This is a production of WEDU PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

[music] Coming up on this special edition of Florida This Week, we take you behind the lens of the documentary Our Vanishing Americana Florida.

It captures the spirit of Florida's main streets through nearly 30 short stories from across the state.

Places like general stores, barber shops and local theaters that were once the heart of daily life and community connections.

That's coming up next on Florida This Week.

[upbeat music] Welcome back.

I'm Lissette Campos.

This month, WEDU is honored to premiere Our Vanishing Americana Florida.

The documentary includes 30 short stories of people and unique places in our state for local historians and businesses.

It's an opportunity to curate the stories of small town institutions and their special mark on the communities that they serve.

In Florida, there's an interest in preserving the past.

It's been this way since her grandfather started.

[music] We haven't changed that recipe and we won't.

It's hot.

This is a place that used to come with your girlfriend.

If you didn't have one, you could pick one up.

We are so honored to be joined in the studio today by producer director of Vanishing Americana Florida, Mr. Eric Davis, and the Tampa Bay History Centers, Rodney Kite-Powell, who serves as the director of the Touchton Map Library and Florida Center for Cartographic Education.

Welcome, gentlemen.

Thank you so much for coming in.

It's good to be here.

It's great to be here.

We are all so excited about this documentary.

Eric, you visited 30 different places.

How do you even pick?

There's so many to pick from.

It was a lot of fun to try to pick.

I know that, um, we do some basic research.

We can look to see what's an interesting theater or general store or restaurant that's been around for a while.

Is there a person connected to it?

Then I got to drive around the state for a week in an epic adventure just to drive up, walk in, talk to people, look around, see what makes sense, who are the people that are actually preserving things and still living like they did in the 20th century?

That would be an interesting story.

So you had to go meet and feel and touch to see if it would work.

One of the things that you've talked about is that Vanishing Americana aspect, that you're trying to preserve this for future generations.

Um, how is our how is it different in Florida than it is in the rest of the country?

So we've done this is the third Vanishing Americana episode we've done.

The first two are North Carolina and South Carolina.

And I think when you have things that are vanishing in other places, particularly north of Florida, um, they're going away and nothing's coming back.

The middle is not coming back, right?

The town is not going to reemerge in Florida.

Things come and go all the time.

There's a great resilience here.

So something that disappeared yesterday.

Something else is taking its place.

And so it's hard to find, um, things that.

Oh well this used to be here, but it's gone now.

It's already been bulldozed.

You're not going to find the building that's been here for 200 years.

Um, we went to Pine Level, you know, it's a ghost town now, but it used to be a really happening place, and now there's barely a tree standing there, so those things are just gone.

So I think that's what's different about Florida is that you're catching it at a moment in time to preserve it.

And in 100 years, some of these things might be there, but most likely it will evolve into something else, because there's a constant rebirth in Florida that I don't think you have other places.

And so many places bloom around an industry, a sector.

Rodney is that's certainly been the case.

There are different reasons, right.

Different factors for that here in the state of Florida.

Yeah, definitely.

As as you can kind of almost see when a place blooms, as it were when that happened, kind of where it was geographically.

North Florida is really the oldest part of our our state.

Although Tampa does have a bit of age to it.

But by the time you get into places like Dunedin or Tarpon Springs or Sarasota or, you know, kind of down the coast, it's almost all the railroad or at the very least, it's post Seminole Wars around the Civil War, when some of the earliest American pioneers come in.

Particularly, there's something called the Armed Occupation Act, which was a federal legislation that opened up development of Florida in 1842.

And you'll see lots of small towns around these military forts.

Tampa is one of the forts.

And so you'll see lots of places around places like Tampa that all have their very beginnings in the 1850s.

And then they have kind of another rebirth in the 1880s when the railroad comes.

Tarpon Springs has always been one of my favorites.

So I was so excited to see that you have that in the documentary, and we want to let our viewers take a look at it the way that it's filmed and edited.

You can almost.

I wish we had smell o vision because you can almost smell the baklava.

You can smell the salt air.

Um, let's take a look.

Tarpon Springs.

[music] This is our flaming cheese.

[music] Any restaurants?

You go here in Tarpon Springs.

They're mom and pop.

[music] Mhm.

How would you describe Tarpon Springs?

A town that you can come back to 20 years, 30 years from now, that will not change.

And we're a very small town, small town mentality.

We try to keep it very quaint and keep it local.

[music] We're at faculties, department store and shoe repair.

You're coming here to be fit with shoes, repair shoes.

People have shopped with us for generations.

We're still able to use the machines that we've been using for 85 to 90 years.

My grandfather, as a master shoemaker coming over from Greece, started this business in 1912.

How is it that so many Greeks came to Tarpon Springs?

Tarpon Springs was started with sponge divers.

This was basically a sponge diving town.

It was in the late 20s when started slowly coming.

And now we've got about ten that are still really doing the true artwork of sponge diving and harvesting sponge wild.

[music] They call me Taso.

T.A.S.O.

I've been sponging since 1972.

This is a sponge dock.

This dock over here made out of sponge divers way back then.

You know, on the first.

Come over here.

When the Greeks arrived over here, they discovered sponges everywhere.

Sponges always going to be here.

No matter if the Greeks or Americans.

Somebody's going to be sponging.

The way the sponge divers harvested the sponge was by putting on these heavy diving helmets with a suit on and going under and walking around on the bottom collecting sponge.

I'm the only helmet maker in tarpon right now.

There have only been three helmet makers in Tarpon Springs.

My grandfather came over in 1913 and he was a marine engineer.

I've followed in his footsteps and carry on the tradition.

You know, it's such an iconic figure.

These diving helmets, their importance to the community.

They have become sort of a symbol of that community.

I don't think anyone is still making helmets the way I do.

We're standing in a machine shop from 100 years ago.

The techniques and the processes I use hadn't really changed in 150 years.

I make the portholes here, the valve assemblies, even the wing nuts.

I drill and tap them on this lathe.

So this is as old school handmade one at a time as it gets.

Just beautiful.

You hosted two pre-screenings on the 13th and the 14th of June, a full week before the debut of the documentary.

It was standing room only in Tarpon Springs, with hundreds in attendance at the Performing Arts Center building, and the Tampa event had to be moved to the campus of Feeding Tampa Bay to make more room for additional guests because they would not fit in our studio.

Lots of questions.

Lots of excitement.

Eric, you know, there are so many different places that you went to.

Um, so when folks ask you which one is your favorite, how do you answer that?

I do have favorites, and I have some favorite people that I met.

I knew we wanted to do Arcadia.

I have a family connection to that and that old opera house, and I was thrilled to meet the young couple there who has kind of refurbished that and kept that place going and rebuilt it after the hurricane.

And to see the Cowboys and talk about the rodeo and everything, I thought that was really cool.

The other one is Melrose.

Um, there's a little store right there in the middle of Melrose where there's two brothers, and you go in and you can sit.

It's like a convenience store, except they have a bar and they have a bunch of animal heads on there, and there's some machines in the back, and there's fish and bait and tackle.

And if you just want to go in and sit and talk to some people about anything in the world, you know that hole where everybody knows your name, they don't know your name, but they'll be happy to talk to you.

I thought Melrose was really cool.

What was the what's been the biggest surprise?

Um, when you when people ask you about Florida and these different places that you're, that you're spotlighting.

I think two, two themes came out that I didn't think about as much when we started.

One was we found a lot of food, so much more food than we we expected, and a lot of it was connected to Elvis.

There's a whole trail of Elvis in places that he ate, so we had a lot of fun.

Um, chicken and waffles?

Chicken and waffles.

A lot of pie.

A couple of hot dogs, those sorts of things.

And then it turns out everybody has a story about their grandfather.

And you'll see that in the end of the program is that a lot of the people we talked to were trying to make their grandfathers proud.

And I think that's a kind of a universal thing.

Everybody's got someone in their family that they like to be proud of them, and that that really comes out in the love and the care that people are taking with these businesses and these places that they're they're maintaining.

Rodney, you gave the example of how some of the communities they they, they rise from the transportation.

Um, the trade routes.

What are some of the other factors that are of interest in these different places that he spotlighted in the documentary?

Well, I think, you know, with Florida, you see a lot of stuff that is, you know, transportation on the water.

And so, you know, places like Arcadia aren't or you think of Brooksville, you know, those are more landlocked in interior areas, and they have their own story.

A lot of them are cattle.

You think about the cattle story.

It's very much a story about the interior, because that's where that's where the cows were when they were first roaming wild, literally after the Spanish had brought them here.

And so that that cattle industry story is a really big one.

And then again, of course, the railroad again, which goes back to transportation.

Um, you've got to have these stops along the way, um, to, you know, to recoal or to get water or whatever you got to do.

And then these little communities grew up around that.

Um, but really, water is such a big part of it.

You know, there's there's so many connections to the water.

And it's really it's what gives us life.

It's what can also bring destruction.

You know, as you're mentioning, you know, the hurricanes.

And so that is so much of the the birth and destruction and rebirth of Florida story is really related to the water.

As a historian, how does our vanishing Americana Florida help you do your work?

I mean, this is this has got to be such a gift.

Absolutely.

It's it's things like this, the work that that Eric and his, uh, you know, his group did that really could help highlight some stories that you wouldn't normally hear.

And again, there's I think one of the great things about it is you're not seeing Miami.

You're not seeing Tampa, you're not seeing Jacksonville.

You're seeing places like Melrose, which a lot of people have never heard of, or Pine Level, which literally doesn't exist anymore.

And so by highlighting these things, I think it brings some attention, but also it's documenting those people because really, even at the History Center, you know, we have a lot of stuff and we talk about a lot of places, but we really want to talk about the people because that's where the connections are and that's where that's where the stories come from.

And so the fact that you were able to, to make contact with these people, document their story and, and get that story, you know, down will be a great help to future generations who will want to learn about that.

And with now there are so few letters, so fewer diaries, things like that.

It's these kinds of ways that these stories are documented and preserved.

The Lakeland story that evolved around the the drive in theater.

Um, how does a theater, um, create, help to create such an interesting culture of a city?

Like most people would not equate the two, would say, one cannot factor into the other, but yet it did.

Well, I think theaters generally, uh, particularly the older they are, were the hub of a community back when that's the way we communicated before we had the modern technology to do that.

And a place like Lakeland.

What is what really stands out about the drive in there is that and I've been to a number of drive ins, a number of places, the screen, the projector, the way they've kept that place up but preserved the history, um, is really, really top notch.

You can go there.

And we were there on this show for a night when they were showing, I think, a twister movie.

And it was, it was storming and it was raining and the place was full.

And I'm like, why are all these people here?

And I'm like, well, we wanted to experience the twister.

During the twister.

I'm like, okay, we're leaving before it starts.

But anyway, they they make it so that it doesn't cost a lot and you can have a really good time and you feel like you're doing something that's a little bit distinctive and different.

So and that's what people are looking for in the community, that kind of that connection to something that was a little bit simpler, a little bit easier that they enjoyed.

How do you pay so much attention to the natural sound, to the smells, to the shading?

I mean, each place has its own degree of that.

And how do you capture that on film?

Well, we bring a couple of really talented people with us.

Our photographer, uh, are great at noticing those details.

And then if we're at a place for three hours, we know that we know what the story is.

We know we want to talk to this person, but we want to tell their story.

And those little details are the things we're looking for on purpose that kind of accentuate and explain a person without having to have them, you know, explain it.

I thought, um, Wendy Holley in Jacksonville at Holley Holley's barbecue outside of Jacksonville was really good for that.

Um, it's a barbecue.

It's a it's a cinder block.

Hut is what it is.

But her father and her uncle had that since the 30s.

And it's really important to her to hold on to that land.

She explained why it was different.

It was difficult for African Americans to own property.

But you go in there and the smoke is everywhere, and the community is right there in front of you, and you can get all those details become very, very simple.

And she just did a fly by.

Yeah.

And this is the same butcher block we've had since the 30s.

Come back.

Tell me about that again.

You've been chopping ribs on here since the 30s, and you can see the grooves and the cuts in it and the whole bit.

I'm like, then you can actually feel it.

And so, yeah, we're looking for that stuff on purpose.

It makes it more fun to tell the story.

And Rodney, you said that it's great that people will learn about different places that don't always get all the attention.

Um, you talked about some of the two points.

Give us another place that you that you think people don't really know about, that you're really excited for them to learn more?

Well, you know, I think you even kind of closer to to home where we are, a place like Brooksville.

Um, Brooksville is a really, really interesting city, and it has a pretty long history.

And it's and it's a history that is very much Florida.

But we don't think of it as, as such because it's a pretty southern history.

Um, and, and it's, it's a, it's a story because Brooksville is a smaller place.

There hasn't been a lot of, of redevelopment and a lot of change happening there.

So you can actually go into downtown and you can you can see a lot of the sites that have been there.

A lot of the same people have been there.

And then, you know, the History Center is helps maintain and interpret a place called Chinsegut, which is just outside of Brooksville.

It's an antebellum property.

And so it had enslaved people there, and it had the people who owned the property.

And so being able to dive into that history and see how that moved forward into the 20th century and eventually being owned by a very progressive family that donated it to the to the federal government in the 1930s.

It's a really interesting story, but places like that, I think we just don't see very often.

And it really it's the places that aren't on the interstates anymore.

You know, think about, again, that transportation path.

It was on a very major crossroads, and the railroad went right through there.

But as the interstates came in and as the really big theme parks came in, we really lost so much of those connections.

It really kind of vanished.

It's a perfect connections.

I'm glad you mentioned Brooksville, because there's a couple things.

First, it was the only courthouse we've ever been to that has a mermaid statue.

Looking at the Confederate soldier, it was fantastic.

We just have a glancing picture.

But you're right.

It's off the interstate, and there's a big, wide highway that you can take to get in there.

And we could have done a story where we showing, hey, here's all the progress that's impeding on all these places.

Here's what's what's different about it.

And we decided to make a happy story and not focus as much on, hey, here's this.

The sad part, here's what's still here that you can go and look for.

And it's only 5 to 7 minutes off the interstate.

And yeah, Brooksville had a lot of I was that was a shocking thing to me is like wow.

How do I have 3 or 4 stories from Brooksville?

This is incredible.

Eric, tourism remains, you know, the big engine of our of our Florida economy.

And so much of it is geared towards the big theme parks, the amusement parks.

How do these small businesses continue to be players in this tourism economy?

They adapt.

They're really tough people and they're relentless.

There's a lot of it.

So I think about a place like Boyette's Grove up near Brooksville that, you know, 50 years ago, tourists would come down to climb the citrus trees and see how the citrus was processed and buy citrus.

And now there's no more citrus on the hill.

There's one tree left.

Um, but they've they've turned the whole place into this bizarre attraction that has a zoo in the back and dinosaurs over here, and this ice cream bar and this history, it's incredible what they've done to remain relevant.

I think of, um.

Davidson of Dundee, which is the candy shop that opened up because it was near Cypress Gardens, which was the attraction that everybody was going to.

So they they built it by location, and they've continued to make the candy the same way.

And because of that location, they're able to continue doing it even though they can't get the citrus from their backyard anymore to do it.

Um, so it's that part of it where they're adapting.

How can I keep surviving, particularly the citrus part?

You see, the a few of these are the people that are left.

It's not like there's a lot of them.

There's a few people that have just determined that I'm going to keep doing this.

And they have.

And that's that's the case.

Another big question is how these businesses continue when everything around them is changing.

What are some of the economic factors that contribute to that?

Rodney, let's start with you.

Well, I would say, you know, in large part it's just an adaptation.

And so you can think of a couple examples, kind of locally like the St. Pete shuffleboard courts.

They started off very recreationally in the 1920s as a tourist attraction.

And that's what St. Pete was, was itself a tourist attraction.

But then over time, as things like shuffleboard fall out of favor, you have to find a way to recover.

And what they have done really, in the past 15, 20 years is one they've kind of made shuffleboard cool again.

But, you know, allowing the craft beer vendors nearby and food trucks.

And they really have literally brought a new generation of people into that world, which, again, the stereotype people in their 70s and 80s like literally shuffling around on the shuffleboard courts.

But now you go to St. Pete Shuffle and you will see people of all ages doing this activity that has been really reserved for for the elderly.

And then you look at a whole community, a place like Cortez that, you know, economics played a role in some of the problems that Cortez experienced.

But really it was politics.

The 1990s gillnet ban, which you can look at, the environmental impact of that and the positive impact of the gillnet ban, it definitely helps seagrass and helped a lot of the bycatch that wasn't the mullet they were trying to catch, but it was devastating to those people who had fished there for generations.

But they were able to pivot, and they were able to find another way to, to fish.

And and either, do you know, hook and line fishing or other methods of fishing and even, you know, oysters trying to come back in Florida, which is great.

And they've really again, been able to to stay in that maritime business and the fishing business, but just use different apparatus to do so.

And one of the things that the team here at WEDU has done is to create a special map that folks can use and keep in their glove box.

Does anyone still use their glove box for gloves?

They should.

Maps are important.

And so they can go and visit these different areas.

You know, with the time that we have left, what would you say is the thing, Eric, that you would like people to walk away with after they see this premiere on June 23rd?

What do you want them to know or feel after they see Our Vanishing Americana Florida?

Well, I want them to feel warm and happy is the big thing.

I want you to leave with that.

Um, and I want you to appreciate that the history is not about the buildings.

It's about the people inside them.

And if someone has maintained a restaurant or a hardware store or something, they want to talk to you, they want to tell their story.

They want to have that that connection.

And I would tell you go in and talk to them, go and see these places and tell them, hey, I appreciate that this is still here because it's probably ignited something in your brain that's oh, I remember my family had I mean, these are distinct stories, but they're actually universal.

Somewhere in your own past you have something like this.

So if you spend a few moments appreciating that, I think we've we've done our job.

And they can spark some really wonderful conversations with your, the elders in your family that maybe you would not think to have.

There's definitely more stories we didn't tell than we did.

So before we go, I do want to ask you Our Vanishing Americana Florida is not the first.

It won't be the last, but Our Vanishing Americana series you've done, this is the third, correct?

What are the other places?

North Carolina and South Carolina are the other two that we've completed.

So your favorite.

Well, I'm partial to this one.

Um, but, uh, the North Carolina was the first one.

I thought, there are some stories in there that there was a 100 year old barber in there who was still trudging to work and all.

There was some incredible stuff in that piece as well.

But they're all good and they all touch on, again, things that we, I think still relate to, particularly people who've, you know, are older than 30 years old.

I remember this, you know, somebody younger than 30 years.

A different set of memories.

But they're going to have the same kind of emotions at some point.

Thank you.

Thank you both for coming.

And again, Rodney Kite-Powell, congratulations to the Tampa Bay History Center voted in the top ten museums in the country by USA Today.

Thank you.

Quite an honor.

And Eric, again, thank you so much for coming in.

We're so honored to have you and so excited about this documentary.

We're grateful to WEDU and all their viewers for helping make this happen and make it possible.

Absolutely.

So again, Eric and Rodney, thank you so much for joining us.

We will premiere Our Vanishing Americana Florida on Monday night, June the 23rd at 9 p.m.. On behalf of the entire team here at WEDU, thank you so much for watching.

At this point, we want to leave you with the sights and sounds of Sarasota's Starfish Market featured in the documentary.

Enjoy.

You know how everybody, when they're younger, wants to go away and discover the world?

Well, I discovered that I really missed here.

This is Cortez village.

This is a working village.

People that live here are fishing people.

There's the main fish house where I work every day.

A.P.

Bell, we're basically farmers of the sea.

These are the boats that are working right now due west of us.

Pretty much.

And so your grandfather started the business, correct?

Aaron Bell for A.P.

Bell Fish Company.

When I graduated from college, I called my dad and I said, dad, I really, really miss this coast.

I miss the village.

I miss the things that I thought I wouldn't miss.

He told me it's a bad idea.

It's a man's world.

He just wanted for me something easier.

So right now we're offloading mangoes.

He got in last night.

He's got about 2,000 pounds of fish.

We try to really let people learn what Cortez is about reflected in this little restaurant.

The fish are wild caught on our boats.

Fried, grilled or blackened?

My favorite is mullet.

I have the big fried mullet.

Yea of course.

It's very homey.

It's just such good quality.

And it's really casual.

That's the mullet.

[music] I love what we do, what the fishermen do, what this place does.

My dad passed in 2012, I believe he was pleased after a number of years that I was here.

Or at least I think he was pleased.