- [Announcer] This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

- [Rob] Coming up next Florida to outsiders, it's simply beaches and theme parks and locals doing stupid things.

But the real Florida is so much more with a 500-year recorded history which includes myths, science marvels, and dream scapes that have lured people here for centuries, drawing immigrants from across the globe, creating a diverse culture that is not duplicated in any other state.

From visual artists to musicians, to cattle ranchers, to an endless supply of retirees.

Florida has a surprising culture and a surprising backstory.

We'll talk about it next on a special edition of Florida this Week.

(television news music) Welcome back.

How do you sum up Florida to someone who's never lived here?

It's much more than bucolic days at the beach.

Florida's recorded history predates most states with historian telling us that the first Thanksgiving was celebrated here and not in Massachusetts.

This territory was ruled by three foreign governments before it became part of the US 200 years ago.

It's been the scene of some of the most important struggles in the Civil Rights movement.

The rocket launches which took humans to the moon for the first time originated here.

We have some of the best national parks, a host of prominent authors, musicians, and painters who called Florida Home.

And there's no better way to discover the history and culture of this place than to read the new book, Once Upon a Time in Florida published by Florida Humanities.

We're joined now by Jacki Levine, the editor and three authors featured in the book.

Jacki is the editor of Once Upon a Time in Florida and the former editor of Forum Magazine.

Pete Gallagher is the founder and co-host of the Florida Folk Show broadcast on radio St. Pete.

Gary Mormino is an author, historian, and emeritus professor of history at USF St. Petersburg.

And Dalia Colon is a journalist, podcaster, and co-host of Arts Plus on WEDU.

Nice to see all of you.

And Gary and Pete, why are you guys wearing the same tie?

I gotta ask.

- We're channeling Bob Graham.

- It's Bob Graham's favorite time.

- Yes.

- Gary, I gotta ask you.

The first Thanksgiving, not in Massachusetts.

It's here in St. Augustine.

Tell us about that.

- To channel Michael Gannon, one of the most remarkable persons I ever met, moved at an early age to St. Augustine in the 1940s, became a priest.

In fact, he was the Monsignor at St. Augustine.

And then married a nun, Mimi, and became a historian, civil rights activist, professor at University of Florida.

But he rocked the Plymouth establishment, Plymouth, Massachusetts establishment, in the 1970s when he came out with a pronouncement that the first Thanksgiving was in St. Augustine in 1565, not Plymouth in 1620.

- [Rob] That shook things up.

- He even got a threat from the Plymouth City Council that they were going to sue him for slander.

- Was it the same idea of Europeans and indigenous people getting together?

- There were Tamaqua Indians there, but it was a Thanksgiving for having survived the village and founding a extraordinary place, St. Augustine.

- What's Mike's line about St. Augustine and the first Thanksgiving?

- He said by the time Plymouth had become a city, St. Augustine was ready for urban renewal.

- The longest established settlement in North America.

- [Gary] In North America, yes.

- Jacki, this is a great book.

Tell us about the idea behind it.

Where did the idea come from?

- Well, when I became editor of Forum in 2017, one of the things I enjoyed so much, like maybe too much, was digging into the archives which are online through the University of South Florida Libraries.

I go looking for one thing, maybe I was about to assign a story.

I wanted to make sure it hadn't been done.

Or even if it had been done, what we've already written about it.

And I would get caught up in the treasures of these archives.

It was just amazing.

One thing would lead to another and I would just go from story to story to story.

And I thought these are just amazing tales that people really may have read when they came out in Forum the first time, but now they're not seeing them anymore.

- Famous authors have contributed to Forum Magazine for many decades.

- For many decades.

I mean, this story begins with the story of the first Floridians by the noted archeologist-anthropologist, Jerald Milanich, who was a curator at the University of Florida and it ends with this beautiful story by southern author Harry Crews.

We have environmental writers like Cynthia Barnett and Jack Davis, novelists like Lauren Groff who is a contemporary novelist, very well known.

Philip Caputo, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Rumors of A War years ago, wrote about Key West, what it was like in the seventies and eighties, the literary scene there.

Edna Buchanan who wrote for the Miami Herald.

She was a crime reporter and just fantastic.

When she received the Florida Humanities Lifetime Achievement Award, she gave a speech and the speech chronicled her time as a young girl who grew up in New Jersey in just impoverished circumstances and coming to Miami Beach for the first time and just discovering this whole new world.

So we had people of all sorts writing in there.

And it's full of- - She says that at some point that the world became technicolor to her when she moved from New Jersey to Miami Beach.

- Exactly, and I thought that was so beautifully put.

- So why do you think Florida is portrayed as this kind of backwater where people do dumb things?

- Because it's... Well, I was gonna say because it's easy.

But I think also because it's amusing.

And what we're hoping with Once Upon a Time in Florida, it becomes somewhat of an antidote to the whole Florida man trope.

Nothing wrong with that, it's funny.

But if you see Florida only through that lens, you're missing an incredible, rich, and deep and diverse state.

And so that's what we're trying to present in Once Upon a Time in Florida.

- Gary, I gotta ask you about one of the myths.

The early Europeans came here in search of something called the fountain of youth.

Was there ever a fountain of youth?

Or what were they really looking for?

- They were looking for gold, silver.

Although you could argue there was a fountain of youth.

If you look at the profile of Florida the last 150 years, it has a senior presence.

In fact, the three men here all have gray hair on the panel.

So I mean, what a perfect origins myth for a place that has meant so much to so many senior citizens in America.

- The fountain of youth story is a way to attract people to come here to invest, to move here and all that.

- There must be two dozen cities in Florida claiming we have the real fountain of youth.

- Dalia, two thirds of Floridians were born somewhere else.

And your piece in the book is all about one refugee from Cuba who had an incredible career.

- Sure, so I was honored to interview former Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinan.

In 1960, she was eight years old.

She, her parents, her brother, and about 1.4 million other of her closest Cuban friends, they all left the island for the US fleeing Fidel Castro's regime.

Her family actually bought a round trip ticket on Pan Am Airways.

- [Rob] Thinking they'd be going back.

- They were that optimistic.

They thought this will just be a quick little detour.

We'll be right back.

Never came back.

She still has that ticket.

I don't know what she's gonna do with it.

- [Rob] The Pan Am is no longer.

- Pan Am is no more.

But that was their mindset at the time.

So they came to Miami.

She didn't speak any English.

And she worked her way up in school and so on and she became the first Latina elected to Congress.

- So this really changed the profile of Florida because we have always had Cuban immigrants as Gary's written about in Ybor City cigar workers.

But this tremendous influx beginning with the revolution in Cuba changes Florida forever.

- Absolutely.

It's changed our politics, our food.

We all have a favorite Cuban restaurant, I'm guessing, in Florida.

It's really changed the fabric of all of our major cities.

And regardless of your politics, I mean, you have to admire her story and millions more like it.

- And we have refugees from all over.

We have refugees from the Middle West, people coming for maybe the sunshine, maybe to escape taxes.

We have people from all over the world coming here.

All parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, they come here which has really enriched the culture.

- Oh, 100%.

And that's why I love the subtitle of this book, stories of life in the land of promises.

So when you think of the land of promises, I mean, a lot of people might say that's New York.

That's where you go to make your dreams come true.

But as you said, it's Florida.

It really is.

And so we get such an interesting cross section of people here.

- Gary, if we go back a little bit more than 100 years, Florida was considered a backwater and it was one of the least populated states in the South.

And a lot of people say, "Well, it's air conditioning."

Once we developed air conditioning in the beginning of the 20th century, that changed everything because people could now live here through the summer with that.

But it's not just simply air conditioning.

It's much more than that.

- Consider that on the eve of Pearl Harbor, 1940, Florida was the smallest state in the south, the south.

Arkansas and West Virginia and South Carolina had more inhabitants than Florida.

We had reached 2 million... We're 23 million and growing today.

I mean, it's...

So I think it was World War II.

Several million servicemen came here during the war.

Cheap.

They were in the winter.

The Florida dream that Ray Arsenal and I write about was really born after World War II.

I mean, this sounds so unlike 2023.

Was there ever a more hopeful and promising time than 1945 America?

Always the boys are coming home.

2 million... Our cities hadn't been bombed.

Land was cheap.

GI Bill.

Was there ever a greater congressional act than the GI Bill for housing and medicine?

And then you had air conditioning, interstate highways, increased social security benefits, penicillin.

- All contributing to the Florida boom.

One of the things that contributed too was the decision in 1942 to allow women military training in Daytona Beach.

Talk about that, Jacki.

- This is really one of my favorite stories by Gordon Patterson.

And it's about how Mary McLeod Bethune helped save Daytona Beach, a city that...

While they loved her in Daytona Beach, she was a resident.

She brought in education with the Bethune-Cookman College and all the other things she did.

She was a very beloved resident, but she couldn't sit in any restaurant she wanted to because she was black.

So here comes World War II.

Daytona Beach is a tourist destination.

Except, where are the tourists?

They're not coming.

It's World War II.

So one of the city mothers, it was a city mother, I don't think it's a city father, who came to Mary McLeod Bethune who was very well-connected with the Roosevelt administration.

She had served in the Roosevelt administration.

And they said, "Mary, can you help us?

We're drowning here.

We don't have any tourists.

Could you perhaps convince the Roosevelt administration to set up a women's army auxiliary corps training facility in Daytona Beach?"

And you know, I don't know how she did it, but apparently she just said, "Okay, darling."

Which apparently that was her pet name for people.

And she got on the phone with the Roosevelts.

And the next thing you know which I'm sure wasn't immediate, but pretty soon, they had a training facility there, and it turned things around for day Daytona Beach.

- And people from Pittsburgh and other northern cities are coming.

- That's right.

- And what did they think of Florida?

- Well, you know, what did they think?

I mean, I'm sure they were amazed.

I mean, you see some pictures that we feature in the anthology that show these women training on the beach, okay?

So, it was a pretty nice deal.

And going back to what you were talking about, you and Gary were talking about, in terms of people coming to Florida, World War II, the people who trained in Florida said, "Why am I living in Oshkosh, Wisconsin?

Why aren't I living where there's sun in the middle of the winter?"

And that really spurred the development.

But I love the story about Ms. Mary McLeod Bethune who is now in her rightful place in Statuary Hall in the nation's capitol.

- Representing Florida.

- Representing Florida.

I love the story because it shows so much about her own humanity and kindness.

And the irony part of our history.

- It's interesting.

My dad was in World War II, signed up right after he left high school and came to train in Miami and loved it.

And eventually bought a house in this area.

So Gary, the military was a big part of attracting people from around the country to see that Florida was a possibility.

And this was at a time when Florida was very affordable.

You could buy waterfront property on a regular income, regular salary.

Housing was so much more affordable than it is today.

- There was a line that Florida was California on the cheap after World War II.

It really was.

You could live in mobile home parks with Gulf of Mexico views as late as the eighties and nineties in Florida.

The trailer park phenomenon in Florida.

Florida is a kaleidoscope of... A mirror of America.

It's such a fascinating place.

- So Pete, when it comes to... Jacki, I should ask you.

The humanities encompasses what?

- Oh my gosh, that's the big question.

That's a question that's talked about an awful lot but- - [Rob] At your staff meetings.

- Well, yeah.

Florida Humanities spends a lot of time talking about that.

It encompasses the history.

It encompasses the culture, the arts, but the way people live.

So, in the environment.

So it could be many subjects, not just what you would consider liberal arts subjects, but all told through the life of the people.

And so that's why the Florida Humanities, the work they do, is so phenomenal spreading the love and understanding of the humanities throughout the state.

- So some things that come under the rubric of humanities, Pete, architecture, history, literature, novel writing, music.

So, let's talk about that.

You know, so many great authors have called Florida home.

John D. MacDonald, Harry Crews, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Zora Neale Hurston, Stetson Kennedy.

I gotta read this list 'cause it's so long.

Stephen King, part-time resident, Tim Dorsey, Randy Wayne White, Carl Hiaasen.

Ernest Hemingway, of course.

Just to name a few.

And their writing focused on Florida before the waves of development changed the state's environment forever.

Florida folk musicians which you're an expert on also complain about development.

I mean, some of the people that you've written about and known personally and sponsored have looked at Florida the way it was 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, less developed, and say they missed those days.

- Well, I always go back to Bobby Hicks famous quote, "It never got so bad in my state that I had to leave."

You know, the idea that people... And I used to tell this story about the I-75 when it came to Florida.

It's stopped in St. Petersburg for years.

And that's why we have so many Michiganders and Canadians in this area just stop there and they say, "Hey, let's just live here."

And those stories are done to limit the...

Almost limit the intelligence factor of Northerners coming down here.

What right do they have to come down here and mess up our world?

Get those developers and those developments.

And you know, a guy like Bobby Hicks, he was not a lot different than Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

She was a little tiny lady but she had a loud voice.

In just her stature, in the meeting she would get up and no one would dare talk back to her.

In fact, I was at several meetings where she was at where people started yelling back at her.

And some big guys in the audience would go up there and almost be a fight.

And Bobby Hicks would just...

He'd play his songs.

But before, he would tell a story.

What the meanest, ugliest, worst word in English language is developers.

He would do routines like that.

- So he shared that with John D. MacDonald, the author, who hated condos and warned that we're headed for disaster by putting so many condos on the coast.

- And Carl Hiaasen made fun of them all.

- So one of Bobby Hicks's greatest lines of one of his songs, he sums up Florida this way.

He says, "I'm Spaniard, I'm Frenchman, I'm British, I'm Indian, I'm Florida.

Need I say more."

- I'm swamplands.

I'm forest opportunities for all men.

- Yeah.

So how did Bobby view all the folks moving to Florida?

How did he view the development, the kind of...

I think many people would call overdevelopment of the last 30 years.

- You know, he has that song, the condo hurricane song.

You know, with a big wind coming up from Africa.

You know, and I hope they're all home.

You know, that type of attitude.

He was very harsh about it.

- I remember a movement here in Florida that said... People had bumper stickers that said Florida native.

And people had bumper stickers that said, "Welcome to Florida.

Now go home."

There was a real move to try to limit development in the seventies and eighties here in Florida.

- Yeah, and then now you see today the environmental movement.

The environmental movement, a lot of it is in Florida now.

A lot of talk.

And you have politicians refusing billions of dollars that the federal government's trying to give them to help build parking lots for big semi-truck.

Such a large percentage of the carbon that is in Florida, like 50% or 60%, it comes from those trucks.

- [Rob] Trucks looking for a place to park.

- Looking for a place to park.

- Takes an hour to find a place.

So Pete, you wrote about something really famous that takes place every year in White Springs called the Florida Folk Festival.

Why is that so important to recognize in this book about Florida?

- Well, it's the nation's oldest continuous folk festival for one thing.

And I first became involved in it in the 19...

When I went to the University of Florida in 1970.

Don Grooms was a Florida folk singer and I was in the journalism department.

And we were in the stadium back in those days.

And all the walls were like that, you know?

If you're sitting in the back.

I went to see him one day in his office and he had a guitar there and we started talking.

And so he invited me and I invited my buddies in Coco where I was growing up and we went to the Florida Folk Festival.

- [Rob] What was it like in the early days?

What kind of music did it feature?

- It featured a lot of gospel, a lot of gospel music.

Bluegrass, but you didn't see any blues.

And for a long time, you didn't see any minorities.

The Key West Junkanoos were like a token...

The token group that would come up every year and do their drums and their songs and stuff.

And then along came Blind Johnny Brown and then Diamond Teeth Mary.

- [Rob] Two blues singers.

- That had been lost to history and rediscovered.

- [Rob] You helped rediscover.

- Well, Blind Johnny Brown was at the neighborly center, a place for old folks to hang out.

Like a daycare center for old folks.

- [Rob] In St. Pete.

- And somebody said he could play the guitar.

And I went and got him a guitar.

And next thing you know, he was the guy that wrote...

Traveled around with Jimmy Reed.

And he was really good.

And he wrote "I'll Be Glad When You're Dead, You Rascal, You" and some of these great- - It's a big hit.

- Blues songs.

And so I went to try to get him to go up to the Florida Folk Festival.

And that's where Cousin Thelma then... - She was the leader.

She controlled that festival for many years.

- Yeah, and she was a great lady.

She was a great lady.

She's the real thing.

If you listen or go to some of the Florida Memory Project, it has a lot of tapes of her talking and singing.

But she was from a culture that...

Blacks and whites did not merge with each other as much.

- It was a struggle to expand the diversity of the Folk festival.

- But I told her...

I'll be honest with you, I had a talk with her one day and I said if you don't let a guy that was as famous as Jimmy Reed or Diamond Teeth Mary, if you don't let these people in the Florida Folk Festival, I'm gonna go back and write the story about it in the St. Pete Times.

And then what's gonna happen?

- So the festival has expanded.

Now you can see all sorts of cultures represented at the Florida Folk Festival, including Haitian culture, African American culture, everybody that's kind of represented in Florida.

- It's very colorful.

For years though, they didn't invite some of the famous people in Florida.

Tom Petty lived right there, not far, far away, and he never got invited to the Florida Folk Festival.

Jimmy Buffett, they tried to get him and he said, "Well, come see me when there's a democrat in the Governor's..." And to this day, I don't believe there's ever been a Florida governor that has attended that event.

- So Jacki, Florida has been the scene of many of the most important civil rights movement events in history.

There was a fort called Fort Mose in the 1700s that was populated by people who had escaped slavery and set up their own city.

- It was really an amazing find.

It was really discovered not that long ago in relative terms.

I think in the seventies, they started uncovering this near St. Augustine.

And it started under Spanish rule.

And the Spanish Catholic rule had a different perspective on slavery.

It was still onerous and horrible.

But they would agree that if someone who was an enslaved person would become a Catholic and would serve in their militia, they would give them freedom.

So there were these escaped enslaved people from the Carolinas who came down.

And led by a man named Francisco Menendez and they started this colony which in Fort Mose which became the first free African American settlement in the United States.

And just think that this was not heard of for years and years and years.

- [Rob] In Florida.

- In Florida.

- Dr. King also came here in 1964.

- In 1964 in St. Augustine, he was jailed there.

And the very famous integration of the Monson Motor Lodge pool took place there right in front of the cameras.

- So, this is a segregated pool.

Blacks are not allowed to swim in the swimming pool.

- Exactly.

And you know, the civil rights workers who came that summer, they came knowing what they were doing, and they were gonna challenge all sorts of segregationist laws including that one.

So there were some white college students working with the civil rights movements staying at this hotel, and they invited some of their peers, their African American peers, to come swim in the pool with them.

And they invited the press.

And so there was a whole cadre of people witnessing this event.

And so they got in the pool.

And of course, the owner manager was appalled and said get out of the pool.

- He tried to poison them.

- Get out of the pool.

They would not get out of the pool.

So he ran back to, I guess, his storage closet and he got a couple of gallons of muriatic acid that you clean the pool with.

- Yeah, outrageous.

- And poured it in, captured.

AP photographer went round the world.

- People were horrified.

- The people were horrified.

The book is called Once Upon A Time in Florida.

Congratulations on all of you for taking part in the book.

It's a great, great read.

Thank you for joining us.

Send us your comments at ftwwedu.org.

Like us on Facebook.

You can view this at PBS shows online at wedu.org.

And from all of us here at WEDU, have a great weekend and a Merry Christmas.

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