Here are the fin-less Weeki Wachee Mermaids in an advertisement for Weeki Wachee Springs in the 1950s.
Click here to learn more and plan a visit to Weeki Wachee State Park.
This is from ‘Weeki Wachee – City of Mermaids’ by Lu Vickers and Sara Dionne.
This is a fantastic, colorful and very well written book.
You can purchase one by clicking here.
This group of surveyors was in the process of mapping 44,000 acres of of land, mostly swamp, owned by the Florida Everglades Land Company in 1911.
From ‘Lake Worth – Jewel of the Gold Coast’.You can purchase a copy by clicking here or below.
Cows get refreshed in the fountain that once sat at the intersection of Main Street and Palm Avenue. The fountain was added by Sarasota’s founder, John Hamilton Gillespie. In the early 1900s cows could often be found wandering around Downtown Sarasota.
This photo is from ‘The story of Sarasota: The history of the city and county of Sarasota, Florida ‘ by Karl Hiram Grismer.
You can purchase your own copy of this book by clicking here or below.
This is what beckoned visitors to the La Mark Charles Motel in Pinellas Park on US 19. The motel is still open today!
Here’s what the La Mark Charles Motel looks like today:
Sorry to learn of the death of the prolific author, Elmore Leonard. Besides his writings with weastern and Detroit settings were his many books with Florida settings. Many of which are seen above. Settings mostly focused on Dade and Palm Beach Counties, Leonard made full use of the headlines and the voracious appetite the criminal underworld has in our state. His quirky characters so well reflected the many ne’er-do-wells that move into the state.
That was one thing he differently than Hiassen and, later, Tim Dorsey, Leonard’s characters were mostly from out of state. A big exception to that were the nutty characters in ‘Maximum Bob’, which later became a television series starring Beau Bridges.
That’s something else Leonard accomplished, getting Florida on film. From ‘Out of Sight’ to Burt Reynolds in ‘Stick’ to the short lived television series ‘Karen Sisco’, Leonard brought film crews into our state to depist it for generations to come.
Many in tourist promoting would say Leonard’s books and then films did not put Florida in the kindest light, but in a funny, quirky, over-kilter light – and really, isn’t that what Florida tends to be, anyway?
We’ll miss Leonards writings about our state, but cherish what he did get down on paper as will generations to come.