulate the generosity of their
charges. “What sort of ducks are those, George?” usually brings the
intelligent answer: “Those ain’t no sort, suh. Those is just ducks.” A
query as to whether a wheel-chair is harder to push with one or two
people in it brought the reply that there “wasn’t no difference.” But to
push an empty one is the hardest. Yes, suh! Must be because no money is
being made. Yes, suh!
CHAPTER V
OF THE TELEGRAM-EXPECTERS--OF THE DATE-GUESSERS--AND OF THE
STATISTIC-WEEVILS
There are many lonely men and women at Palm Beach who almost cry with
gratitude when somebody speaks to them. They are like many Congressmen,
who are big people at home, but of less account in Washington than a
head porter. Out of all the people who flock to Palm Beach to spend
large amounts of money and bask in the soothing rays that emanate from
the socially prominent, ninety per cent. might be compared to very small
potatoes in a two hundred-acre lot. Even the majority of the people
whose names are names to conjure with in Palm Beach society can’t be
found in the pages of _Who’s Who_.
The majority of men who pay the bills at the big hotels are forced to
struggle hard to kill time when they have finished their golf-playing
for the day. Enormous numbers of them seem to spend most of their spare
time sitting dolefully around hotel lobbies and expecting telegrams that
never come. If you fall into conversation with any man in any Palm Beach
hotel lobby, he invariably explains his inactivity by saying that he is
expecting a telegram.
Next to expecting telegrams, the most popular Palm Beach time-killer
seems to consist of wondering what day of the week it is. Sneak up
behind any two important-looking men who seem to be discussing affairs
of moment, and the chances are ten to one that you will hear the
following weighty conversation:
“Is to-day Tuesday or Wednesday? I sort of lose track down here.”
“To-day? Why to-day’s Wednesday. No; hold on! It’s Thursday, isn’t it?”
“No, I don’t think so. I think it’s either Tuesday or Wednesday. Still,
I don’t know: it might be Thursday.”
“No, I don’t believe it’s Thursday. I was expecting a telegram on
Tuesday, and it would have had to come before Thursday. I guess it’s
Wednesday.”
“Yes, I guess it is. I thought for a while it was Tuesday.”
“Oh, I don’t believe it’s Tuesday.”
“No, I guess it’s Wednesday, all right. That telegram ought to be here
by now. How long are you staying here?”
“I don’t know. I’m expecting a telegram and I can’t tell till it gets
here.”
Having reached a comparatively ripe intimacy by this time, it is almost
inevitable that one of them should advance one of the thousand
statistical questions that are so frequently encountered at Palm Beach,
such as “Did you ever stop to think how many nails it took to build this
hotel?” A few seconds later both of them have produced envelopes and are
figuring busily.
Men who have traveled thousands of miles for the purpose of killing time
at Palm Beach will frequently argue for two or three hours, and figure
all over the backs of eight or ten envelopes and a couple of golf scores
in an attempt to decide whether or not the value of all the diamond
bracelets in Palm Beach would be sufficient to secure economic control
of Russia. Newcomers to Palm Beach, knowing that America’s greatest
financiers flock there during the season, frequently make the mistake of
thinking that two men knitting their brows over a lot of figures are
probably two great money-kings working up a scheme to corner the
nation’s hop crop. In reality they are two ordinary citizens killing a
little time by choking it to death with useless statistics.
CHAPTER VI
OF THE CHANGING OF CLOTHES--OF THE WAY THEY WEAR ’EM--AND OF THE FEMALES
OF THE DRESS-FERRET SPECIES
Compared with the good old days when dresses hooked up the back in such
an intricate fashion that one needed blueprints, diagrams and charts in
order to hook up a dress properly, there is practically no
dress-changing at Palm Beach nowadays. In the old days the womenfolk
spent at least forty per cent. of their waking hours changing their
clothes. They changed their clothes whenever the wind changed. They
changed their clothes every time a train came in. They couldn’t eat or
go out in a wheel-chair or put on a string of beads or take a drink
without changing their clothes. Their menfolk were kept constantly busy
hooking them up the back.
To-day things are different. Dresses no longer hook up the back with
their erstwhile whole-heartedness. Careful and competent observers state
that many present-day dresses are safely attached to the human frame by
as few as three hooks, all of which can be reached without dislocating
an arm or displacing any vertebrae, and that an equal number of dresses
are merely slid on over the head and worn just as they fall, without any
further formality. A great many women at Palm Beach wear only two
costumes each day--one for morning and afternoon that shows almost
everything below the hips and one for evening that shows almost
everything above the waist.
Not so many years ago a woman who wore only two dresses in one day at
Palm Beach would have been regarded as mentally unbalanced or
disgustingly pauperized.
The real snappy dressers, however, get in and out of three costumes a
day; while it is not at all unusual to find prominent society
camp-followers staggering in and out of as many as five and six daily
costumes. How they ever do it will ever remain a mystery to us simple
writers and oatmeal-manufacturers and mattress-makers from the buckwheat
belt.
Every morning directly after breakfast, the hotel lobbies fill up with
women who want to talk about dress. The Palm Beach dailies and weeklies
cater to their pitiable weakness by specializing on thrilling
information of this nature. So far as the female contingent at Palm
Beach is concerned, an economic conference in Europe or a presidential
utterance on the Bonus hasn’t a chance with such news as what Mrs. Harry
Payne Whitney wore at the Beach Club last night.
Outside the warm sun may be beating down upon golden sands and an azure
sea, the wind rustling softly through the palms and the bland air
thrilling to the melodious murmur of the wheel-chair boys as they point
out the Stotesbury cottage with caustic comments on the height of the
Stotesbury wall. Yet the dress-ferrets sit on with bated breaths in the
cool gloom of the hotel lobbies while the papers inform their enthralled
readers that:
“Very smart was the slate colored strictly tailored suit worn by Mrs.
Aurelius Vandersouse, Jr., at a recent Poinciana luncheon. Her hat was
of a tone of straw perfectly harmonizing with the suit and bore only a
flat bow of tomato-wire for trimming. The Honorable Mrs. D. Dryver
Flubyer’s suit was fashioned of an imported bed-ticking fabric guiltless
of any embellishment. Her chapeau was fashioned of the same fabric. Mrs.
J. Eaton Swank wore a clinging gown of fromage-de-brie crêpe in a light
heliotrope shade, fashioned in a one-piece style, with flowing sleeves
and uneven hem, whose folds clung gracefully to the tall slender
wearer.”
That’s the stuff to give the Palm Beach Battalion of Dress. Like Bosco,
they eat it alive. They are veritable cormorants for it.
CHAPTER VII
OF THE FASCINATIONS OF THE BEACH--OF THE SAND-HOUNDS FROM ODESSA AND
ELSEWHERE--AND OF PRUDES AND STYLISH STOUTS
At half past eleven every morning, stimulated by the early morning talk
of dress, all the feminine population of Palm Beach, accompanied by all
obtainable male escorts, set out from their hotels and homes in
wheel-chairs for their daily pilgrimage to the beach.
The beach is not prized by Palm Beach visitors because of its bathing
facilities, but because of the perfect spirit of camaraderie and
democracy which reigns there. A Philadelphia Biddle is just as apt as
not to come along and accidentally rub damp sand on a South Bend Smith.
Anything may happen. A Vanderbilt may ask you what time it is.
There is no distinction on the beach itself between the people who
emigrated from Montana to Fifth Avenue back in ’01 and the people who
emigrated from Odessa to Houston Street back in ’91. Both of them have
the same funny knobs on their knees; and there are lots of
them--especially of the Odessa set.
The beach is the only place in Palm Beach where everybody has an equal
chance; and there everybody uses the same ocean and sits around in the
same sand in almost hopeless confusion. Things are so congested that if
one leans back carelessly and braces himself by sticking his hand down
in the sand, the chances are excellent that a couple of ladies from
Kansas City or Boston will come staggering along with their eyes fixed
raptly on Mrs. B. Gurney Munn or Mrs. Jerome Bonaparte and sheer off two
or three of one’s fingers with their French heels.
The only portion of the beach which anybody considers worth using is the
portion directly in front of the casino, which is a large, gorgeous,
white plaster bath-house with an outdoor swimming pool and polite
attendants who are always appearing at inopportune moments and helping
patrons to do things which they could do much better alone--such, for
example, as removing a towel from a hook or lifting a brush and comb
from a shelf.
Many people garbed in elaborate dresses stand on the terrace in front of
the casino and stare down at the people on the beach, while the people
on the beach stare up at them. On chairs on the beach there are many
other elaborately gowned women who examine every one closely and are
closely examined by every one.
Down in front of the entire mob stand large numbers of professional
photographers who keep a careful lookout for exciting costumes and
prominent faces, and constantly snap little groups of laughing people
who subsequently appear in leading Sunday papers or monthly magazines
over legends like: “Far from Northern Snows: a happy society group on
the Palm Beach sands: from left to right, J. Edge Smush, Mrs. B. Goodwin
Eezy, the Honorable Mrs. Claribel Custard, I. Winken Ogle, Miss Patricia
Swaddle. Behind the feet at the right, Perry Peevish, Jr.”
Every little while the photographers find some one who is prominent and
pretty without being too much overweight and overdressed; and when they
do, they coax her out to an unoccupied section of beach and arrange her
in a position of unstudied ease and graceful carelessness, and shoot
half a dozen pictures of her admiring the distant horizon with a gay,
unaffected, girlish laugh.
Everything on the beach is so simple and natural and wholesome that one
can’t help but like it. Then, too, one never gets that offensive, salty,
seaweedy odor of ocean that one is apt to get on the New England coast,
owing to the ocean odors being completely overwhelmed by the rare and
powerful French perfumes that are worn by many elements of Palm Beach
society. If one closed his eyes, he might think that he was at a
perfumery show and that somebody had kicked over all the bottles.
Palm Beach is not exactly what one would call a Prude’s Paradise, but a
prude can feel more at ease on the beach at Palm Beach than at any other
resort in Florida. This is due to the fact that women are not allowed to
appear on the beach with any portion of the leg uncovered. A policeman
is stationed on the beach to see that this rule is enforced, and there
is a great rejoicing among all the local prudes, who--like all prudes
throughout the world--see evil where there is none, and pass blindly by
the evils that every one except themselves can see.
This rule has brought about one great benefit in that it has prevented
large numbers of ill-advised and otherwise charming stylish stouts from
rolling down their bathing stockings and exposing too much knee. Any
rule that does this is a good rule--and it is generally agreed that
there are more stylish stouts at Palm Beach than at any other resort on
earth.
CHAPTER VIII
OF THE THREE DAY SUCKERS--OF TRUE SMARTNESS--AND OF THE BUCKWHEATS AND
THE DEAD-LINE
When the bathing hour has passed into history, the merry bathers and
clothes-wearers sally forth in search of lunch. The ordinary run of Palm
Beach visitors eat their lunch at their hotels. This act almost
automatically stamps them as Buckwheats, or Three Day Suckers, or people
who aren’t Smart. A Buckwheat is a coarse, rude, barbaric person who is
addicted to the secret and loathsome vices of eating buckwheat cakes for
breakfast and not spending money recklessly.
A Three Day Sucker is a person who only stays a few days at Palm Beach.
As a time-killer he is not regarded with any respect. He travels so far
to kill time that he hasn’t any time left to kill when he gets there.
This is not regarded as smart. Any one who stays less than two weeks is
not viewed with favor by people who stay a month or more, and who know
how important smartness is. If one wishes to have the respect of the
cigar-counter clerks and the mail clerks and the head waiters and other
Palm Beach people who--as the ultra-refined advertisements say--matter,
one must above all things be smart. You might as well be dead at Palm
Beach as not be smart.
Certain things are smart and certain things are not smart. It is smart,
for example, for a man to go without a hat. It is smart to ride a
bicycle. Any article of feminine wearing apparel that is essentially
useless is smart. It is smart to speak of a thing as smart. It is not at
all smart to tell a Palm Beacher that you would gladly disembowel him
when you hear him use the word “smart” for the fiftieth time.
None of the big Palm Beach hotels rents rooms without meals. One must
pay for his meals as well. Two people at most of the big hotels pay a
minimum rate of about thirty-five dollars a day for the two--which is
about the amount from which the same people would have to separate
themselves at any of the big New York or Chicago or Boston or Washington
hotels by the time they had finished paying for their food. But if one
wishes to be smart at Palm Beach, one mustn’t lunch or dine at the hotel
where one’s meals are included on his bill. It is very buckwheat to do
such a thing: very uncouth: very hick and very rough-neck: not, in a
word, smart. That is why the desirable Palm Beach habitués, at the
height of the season, find it difficult to spend less than a hundred
dollars apiece per day. One can’t indulge in games of chance or keep
many wheel-chairs on that amount; but if one is reasonably careful and
content to be only moderately smart, one can get along fairly well for a
hundred dollars a day.
The truly smart person strives always to pay for two meals where one
would normally be paid for. He strives to pay for one that he eats and
for one that nobody eats. If one is living at the Poinciana, one should
make an effort to lunch or dine at the Breakers or at the Country Club
or at the Beach Club or at the Everglades Club, or one of the cottages.
It is a fascinating system, and is based on the familiar society theory
that the more useless a thing is, the smarter it is.
One of the smartest--in a society sense--of all the persons that come to
Palm Beach is a man who never eats at the hotel where he lives, and who
keeps a flock of twelve wheel-chairs always in attendance on him. Day
and night his twelve wheel-chairs are waiting for him and his friends.
They are used about an hour a day--but it is very smart to keep them
waiting: frightfully smart. Useless and therefore smart.
The head waiters in the restaurants become very proficient at
distinguishing those who are smart from those who are not smart. In the
dining-room of the largest hotel there is a cross-strip of green carpet
which is known as the dead-line. The people who sit between the entrance
and the dead-line have been carefully looked over by the head waiter and
put in the smart class. But the people who are put on the kitchen side
of the dead-line are dubs and Buckwheats in the judgment of the head
waiter. Once people are put below the dead-line, they rarely have a
chance to come up for air, but are doomed to stay down among the other
Buckwheats for the remainder of their visit.
CHAPTER IX
OF THE SMARTEST THING IN PALM BEACH--OF LARGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY--AND OF
THE OLD GUARD
The smartest thing at Palm Beach is the Everglades Club. The Everglades
Club is so smart that it almost gives itself a pain. It has only a few
over four hundred members, but these four hundred include names that
make a society editor’s scalp tingle, and control so much money and
jewels that the mere mention of them is enough to make any normal
burglar tremble all over.
The Everglades Club building was started in the summer of 1918 by Paris
Singer, who is a wealthy society man, as a hospital for convalescent
officers. The war was over, however, before the building was ever used
as a hospital; and it immediately occurred to the smartest of the Palm
Beach colony that the building was exactly the thing to use for a smart
club where really smart people could go off by themselves and be too
exclusive for words. The proposition was put up to Paris Singer, who saw
the force of it; and that’s how the Everglades Club started. The
initiation fee and yearly dues might be expected to be about as large as
the national debt, but in reality they amount to something like one
hundred dollars initiation fee and fifty dollars yearly dues. The club
has built a very smart and attractive apartmenthouse within a stone’s
throw of the parent building; and in it club members can rent small but
smart apartments for a mere twenty-five hundred dollars a season--and
there are several Maine summer resorts where one pays as much and gets
much less for his money.
The club has its own golf links and tennis courts; and it has a
restaurant whose chef could easily enter a cheffing contest with the
leading Parisian chefs with an excellent chance to win the
diamond-studded skillet, or the seventeen-jeweled egg-beater. It is my
fixed belief that if old M’sieu Marguery, who invented Filet of Sole
Marguery, could have been led into the dining-room of the Everglades
Club and placed where he could look out through the palms to the placid
waters of Lake Worth, and handed a platter of Pompano Meuniere--it is my
fixed belief, I say, that old M’sieu Marguery would have put his head
down in his hands and cried like a child to think that he could have
doubled his fortune if he could have started serving Pompano that way
thirty years ago.
The interior fixtures of the Everglades Club are of the proper sort to
go with such food. The walls are hung with sixteenth century tapestries,
and the dining-room is wainscoted with oak from the interior of a
Spanish monastery.
There was some talk at one time of covering the wall of one room with
silver plates made by flattening the silver cocktail shakers of the
club members. This was never done, however; and it is probable that the
members found other uses for their shakers.
It would be idle to attempt to estimate with any accuracy the amount of
money represented by members of the Everglades Club. If they were
pushed, they could easily dig up one billion dollars among them.
While we are speaking in billions instead of in mere beggarly millions,
it might be appropriate to mention that the most astute Palm Beach
estimaters figure that the thirteen hundred guests who fill the Royal
Poinciana Hotel at the height of the season, if placed in one room and
carefully assayed, would yield at least two billion dollars.
The Country Club is another smart place at which to lunch or dine. There
is no restaurant in Europe to my knowledge that is able to produce a
better dinner than the Palm Beach Country Club, especially if one leaves
it, as the saying goes, to François. François is the head waiter; and
he works in conjunction with a chef named Marius, who inherited most of
his recipes from a gifted relative in the south of France, and who
spends a large part of his time when not cooking in fearing that
somebody will solve the recipes. The chief object of the Country Club is
to provide a golfing retreat from the Buckwheats and the Three Day
Suckers, who usually break for the hotel golf links immediately on
arrival. Consequently the links which are open to the Buckwheats are apt
to become so congested that if one doesn’t stick rigidly in his place in
the golf procession, he is more than apt to get a couple of golf balls
in the side of the head and then have to stand aside for two hours while
a long parade of golfers and near-golfers hacks its way past him. So the
smart golfers go to the Country Club. It is there that one finds the Old
Guard of Palm Beach.
The Old Guard is a hide-bound organization of ardent golfers who know
all the intimate personal scandal about practically every dollar that
has changed hands in North America since the Dutch purchased Manhattan
Island from the Indians for twenty-four dollars, and threw in enough rum
to provide magnificent hang-overs for the families of the original
owners.
One must have been a resident of Palm Beach for five years before he is
allowed to join the Old Guard, the theory being that unless a golfer has
lived there for five years, he is not thoroughly conversant with the
essential features of Palm Beach gossip and will be apt to interrupt a
calm and quiet game of golf to ask who the G. Daley Squabbles are going
to marry when they have divorced each other, or some other equally
irrelevant and unnecessary question.
CHAPTER X
OF THOSE WHO WISH TO CRASH INTO SOCIETY--AND OF THOSE WHO FURNISH THE
PALPITATING SOCIETY ITEMS
The business of being smart and appearing at the proper places at the
proper hour is merely the accepted method of killing time with many Palm
Beachers; but with many others it is as serious as the death of a near
relative. Palm Beach is well sprinkled with people who are determined to
break into New York society, and who have selected Palm Beach as the
place to drive the entering wedge because results can be obtained there
with greater speed, with less expense and with more noise than in any
other section of the country.
A young New Yorker with a small income broke into society with a crash
and married, not so very long ago, a beautiful widow with a
strangle-hold on society and a fortune that kept a couple of income tax
experts working a month each year. He explained his system to a friend
of mine with the peculiar half childish and half idiotic frankness that
may frequently be encountered in the upper crust of society. If he had
attempted to break in by way of New York, he said, he would have spent
all his money on dinners and luncheons; and about as much notice would
have been taken of his struggles as would be taken of a stray dish of
prunes at a banquet. But by coming to Palm Beach and getting on the
right side of the society reporters, he was able to give one fair-sized
and comparatively inexpensive luncheon and have the news telegraphed
immediately to the New York papers. By doing this a couple of times a
season, he was able to repay all the invitations which he accepted in
New York; and it was apparent to all New York newspaper readers that he
was making a society splash at Palm Beach. So he was soon accepted as
being socially prominent, whereupon he picked out the richest thing in
sight, married it and stopped worrying.
Many people at Palm Beach feel that they must have press agents to keep
them in the limelight. There is one enterprising Palm Beach press agent
who supplies the newspapers with palpitating items about seven or eight
social climbers, and whose earnings from this source are over thirty
thousand a year. When one reads of a socially prominent Palm Beacher
doing something fearfully original, like giving a dinner to all her
friends’ dogs, one may know that she has been hiring a press agent to
fill her mind with valuable ideas.
CHAPTER XI
OF THE ALIBI WINDOW--OF THE TRICK FLASKS AND CANES--OF DRINKERS FRAIL
AND FAT--AND OF ONE CONCEPTION OF SIMPLICITY
The Palm Beach crowd is always ready to part with money for anything
that looks sufficiently smart and interesting. In order to facilitate
the parting, some of the country’s leading costumers and rug merchants
and hat makers and jewelers have moved their branch stores into the
hotel lobbies, so that the passers-by can separate themselves from their
money with a minimum of exertion.
There is one Palm Beach window that is known as the Alibi Window. It is
full of gorgeous diamond pendants and diamond bracelets and simple
little ten-thousand-dollar rings; and the Palm Beach theory is that the
shop’s best customers are men who have been raising what is somewhat
loosely known as the dickens. As is well known, a man whose conscience
is troubling him can frequently keep it quiet by getting his wife a
pendant of diamonds set in platinum. At night, when the shop is locked
up, all the jewelry is removed from the window and replaced with a large
flock of frosted silver cocktail-shakers whose appearance alone is
warranted to give even a Prohibition Enforcement Agent a thirst. This
spectacle is supposed to make the observer hunt up some whisky and get
himself nicely boiled, and possibly to make him fall so low as to speak
disrespectfully of the society leaders. On the following day he buys
jewelry to square himself with his wife.
Large, curved pocket flasks, two of which would make fine protective
armor for the entire upper part of the body if worn on opposite sides,
are popular at Palm Beach, as is a new trick cane that unscrews at a
joint and reveals a long, slender bottle three-quarters of an inch in
diameter and two feet long. The popularity of these canes, which come in
half-pint and pint sizes, indicate clearly that some enterprising hat
manufacturer will soon get out a two-pint straw hat for Florida wear.
There is a great deal of fire-water in sight at Palm Beach at all hours
of the day and night; and the débutante who can’t absorb eight cocktails
without raising her voice or falling over the chairs is regarded as
being handicapped by some sort of inherited weakness. One of the most
frequently pointed-out personages at Palm Beach is a very fat man who
can--according to the claims made for him by his admirers--drink
thirty-five cocktails at one sitting without blinking. The price of
Scotch whisky starts down around forty dollars a case in the summer time
and works gradually upward until at the height of the season one is
paying from seventy to one hundred dollars a case for it.
The building-boom that has struck Palm Beach in the last five years is
claimed by most of the loose claimers and enthusiastic drinkers to be
due to Prohibition. A great many cottages have been erected by persons
of wealth and social prominence in these five years; and the prevalent
architectural idea for a simple little Palm Beach cottage seems to be a
Spanish modification of a Union Station, or a Court of Jewels at a
successful World’s Fair.
To hear the drinkers tell it, these houses have been built so that the
owners could have a place in which to drink without being watched or
hurried or made to feel uncomfortable. This may be possible; but if it
is, the house builders are the only ones who haven’t felt free to drink
when and where they choose.
The truth of the matter unquestionably is that the people who built
houses liked the place and the climate, and so built in order to enjoy
them more thoroughly than they could be enjoyed in a hotel room
smelling faintly of damp carpets and previous occupants.
CHAPTER XII
OF NUTS IN THE COCONUT GROVE--OF BRADLEY’S--OF THE RELAXATION AND
AMUSEMENT OF THE BEACH CLUB-FELLOWS--AND OF GAMBLING IN GENERAL
After one has spent a fatiguing afternoon pricing whisky flasks, or
being pushed along avenues of palms and Australian pines in a
wheel-chair, or indulging in a little steady bridge and drinking, or
some other equally arduous pursuit, the smart thing to do is to go to
the Coconut Grove and participate in a little tea and dancing.
The Coconut Grove consists of a large and beautiful grove of coconut
trees surrounding a polished dance floor. All the coconuts have been
removed from the trees, owing to their well-known habit of falling off
unexpectedly and utterly ruining any one who may be lingering beneath
them. Thus the only nuts in the grove are the ones who come there to
dance.
The Coconut Grove starts doing business at half past five every
afternoon in the bright sunlight; but in a few minutes the tropic night
closes down just as advertised in all books on the South Seas. By a
little after six o’clock the only illumination comes from strings of red
electric light bulbs strung through the palms and from the occasional
flare of a match as some distinguished social butterfly tries to find
out how much whisky he has left in his cane.
Later in the evening, the smart thing to do is to go over to what is
formally known as the Beach Club, but universally spoken of as
Bradley’s. As trains from the north enter the Palm Beach station, the
enormous bulk of the Royal Poinciana Hotel stretches out at the right of
the train. On the left of the train, directly opposite the station and
so close to the train that the traveler could toss even a lightweight
biscuit on to its roof from the car window, is a long, low, white frame
building with a large revolving
[Illustration: The Coconut Grove at Palm Beach. The nuts have been
removed from the trees; but plenty may be found at the tables on any
winter afternoon.]
[Illustration: Near the Flagler estate at Palm Beach.]
[Illustration: The Australian Pine Walk between the Poinciana and The
Breakers, Palm Beach.]
ventilator in one end. This is Bradley’s, Palm Beach’s oldest, most
celebrated and most popular charitable institution--charitable because
it assists people who have more money than they know what to do with to
get rid of part of it in a quiet and eminently respectable way.
Every large resort in the world that caters to wealthy people has its
gambling houses. In Europe the municipalities run them, recognizing the
fact that all people of means who are on a holiday are bound to gamble.
At America’s resorts the gambling houses are usually concealed; but they
exist none the less; and usually, because of the secrecy that surrounds
them, they are lurking-places for troublesome aggregations of trimmers,
bloodsuckers and crooks of various sorts.
Bradley’s is different. It is run exclusively for the wealthy northern
patrons of Palm Beach; and the person whose legal residence or place of
business is located in Florida is supposed to be barred. Almost
everybody who goes there can afford to lose and lose heavily; and a list
of the names of the people who play there every night would read like a
list of America’s leading celebrities, social lights and millionaires.
There may be some who can’t afford to play; but if there are any such,
their folly in visiting Palm Beach marks them as persons who deserve to
be ruined as expeditiously as possible.
A crook would be about as much at home in Bradley’s as an icicle would
be in the crater of Mt. Vesuvius.
All things considered, it is probably the only gambling house in the
United States whose closing would be a calamity to the community.
Bradley’s is a club. In order to be made a member, one must be
introduced by a member. It is one of the few existing clubs which has no
initiation fees and no dues; but for all that, the members usually
spend all they have in their clothes every time they go in for an
evening of good fellowship and club life; so it isn’t as inexpensive as
it sounds.
Anybody in Palm Beach, from the wheel-chair boys to the policemen, can
supply the inquirer with all the standard Beach Club stories, usually
starting with the one about the man who lost six thousand dollars in one
evening and left Palm Beach hurriedly the next morning. A few hours
later, one of the Bradley brothers was visited by a young woman who was
obviously in great distress. Her eyes were red and swollen and she was
sobbing convulsively. She explained that her husband had lost six
thousand dollars the night before, that the money didn’t belong to him
and that unless she could get the money back for him, he would have to
go to prison. So Bradley gave back the six thousand dollars after
telling the young woman to tell her husband never again to set foot in
the Beach Club. A few days afterward the same man turned up in the
Beach Club and began to play. Bradley summoned him to his office and
asked him how he dared to do such a thing after his losses had been
returned to his wife. “What do you mean?” asked the man, “I’m not
married.”
“Then you didn’t leave town because you were ruined?” asked Bradley.
“You bet I didn’t!” said the man. “I went down to Long Key fishing with
my business partner, who came down here with me.”
A woman in an adjoining room had heard the two men talking before their
departure, and had cashed in on the conversation.
Then there is the story about the wife who used to extract uncashed
chips from her husband’s clothes whenever he played at Bradley’s, and
who cashed them in for twenty-five thousand dollars without her husband
knowing that he had lost anything. And the one about the gentleman who
cleaned up seventy thousand dollars in one week.
It is not at all unusual to see one of the big steel men or oil men
placing five hundred dollars in chips on the board at each turn of the
wheel, and dropping fifteen or twenty thousand dollars in half an hour.
CHAPTER XIII
OF THE DIVERGENCES BETWEEN BRADLEY’S AND MONTE CARLO--OF THE
IDIOSYNCRASIES OF THE LITTLE WHITE PILL--OF THE ODDITIES OF FAT
PLAYERS--OF TIME-KILLING PASTIMES--AND OF THE WISDOM OF DIONYSIUS THE
ELDER
About the only similarity between Bradley’s and the Monte Carlo Casino
is the squareness of the game and the roundness of the roulette wheels.
A majority of the people who gamble at Bradley’s are the extreme
opposite of the majority of the people who gamble at Monte Carlo; and in
these two gambling houses any observer may discover an outstanding
difference between the European’s and the American’s attitude toward
money. For years Americans have been disparaged by Europeans as
money-grubbers. As a matter of fact, the people of all nations,
generally speaking, are money-grubbers, in that they devote themselves
to earning money on which to live. The European, however, pursues his
money with an unrelenting ferocity; and when he over-takes it, he seizes
it with such an iron grip that the head on each coin almost bursts into
shrill screams of agony. The European makes money in order to save it;
and he never lets go of it if he can help it. The American regards
money-making as a fascinating game; and he makes it in order to spend
it.
At Monte Carlo almost every gambler, out of the thousands that play
there, plays a system. He uses a system book, checking each turn of the
wheel in it, and writing down column upon column of figures. He devotes
hours to computing his chances of winning; and practically every system
player believes implicitly that he isn’t risking his money, but that he
has a sure system that will enable him to get something from the Casino
for nothing. He gambles for profit; not for pleasure.
At Bradley’s, nobody plays a system. All of the club-members--oil
millionaires, steel millionaires, short-haired and short-skirted
débutantes, and fat dowagers half concealed behind interlacing ropes of
pearls and diamonds--play only for the thrill of playing. A person who
used a system book would probably be regarded as being either insane or
drunk. Nine-tenths of the women don’t know enough about the game to play
anything except a number full on the nose, or red and black. In roulette
a number can be played full on the nose; and if it turns up on the
wheel, the player receives thirty-five for one. If one is satisfied with
smaller odds, and with better chances of winning, one can place his
money between two numbers, or in the middle of four numbers, or on a
transversal of three numbers, or on a double transversal of six numbers,
or in various other ways. At Monte Carlo the favorite woman’s bet is the
single and double transversal. At Bradley’s the men, and women too, bet
almost entirely on single numbers. They want the big thrill that comes
from collecting thirty-five dollars for each dollar that they put up.
They become foolishly stubborn about it, sticking to a single number so
long that it would have to turn up three or four times in succession in
order to enable them to break even. Fat ladies at Bradley’s love to take
a fat roll of chips in one hand and run the hand down a column of
numbers, allowing the chips to slip off their fingertips and stay where
they drop.
There are two gambling rooms in Bradley’s--the big octagonal outer room
in which there are six roulette tables and two French Hazard tables, and
the small inner room for men only, in which there are three roulette
tables and one French Hazard table. The inner room provides a retreat
for the men whose attention is constantly distracted in the outer room
by the frequent demand on the part of their wives and daughters for
another fifty dollars.
By half past nine o’clock every night, Bradley’s is so crowded that one
must almost fight his way from table to table. No matter where one threw
a brick in the assemblage, it would be certain to hit a millionaire and
carom against two other millionaires before falling to the floor. Until
midnight there are usually more women than men engaged in observing the
idiosyncrasies of the little ivory ball; and the hold-up man who
succeeded in holding up the clientele of the Beach Club at eleven
o’clock at night would have no difficulty at all in picking up at least
ten million dollars’ worth of loot in jewelry alone. Many of the women
wear their strings of pearls in double and triple loops so that they
wont trip on them when they walk, and most of them seem to think that
they may get rheumatism if they don’t wear at least five diamond
bracelets on their left wrists.
One frequently sees these ladies rolling up the Lake Trail at midnight
in wheel-chairs with a quarter million or a half million dollars’ worth
of jewels sparkling in the moonlight. They are merely out taking the
air, so that they can go back to the party which they just left and
renew their activities without falling asleep. They dance and play cards
and slip a few cocktails and exchange light persiflage until four and
five and six o’clock in the morning.
They grow stronger and stronger as the season grows older, until toward
the end they may be found going in bathing in their ballgowns at dawn
and indulging in other tireless activities. If a tough, hardy Indian
scout or Alpine mountain climber tried to follow them for three days,
he’d drop in his tracks with fatigue.
Such is life among the time-killers of Palm Beach. They go there to kill
time, and they are diligent at it. Old man Plutarch states that
“Dionysius the Elder, being asked whether he was at leisure, replied,
‘God forbid that it should ever befall me.’”
The Palm Beach time-killers operate on the same principle. The last
thing in the world that they desire is leisure, and the person who
argues that Palm Beach is frequented by the leisure class is suffering
from warped perception. They have different ways of killing time. Some
of them talk it to death and some of them worry it to death, and some of
them smother it with money. No time gets by them: they kill it all; and
however they choose to do it, they’re the hardest working people in the
world.
BOOK TWO
THE TIN-CANNERS
CHAPTER I
OF JANUARY IN THE NORTH--OF THE WINTER PASTIMES OF MR. AND MRS. CHARLES
WALNUT--AND OF A PENETRATING CHILL
Scene I of this drama of American manners is laid in the small and more
or less flourishing town of East Rockpile in the northern state of
Massachusetts, Illinois, Maine, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey,
Vermont, Ohio or Connecticut. Or Rhode Island or Michigan. Or New
Hampshire or New York.
The month is January and there are three feet of snow on the ground. The
temperature is so low that the mercury has shriveled in the thermometer
bulb until it looks like a small silver cherry in a cocktail. The feet
of passers-by make the same sort of squeak in the frozen snow that a
mouse makes when it unexpectedly falls six feet behind a bedroom wall at
two o’clock in the morning.
Mrs. Charles Walnut, wife of East Rockpile’s popular contractor and
builder, is seated before a roaring open fire in the parlor of the
Walnut home reading a mailorder catalogue. Directly behind her chair an
oil stove emanates heat-waves and an oil-stove odor. In spite of this
Mrs. Walnut shivers perceptibly from time to time and hunches herself
more firmly into the woolen shawl that is wrapped around her shoulders.
She is studying the portion of the catalogue devoted to Gardening Tools.
There is a loud thumping and kicking outside. The front door opens and
closes with a bang, and a moment later Mr. Walnut enters the room
chafing his ears briskly. “My gorry, it’s cold!” he observed, moving his
feet up and down in a gingerly manner.
“Take off your overshoes, Charles, and don’t track snow all over the
house,” replies Mrs. Walnut “What made you so late? Did you stop at the
drug store? Wasn’t there any mail? I believe that furnace has gone out
or something, Charles, and you’d better go down and see if you can’t do
something. I had to light the oil stove to keep my back from freezing.”
“That furnace is all right,” declares Mr. Walnut, sniffling loudly and
unbuckling his overshoes. “‘Taint any use trying to heat anything in
this weather. There wasn’t anybody at the drug store on account of it
being so cold. The train was late on account of froze switches or
something. There wasn’t any mail except three seed catalogues. My gorry,
Emma, one of those catalogues has got a picture of a tomato eight inches
through. The name of it’s the Great Ruby. We want to get a lot of those
Great Rubies in May, Emma.”
“Yes,” says Mrs. Walnut despondently, “and when we get around to picking
’em, they’ll be about the size of crab apples, and we’ll feel like Great
Rubes.”
“It’s the cold weather that makes you feel that way, Emma,” says Mr.
Walnut compassionately. “In April, when the grass begins to get green
and the robins begin to sing at sun-up, you’ll feel better.”
“Maybe so, Charles,” says Mrs. Walnut, “but that’s three months away.
Sometimes I wish I could go to sleep like a bear in December and sleep
until April. Go down and fix the furnace and then come to bed. It’s the
only warm place in the house.”
Mr. Walnut leaves the room obediently, clumps noisily down the cellar
stairs, and is soon heard operating on the furnace and depleting his
coal supply. Mrs. Walnut listens with a quick succession of shivers to
the shrill squeaking of sleigh-runners on the snow. The fire-whistle
sounds three hoarse, bronchial notes, marking the arrival of nine
o’clock and of a meaningless something known as curfew. Mrs. Walnut
picks up the oil stove, clutches her shawl tightly against her chest,
goes out into the tomb-like hall, and is heard mounting the front stairs
stiffly.
CHAPTER II
OF A PRONOUNCED CHANGE OF SCENE--OF A DARING GAME OF CHANCE AMID
TROPICAL SCENTS--AND OF THE GLOATING OF CHARLES WALNUT AND HERMAN
BLISTER
Scene II of this emotional cross-section of national life is laid on the
outskirts of the thriving town of Porgy Inlet, Florida. One year has
elapsed between Scenes I and II. The month is January. A soft breeze
rustles the palm-fronds and sets the waters of the near-by inlet to
lapping soothingly against the shore. Electric lights are hung at
intervals between the palms and the moss-hung live oaks; and beneath
them are parked automobiles of all sizes and shapes. Some of the
automobiles are bloated and swollen out of all semblance to an
automobile; while others are obviously automobiles, but have spouted
great tent-like wens at the side or rear. The license plates on these
automobiles show that they come all the way from Maine, from Ohio, from
Dakota, from Massachusetts. Indiana is heavily represented, as are
Michigan and Illinois, to say nothing of Minnesota, Rhode Island, New
Jersey, New York, Oregon, Connecticut, Washington, Vermont and a number
of other states.
Around a folding camp-table beneath one of the largest and mossiest live
oaks sit Mr. and Mrs. Charles Walnut of East Rockpile and Mr. and Mrs.
Herman Blister of Tackhammer, Michigan. Mr. Walnut, as has been stated,
is a contractor and builder. Mr. Blister’s business or calling is that
of corn-farmer. The Walnuts and the Blisters are in the act of finishing
up an exciting game of hearts. “My gorry,” declares Mr. Walnut as he
slaps down his last card with great violence on Mr. Blister’s lead, “my
gorry, I certainly thought I was going to get stuck with that queen of
spades!” He figures hastily on the back of an envelope. “You folks owe
us seven cents,” he announces eventually. Mr. Blister sighs deeply,
removes a shiny black wallet from his trousers pocket and wrenches seven
cents from it reluctantly.
Mrs. Walnut waves a wisp of Spanish moss reprovingly at a mosquito that
is dancing gaily in front of her nose. “Now, Charles,” says she
dreamily, “if you’re going up the inlet after yellowtails at sun-up
to-morrow, we’ve got to be getting to bed. You know the last time you
sat up late, it made you nervous and you lost forty cents pitching
horseshoes.”
From the water’s edge sounds the tinkle of a mandolin; a distant quartet
toys successfully with _Mandy Lee_ in spite of the fact that the tenor
is decidedly sour; a baby in a near-by automobile awakes to the woes of
its new life with a series of shrill and wheezy bleats; the balmy air is
rich with the mingled scent of jasmine, orange peel, salt water and
talcum powder.
“All right, Emma,” says Mr. Walnut, pocketing his seven cents and
stretching his arms comfortably. “I think mebbe if I get a good sleep, I
might catch me enough red snappers for a mess.”
Mrs. Walnut precedes him into the khaki tent which is attached to the
side of their small automobile like a giant fungus, and as Mr. Walnut
raises the flap to follow her, he looks back at Mr. and Mrs. Blister and
bursts into hoarse laughter. “Say, Herm!” he bawls pleasantly. Mr.
Blister halts expectantly. “Back home,” says Mr. Walnut, jerking his
head over his left shoulder, “back home they’re fixing the furnace and
hoping the pipes won’t freeze.”
“Haw, haw, haw!” replies Mr. Blister with evident enjoyment.
“My gorry!” ejaculates Mr. Walnut by way of expressing combined disgust
for and despair of the human race. And the tent-flap falls behind him as
he joins Mrs. Walnut.
CHAPTER III
OF MIGRANTS AND MIGRATIONS--OF THE TRUE SUN-HUNTER AND HIS DESIRES--AND
OF HIS UNIFORM, AND HIS FLUENT ASSORTMENT OF EQUIPMENT
The manner in which modern migrations are stimulated is pretty much the
same all over the world. A resident of Poland, having no money and no
job, borrows enough money from a relative in America to make the trip.
Having made it, he writes back pityingly to his friends in Poland.
“Why,” he asks in his letter, “should you stay in Poland? It is a rotten
place. Borrow some money and come over here quick. The place is full of
rich suckers who will buy anything you show them. All of the Americans
have got money. Come quickly before somebody gets all of it away from
them.” As soon as it becomes known that America can offer advantages
which Europe doesn’t possess, the European is filled with a passionate
desire to capture a few of them. Philosophers who have made a careful
study of human motives and emotions have embalmed the philosophy of
migrations in a few phrases, such as “distance lends enchantment,” and
“they all look good when they’re far away.” These phrases are true; but
the thing that lends the greatest amount of enchantment to a distant
piece of real-estate is a letter from Cousin Walt or Friend Herbert
saying, “You ought to see the fish we catch down here. A full course
dinner only costs seventy-five cents. Don’t miss this next year.”
The northern states, in the past few years, have developed a new type of
migrant. Instead of being hot on the trail of any sort of coin, currency
or legal tender, as is the modern European immigrant, and instead of
being in search of political or religious freedom, as were many European
immigrants during the past century, the modern migrant is after warm
weather during the winter months. He is a sun-hunter. He is sick of four
months of snow and ice. He is heartily tired of cold feet, numb ears,
red flannel underwear, rheumatism, stiff necks, coal bills, coughs,
colds, influenza, draughts, mittens, ear-tabs, snow shovels, shaking
down the furnace, carrying out ashes, and falling down on an icy
sidewalk and spraining his back. It gives him a prolonged pain to wear
his overshoes and a muffler and to have to thaw out the radiator of his
automobile every two or three days. The bane of his existence is sitting
around the house for four months waiting for April to come along and
unstiffen his joints. He wants sun and lots of it. If he must spend four
months doing nothing, he prefers to spend it amid the Spanish moss and
the palm trees, harkening dreamily to the cheerful twittering of the
dicky-birds and to the stirring thuds of coconuts, oranges and
grapefruit as they fall heavily to the ground.
In the big hotels in Palm Beach, Miami, Ormond, Daytona, St. Augustine
and other Florida resorts are the time-killers, with their jewel-lariats
and their acres of white trousers: with their flask-trimmed tea-dances
and their hard-boiled social aspirations and their refined gambling
houses, and their trick whisky-canes. The sun, to the time-killers, is
not of the utmost importance. If they were unable to change their
clothes several times a day they would feel ill-at-ease; if they were
unable to be charged a little matter of forty dollars a day for a double
room and bath, they would feel that they were being slighted in some
way; if they couldn’t have the knowledge that they were inhaling the
same air which was being inhaled by the leading millionaires and society
pets, they would feel cheated.
Not so the sun-hunter. The sun-hunter knows the value of a dollar. He
usually knows the value of a nickel, also. It is said that before he
relinquishes his hold on a twenty-five-cent piece, he gives it a
farewell squeeze of such violence that the eagle on it frequently emits
a strangled squawk of anguish. This statement, I believe, is a gross
exaggeration. The fact remains, however, that one never finds the
sun-hunter throwing his money around in the loose, spasmodic manner
which always characterizes the genuine time-killer. And the sun-hunter
wants just two things: sun and air. He knows nothing about Charley
Schwab or Harry Payne Whitney or the Stotesburys, and he would take no
interest whatever in them unless they got between him and the sun.
He might entertain the notion of running over to Miami Beach to view the
residence of Bob Hassler, who invented a Ford shockabsorber; but other
plutocrats and social luminaries leave him cold.
Clothes mean nothing in his life. The male sun-hunter is usually garbed
in dark trousers which hang loosely on his legs like the trousers
always inflicted on sculptured statesmen by sculptors of the Horace
Greeley period. He may or he may not wear a coat, depending entirely on
his whim of the moment; but he almost invariably affects the
old-fashioned gallus, or suspender. He will be found in this garb on
Sunday morning, when fishing for yellowtails on the edge of a creek with
a bamboo pole; he will be found in it on Wednesday afternoon, when
visiting the movies; and he will be found in it on Friday evening when
engaged in an exciting game of euchre with a pair of brother and sister
sun-hunters. He may change it, but there are few who are aware of it if
he does. It is the sun-hunter’s uniform.
The sun-hunters are not recruited from any one class of citizens. The
natives of Florida, with their unflagging determination to place
everything in the most favorable light, tell you that they are bankers,
merchants, doctors, lawyers and what-not. They’d have you think that
most of them are bankers. As a matter of fact, there are some bankers
among them--and some burglars, too. The bulk of them are farmers; for a
farmer can, if he wishes, arrange matters so that he has little or
nothing to do during the winter months. Next to them come contractors,
builders and carpenters. The sun-hunters are the people who can get away
from home with the least amount of trouble; and among them one finds
retired business men of all sorts, dairymen, doctors, bankers, lawyers
and similar folk.
Such is the modern American migrant, and Florida is the goal of his
migration. As soon as the first snow begins to fall in the North, or
when the earth has tightened up under a black frost, the sun-hunters
prepare for their flight to the South. Great numbers of them travel by
automobile; and their automobiles are completely stocked with folding
chairs, collapsible beds, accordeon-mattresses, knock-down tents,
come-apart stoves, telescopic dishwashers and a score of dishpans,
tables, dinner-sets, tin cups, water-buckets and toilet articles that
fold up into one another and look like a bushel of scrap-tin. In
addition to this, each automobile carries a large assortment of canned
goods. There are canned goods under the seats, slung against the top,
packed along the sides, tucked behind cushions and stacked along the
floor. Some of the automobiles are so well stocked with canned things
that they could make a dash for the Pole. And as one passes some of them
on the road, they sound as though their owners were carrying a reserve
supply of canned goods under the hood--loose.
CHAPTER IV
OF THE TIN-CAN TOURISTS OF THE WORLD--OF IMMIGRANTS AND OTHER
UNSUPERVISED VISITORS, NATIONAL AND LOCAL--OF CHEAP SKATES--AND OF THE
REASON WHY TIN-CANNERS DO NOT ABOUND IN PALM BEACH
It is due to the heavy weight of cans carried by these automobiles that
the true, stamped-in-the-can sun-hunter is known to himself, to his
friends and to his enemies as a tin-can tourist. He lives in more or
less permanent settlements known as tin-can towns; and his interests are
safeguarded by a flourishing organization rejoicing in the impressive
title of Tin-Can Tourists of the World.
The badge of the Tin-Can Tourists of the World is a small white
celluloid button with the letters T C T tastefully disposed on it in
dark blue. The insignia of the order is a small soup-can mounted on the
radiator of the member’s automobile. There is also a password which the
members bawl at one another when they pass on the road; but this is one
of the secrets of the fraternity that should not be profaned by
publication.
The Tin-Canners organized in 1919 at the Tampa Tin-Can Town and have
held conventions there ever since. The present membership of the order
is estimated by some of the most important officials or Khans of the
Tin-Can Tourists to be in excess of thirty thousand.
Practically every Florida town and city, large and small, located inland
or on the gulf or on the ocean, provides a tin-can town or a tin-can
village for the tin-can tourists. Occasionally these towns are free and
provide not only all the comforts of home, but comforts that home never
possessed for most of the tin-canners. The largest and most celebrated
tin-can town is in De Soto Park, East Tampa, on the shore of Tampa Bay.
Hundreds of automobiles are lined
[Illustration: A tin-can paradise on the shore of Tampa Bay.]
[Illustration: The apotheosis of tin-can comfort.]
[Illustration: A tin-can camp between Palm Beach and Miami.]
up side by side throughout the winter in De Soto Park. The camp, which
is carefully regulated and policed by the municipal authorities, is
free. A trolley line connects it with the business section of Tampa. In
the center of the camp is a pavilion where entertainments are given. The
camp has electric lights, running water, city sewerage, shower baths and
an enormous hot-water tank. Tourists are permitted to send their
children to the excellent schools on payment of fifty cents a
week--which is too little.
Oddly enough, fifty cents a week, or twenty-five dollars a year, is the
amount that naturalization experts want to charge aliens for their
schooling, but that Congress considers too high. It’s not enough for
American tin-canners; but it’s too much for aliens. How does Congress
get that way?
About the only things that aren’t furnished for the tin-canners are free
telephones, a free morning paper and free butler and valet service.
During the 1920-1921 season there were great numbers of free tin-can
camps throughout Florida; but Florida towns found, as the United States
itself is beginning to find, that an open-handed and unsupervised
welcome to any person who can scratch up enough money to take advantage
of the welcome will bring nothing but annoyances, losses and misery in
its train. The Tampa camp was a success because it was very carefully
regulated and policed. Many of the other free camps, however, suddenly
woke up to the truth of the old adage that people never appreciate the
things that they get for nothing. This is, of course, the old problem of
immigration reduced to a personal basis.
The United States talks for a century about the necessity of restricting
immigration and forcing aliens to pay for the privilege of enjoying
America’s benefits, but in that hundred years, she does next to nothing.
Florida towns, confronted with a mild edition of the same problem, take
action overnight.
What happened was this--and the same thing to a far greater degree and
with far more evil and wide-spread results, is happening to the United
States and will keep on happening until immigration is rigidly
restricted:
Word began to go forth in the northern states that free camping-grounds
were to be had in Florida towns and cities; that if one bought a
second-hand flivver at the beginning of winter and beat his way to these
camps, he could live more cheaply than he could live in the North, could
afford to accept lower pay for his services than could the Florida
natives, and could go back North in the spring with money in his pocket
and sell his flivver for what he paid for it. These are almost exactly
the same reasons that brought a million immigrants a year to America
from Eastern and Southern Europe before the war.
Florida has made it plain that she wants no more of these seasonal
laborers who can’t make a satisfactory living in their own communities.
Most of them are so hard-boiled that a diamond-pointed drill is needed
to penetrate their shells; and most of them have as much regard for
neatness, cleanliness and the rights of others as a Berkshire hog has
for a potato-peel. Tin-can towns have begun to charge various prices for
the privilege of staying in them--prices ranging from twenty-five cents
a night to seventy-five cents a night, or from four dollars to ten
dollars a month. Even the free towns won’t admit residents who wish to
go to work each day. They’ve got to be tourists, or devote themselves to
taking the air. As a result the seasonal laborers who went to Florida
for the 1921-1922 season were taking themselves homeward early in 1922
and hurling many a deep, guttural, rough-neck curse at the state of
Florida as they went. America would get very rapid and satisfactory
action on her immigration problem if her citizens could be brought in
personal contact with its rottenness.
These automobile hoboes are about as welcome in Florida as a rattlesnake
at a strawberry festival. The Florida newspapers, usually very slow
indeed to find any flaws in anybody or anything that has secured a
foothold in the state, emit poignant shrieks of rage at the very thought
of them. Early in 1922 a North Carolina paper, with the smugness which
characterizes the utterances of a resort newspaper when it thinks it is
administering a painful black eye to another resort, stepped forward
with a tale to the effect that 1922 was seeing a great exodus from
Florida of broke, hungry and disheartened tourists. Instantly the
Florida papers threw their palpitating typewriters into the breach. “The
only Florida tourists beating it back to the North,” declared the _Tampa
Tribune_ scornfully, “are the cut-rate, fly-by-night cheap-skates who
have been coming to the state and preying off the public for the past
many years.... The state has enough of its own honest labor to take care
of without opening its doors to the floater who is here to take the
bread out of his brother’s mouth for less than the honest price. This
winter Florida is taking care of its own out-of-work men and women. The
riff-raff, the confidence men, the fakir, the wage cutter and the public
mendicant all get the cold shoulder in Florida.”
The true sun-hunter and the tin-can tourist in good and accepted
standing are received in most parts of the state with the same quiet
welcome that would greet the arrival of a new citrus fruit. The big
resorts like Palm Beach and Miami Beach don’t welcome the tin-canners;
but those resorts don’t welcome any one who isn’t able to spend at least
fifty dollars a day on the merest essentials. And there are a number of
young men employed by the leading Palm Beach hostelries who have nothing
but unutterable contempt for the person who doesn’t spend one hundred
dollars a day while he is at Palm Beach.
So far as I know, tin-canners have never attempted to wield their
can-openers at Palm Beach or Miami Beach; and it is highly probable that
the regular Palm Beach set would give the tin-canners even more of a
pain than the tin-canners would give the Palm Beach set. One can imagine
the anguish on both sides if Mrs. J. Vanderplank Fritter of Park Avenue
and a party of her prominent friends, should, after going in bathing in
full evening dress, at one a. m., emerge in a still-potted state and run
smack into a flivver loaded with that well-known tin-canner, Herman
Blister, of Tackhammer, Michigan, and his wife, sister, daughter and
maiden aunt. The Fritter party might feel that its entire evening had
been spoiled; but the Blister family would probably feel that a sinister
cloud had descended on their entire season.
CHAPTER V
OF PORTABLE BUNGALOWS--OF THE RHEUMATIC DAIRYMAN--OF THE LITTLE OLE
TRUCK--OF SIMPLE PLEASURES AND LOW EXPENDITURES
The tin-canner spends, for his winter of travel, about the same amount
of money that a seasoned Palm Beach mixer frequently spends in a couple
of days. This isn’t exaggeration, either.
On the road between Miami and Palm Beach I encountered a commodious
portable bungalow lumbering noisily along in the general direction of
Palm Beach at the rate of about fifteen miles an hour. It filled the
entire road, which was nine feet wide at that point. There are many
stretches of fine macadamized road in Florida which are exactly nine
feet wide, so that when two machines pass each other, one or both of
them has to take to the ditch. The reason for such peculiar
road-building is supposed to be due to the fact that the road-engineers
took a look at the surrounding country, decided that nobody would ever
be willing to live in it, and figured that all traffic along the road
would run in only one direction--north. They were mistaken, as people
usually are about the development of Florida.
At any rate, this portable bungalow filled the road, and it continued to
fill the road until it found a good hard place beside the road that
would permit it to get out of the way without tearing itself to pieces.
It had a thermometer hanging beside its back door in an attractive
manner, and three neighborly-looking people were sitting placidly on its
glassed-in front porch. Across the base of the front porch, in large
gold letters, was painted the owners’ address, Bellevue, Ohio, from
which fact one might suspect that the owners were not persons who were
striving to hide their lights beneath a bushel, or who would shrink
timidly from publicity.
When questioned, the suspicion became a certainty. The owners of the
portable bungalow proved to be typical tin-can tourists, equally ready
to share with you their last tin of Norwegian sardines or Chicago baked
beans in the Boston manner, or to furnish you with concise and intimate
information concerning their own or their neighbors’ business and family
affairs from the panic of 1907 down to the present day.
The owner of the portable bungalow was a dairyman near Sandusky, Ohio,
who had grown tired of developing rheumatism, chilblains and a grouch
during the long winter months, and had decided three years before to
spend the winter in Florida. He had enjoyed his first winter so much
that he had persuaded a couple of friends to make the trip with him
during the second winter; and this winter there were two other couples
in his party. The other four people traveled ahead in a little sedan;
while he and his wife and his eighteen-year-old son pounded along
behind in the ole truck. “Yessir, this house here is nothing but our ole
delivery truck with a camping top put on it, and she certainly is the
greatest ole truck you ever saw! Why, my gracious, she’ll just go
through anything, this ole truck will. Why, coming through the
Everglades this ole truck ran into....”
That is one of the hall-marks of the simon-pure tin-can tourist. No
matter how battered and dilapidated his automobile may be, it has
qualities which place it above all other cars--even above other and
newer cars of the same make. It can extricate itself from thicker mud
and from deeper sand than other automobiles. Its feats of endurance are
super-automotive. They verge--to hear the tin-canner tell it--on the
miraculous. After the tin-canner has dwelt for some time on the
almost-human intelligence of the little ole car, one thinks of it as
standing up on its hind wheels and honking with delight when its master
says a kind word to it.
The dairyman’s portable bungalow, which would slough its skin with the
advent of spring and return to its less romantic duties of trucking
milk, contained a portable stove, countless canned things, a fully
equipped sink and kitchen cabinet, three hammocks, bedding for seven
people, and a phonograph, to say nothing of numerous odds and ends like
chairs, dishes, pans, suit-cases and what-not.
In the party that used this portable bungalow as a base there were, as I
have said, seven people. The seven of them had started from near
Sandusky on the twenty-second of November, worked down to the west coast
of Florida, lingering at the larger and better resorts, crossed over to
the east coast and were slowly working back up through Palm Beach and
Ormond. I met them on the eighth of February, so that they had been on
the road for two months and a half. The expenses were borne equally by
all of the travelers, except the dairyman’s son, who worked out his
keep by doing the dirty work around the cars. Each of the other six
chipped five dollars apiece into a general pool as money was needed. In
the two and one-half months a grand total of five hundred and ten
dollars had been chipped in; and this sum covered the total expenditures
of the trip--gasoline for both automobiles; inner tubes, tires and
repairs for both automobiles; street-car fares when needed; food for
seven people; and movies whenever the spirit and the movies moved
together. This meant an average of seventy-three dollars apiece for two
and one-half months’ travel in the sunny South, or almost exactly a
dollar a day apiece. Such an expenditure contrasts startlingly with
expenditures in the big resorts, where one week’s expense for a man and
his wife may easily cause a thousand-dollar bill to degenerate into a
two-ounce package of chicken-feed.
The dairyman declared that to travel in the way he was traveling cost
him about one-third as much as it would have cost him to travel to
Florida in trains and to live at hotels and boarding-houses. From this
statement it can be seen that one doesn’t necessarily have to be a
millionaire in order to spend a winter in Florida.
CHAPTER VI
OF MRS. JARLEY, THE ORIGINAL TIN-CANNER--OF THE TWO SCHOOLS OF TIN-CAN
THOUGHT--OF THE HARD-BOILED BACHELOR WITH THE CONDENSED OUTFIT--AND OF
FOLK WHO RIDE ON THE BACKS OF THEIR NECKS
Mr. Charles Dickens, in _The Old Curiosity Shop_, described the original
luxurious tin-canning vehicle; but Dickens knew the contraption as a
caravan. And instead of being motor-driven, it was, of course,
horse-drawn. The original tin-can tourist appears to have been Mrs.
Jarley, proprietress of Jarley’s Waxwork, who “rode in a smart little
house upon wheels, with white dimity curtains festooning the windows,
and window shutters of green picked out with panels of a staring red, in
which happily contrasted colors the whole concern shone brilliant....
One-half of it ... was carpeted, and so partitioned off at the further
end as to accommodate a sleeping-place, constructed after the fashion
of a berth on board ship, which was shaded, like the little windows,
with fair white curtains, and looked comfortable enough, though by what
kind of gymnastic exercise the lady of the caravan ever contrived to get
into it, was an unfathomable mystery. The other half served for a
kitchen, and was fitted up with a stove whose small chimney passed
through the room. It held also a closet or larder, several chests, a
great pitcher of water, and a few cooking utensils and articles of
crockery.”
Heated discussions arise among the tin-canners as to the proper size of
a camping outfit. The man with a portable bungalow scorns the man who
jams all his belongings into a small space as being an old woman and a
tight-wad; while the man who packs his camping outfit into the small
machine views the portable bungalow owner with the utmost contempt as
being inefficient, spoiled by luxury, a road hog and a slave to his
belongings.
In Lemon City, a suburb of Miami, I found a tin-canner whose tin-canning
outfit was probably the extreme opposite of the portable bungalow
outfit. His home was Chicago, and since early autumn he had jounced from
Chicago down to Texas, around the eastern side of the Gulf of Mexico,
down the west coast of Florida and up the east coast.
He was a hard-boiled bachelor of the sort who announces loudly that he
doesn’t propose to bother anybody and that he doesn’t want anybody to
bother him. His means of locomotion was a small Ford runabout with a
box-like contraption behind the seat similar to that used by salesmen
who carry their samples around with them. Nothing was strapped to the
sides or the running boards of the machine; it was an ordinary runabout
with the top up and with an inconspicuous box attached behind. Into this
box, which a carpenter had built for him for a matter of seven dollars,
the tin-canner had packed everything that he needed for a five months’
camping trip. He had lain awake at night for years doping out exactly
where he was going to carry the butter and how he could fry the eggs
with the least commotion; and the final result was a masterpiece of
compactness--or such compactness that if any one but the inventor had
tried to repack the camping outfit, he might have sweated over the
problem for two hours and still had enough left over to fill a freight
car.
The front of the box came off and proved to be shelves packed with tin
cans and other matters pertaining to the kitchen. A khaki top and sides
pulled out of the top of the box, extending straight backward from the
machine top, and were held in place by collapsible uprights. The seat of
the machine, laid along the top of his kitchen shelves, formed his bed;
and on this was placed what he called a shoulder-and-hip mattress. All a
person needed, he explained, was a mattress that made a comfortable
resting-place for his hips and shoulders: it made no difference what
became of his legs. His cooking utensils, including a collapsible stove
no bigger than a fair-sized inkwell, came out of a small tin suit-case.
He had every move planned out in detail.
“In the morning,” he explained, fondling his outfit with the proud and
gentle hands of a parent, “I get up and eat one of these individual
packages of breakfast food. While I’m doing that the water is boiling
for my coffee, and as soon as the coffee is done, I put on my frying pan
with bacon and eggs in it. I use two paper napkins for my tablecloth.
When I have finished breakfast, I put the eggshells in the
breakfast-food box, wipe out the frying-pan with the napkins, put them
into the box on top of the eggshells, and touch a match to the box. That
cleans everything up.” He knew exactly how, when and where he was going
to do everything, and he was delighted to knock off a couple of days to
explain any or all of his well-ordered regimen to any one who wanted to
know about it. He would even deign to explain it as fully as possible to
some who didn’t want to know about it. One of his greatest pleasures was
to unpack and pack the tin suit-case that contained his kitchen
utensils. It seemed impossible that any human agency could get all of
them into the space at his disposal, but he could do it almost every
time. Occasionally he would find himself with a frying-pan left over
when the packing was finished; but instead of getting excited he would
unpack calmly and coolly and fit the things together with a practised
hand until there was nothing left over. He had a collapsible chair that
dropped into the side pocket of his coat and took up less space than a
note-book. He had a diminutive double-ended ice-cream freezer. This was
his ice-chest. Butter went in one end and milk or cream in the other.
The biggest day in the life of this genius will, I believe, be when he
discovers a collapsible frying pan that will fold into a one-pound
bacon box.
The ordinary tin-canner, unlike these two extreme examples, is content
with an ordinary, small touring car, which, when in motion, has a part
of his camping outfit attached to every exposed part of his machine. The
tent and a couple of suit-cases are attached to one running board;
mattresses and blankets are attached to the other; cases of canned
goods, kitchen utensils and other odds and ends are fixed to the rear or
concealed beneath a false floor in the tonneau. The false floor is
frequently carried to such an extreme that the occupants of the
automobile convey the impression of riding around the world on the backs
of their necks. When the ordinary tin-canners break out their camping
outfit, the tent extends out at right angles from the side door of the
car, so that the occupants of the tent can use the car as a combination
lavatory, sitting-room, chiffonier, clothes closet, pantry and
safe-deposit vault.
CHAPTER VII
OF THE MIGRANT FROM MARION--OF HIS FEARS--OF LAND AT A NICKEL AN
ACRE--OF SAND FLEAS AND SAND SPURS--OF LONELINESS AND HONEYMOONERS--AND
OF THE DOCTOR WHO WAS RUN TO DEATH
I conferred with a mild-spoken tin-canner at a Miami tin-can camp one
hot February afternoon as to tin-canning in general. His wife, who was a
capable and keen-witted lady in a blue gingham dress, sat with us and
dug the soft substance out of tiny pine cones, her idea being to
sandpaper them and varnish them at a later date, and make them into
fascinating strings of beads. This is one of the most popular diversions
among lady tin-canners--almost as popular as is horseshoe pitching among
the male tin-canners.
The tin-canner was a non-committal corn farmer from the vicinity of that
newly-famous Ohio town, Marion. Careful thought on his part, assisted
by frequent promptings from his wife, brought out the following
information: He had broken away from the farm for the winter because he
preferred sitting around where it was comfortably warm to sitting around
where it was uncomfortably cold. He wasn’t particularly struck with
Florida land, but he liked the Florida air. Looking at Florida land with
the eye of an Ohio farmer, he felt that he wouldn’t particularly care to
pay much more than a nickel an acre for most of it. He met up with a lot
of Michigan and Ohio farmers along the road, and they felt the same way
about it. Still, it was kind of restful and soothing to look at, and the
sun and the air more than made up for the drawbacks of the land. The sun
was nicer just to sit in than the Ohio sun, and there was more of it.
This Florida sun made a person feel kind of trifling--trifling being
southern and mid-western slang for lazy. He wouldn’t want any Florida
people to hear him say that some of the land looked worthless, because
they would probably pass an act through the legislature forbidding him
to come back into the state again--and he wouldn’t like that because it
was a real pleasant place to come back to--in the winter. Besides, you
couldn’t tell much about this Florida land from looking at it. Something
that was a swamp one year would be nice solid land the next year and
selling for fifty dollars a front foot. These Florida people were real
touchy people and you had to be mighty careful what you said when they
were around. The sand flies pricked holes in him every afternoon, but he
preferred not to mention it when any Florida people were around for fear
they would say he was a California man that had been paid to come over
and cast slurs on Florida’s fair name. And for the same reason he
disliked to mention the sand fleas that came up out of the sand around
sun-down and nipped him all over the legs, or of the sand spurs that
caught in the trousers and felt as though several people were prodding
him with ice-picks.
There was one bad feature connected with tin-canning, and that was
loneliness. There were a lot of honeymooners among the tin-canners, and
they were about the only ones who didn’t seem to get lonely. Unless you
had a couple of friends to travel with, or were honeymooners, you were
apt to get lonely and homesick, and go back where it was cold, and be
sore at yourself for going back.
They were traveling with a doctor and his wife from back home. The
doctor was the only doctor in the neighborhood and he had been just run
to death. Folks wouldn’t let him alone. He was just run to death.
Somebody was getting sick every minute, and they’d call him up at all
hours of the day and night and just run him to death. For years he’d
been planning to take a vacation and rest up, but they ran him so he
couldn’t. So finally when he heard that they were going to Florida, he
just up and went. Oh, he was run to death, but a few weeks in Florida
had done him a world of good. No, he didn’t know how his former patients
were getting along. Probably they were all right. Probably there was
some young college feller looking out for them. There generally was in a
case like that. He didn’t know. Things like that didn’t worry you much
when you struck Florida and began to sit out in the sun.
CHAPTER VIII
OF THE MARVELOUS SITTING ABILITY OF THE TIN-CANNERS--OF THE PARKS IN
WHICH THEY SIT--OF THE HORSESHOE BUGS AND THE CHECKER AND DOMINO
BEETLES--OF THE DELICATE MOVEMENTS OF A CELEBRATED HORSESHOE TOSSER--AND
OF THE INTERNATIONAL HORSESHOE CLUB
And so we return to the great craving of the sun-hunters: to sit in the
sun and take the air. Golf is a matter of which they know little; tennis
is regarded as a game for muscleless smart Alecks; polo might be a sort
of dog or a movie actor--they’re not quite sure about it; sea-bathing is
a diversion in which they rarely indulge. But they are remarkable
sitters. Given a bench in the sun, they can outsit a trained athlete or
the United States Senate.
All of the towns and cities and large tin-can camps of Florida cater to
the sun-hunters by setting apart a sunny park where they can gather and
commune silently or monosyllabically with one another, chew tobacco,
discuss fertilizers, cuss the administration and indulge in the games to
which they are addicted. Some of the sun-hunters who wear the benches
shiny in these parks are tin-canners; and some are seasonal sun-hunters
who have left their farms and their businesses in the North and hired a
bungalow in Florida for two hundred or four hundred or eight hundred or
one thousand dollars a season; and some are professional sun-hunters
from the North who have made barely enough money to last them the rest
of their lives unless the country goes Bolshevik or unless Congress
taxes their savings out of existence and who have bought homes for
themselves in Florida; and a very few are rebellious husbands from the
big hotels who have sneaked away from the money-perfumed atmosphere of
the time-killers and incurred their wives’ disgust and loathing by
mingling with the rough-necks.
Take, for example, Royal Palm Park at Miami. It is larger than some of
the Florida parks for sun-hunters; but the people who use it are no
different from those who use similar parks all over Florida.
On one side of the park is Biscayne Bay, with ginger-breadish
house-boats and gleaming steam yachts and broad-winged flying boats
crowded along the shore. On another side is Miami’s principal business
street, lined with modern office buildings and up-to-the-minute
haberdasheries and modistes and drug-stores and real-estate offices and
hotels and soft-drink emporiums and parked automobiles and bustling
shoppers.
In the park itself, beneath the softly rustling palms, an audience of
silent sun-hunters, sprawled on benches which surround the edges, gaze
intently at the long double row of horseshoe pitchers and at a score of
long tables crowded with men who are brooding over obviously important
matters. The men at the tables are the skilled checker, chess and
domino players of the tin-can camps and the sun-hunters’ colonies. At
one table one afternoon I recognized a doctor who had cured my childish
ailments in Maine many years ago. Opposite him was a cattleman from
Iowa. Beside him was a crippled begger and panhandler who owned no home
at all; and busily playing checkers with the panhandler was a
prosperous-looking small-town banker from Illinois.
Checker and domino tournaments of terrifying ferocity take place at
frequent intervals. The champion checker player of Miami issues a
challenge to the champion checker player of West Palm Beach, and the
outcome is awaited with breathless interest. It is not unusual for
individuals to wager as much as fifty cents on the result.
For hair-raising excitement and action so thrilling that it frequently
causes hardened sun-hunting onlookers to swallow their chews, one must
turn to the horseshoe pitchers. Horseshoe pitching is the
[Illustration:
_Photograph by F. A. Robinson_
Miami’s main street at midday showing that there is one automobile to
every seven-eighths of an inhabitant.]
[Illustration: A portion of the Tin-Can City at Tampa, with tin-canners
engaged in their favorite pursuits.]
representative sport of the tin-canner and the sun-hunter, just as the
representative sport of the British working man is drinking Burton’s and
just as the representative sport of certain African tribes is wearing
rings in their noses.
Just as an Englishman is unable to see anything in baseball, and just as
most Americans yawn heartily at the mere mention of cricket, so is the
ordinary passer-by unable to detect the charm in horseshoe pitching. He
sees a long row of men tossing horseshoes at iron stakes and another
long row of men digging the horseshoes out of the dirt and tossing them
back at other stakes. But the sun-hunters get out immediately after
breakfast and pitch all day with feverish intensity and passionate
concentration, only quitting when the sun goes down behind the palms in
a golden haze.
Some of the horseshoe experts carry their private horseshoes with them
in leather bags, and it is not unusual for an aspiring horseshoe tosser
to seek out the experts and pay handsomely for copies of the instruments
with which they won to fame and high position. Thus it may be seen how
among horseshoe tossers, as well as among golfers, ballplayers and
others who should know better, the delusion persists that a workman may
attain perfection through his tools instead of through himself.
The more skilful tossers carry with them all the appliances of their
avocation--tape measures with which to measure the distance of the shoes
from the stake; calipers to measure their distance from one another;
chalk with which to keep score; collapsible rakes to smooth out the
tumbled dirt around the stakes. The delicate movements of a celebrated
tosser as he hitches up his galluses, spits on his right hand and tests
his muscles by sinking to a semi-squatting position and rising upright
again, are watched with the keenest interest by large crowds of
sun-hunters. When a horseshoe makes a particularly noteworthy flight, a
fusillade of applausive spitting splashes on the sun-baked ground.
There is, of course, an International Horseshoe Club. It is too
important an organization to be demeaned with a merely local name, such
as the Horseshoe Club of America. Then there are local chapters that
indulge in tournaments at which feeling runs high. At West Palm Beach,
when I was there, a new pitch was being prepared for the big impending
tournament with Lake Worth. An international polo match may get more
publicity, but there’s more quiet bitterness over a horseshoe
tournament--much more. Especially in Florida.
Those who weary of dominoes, checkers, chess and horseshoe pitching are
at liberty to cut a bamboo pole and sit in the sun beside one of the
countless rivers, streams and inlets that dent the Florida coast. These
waters are full of trout, bass, red snapper, yellowtails, pompano,
grunts--silvery and delicious fish so-called because of their noisy and
peevish growls and grunts of protest when removed from the water--and
many other fish whose eating and fighting qualities would have caused
Izaak Walton to swoon with delight.
It’s hard to believe that the North, every winter, is full of people who
hate northern winters, and of folk who don’t know what to do with
themselves. If they don’t know enough to become sun-hunters, they
deserve to suffer.
BOOK THREE
TROPICAL GROWTH
CHAPTER I
OF THE ENTHUSIASM OF ALL GROWING THINGS IN FLORIDA--OF PAW-PAWS AND
PROSPECTUSES AND PERFECT THIRTY-FOURS--OF FIENDS IN HUMAN SHAPE--AND OF
THE WATCHFULNESS OF THE NATIVES FOR INSULTS
Everything grows in Florida. That is to say, everything grows in Florida
that Florida people want to grow. That is Florida’s specialty: growing.
Occasionally a few things get out of hand and indulge in some
over-enthusiastic growing when Florida people wish that they wouldn’t;
but for the most part Florida is proud of the remarkable growths that
take place within her boundaries. This is particularly true of southern
Florida. The superlatives as well as the fish grow to surprising
proportions: so do the real-estate advertisements and the avocados. The
sun is larger and warmer than in other parts of America; and the
sky--unless the leading Florida authorities are mistaken in their
observations--is higher and bluer than elsewhere.
There are only three things that southern Florida has never made any
effort to grow. These are mountains, snow-storms and earthquakes. If
there were any particular reason for her to grow any of these things,
she could probably arrange to pump up a few square miles of ocean floor
and pile the sand up into a mountain that would look like a blood
relative--say a grandson--of Fujiyama; and she could unquestionably find
a way to raise artificial snow-storms that would make Oregon jealous,
and earthquakes that would shake out a person’s eye-teeth. Since there
isn’t any reason for them, she specializes on more useful things like
paw-paws and prospectuses and perfect thirty-four bathing-girls and
what-not, and secures some startling results.
Take Miami, for example. Before taking it, one should understand that
there is grave danger in taking any particular city in Florida to the
exclusion of any other city, because all the untaken cities immediately
feel slighted and begin to thirst for the heart’s blood of the one who
did the taking.
Each Florida city or resort is violently jealous of every other resort
or city. The residents of Palm Beach speak sneeringly of Miami as being
a bit plebeian. The residents of Miami speak compassionately of Palm
Beach, as young and pretty girls speak of decaying beauty. St.
Petersburg and Tampa and Miami have little of a favorable nature to say
concerning one another. They only unite to resist attacks from resorts
outside the state, or to say a few tart words about California.
Every little while some fiend in human shape prints a piece in a South
Carolina or North Carolina or Georgia paper falsely accusing a Florida
city of harboring a few cases of typhoid or scarlet fever, or of being
too chilly for winter bathing. Instantly the Florida people rise to
defend the state’s fair name; and the low, searing curses that are
hurled against the foul detractor are warm enough to singe a hog.
Every little while, too, Florida gets a chance to slip a knife into her
hated resort rival, California; and when the chance occurs, the air is
filled with a deadly swishing sound, due to the violence with which the
knife is inserted.
A snow-storm in California causes Florida newspapers to spread loud and
exultant head-lines entirely across their front pages, declaring
excitedly: NO LIVES LOST IN CALIFORNIA BLIZZARD. This is the negation of
news everywhere except in Florida; but Florida smacks her lips over it
with the keenest delight. She emphasizes the blizzard’s severity by
shrieking that no lives were lost, thus implying that hundreds--nay,
thousands--might have been lost save for the merest chance. She is so
anxious to have tourists realize that she is the queen of winter
resorts that she is overjoyed when another resort-state is cursed with a
phase of Nature that tends to discourage tourists.
There is another grave danger in taking any Florida city as an example.
The natives of Florida winter resorts are constantly on the qui vive for
slights and insults. They are so much on the qui vive in this respect
that there is scarcely room for any one else on it. They occupy
practically the entire qui vive.
CHAPTER II
OF HOTEL RATES--OF MOSQUITOES--AND OF THE OUTCRY AGAINST THE SHIPPING
BOARD FOR DARING TO MENTION EUROPE
One can never tell beforehand what statements, phrases, remarks, words
or inflections--or lack of these things--the staunch Floridans will
regard as slighting or insulting. Sometimes they become just as fretful
if you don’t say them as they do if you do say them.
There is the matter of hotel rates, for example: if you tell what they
are at the best hotels, all Florida reviles you for frightening tourists
away. If you tell what they are at the cheaper hotels, the owners and
officials of the best hotels curse you bitterly for representing Florida
as a cheap place. Evidently they want you to lie about the hotel rates;
but if you do, they will call you a liar.
Then there is the little matter of mosquitoes. Usually there are not
mosquitoes along the Florida coastline between the months of November
and March, inclusive, because the prevailing winds drive them inland.
Occasionally, however, the wind shifts or the atmosphere is unduly
affected by the hemisphere or something technical; and the tough,
leathery, muscular, hungry Florida mosquitoes are blown down to the
shore, where they sink their dagger-like beaks into the soft white flesh
of the northern tourists.
It is only occasionally, it should be understood, that such a
catastrophe occurs. Occasionally at Palm Beach one is told with hoarse
jeering laughter that there are mosquitoes at Miami; but when one gets
to Miami he finds no mosquitoes, and is told with cold emphasis that
there aren’t any in Miami--but that there are many of them at Palm
Beach. And so it goes. If one doesn’t mention the Palm Beach mosquitoes,
one runs the risk of being viewed with abhorrence by the Miami folk;
and if one doesn’t mention the Miami mosquitoes, one is apt to be
regarded with loathing by the Palm Beach boosters. And if one goes back
North and makes any mention whatever of mosquitoes in Florida, he is
more than likely to be enthusiastically damned by every Floridan as a
vile prevaricator.
Not long ago the Shipping Board in its advertisements emphasized the
delights of winter travel in Europe. Instantly the watchful Floridans
leaped to their feet with ear-piercing shrieks of protest. A government
bureau, they screamed, was taking the money of Florida taxpayers to
advertise winter attractions in competition with their own. The entire
state had never been so insulted in its life; and the wrathful cries
which went forth traveled all the way to Washington and knocked
unsightly chips from many of the capital’s ivory domes. As a result, the
Shipping Board promised to change its policy, and the touchy Floridans
became calmer--though it is difficult for the outsider to see how the
Shipping Board can advertise at all in the winter without entering into
competition with Florida. But you never can tell. You never can tell. It
is about as safe to write about Florida as it would be to kick
carelessly at the nubbins on a floating mine.
CHAPTER III
OF PALM TREES--OF VARIETIES OF FISH--AND OF FRUIT AND LIARS AND BARON
MUNCHAUSEN
Let us return to the matter of growth in southern Florida. Everything,
as has been said, grows there. There are twenty-nine varieties of palm
trees; and one can spend an entire week doing nothing but check up palm
trees. According to official count there are two hundred and
seventy-five different varieties of fish in southern Florida waters--or
there were toward the middle of last February. A new variety is
discovered every week. Unofficial counters say that there are more than
seven hundred varieties. The unofficial ones are probably nearer right
than the official ones. There are so many different varieties of fruit
that if one attempted to eat every variety in one day, he would
unquestionably burst with a loud majority report. A partial list of
fruits which are being successfully raised in Florida’s southernmost
county, provided by a man with a poor memory, contains avocado--or
alligator pear, custard apple, mammea apple, Jamaica apple, rose apple,
Bugamot, citron, banana, Barbadoes cherry, chermoyas, cecropia, Surinam
cherry, carissa, Jackfruit, lime, lemon, loquat, various sorts of
mangoes, fifty-seven different varieties of orange, a number of crosses
between oranges and other things, grapefruit, eggfruit, dates, olives,
monsterosa deliciosa, papaya, pomegranate, Japanese persimmon, sour sop,
sapote, sapodillo, strawberry, tomato. If a Floridan has plenty of time
at his disposal, he can think up twenty or thirty more fruits that are
fruiting constantly and energetically in southern Florida.
One of the unfortunate features of discussing southern Florida lies in
the fact that if one isn’t careful, his non-Florida or anti-Florida
hearers will suspect him of having taken money to advertise the state.
They will, in short, suspect him of exaggeration when he carelessly
mentions the ever-sunny skies and the perfect-thirty-four bathing girls
and the amazing growths. The whole subject is fraught with risks. Baron
Munchausen would never have been able to work up a reputation as a liar
in southern Florida, because his lies weren’t much more startling than
the things that happen there every day. But if the Baron had sandwiched
a few Florida facts among his lies and had tried them out on his
neighbors some evening after his second gallon of Dortmunder beer, they
would have slapped one another on the back and rolled around in their
chairs with tears of mirth pouring down their cheeks, and assured one
another between their spasmodic gasps and groans of merriment that there
never would be anybody in the world who would be able to tell such
downright ridiculous, preposterous, side-splitting, hair-raising lies as
the Baron.
CHAPTER IV
OF MIAMI AND OF TROPICAL GROWTH--OF THE GROWING OF A SHINGLE INTO A
BUNGALOW--OF THE POPULATION OF MIAMI IN 1980--AND OF THE PRONUNCIATION
OF MIAMI
Take Miami, for example. In 1896 Miami consisted of two small dwellings
and a storehouse. Sometimes as many as ten Seminole Indians would be
seen in the vicinity of these buildings at one time, and the occupants
of the dwellings would scarcely be able to sleep that night because of
their excitement at seeing such a throng of people.
In 1910, Miami had a population of 5,471. In 1920 there were about
30,000 people living there. In 1922 there were 40,000. That’s the way
things go in Florida. Once let a thing get a foothold, and it grows so
rapidly that the general effect is more that of an explosion than a
growth.
Grass grows with such enthusiasm in Miami that one can’t merely plant
seed and let it grow. If one did that the grass would come in so thick
that it would choke itself. What one does is to plant the seed and then,
when the seed has sprouted, transplant the spears of grass so that
they’re six inches apart.
Tree culture is very simple. A small piece of wood the size of a
toothpick is stuck in moist sand. At the end of four years the toothpick
has grown into a hibiscus bush twenty feet high and twenty feet across.
The publisher of the leading Miami paper declares that in some sections
of the city the soil is so fertile that if a shingle is planted in it
before sun-up, it will grow into a fully equipped bungalow by nightfall.
Other fish stories will be taken up in another place.
Miami surges ahead so rapidly that none of its citizens dares to stand
still for a moment in order to watch it grow for fear that
[Illustration:
_Photograph by F. A. Robinson_
Scientists skilled in the use of the slide rule have estimated that up
to and including April 1, 1922, 1,672,889 kisses have been exchanged
beneath this tree.]
[Illustration:
_Photograph by W. A. Fishbaugh_
One of Miami’s many beautiful public schools.]
[Illustration:
_Photograph by W. A. Fishbaugh_
Private yachts and house-boats tied up at the foot of Miami’s principal
shopping street.]
he’ll be left so far behind that he’ll never catch up. If he makes a
prediction, he makes a running prediction; never a standing prediction.
If he sells a piece of land--and it’s as natural for a Miami citizen to
sell a piece of land as it is for him to have coffee for breakfast--he
is very likely to name a price that the land will reach to-morrow
instead of the price that it has reached to-day. He is always moving
ahead of the city.
The population of Miami has increased four hundred and forty per cent.
in the last ten years. Therefore the Miami people figure that it will
easily increase another four hundred and forty per cent. in the next ten
years. They claim that the city’s population in 1925 will be one hundred
thousand, and that in 1930 it will be two hundred thousand. Proceeding
at that rate, its population in 1950 will be five million; and by 1980
practically every one in North America will be pushing and crowding in
his effort to squeeze into the city.
It is, of course, quite obvious to the effete and blasé northerner that
the claims made by the Miami folk show that there are some screws loose
on their claimers. The Miami people, however, say that the northern
people don’t know how to adjust their views to a rapidly growing
city--that they stand still to look at it; and that while they are
looking, the city grows out of focus. They prove their theory by the
following anecdote:
A short time ago the telephone company sent down estimators to look at
Miami and estimate its population in another ten years, in order that
the company might be able to install the proper-sized telephone
switchboard. The estimators looked, made careful estimates, and reported
that the population would be one hundred thousand in ten years’ time.
The telephone company burst into loud howls of derision. “You’re crazy!”
it cried to the estimators. “Who ever told you that you could estimate?
Somebody must be paying you to boost the place! Get out of the way and
let us send down some regular estimators!” So the company sent down some
new estimators; and these estimators in turn looked over the ground and
did some careful estimating. They then returned and reported that the
population in ten years’ time would be one hundred and twenty thousand.
The telephone company, without more ado, installed a switchboard based
on that estimate. But the Miami people claim that the estimators were
making stationary estimates, and that the difference between the
estimates of the first and the second estimators was merely due to the
fact that the city had moved forward between their visits. If they had
known how to place themselves _en rapport_, so to speak, with the city
and move forward with it, both of them would have estimated that the
population would be two hundred thousand in ten years’ time.
At any rate, the real-estate operations in Miami--and the word Miami,
by the way, is pronounced My-amma by every one except the uncultured
folk who insist on pronouncing it as spelled--the real-estate operations
in Miami are on a scale that will provide building lots for twenty
million people by 1930.
CHAPTER V
OF REAL-ESTATE DEALERS--OF THE LARGE HANDSOME SALESMEN--OF NOISY
AUCTIONS--OF ABSOLUTE AND UNABSOLUTE AUCTIONS--AND OF PRICES FOR EVERY
POCKETBOOK
The exact number of real-estate dealers in Miami is not known.
Practically every one over eighteen years of age dabbles in real-estate
at one time or another. Almost every one owns a lot somewhere that he is
anxious to get rid of, although it is unanimously admitted by the owners
that every lot in Miami will double in value in a year’s time. Almost
every other doorway along Miami’s crowded streets shelters a real-estate
firm; and whole coveys of real-estate firms are frequently sheltered in
buildings that would be considered small by a family of three people.
Some of the firms keep impressive-looking salesmen standing just outside
of the building in which the firms do business. These salesmen are
large, handsome men for the most part, strikingly dressed in white
trousers, pearl gray sack coats, white shoes, white belts, white
neckties and straw hats tilted knowingly toward the right ear. If one
stops for a moment to admire a window display which shows automobiles,
diamonds and tax-exempt bonds sprouting from the super-fertile soil of
land that is on sale within at one thousand dollars an acre, one of the
salesmen is very apt to come up behind him and tempt him with honeyed
words. It is almost futile to struggle against these salesmen. Unless
one possesses an iron will, he will weakly permit himself to be coaxed
within the portals of the office, where he will spend the better part of
an hour looking at meaningless maps and hearing large sums of money
mentioned with the utmost carelessness and disrespect.
Other real-estate firms constantly carry on selling campaigns that
strongly resemble--in noise, at least--the return of the Twenty-seventh
Division from the War. They resort to brass bands, numbers of
sight-seeing automobiles, silver-tongued orators to cajole the crowd,
and advertisements that inflame the acquisitive spirit of every
beholder. When newcomers see a monster parade of automobiles, headed by
a blaring band, swinging through the streets of Miami, they usually
think, in their innocence, that a three-ring circus has come to town. As
a matter of fact, it is only the firm of Yammer & Yawp taking a mob of
prospects out to its daily auction sale of lots at Rubber Plant Park.
Skilled and expensive real-estate auctioneers are imported from
California and New York--auctioneers capable of selling refrigerating
machines to inhabitants of the Arctic Circle. People are lured to the
auctions by free lunches, by distribution of souvenirs, by the giving
away of automobiles. “We give away,” advertises one subdivision owner,
“a new Ford car each Monday or its equivalent in cash, and other
valuable gifts daily for the duration of the sale. And we will entertain
those who attend the sales with Any Amusements We Are Able To Provide.”
The exact meaning of the last phrase is shrouded in mystery, but it
makes its appeal to those who read between the lines.
“Remember,” shouts another firm, “Remember, We Are Giving Away
Absolutely Gratis a Sedan to the Person Holding the Lucky Number--Get
Your Free Ticket Now.” “Auction! Auction! Auction!” bawls another.
“Beautiful and useful souvenirs and prizes to be given away.” “Come ride
in our busses and win our free prizes,” coaxes another.
Early in 1922 the real-estate firms which disposed of their land by
auction were vociferating passionately that their auctions were bona
fide, that they were “legitimate and sound,” that they were “without
reserve,” that they were absolute. “Absolute auctions” was the
watchword of the hour. The inference was, of course, that a number of
auction sales had been held that were not absolute. “One Thousand
Dollars Reward,” stated one firm in a dignified but bean-spilling
manner, “will be paid for the proof of any buy-bidder at any of our
sales. The opportunity of opportunities to buy a piece of the richest
garden and fruit land in southern Florida. Remember, you make the price
and every lot put up will positively be sold to the highest and best
bidder without limit or reserve.”
This was what had been happening: Real-estate firms had advertised
auctions, put up lots for sale, and, when those in attendance languidly
refused to bid more than six or seven dollars for a lot, used
professional buyers to make phony bids in order either to run up the
price or get the lots off the market. It is possible that such a thing
will never happen again, now that real-estate firms have the habit of
advertising absolute auctions--possible, but scarcely probable. With
five or six auctions being held each day, and with large numbers of
unattractive lots being offered to stolid middle-westerners who have
come more for the free lunch and the automobile ride than for the
real-estate, it is inevitable that some lots will go for about one
dollar and seventy-five cents if everything is left in the hands of the
legitimate prospects. Common sense tells us that no real-estate dealer
could stand such a blow without emitting raucous shrieks of pain, no
matter how persuasively and convincingly he may chatter about absolute
auctions.
Some of the real-estate dealers allow customers to buy land on terms
that would attract even Trotsky, who doesn’t believe in that sort of
thing. Four-hundred-dollar lots in one subdivision can be had for twenty
dollars cash and ten dollars a month, with no interest or taxes for a
year. In another subdivision, one-thousand-two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar
lots sell for one hundred dollars cash and twenty-five dollars a month
until twenty per cent. of the principal has been paid, after which the
buyer can sink back and refrain from paying any more on his principal
for seven and a half years. A firm advertises island water-front lots at
five thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars a lot, the terms being
“seven hundred and fifty cash; balance five hundred every six months; no
interest first year; no taxes till spring 1925.”
CHAPTER VI
OF SUBDIVISIONS, WISE AND OTHERWISE--OF LANDSCAPE ATROCITIES--OF SMALL
FARMS AND FARMERS--AND OF FASCINATING STRAWBERRY AND TOMATO STATISTICS
Subdivisions extend out of Miami in all directions--up the coast and
down the coast and inland and out into the bay in the shape of islands.
Palm Beach is seventy-five miles north of Miami; and there are almost
enough subdivisions along that seventy-five mile stretch to provide
homes for a million people.
Some of the subdivisions are beautiful and some of them are horrible.
Some have been thoroughly cleared of the tangled jungle of palmettos and
other scrub that makes a total mess of all undeveloped Florida land; and
flawless roads and pavements have been constructed, water mains put in,
and gas, water and electricity provided. Restrictions are imposed in
some of the good ones: homes costing less than four thousand can not be
built on certain lots, while on other lots they must cost at least
fifteen thousand.
Other subdivisions are laid out purely and simply, as the saying goes,
for the purpose of separating the sucker from his money. The streets are
half-laid, the location is vile, and the shacks that are run up on the
crowded lots are little better than the marshhuts of Revere Beach and
Coney Island to which poverty-stricken city dwellers of Boston and New
York frequently repaired during the heated terms of the early;
’eighties.
On top of these depressing spectacles, many of which may some day be
partly obscured in tropical verdure, certain enterprising citizens of
Miami have added to Florida’s scenic beauties by lining the roadsides
with blatant sign-boards setting forth the delights of garages,
restaurants, clothing emporia and similar enterprises. Not content with
building self-sustaining sign-boards which protrude gauntly and
repulsively from the flat landscape and convince the newcomer that he is
approaching a slum-city, they have nailed countless numbers of huge
yellow monstrosities to the palms and fruit-trees along the
highways--signs that have no influence on any one except the lover of
beauty, and which only serve to fill him with contempt for people who
can permit the few natural beauties of their surroundings to be so
befouled. In the North one expects to find--as he does find--a plague of
sign-boards, and hideous summer resorts whose predominant features are
those of the awful and tasteless ’eighties. In the new South, however,
which lures tourists with honeyed words and promises of every sort of
beauty, the erecting of roadside sign-boards should be viewed with as
much disgust and loathing as grapefruit-stealing or murder--both of
which crimes fall under somewhat the same head in Miami.
Spreading through and beyond the subdivisions are the orange and
grapefruit groves, and the truck gardens and vegetable farms. Oranges
and grapefruit are so common in southern Florida that grapefruit are
served free in many of the hotels; while many other hotels keep large
bowls of free oranges alongside the ice-water tank. So far as is known,
these are the only things that one has a chance of getting for nothing
in Florida hotels.
There are hundreds of three-acre and five-acre farms owned by
northerners who didn’t like winter, and ran away from it with one or two
thousand dollars in their pockets. Many of these little farmers not only
manage to make both ends meet, but even salt away comfortable bank
rolls. One little town near Miami shipped sixty-one thousand quarts of
strawberries to northern cities during the first six weeks of the 1922
season, and the growers’ share of the spoils was fifty cents a quart.
The wise strawberry farmers, who plant their land to velvet beans during
the summer and plow them under in September, and otherwise indulge in
the clever tricks of the trade, get some very snappy results. One of the
best strawberry farmers near Miami had four and one-tenth acres of land
planted to strawberries in 1921. His first berries came in on December
twentieth, and he picked twice a week until July fifteenth. The total
yield of his four and one-tenth acres was 41,059 quarts, his average
price for each quart was forty-five cents, and his gross sales amounted
to slightly over eighteen thousand five hundred dollars. His total
expenses were a little over six thousand dollars.
More than eight thousand acres are planted to tomatoes in the vicinity
of Miami, and nearly five hundred thousand crates were shipped north
during the 1921 season. These tomatoes bring the growers about three
dollars a crate, of which about a dollar and seventy-five cents must be
charged off to fertilizer, labor, hauling and crating. The life of a
tomato farmer is not a happy one, for the crop is very sensitive to wet
weather. It is also very sensitive to dry weather. The slightest nip of
frost also puts a severe crimp in it. Some of the tomato farmers say
that the plant is so sensitive that if a man cusses or chews tobacco in
its vicinity, it will refuse to bear. In spite of all this, there are
plenty of tomato-lovers to plant tomatoes every winter, and some of them
have made fortunes out of this popular fruit--or vegetable.
CHAPTER VII
OF THE SUSPICIOUS STORIES CONCERNING THE MANGO--OF THE PET MANGO OF THE
MIAMIANS--AND OF ITS SUPERIORITY TO OTHER THINGS
The cupidity of farmers who are sick of northern winters is easily
aroused by prices obtained for the best varieties of mangoes. “Their
rich, spicy flavor, tempting fragrance and beautiful coloring,” say the
Miami prospecti, “make them one of the most tempting table desserts that
can be imagined.” Miami, it appears, has a monopoly on this fruit, and
the catalogues rub in the bad news by adding that “this monopoly is not
only confined to the cultivation, but also to the exquisite joy of
eating it, as very few find their way to the northern markets, the local
demand far exceeding the supply.” One reads that the choicest varieties
“readily sell in the northern markets for from one dollar to one dollar
and fifty cents each,” thus confirming the skeptical northerner in the
belief of the late P. T. Barnum that there was one born every minute.
The weak spot in this argument is not visible offhand to the doubting
Thomases from the North who spend the winter in Florida. The mango
ripens in summer--in June and July--so the winter visitors can not sink
their teeth in the widely advertised fruit. Consequently they always
feel sure that there is some good reason why the Florida people prefer
the exquisite joy of eating the mango to the even more exquisite joy of
shaking down their northern brothers for one dollar and fifty cents per
mango.
Strangely enough, there is no Ethiopian concealed anywhere in the mango
woodpile, although any one who aspires to become a mango-grower may have
his first fine enthusiasm dashed by the fact that mango trees don’t
begin bearing until five to seven years after they have been set out;
and seven years is a long time to wait, especially if one is hunting
for quick returns.
The mango in its finest form, however, is worth waiting seven years for.
The mango with which northerners are familiar is a small, mottled,
unhealthy-looking fruit about the size of a large lemon. The interior is
partly mushy and partly stringy, and it gets tangled up in the teeth in
a most annoying manner. The general effect obtained from dallying with
it is that the mango is a total loss. The pet mango of the Miamians is a
very different proposition. It is known as the Hayden mango, and is
about the size of a large coconut. When ripe it is rosy red all over,
and has the fragrance of a flower. It is a baffling fruit to open, as
its seed is about the size and shape of the cuttle-bone used as an aid
to canaries’ digestions. The unskilled mango eater will frequently wreck
an entire mango trying to worry it open gently; but he eventually learns
that one must wring its neck in a brutal manner to get the best
results.
The meat of the Hayden mango is sweeter than that of any other fruit I
know; and it has a peculiar and delicious taste and aroma of pine
forests. Years ago my grandfather, in the spring of the year, would go
prowling through the New Hampshire woods; and on his return he would
bring with him a lardpail full of the tender, slippery, fragrant inner
lining of the bark of pine trees, locally known as “slyver.” This was
always seized with delighted acclaim by the entire family and wolfed
down greedily because of its delicious piney taste. The Hayden mango has
the same piney taste raised to the thirty-third or master’s degree. One
Hayden mango makes an ample dessert for two people; and I have not found
that the Miamians are averse to selling them, or that the prices are as
high as the catalogues claim. Packages of six Hayden mangoes have been
sent to me repeatedly from Miami by parcel post at three dollars a half
dozen.
The Miami catalogues are a trifle wild when they start raving about the
exquisite joy of eating a mango that costs a dollar and a half; but if
one can get a good Hayden mango for half a dollar, it will probably
strike him as being considerably better than such ordinary matters as
oatmeal gruel, baked beans, suet pudding, griddle cakes, fried bananas,
bread pudding, or a poke in the eye with a pointed stick.
CHAPTER VIII
OF THE EVERGLADES AND OF THE TWO SEASONS OBTAINING IN THAT DAMP
LOCALITY--AND OF GRASS, FANCY AND OTHERWISE
Off to the west of Miami lie the Everglades, first made famous by the
Seminole War, when the United States Army spent upward of fifteen years
trying to chase the Seminoles out of the Everglades but seldom saw more
than three Seminoles at one time. The Everglades, not so long ago, was
an enormous shallow lake eight thousand square miles in area, dotted
with half-submerged islands out of which grew giant whiskered live oaks
and countless varieties of tropical plants. The alligator basked in its
shadowed streams; and the graceful panther lurked among the undergrowth,
constantly ready to emit a bloodcurdling scream calculated to make the
hardiest intruder think longingly of home and mother. Exploration was
made almost impossible by a saw-toothed grass which grew throughout the
Everglades and extended several feet above the water, so that the person
who tried to force his way through it would cut everything to shreds up
to and including his eyebrows. People talked for years of draining the
Everglades; but such talk was usually received with screams of laughter
that rivaled the yells of the Everglades panthers.
Several years ago the State of Florida settled down in earnest to the
systematic draining of the Everglades. Canals were cut, giant locks were
installed to control the water level, and the land was cleared.
Thousands of acres are being reclaimed each year, settlers are moving in
constantly, and the reclaimed land is yielding vegetables and fruits of
a size and quality to make a Maine farmer shake his head dubiously and
wonder whether that last batch of licker that the sheriff sent him had
affected his eyes. The soil is a rich black muck which has resulted
from centuries of decaying vegetation; and anything that will grow will
grow about twice as large and twice as rapidly in the Everglades as it
will anywhere else. There used to be only two seasons in the
Everglades--wet and wetter; but now there is a dry season; and in the
course of a few years, when the fruit-trees begin to bear, the
Everglades alone will be in a position to supply every northern city
throughout the winter with all the newfangled and oldfangled fruits and
vegetables that can be desired.
The thousands of farmers who have retired from active farming and are
occupying their winters by absorbing the sun in Miami and pitching
horseshoes in Royal Palm Park become fearfully excited over the various
varieties of grass that are raised in the Everglade lands. Grass is not
a thing that one would expect to mention at any length in a casual
dissertation on a winter resort; but the excessive wonderment over it
on the part of the horseshoe pitchers requires some mention of grass. It
appears that some of the grasses that have come in thick enough to get
themselves talked about are Para, Bermuda, Rhodes, Natal, Sudan, St.
Lucia, St. Augustine, Napier, Broom, sage, Guatemalan, panicum, crab
grass, maiden cane, Billion Dollar grass and several others. There seems
to be everything but just plain grass. The chief idea of the farmers
seems to be that with all this grass, the Florida stock raisers can have
evergreen pasturage, and cattle can be fed on about a third of the space
that they need in the North.
This, of course, is important if true; but the average person who comes
to Miami is not interested in grass except as something on which to play
golf or sit. What he wants is usually holiday relaxation and plenty of
it; and if that’s what he wants, he can get so much of it in and near
Miami that one week of complete relaxation must usually be followed by
two weeks of recuperation.
CHAPTER IX
OF THE OLD MIAMI AND THE NEW MIAMI--OF DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MIAMI BEACH
AND PALM BEACH--OF THE SCENIC POSSIBILITIES IN FLOATING COCONUTS AND THE
ACTIVITIES OF JOHN S. COLLINS
The people who knew Miami prior to 1918 have in their minds an entirely
different place from the Miami of to-day. The old Miami was a city first
and a winter resort afterward. This statement will, of course, offend
the touchy Miami folk; but it is true none the less. It was--and is--a
hustling, bustling, booming, noisy city with about one automobile for
each seven-eighths of an inhabitant, and with perpetual warmth and
sunshine. In the long run, however, the big-money tourists don’t want to
go to a hustling, bustling, rapidly growing city for their winter
holidays, even though the city may boast perpetual warmth and sunshine.
What they want is clean air and plenty of sun and sky, and a complete
change from the scenery to which they are accustomed in their northern
cities, and a surcease from all noises except the noises they make
themselves--which are frequently much louder than the ordinary noises of
a city. For that reason Palm Beach was in a class by itself. The
big-money tourists went to Palm Beach. Miami got a smattering of them,
but a very small smattering. Palm Beach sneered at Miami Beach and
called it “the Coney Island of Florida.”
That, however, was prior to 1918. To-day Miami has been augmented by
Miami Beach; and eventually Miami Beach will nose out ahead of Palm
Beach and get all the youngsters and live wires who like to be on the
jump from eight in the morning until three and four and five o’clock the
next morning--with occasional busy evenings which will keep them up
until six or seven in the morning. Palm Beach folk still sneer
[Illustration:
_Photograph by F. A. Robinson_
The outdoor swimming pool on a private estate in Miami.]
[Illustration: Any January morning at Miami Beach.]
[Illustration: A January afternoon tea-dance on the shore of Biscayne
Bay.]
at Miami Beach and still, according to their ancient custom, call it the
Coney Island of Florida. But it isn’t the Coney Island of Florida; and
Palm Beach is frightened for the first time in years--frightened that
the wealthy tourists will desert the endless corridors of her hotels and
the continuous clothes-changing and the eternal chatter and twaddle of
society and near-society and the lifeless air of Bradley’s Roulette
Emporium, and get down to Miami, where there’s something doing every
minute, and where people go into dinner in golf clothes without getting
a hard look from the head waiter.
The story of Miami Beach is a remarkable one and without it Miami would
scarcely be able to get out gaudy prospectuses with pictures of
beautifully shaped ladies in red one-piece bathing suits on the covers.
This is the way of it:
Miami’s palm-shaded streets run down to the shores of Biscayne Bay,
which is a strip of water some seven miles long and between two and
three miles wide. Between the bay and the ocean is a long narrow tongue
of land, not much over a mile in width at its widest point. Prior to
1913, ninety-nine per cent. of this narrow tongue of land was a
worthless jungle. The man who owned it is said to have bought it for
twelve thousand dollars. The only way of reaching it was by ferry boat,
and there was nothing on it in the line of a winter resort except a
bathing shack on the beach at the extreme tip, to which a few tourists
occasionally repaired when the urge for sea bathing became almost too
intense to be endured.
A persistent attempt had been made to utilize the natural advantages of
this narrow tongue of sand and jungle. In 1884 some New Jersey business
men essayed to plant coconuts on it in sufficient quantities to make the
venture profitable. There were no railroads, and it could only be
reached by boat. Three shiploads of coconuts were brought from the
island of Trinidad. The ships were anchored off the tongue of land; and
when the wind blew toward the shore, the coconuts were dumped overboard
to float to land. Three hundred and thirty-four thousand coconuts were
sent ashore by the promoters of this scheme. They cost five cents apiece
in Trinidad, and the freight figured up to six cents apiece. The venture
became so costly that the promoters hunted around for more capital and
succeeded in interesting a New Jersey fruit-grower named John S.
Collins. As a commercial proposition, the coconut planting was a
complete failure. But as a flyer in landscape architecture, it was a
great success; for the entire ocean-front of the tongue of land was
fringed with beautiful coconut palms.
The original coconut planters dropped out as their failure became
apparent. Collins and one other man hung on to their narrow and
apparently worthless piece of land. In the center of it was some high
ground on which Collins conceived the idea of starting a grove of
avocados, better known as alligator pears. The avocado shuns frost as an
Epworth Leaguer shuns cocktails; and since there is no frost worthy of
the name on the tongue of land because of its water-protection on both
sides, Collins figured that avocado culture could be made to pay. He was
right; and his avocado grove is now the largest in the world. The speed
with which he worked, however, didn’t meet the approval of his one
remaining partner; so Collins bought him out, becoming the sole owner of
the narrow sand-spit with the avocado grove down its backbone.
It then began to dawn on Collins, who was seventy-four years old and
therefore able to see a good many things that younger men overlooked,
that his sand-spit was a pleasant place on which to live during the
winter and summer too, but that he probably couldn’t persuade people to
live there until he made it possible for people to get there.
Consequently he conceived the idea of building a wooden bridge two and
one-half miles in length--the longest vehicle bridge in the
world--between Miami and the sand-spit.
The bridge was started in July, 1912; and, as has always been customary
in the early developments of Florida, his friends, attorneys and bankers
almost had heart-failure over his wild scheme. They prophesied
enthusiastically that in about two years’ time he would be standing at
the Miami end of his unfinished bridge, begging for nickels with which
to get a square meal. The population of Miami at that time was about
seven thousand five hundred.
At one time, late in 1912, the amateur prophets were looking gloomily at
Collins and saying proudly to each other: “Well, I told him so!” The
bridge was such a tremendous undertaking that the Collins money began to
pinch out; and no local talent could be found to advance any sum larger
than nine dollars on the chance of making a success out of the bridge or
the sand-spit.
CHAPTER X
OF THE ARRIVAL OF CARL FISHER IN MIAMI--OF FISHER’S FEVERISH IMAGINATION
AND VIOLENT DREAMS--OF THE DESPAIR OF FISHER’S FRIENDS--AND OF THE
EVOLUTION OF A JUNGLE
Early in 1913, a wealthy Indianapolis business man named Carl G. Fisher
came to Miami for his health. Fisher, from the days when he used to be a
news butcher on Indiana trains, was able to see the possibilities in
things which every one else regarded as impossibilities. He had always
plunged heavily on his beliefs while his friends and acquaintances stood
on the side-lines and told one another what a shame it was that Carl had
gone bugs. One of his plunges had been the big Indianapolis Speedway--a
gigantic structure which does all its business, pays its expenses and
makes its profits on one day out of the year.
Collins, unable to complete his bridge alone, went to Fisher and asked
him for assistance. Fisher, with his ever-present willingness to take a
chance, supplied Collins with the necessary funds to finish the job,
taking in return a large and unprepossessing slice of the long, narrow,
jungle-grown sand-spit that shut Miami off from the sea. He immediately
began to take a passionate interest in that desolate piece of real
estate. In his feverish mind’s eye he saw it covered with the greatest
winter resort of modern times--with acres of beautiful homes, and hotels
bowered in towering palms and scarlet-flowered hibiscus; with polo
fields and golf links and tennis courts and ice-rinks: with lagoons and
canals and artificial islands and Venetian gondolas: with casinos and
bath-houses and outdoor swimming pools that would outdo anything in
America or Europe.
He let himself go with the utmost enthusiasm, and kept his imagination
working on a twenty-two-hour day. His friends gave up all hope for him.
“Poor Fisher!” they murmured privately behind his back. “Poor Fisher has
gone completely loco. We must make arrangements to put him away
quietly.”
After he had dreamed a few of his more violent dreams, he went out to
the sand-spit to look it over more carefully and decide definitely where
to put a few of the hotels and casinos. Around its shores he found a
solid wall of mangroves whose interlaced roots rose several feet out of
the water in such a confused and slimy jumble that any appreciable
progress through them was a matter of hours. So he got a gang of twelve
negroes and set them to work hacking a hole all the way through this
jungle. Beyond the mangrove swamp was a solidly interlaced growth of
cabbage palms and palmettos through which no human being could force a
passage without tearing his clothes and his skin to shreds. The palm and
palmetto growth filled every part of his property except the
shores--and the shores were overgrown with mangroves.
Greatly cheered and stimulated by these obstacles, he promptly set to
work on his scheme to build, almost overnight, America’s greatest winter
resort. Starting at the extreme tip of the tongue, his gangs of laborers
cleared off the mangroves, cabbage palms, palmettos and other scrub.
They found bear in it, and panther and countless numbers of smaller
animals, and quail by the thousands. Then along the edges of the tongue
they built high cement bulkheads. As the bulkheads were finished,
dredgers pumped sand and water out of Biscayne Bay and inside the
bulkheads. The water ran off, but the sand remained and turned the
swamps and marshes into solid land. This work required dredging crews of
one hundred and fifty men, three pumping boats, two digging boats, from
ten to fifteen barges, five supply boats, two oil tugs, two anchor boats
and an eighteen-inch pipe line over a mile in length. For eight months
the pay roll was four thousand dollars a day, and Fisher’s friends daily
became more insistent that he be locked up where he could no longer
throw his money into the Atlantic Ocean.
Canals and inland waterways were dug so that future residents might have
easy access to all portions of the resort by yacht, house-boat and
motor-boat. Palms, hibiscus and tropical plants and vines slowly crept
along in the rear of the dredging operations. Fifty acres were turned
into polo fields. Three hundred and twenty-five acres were set aside for
golf courses. Three excellent golf courses were made, two at a cost of
two hundred thousand dollars apiece, and one at a cost of a quarter
million.
To-day, the tongue of land that was an impenetrable jungle in 1913 and a
waste of sand in 1917, has become the city of Miami Beach. Its value has
grown from twelve thousand to twenty million. There may be some to
question the latter figure; but the accessed value of Miami Beach
property in 1921 was $5,540,112; and unimproved property was being
assessed at one-quarter of its valuation, while improved property was
being assessed at one-tenth of its valuation. It has a frontage of six
miles on the ocean, seven miles on Biscayne Bay, and sixteen miles on
inland waterways and canals--though a Miami Beach enthusiast would no
more think of listing Miami Beach property in miles than a jeweler would
think of listing diamonds in quarts. It is too precious. He lists it in
feet, and tells you that the frontage on inland waterways is eighty-five
thousand feet. In a few years, if he progresses in the future as he has
in the past, he’ll probably be listing it in inches.
CHAPTER XI
OF EXPENSIVE EXPENSES AND HEATED ICE-RINKS--OF LILY ON LILY THAT
O’ERPLACE THE SEA--AND OF THE BONEHEADEDNESS OF MOST OF THE HUMAN RACE
In 1913 Miami Beach was an impenetrable jungle on a sand-spit and a
swamp. In 1922 many a water-front lot was being sold for double the
price that was paid for the original jungle not so many years ago.
In place of the sand and the swamp and the jungle there are over forty
miles of street and roads, lined with palms and shrubs. Several hotels
have been built, the largest of which--the Flamingo--looks exactly like
a grain elevator and has the reputation of being the most expensive
winter resort hotel in the world. As a matter of fact, it is no more
expensive than the big Palm Beach hotels--although that is sufficiently
expensive to send the cold shivers up and down the spine of the person
who hasn’t become thoroughly hardened to money-spending. Two people can
have a nice room with bath and all the food they want--in reason--for
forty dollars a day. They can also have free oranges, which somehow
seems to remove some of the numbing pain from the impact of the bill
against the brain. There is no particular reason why it should, as one
can easily drown himself in the juice from a dollar’s worth of oranges.
There are a score and more of apartment-houses, and three hundred and
fifty private residences ranging from unconsciously simple little
ten-thousand-dollar bungalows up to artfully simple little
two-hundred-thousand-dollar cottages.
Within another six years, according to the more sane and conservative
Miami Beach predicters, there will be six or seven more hotels at Miami
Beach, all larger than the Flamingo. Fisher has another modest
caravansary planned which is to have an ice-rink, covered tennis courts
and a tanbark horse-show enclosure on the roof. Unless his friends lock
him up, he is sure to carry out his plans--which will probably be as
highly successful as his past ventures.
A few of his friends no longer fear for his sanity. His former business
partner in Indianapolis, James A. Allison, has even helped the good work
along by building and stocking at Miami Beach an aquarium that rivals
the great aquariums of Monaco, Naples, Honolulu and Manila. A great many
of his friends, however, still shake their heads pityingly when they
hear mention of hotels with ice-rinks on the roof.
The dredging operations which had transferred sand from the bottom of
Biscayne Bay to the top of Miami Beach had left several unsightly mud
banks protruding a few inches from the surface of the bay. Fisher
surrounded these mud banks with bulkheads and pumped more mud into
them. The result was seven beautiful islands, most of which are already
shaded by palm groves and dotted with simple but beautiful homes costing
about thirty dollars a square inch. They are easy of access, since they
are connected with the mainland or the causeway.
Some Miami people have likened these islands to lilies which o’erlace
the sea, after the fashion of Senator Lodge quoting from Browning in an
attempt to explain the islands of the Pacific to a concourse of
hard-boiled hearers; but Palm Beach folk, with that peculiar jealousy
evinced by the residents of one Florida resort toward everything in a
rival Florida resort, say that they look more like floating flapjacks.
The truth, of course, lies between; and when they are covered with
masses of tropical foliage, there will be nothing flapjackish about
them. One of the islands, together with an obelisk rising from its
center, was constructed as a memorial to Henry M. Flagler, without whose
vision and foresight Florida would probably only be known as the place
that Florida Water was named after. One of the largest islands has an
area of sixty acres. A mile of bulkhead, with bulkheading at twelve
dollars a foot, was necessary in its construction, and its total cost
was half a million dollars.
The inability of ninety per cent. of the human race to see how a thing
is going to look when finished has cost the human race a large amount of
money at Miami Beach. Not long ago, for example, an effort was made to
sell a new house for sixteen thousand dollars. It stood on new flat
land, however, and there were no trees or shrubs around it. Everybody
who saw it refused to buy it; so three thousand five hundred dollars was
spent in planting grass, palms and flowers and adding walks and a
boathouse. When this had been done, the house sold instantly for thirty
thousand dollars to one of the men who had refused to pay sixteen
thousand for it the preceding year.
CHAPTER XII
OF ONE-PIECE AND TWO-FIFTHS-PIECE BATHING SUITS--OF THE HONORABLE
WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN AND HIS ACTIVITIES--OF BOOTLEGGERS--OF THE
SANCTIMONIOUS HAIG AND HAIG BOYS--AND OF RUM IN GENERAL.
Miami and Miami Beach are now connected by a curving concrete causeway
three and a half miles long. New and spacious as it is, it is often too
small to accommodate the thousands of automobiles that hasten out to
Miami Beach on hot Sunday afternoons in mid-winter in order that their
occupants may obtain an eyeful, as the saying goes of the bathing
crowds. The prudish element hasn’t yet been able to make its influence
felt at Miami Beach to any noticeable extent. The one-piece bathing suit
is heavily displayed by engaging young women, and there are also large
numbers of bathing suits which appear to be one-half-piece or even
two-fifths-piece. The latter variety of bathing suit is never worn with
stockings; for no stockings--so far as is known--have yet been made long
enough to reach to the hips. A striking effect is frequently obtained by
the wearers of these two-fifths-piece bathing suits when they stroll out
on the beach in short, hip-length capes which hang open negligently at
the throat. One sees nothing below the cape but several square yards of
flesh, and nothing above the cape but several square feet of flesh. It
is a sight that gives one pause. When one sees it for the first time, he
feels that he ought to hunt up a life-saver sometime later in the day
and ask him to go and speak to the young woman and tell her that she has
come out without her two-fifths-piece bathing suit. But one soon becomes
accustomed to seeing such things--so accustomed, in fact, that one feels
disappointed if he doesn’t see them.
The Honorable William Jennings Bryan
[Illustration: The site of the Flamingo Hotel, Miami Beach (at top) in
1912; (in middle) in 1917; and (at bottom) in 1922.]
[Illustration: The Miami Beach Aquarium.]
has a home in Miami, and was devoting most of his time during the winter
of 1922 to assuring his large and enthusiastic audiences that the
doctrine of evolution, hitherto accepted as proved by every reputable
scientist because of the overwhelming mass of supporting evidence, is no
more worthy of credence than the story of Cinderella and the little
Glass Slipper; that, in fact, it is as harmful to the young and
impressionable as an unexpurgated set of Burton’s _Arabian Nights_. The
citizens of Miami Beach were highly delighted with Mr. Bryan’s
anti-evolution activities--not because they have anything against
evolution, but because they like to see Mr. Bryan interested in
something that will keep him from trying to make his neighbors conform
to his ideas of right, and, by so doing, spoiling the bathing-hour. In
fact, a committee of Miami Beachers was thinking of waiting on Mr. Bryan
when he had finished shooting holes in Darwin, Huxley, Wallace, Herbert
Spencer and other distinguished scientists, and urging him to attack the
disgusting and contemptible theory that the earth is a globe or sphere,
and to come out strong for a flat earth.
There are no wheel-chairs in Miami Beach, as there are in Palm Beach.
The hotels tried to interest their guests in wheel-chairs, but the
guests would have none of them. They are successful at Palm Beach
because the Palm Beachers find them useful things in which to kill time.
But at Miami Beach one has no time for time-killing. There is something
doing every minute. There is golf and tennis and polo and bathing and
dancing and seeing the bootlegger, or rushing over to town to see a
movie or an orange grove or another bootlegger or something, and if one
tried to get around in a wheel-chair, he’d come down with nervous
prostration in a couple of days.
The bootleggers are very active in Miami; and the Miami bootlegger is a
very superior sort of bootlegger. He comes around to his patrons each
day with long lists of wet goods and the prices, and gives the names of
prominent bankers as references for his reliability. The prices seem
pleasingly low to northerners who have been paying one hundred and
twenty dollars a case for stuff that is only fit for cleaning the
nicotine out of pipe stems. The bootleggers get their wares in Bimini,
which is a small island only a few miles off the Florida coast. It is a
British island, but the British officials evidently haven’t any idea of
assisting the United States to enforce her laws. One of the leading
Scotch distillers stated contemptuously when I was in Scotland a little
over a year ago that it would allow none of its product to be sold to a
nation of hypocrites--meaning America. A good percentage of the stuff in
Bimini, however, is Haig & Haig, and it was the Haig & Haig people that
made the pleasant observation about the nation of hypocrites.
The past record of all distillers has proved conclusively that they
would sell to anybody that had the price--hypocrite, murderer,
wife-beater, degenerate or sot; and Haig & Haig are no better than the
rest of them.
All this Haig & Haig comes over to Florida, where it is not esteemed
very highly because it was apparently turned out of the distillery in a
hurry for the American trade. The Miami bootleggers recommend Lawson
Scotch to their friends rather than Haig & Haig; for they say that the
Haig & Haig is too green--whatever that means. The universal bootlegging
price for Scotch whisky in Miami is fifty dollars a case.[A] The
bootleggers buy it for twenty-four dollars a case in Bimini. The taxicab
men at the big hotels retail the stuff to the hotel guests at ten
dollars a bottle or one hundred and twenty dollars a case, which makes a
very nice profit for them. Gin can be bought--from the bootleggers, not
from the taxicab agents--for thirty dollars and forty dollars a case;
while the most expensive liquid refreshment is absinthe, which comes as
high as sixty-five dollars a case.
[A] February, 1922, quotations.
Tourists who plan to bring back a wee nip of Scotch with them from
Florida should be very careful to carry the bottles in their hand
luggage. Many trunks are opened on the way up, evidently by members of
the train crews, and all alcoholic stimulants carefully abstracted.
Nothing else is touched. A friend of mine took three metal hot-water
bottles to Florida with him so that he could bring Scotch back in them.
These bottles were encased in pretty pink flannel wrappers. He filled
them with Scotch as planned; but when he reached Washington again, he
found that his trunk had been opened and the bottles removed. The pink
flannel wrappers were left behind, and nothing else had been touched.
There seems to be an idea in the North that rum-running from Bimini and
Cuba to the Florida coast can be easily stopped by Prohibition agents.
This is a mistaken idea; for the rum-runner has several hundred miles of
uninhabited coastline and keys on which to land his cargo. It was among
these keys that the most notorious pirates of the early days concealed
their vessels and their treasure, and eluded pursuit for years. It would
be as easy to catch a rum-runner among the Florida keys as to locate a
red ant in the Hippodrome.
Any Prohibition enforcement agent that didn’t have lead in his shoes and
a daub of mud in both eyes, however, could easily get the goods on
twenty or thirty Miami bootleggers in a day.
One good result of comparatively cheap whisky in Miami is the apparently
total disappearance of beer-making and other home-brewing activities.
There seems to be no market for hops, malt, prunes, raisins or
wash-boilers--which would seem to make Miami an unusually healthy city
in which to live.
CHAPTER XIII
OF FLORIDA FISHING--OF THE TIGERISH BARRACUDA AND THE SURPRISED-LOOKING
DOLPHIN--OF THE UNCONVENTIONAL HABITS OF THE WHIP-RAY AND THE VARYING
ESTIMATES OF CAP’N CHARLEY THOMPSON--AND OF THE CONSERVATIVE RAVING OF
THE MIAMI PROSPECTUSES
The Florida keys drip down from the end of the peninsula on which Miami
beach is built, and would doubtless be compared by Senator Lodge or the
late Robert Browning to a necklace of jade and gold, or to mango on
mango that o’erlace the sea, or something similarly poetic. Among,
between and around these keys is found the greatest fishing in the
world. Florida fishing is about as much like the ordinary conception of
fishing as prize-fighting is like fox-trotting. Instead of sitting
contemplatively over a rod and reel with a pipe in his mouth and a
dreamy look in his eyes, and occasionally snaking a small fish out of
the water in a leisurely manner, the Florida fisherman crouches over
his rod with taut muscles and enters knock-down and drag-out fights with
bundles of concentrated energy that leave him as sore and limp and
blistered as though he had been wrestling with the Twentieth Century
Limited.
Speedy motor-boats slip away from Miami landing-stages and reach the
fishing grounds in an hour. Over the reefs, on whose rocky peaks lie the
skeletons of many an ancient wreck, wait the barracuda, sometimes known
as the tigers of the sea. They are long, slim, silvery fish, rather like
enormous pickerel, and their jaws are set with heavy dog-teeth. They
average between four and five feet in length; and as the fisherman sits
in the stern of a motor-boat with his bait spinning along thirty yards
astern, he can see the barracuda following, following along behind the
bait like a thin gray shadow. The barracuda is always there and always
hungry; so when all other game fish fail, the fishermen turn to him.
When he finally decides to take the bait, he takes it with such vigor
that the fisherman feels that a steamer trunk has fallen on the tip of
his rod. The rods are stiff as iron and the big reels have drags on them
that would stop a race-horse in a hundred yards; so the average
barracuda seldom fights more than ten minutes. All game fish, of course,
are caught by trolling from the back of a motor-boat traveling from six
to ten miles an hour.
Out a little farther toward the gulf stream are the golden dolphins,
thin and surprised-looking fish, much smaller than the barracuda, but
better fighters. There, too, is the husky amberjack, that fights for
twenty minutes and more in spite of the heavy drag on the reel. The
prettiest welter-weight fighter of the Florida waters is the sailfish, a
blue and silver torpedo, five and six and seven feet in length, with a
spear for a nose and a lateen sail for a dorsal fin. He is a finicky
striker; and when he is at the bait one feels only a slight jar. The
lightness of the touch usually means sailfish; and when it comes, the
fisherman releases his drag and lets his line run out fifteen or twenty
or even thirty feet. Then he snaps the drag back into place and hoists
his rod with a mighty heave without further inquiry. Frequently the
sailfish is at the end of the line, in which case the fun begins--the
sensation being about the same as holding a bucking bronco at the end of
a fifty-yard rope. If an amateur is holding the rod, the end of the
thirty or forty-five minute fight finds him calling in a weak and
trembling voice for a large drink of varnish or some similar
restorative, and he spends the remainder of the trip pricking and
caressing the blisters on his hands.
Farther out in the gulf stream are the kings of the heavy-weight
scrappers--tuna; while between the keys and the mainland are the giant
tarpon. These fish will fight for two, three and even four hours; and
if, in their leapings to shake the hooks from their mouths they chance
to fall in the boat, there is never any room for any one else.
The spectacles that one sees in these Florida waters are enough to make
Izaak Walton take the pledge.
During one day’s fishing which I had off the keys with President James
Allison of the Miami Aquarium and Cap’n Charley Thompson, champion
tarpon-tracker of Biscayne Bay, a whip-ray twenty feet from wing to wing
shot thirty feet into the air just ahead of our boat, falling back into
the water with a crash that must have been heard a mile in every
direction. Cap’n Thompson declared that this violent leaping was due to
the fact that the whip-ray frequently feeds on clams. When he has
gathered a bushel of clams into his stomach, he leaps high in the air
and descends on his stomach. The resultant crash breaks all the
clamshells and permits the ray to digest the clams. This doesn’t sound
exactly right, but one should be careful about disbelieving any of these
Florida stories. A little later a giant marlin or spear fish plunged out
of the water among our three lines when each line had a dolphin fighting
busily at its end. Cap’n Thompson estimated his weight at four hundred
pounds, but three hours later he was estimating it at seven hundred
pounds. At the end of the afternoon, when the lines were being reeled in
preparatory to starting home, an eight-foot shark surged up from nowhere
and removed my bait from beneath my hand. Fortunately, he removed the
hook with it, and a few minutes later he was lashed fast to the stern of
the boat, making a hurried trip back to Miami--where Director Louis
Mowbray of the Aquarium spent a happy hour removing pilot fish and
parasites from his nose and gills and tongue.
One can never tell what is going to turn up in Florida waters. The
prospectuses of both winter and summer resorts usually lay it on a
little too thick. The Miami prospectuses always sound very much too
much. Starting with the bathing-girls on the front cover and ending with
the proud fisherman on the back cover, they always look a little too
perfect. The phrasing, too, seems a trifle sappy and fat-headed. “It’s
June in Miami,” these prospectuses declare, “where winter is turned to
summer.” They seem to rave over-wildly. “Miami welcomes you with the
smile of the tropics,” rave these bits of passionate literature, “and
the warmth of the unclouded sun is instilled in the hospitality of the
greeting that awaits you here. Leave winter behind, fling care to the
icy winds, come to Miami and play at being eternally young again. Here
in Nature’s most alluring out-of-doors playground, under azure skies,
amid fronded palms and riotous flowers, with song of bird, balmy air,
and the benediction of glorious sunshine, find health, happiness and
contentment.”
It seems like raving before you’ve been there. But after you’ve been
there you recognize that the bathing girls and the fish are as
advertised. As for the prospectuses, they don’t seem so violent after
all. In fact, they seem pretty conservative.
THE END
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Sun Hunting" ***
Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.