Here’s an interesting item from the collections: A giant Silver Springs matchbook. These images are actual size. Above is one side of the outside. Below is the otherside.
Below is the interior of the matchbook. It’s a wonderful illustration of Silver Springs across the matches. Also look at that map! Pre-75, pre-95, pre-interstate 4. Look at the balance of cities. It’s all fairly balanced, as it should be. All communities are important.
Saturday, May 3rd, Princeton Elementary in Orlando marked it’s 81st birthday. Former and current students, former and current teachers attended. Dianne Williams, retired P.E. teacher, was honored with a pavillion opened in her name.
Above Swampy lingers at one of the back entrances of the school. This is part of the original construction of the school.
‘Dutch Uncle’ is part of the ‘Hard Case Crime’ series that is reprinting older pulp novels and brand new ones. This is a new one that was first published in 2005 and still available in stores. The locations is primarily in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Other locations involved are Sunrise, Gainesville and Orlando.
Author Peter Pavia has begun an extremely promising writing career with a top notch read of what most face in South Florida: Various varieties of crime. Pavia does a great job of laying out the various characters and their thought processes. The story then bounces from one to the other each with their own view of various situations in the book. This is very well done. The plot seems to be heading to a cliff,,,and maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t. That makes another interesting turn in the writing: You draw your own conclusion. The way it is all written, you care enough to find out. Well done!
Since 1957, it’s Harry Family Restaurant on Main Street in Lakeland.
Here Swampy visits the Mulberry Phosphate Museum. Mulberry is in south Polk County, nearly 20 miles sould of Lakeland. To the north of the main building is a giant bucket from the enormousmachines that dig out the phosphate you find in your toothpaste.
Here we travel back to 1957 to an official Florida ‘Vacation Guide’. Here is the fabulous Rainbow Springs at that time. Since the park transformed into an amusement type park to a Florida State Park. Today you are not able to swim around the waterfall that still exists there today.
Swampy went to get a haircut and stopped at Jim’s Barber Shop in Orlando. Jim has been cutting hair in Downtown Orlando for 45 years. One of his early haircuts was mine, Rob Smith. That was my first haircut 44 years ago. Jim originally worked with a group of barbers just down the street where he cuts now by himself on W. Church Street in Orlando.
Jim is an Apopkan and is a nut about fishing. One of his hobbies is collecting lures. Above him is part of his collection.
Update: Unfortunately for all of us who were the recipients of Jim’s sharp cutting skills and gentle good humor, Jim passed away August 5th, 2008. He will be greatly missed.
Here’s a bit of history of what I remember of Jim’s barber history:
Jim had apparently started cutting the year before cutting my hair in 1963. I know he worked with the barbers that worked on Church Street. I don’t remember the name of the shop. It was located on the back side of McCrory’s that faced Orange Avenue. The other barbers eventually retired or left that shop and Jim took it over sometime in the mid-80s. When the McCrory/Woolworth block was doomed to extinction around 1990, Jim moved to a little spot just outside the parking garage for the old First Federal, now a County government building, also facing Church Street which he stayed in until a few weeks ago..
This is a very good book. Not only is it very well researched and footnoted, it’s also very balanced. I’ve noticed a trend of recent non-fiction books of Florida to have a very sharp political slant. Despite writing about the Civil War and the very conroversial land and oyster wheeler-dealer William Lee Popham the author, Willaim Warren Rogers, does and amazing job of being very fair.
Rogers writing of Popham could have leaned to pure camp. What a character! Getting the book to read just about Popham is well worth the price!
Here we are at the intersection of Newberry Road and US 75 in Gainesville. As far as we know this is the last Kentucky Fried Chicken sign that still includes the bucket in the state of Florida. Please let us know if you know of another one we’ve missed.
