As April dawns, the tale of Palmetto Pete returns

A vintage view of Lake Eola Park

A vintage view of Lake Eola Park

It’s April 1, and I’ve just returned from a walk at Orlando’s Lake Eola Park, which offers excellent people- and creature-watching. Folks stroll along with anything from a pomeranian to a python. But on this very April day a few years ago,I stumbled on the strangest pet story I’ve ever heard from Central Florida’s past.

It was just about twilight when I found myself walking at the park behind a stooped, white-haired man with a long beard. Behind him on the pavement were what first appeared to be five flat, dark, oval stones. Ack! They moved. They looked like palmetto bugs, our Florida roaches. Impossible. The man turned and fixed me with a gaze that would melt butter.

“Whatever you do,” he said in a low voice, “be careful where you step.” I could only stare. When he stopped, the line of dark shapes behind him stopped, too.

Thanks to 'Anonymous Cow,' Wikimedia Commons

Thanks to ‘Anonymous Cow,’ Wikimedia Commons

“You see,” he said, “these are true descendants of Palmetto Pete, the biggest bug ever to come out of Florida. They don’t hatch ’em like Pete any more. He was a star. Palmetto Pete’s Scrambling Circus, Pappy called it. People loved it.”

“But, roaches?” I said, thinking of those creatures that plague the recesses of my old kitchen.

“See, this was back in the 1920s,” he went on. “People were flocking into Orlando like bees to honey.” Or like roaches, I thought.

Prof. Heckler entertained New Yorkers in the 1920s. (Courtesy sideshowworld.com)

Prof. Heckler entertained New Yorkers in the 1920s. (Courtesy sideshowworld.com)

“My pappy had heard about these flea circuses at fairs up north. He figured we had almost as many of them palmetto bugs around our yard as an old dog has fleas. They were a whole lot bigger, too, and strong!

“Pappy hitched those critters up to a tiny wagon they pulled around a cute little circus arena he built for them. They weren’t all smart like Pete , of course. Pappy knew Pete was special the minute he saw that bug sauntering across our kitchen floor. My mammy was just about to give Pete a smack with a rolled-up newspaper, but Pappy said, no ma’am, that bug’s gonna make us some money.”

I shivered. “So what happened?”

Could this be Pete? Guess not. It's a 'sea roach,' says FloridaMemory.com (found in 1984)

Could this be Pete? Guess not. It’s a ‘sea roach,’ says FloridaMemory.com (found in 1984)

“Oh, Pete was a wonder,” the old man went on. “Could catch a tiny trapeze, ride on the back of a little dog; he could even fly. Pappy was making money hand over fist with his circus. There was just one problem: That bug was bad to drink. This was during Prohibition, and Pete began lappin’ up that moonshine. That roach just became a disgrace. He started falling off that tiny dog’s back, and talking real rude to the lady bugs. One sad day Pappy found him on his back with his legs up in the air.”

A tear dropped onto his worn jeans. And then the old man gathered himself up to walk away, but before he did, he leaned over and whispered one more thing to me.

“Dearie,” he said, “Happy April Fool’s Day to you.” I send the same greeting to you, gentle readers. April 1 is a fine time for foolery. But, we must admit, from what we know of Florida, big Pete might really have existed.

P.S. I looked up ways to battle roaches in Florida, hoping to add something useful to this tale, but found so many online that I opted for this instead: Baton Rouge blues master Silas Hogan’s version of “I Got Rats and Roaches in My Kitchen.” Not Florida, but close enough. http://bit.ly/1jUoTtJ

 

Orange and clove pomanders: Very vintage and aromatic

My 1940s directions call for covering fruit with cloves, but others suggest making patterns with the cloves.

My 1940s directions call for covering fruit with wholes cloves, but others suggest arranging the cloves in lines or patterns.

Years ago, our Florida family made pomander balls for holiday gifts: oranges studded en masse with cloves, rolled in spices, and hung from ribbons.

These fragrant fruit-and-spice pomander balls were a time-honored way to add a hint of fragrance to your home, long before companies attempted to manufacture good smells and put them in a spray can.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac says the practice went back as far as medieval times. (http://www.almanac.com/content/seasonal-crafts-how-make-orange-pomanders)

The ladies are discussing "that Oxydol sparkle" on the back of a recipe in Mom's old book of clippings.

The ladies are discussing “that Oxydol sparkle” on the back of a recipe in Mom’s old book of clippings.

The directions my mother used, clipped from an unidentified magazine, are still taped in the black ledger book where she began to collect recipes and household tips in the 1940s.

They note that the pomanders can also be made with apples, lemons, or limes. We usually used oranges.

The full directions suggest storing the pomander for three or four weeks to dry, but in Florida, the following steps for quick preparation seem best.

1. Spread lots and lots of whole cloves on waxed paper.

2. With a small nail or sturdy toothpick, pierce holes in the skin of the fruit, from one end to the other and as close together as possible without splitting the skin.

3. Now stick whole cloves in the holes. Make additional holes where needed; fill the holes with cloves, so that the fruit is covered with them (or feel free to use less, as picture at top).

Ribbon hangers for a pomander (from Mom's clipping book).

Ribbon hangers for a pomander (from Mom’s clipping book).

4. Combine equal amounts of ground cinnamon and powdered orrisroot, or use a mixture of spices with orissroot.

The recipe at Old Farmer’s Almanac  suggests 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, 1 teaspoon ground cloves, 1 tablespoon ground nutmeg, 1 tablespoon allspice, and 1/4 cup powdered orrisroot.

5. Roll the clove-studded fruit in your spices until the fruit is coated. Our 1940s directions suggest using ground cloves with a lemon and ground nutmeg with a lime.

5. After fruit is rolled in the mixture, place in a shallow baking pan and bake at 300 degrees F for 4 hours. Cool.

6. To make a hanger, tie a long narrow ribbon securely around the fruit, making a knot at top. Leave about 4 inches of ribbon for a loop, and tie with ribbon ends with a bow. The 1940s directions suggest wrapping the ball in “metallic mesh or hat veiling, and it’s ready for Santa to deliver.”

I seem to be all out of hat veiling.

The Waterhouse Museum by artist and journalist Thomas Thorspecken. See http://www.analogartistdigitalworld.com/2011/01/maitland-historical-society.html

The Waterhouse Museum by artist and journalist Thomas Thorspecken. See http://www.analogartistdigitalworld.com/2011/01/maitland-historical-society.html

The orrisroot is the key ingredient, and acts as a fixative. Our directions say to get it from a drugstore, but, like the hat veiling, that’s no longer workable for most of us. A health-food store that sells bulk spices is a better bet.

A few years ago, during a holiday visit to the Waterhouse Museum — a lovely Victorian house in Maitland, Florida — I remembered the pomanders because some were on display, along with other natural crafts.

Even if we don’t make pomander balls, it’s fun to think about them and those rich, natural aromas of citrus and cloves. For more on the Waterhouse, visit http://artandhistory.org/waterhouse-museum/

It’s time for bluegrass and barbecue in old Christmas

Bluegrass fills the air at Cracker Christmas

Bluegrass fills the air at Cracker Christmas

For many Central Floridians, December wouldn’t be complete without a visit to Cracker Christmas at Fort Christmas Historical Park in far-east Orange County. This two-day celebration of Florida pioneer life traditionally takes place the first weekend of the month (in 2013, that’s Dec. 7 and 8).

In search of seasonal feature stories, journalists from near and far often join the crowds at the annual festival, which typically draws more than 15,000 folks each year.

Named by Seminole-fighting soldiers on Dec. 25 in 1837, the community of Christmas, Florida, is about as venerable as it gets in the state’s pioneer past. The park itself, given to the county in 1931, is also one of Orange’s oldest.

CrackerChristmasFlier-2During one festival a few years ago, visitors listened to bluegrass tunes, took cards to the Christmas postal booth to be stamped with the town’s famous postmark, bought books by authors including Florida Artists Hall of Famer Patrick Smith, and consumed copious quantities of barbecue, fried potatoes, and roasted corn. They could also get a taste of life on the Florida frontier at the replica of the 1837 fort or the park’s original Cracker houses, where vendors and volunteers demonstrated old-time crafts.

Joe Gallelli of Geneva gets a `boondoggle' lesson from Aimee Nichols of St. Augustine at a Cracker Christmas festival.

Joe Gallelli of Geneva gets a `boondoggle’ lesson from Aimee Nichols of St. Augustine at a Cracker Christmas festival.

At a display near the Cracker cabins, Aimee Nichols of St. Augustine sat with a sizable sabal palm frond in her lap, weaving it into a “boondoggle” — a decoration she said was often used to welcome newcomers to a community in the pioneer South and served as a Christmas gift.

Neighbors would come to the cabin of a newly arrived family with a fresh-baked pie and the palm decoration, which the family hung on their front door so “others would know they had been welcomed,” Nichols said.

Elsewhere in the park, fans of a showpiece of 20th-century American design — the Airstream travel trailer — helped keep the event rolling smoothly.

airstream1If the silvery trailers’ aerodynamic design at first seemed incongruous at an event that celebrates the antique and roughhewn, the travel trailers do have a link to old Christmas in the pioneer spirit they embody — a mixture of adventurous exploration and lending a hand.

“Don’t stop. Keep right on going,” Airstream’s founder Wally Byam once wrote. “Go see what’s over the next hill, and the one after that, and the one after that.”

For details on Cracker Christmas, visit http://www.nbbd.com/godo/FortChristmas/ and go to events.

Pilgrims, schmilgrims

"The First Thanksgiving, 1621," by J.L.G. Ferris. Library of Congress

“The First Thanksgiving, 1621,” by J.L.G. Ferris. Library of Congress

I fret about this every year: As our commercial culture jumps from Halloween to Christmas, where is Thanksgiving? My favorite holiday seems in danger of disappearing.

I’m talking about American folklore—pilgrims, Squanto, corn pudding, pie, family and friends, gratitude for survival and for the harvest.

But, according to the dean of Florida historians, Michael Gannon, the first North American Thanksgiving actually took place in Florida, and that’s even more forgotten.

Pilgrims, schmilgrims. Our shores were home to a thanksgiving celebration in 1565, decades before the doings at Plymouth Colony in 1621.

The Grinch who stole Thanksgiving

Prof. Michael Gannon. Courtesy Tampa Bay Times

Prof. Michael Gannon. Courtesy Tampa Bay Times

Gannon, now distinguished service professor emeritus of history at the University of Florida, wrote about Florida’s first thanksgiving in 1965, in his book “The Cross in the Sand.” He described the 1565 feast as “the first community act of religion and Thanksgiving in the first permanent European settlement in the land.”

Twenty years later, the good professor would be jokingly dubbed “the Grinch who stole Thanksgiving.”

A reporter called Gannon in search of a fresh angle for a holiday article, and the professor told him about Thanksgiving, Florida-style—how on Sept. 8, 1565, Spanish explorer Pedro Menendez de Aviles had joined in the celebration of a thanksgiving Mass in the St. Augustine area, followed by a meal at which the explorer’s men supped with local Indians.

On the menu: Garbanzos and seafood

Pedro Menendez de Aviles. Library of Congress

Pedro Menendez de Aviles. Library of Congress

The Spaniards probably served their shipboard staples: salt pork, garbanzo beans, ship’s bread (or hardtack) and red wine. The natives would have supplied the good eating: seafood from our coastal waters, Gannon said.

After the interview and an Associated Press story, Gannon found himself besieged by talk-show hosts. Reaction was strongest in Massachusetts.

“You’ve caused a firestorm up here,” one interviewer told him, reporting that Plymouth’s town leaders were meeting about the Florida insurgency.

Now, things have calmed down. When reporters asked a few years ago about other claims to the first Thanksgiving (Texans and Virginians have theirs, too), officials at Plimouth Plantation in Plymouth, Mass., adopted a conciliatory tone. When it comes to original feasts of “American” thanksgiving, they also noted, the best claims belong to Native Americans.

Giving thanks at St. Augustine, 1565

Giving thanks at St. Augustine, 1565

By the way, Michael Gannon’s book “Florida: A Short History” is an indispensable introduction to the state’s past, as is his “History of Florida in 40 Minutes” (University Press of Florida, 2007). For a great article about Gannon, see Jeff Klinkenberg’s profile at TampaBay.com, http://www.tampabay.com/features/humaninterest/the-remarkable-michael-gannon-his-history-is-floridas-history/1098373

All-American Bird

Franklin-Benjamin-LOC-headIf Ben Franklin had had his way, the turkey might be more than the centerpiece of America’s Thanksgiving menu – it might be our national bird as well.

Franklin thought the bald eagle was for the birds. At least that’s what he told his daughter Sarah.

“I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country,” Franklin wrote in a humorous letter in 1784. “He is a bird of bad moral character.”

Eagles were too lazy to fish for themselves.  They just loitered about on some dead tree until some hawk made a catch. “When that diligent bird has at length taken a fish . . . the bald eagle pursues him, and takes it from him,” Franklin wrote.

turkeyIn contrast, Franklin found the turkey “a much more respectable bird” and “a true original native of America.”

UnderwaterTurkey

Photo courtesy of the Florida State Archives, FloridaMemory.com

Thanks to historian Dana Ste.Claire of St. Augustine for telling me about Franklin’s view of turkeys several years ago.

Like Florida sometimes, turkeys don’t get much respect.

In a typical 1950s ad for a Florida attraction, Rainbow Springs, the noble bird even had to pose being carved underwater.

That’s a fine way to treat such a respectable piece of poultry, Franklin might say.

World’s Largest Pinup? Daytona’s Red Diving Girl

This Red Diving Girl incarnation is 1 of only 3 or so in the world, says Stamie Kypreos, owner of the shop. The most beautiful gal at Daytona doesn’t sport a bikini. And tattoos? Not for the Red Diving Girl, the nearly 20-foot icon that has adorned Stamie’s swimwear shop at 8 N. Ocean Ave. since the days when the Beatles were new.

A few years ago, I chatted with the shop’s founder, Stamie Kypreos, who grew up in Orlando, where her family moved from Greece when she was 7. (Mrs. Kypreos died in 2010 at the age of 97.) She had married her late husband, Theodore, also in Orlando in 1935. A dozen years later, wen Harry Truman was America’s president, Kypreos opened her shop on Ocean Avenue and began selling swimsuits to ladies and gents.

When I visited her a decade ago, Mrs. Kypreos was 89. She paused during our chat to ask a shopper how she was doing during a dressing-room session of trying on bathing suits. The suits were fine, the shopper replied; it was the body she was trying to fit into them that posed a problem.

How many thousands of times in more than 50 years must Kypreos have heard this kind of fretting. The pounds! The thighs! I’ll never look like . . . Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, Twiggy, Cindy Crawford, Halle Berry. . . . The beauty icons have changed, but the quest for the perfect bathing suit remains.

Kypreos took these cellulite dramas in stride. “I love my little place,” Kypreos said.

Diving into history

Outside the shop, which looks the same but was closed on the Sunday when I recently stopped by, the big gal in the red suit just keeps diving, suspended in a perpetual, graceful swoop. This incarnation of her, owned by the Jantzen company of Portland, Ore., is one of only six ever made; few survive. One of the statue’s sisters was once suspended from the ceiling of the American Advertising Museum in Portland, which I’m sad to see closed in 2004. The Red Diving Girl symbol has been around for decades longer; she holds a high place in the history of both advertising and sport. In her day, she was considered a glamour gal as groovy as Grable.

The company that became Jantzen didn’t start out to make bathing suits. John A. Zehntbauer and Carl C. Jantzen founded it in 1910 as the Portland Knitting Co., a business that made sweaters and woolen hosiery. The enterprise sidestroked into the swimwear business when members of the Portland Rowing Club asked it to produce a wool rib-knit rowing suit about 1913. In 1918 its name was changed to the Jantzen Knitting Mills.

Early bathing suits at Daytona Beach

Early bathing suits at Daytona Beach

Around that time, the pastime of sea bathing — jumping into waves while holding on to a rope attached to an offshore buoy — was being replaced by the sport of swimming. Women needed swimwear that wouldn’t slow them down.

By the early 1920s, Jantzen was in the market, touting its product with the slogan “the Suit that Changed Bathing to Swimming.” Soon, the company was ready for a national sales push, and husband-and-wife artists Frank and Florenz Clark went after an image to use in ads, according to Jantzen archivists.

http://archivalclothing.com/2010/08/

The Jantzen swimsuit factory

Florenz Clark went to a Portland amateur athletic club, where she watched women divers training for the 1920 Olympics. Inspired by their grace, she and her husband came up with the image of a woman diver in a red Jantzen suit, soon christened the Red Diving Girl .

In a saucy suit resembling a long tank top, the Diving Girl became something of a craze. In 1922, Jantzen printed 10,000 Red Diving Girl stickers that were distributed in store displays, which people grabbed up to paste on the windshields of their cars. Massachu- setts banned the decals from auto windshields.

 Pinups and beach parties

George Petty's airbrushed version of the Jantzen Red Diving Girl became popular in the 1930s and 1940s. The `Petty Girl ' was a successor to the Gibson Girl , an ideal of American beautyBy the 1930s, billboards featuring the work of artist George Petty and others had transformed the Diving Girl into a long-legged, airbrushed dish. The “Petty Girl ” became a popular pinup in the 1930s and 1940s and is said to have been the first centerfold, in Esquire magazine. She didn’t have to worry about her weight, of course; she was an illustration.

In 1959, a mannequin company in Los Angeles transformed the Red Diving Girl , now in an elasticized strapless one-piece, into three dimensions and made six 191/2-foot fiberglass versions of her to be used on signs.

One of the six made its way to Miami and, in 1965, to a happy home at Stamie’s by the World’s Most Famous Beach. She has been there ever since, despite repairs from storm damage in 1980 and the day-to-day toll of humidity and salt air. Her once-white cap is now painted red to match her suit and dainty toenails. A girl must keep up with fashion, after all.

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Magic Carpets Made of Steel

Florence Dickinson George Dickinson Joy Dickinson Sligh Blvd Train StationMy family are railroad people, no strangers to the Orlando passenger station on Sligh Boulevard. After the traveler among us has climbed up into the train, we wave at the long windows sliding by, vanishing into the horizon. Sometimes we go there just to take photos.

Much has changed since the station debuted with a roaring big celebration back in the Roaring ’20s, but the old Spanish Mission station, designated a city landmark in 1977, has remained a working part of America’s railroad heritage, and its new role as a SunRail station has given it a brighter future.

When Atlantic Coast Line officials planned the station in the mid-1920s, they sent architect A.M. Griffin to California to study the Spanish missions in cities such as Santa Barbara and San Juan Capistrano. With its twin bell towers, arches, and tile roof, the station became the Atlantic Coast Line’s very Pacific Coast-style gift to Orlando. It survives as the sole Mission-style station in Florida.

Built at a cost of nearly $500,000, the depot opened in January 1927 with elaborate ceremonies brimming with railroad executives and Orlando dignitaries. The interior overflowed with potted palms and flowers. The Lions Club quartet sang, two bands played, and exuberant speakers hailed a “new era of progress and expansion.”

 The arched letters that spell Orlando were designed by the station’s architects in the 1920s. One of the station’s finest features remains the curved rendering of the word “Orlando” over the entrance facing the trains. It doesn’t hurt that the city’s name is pretty in itself. The folks who picked it back in 1857 must have known it had more marketing potential than its predecessors, Fort Gatlin and Jernigan.

I also love the colonnade of arches that extends out from the station. There our family would wait in the 1950s and ’60s for visitors from western Pennsylvania, our particular slice of up North. Among them were my Northern grandparents, Florence and George Dickinson, always decked out in their best: For her, hat (with silk flower), gloves, corset, suit, stockings, high-heeled pumps, serious purse and the little suitcase called a train case. Granddad wore a snappy fedora, starched dress shirt, double-breasted suit, pocket handkerchief, polished shoes.

Orlando’s Atlantic Coast Line station bustles in the 1930s. Courtesy of the Orange County Regional History Center.

Orlando’s Atlantic Coast Line station bustles in the 1930s. Courtesy of the Orange County Regional History Center.

You dressed for travel then. It was an occasion. And my Granddad Dickinson wouldn’t have traveled any other way except by train. He was an engineer for the Pittsburgh and Lake Erie line. Not too many years after he wore his double-breasted suit to visit Florida, he would depart this world at the throttle of his engine during heavy snow, the victim of a heart attack. His last act was to stop the train safely. The railroad gave my grandmother a gold watch to honor that.

Granddad would be happy to know that people are still traveling to Orlando by rail, on trains that bear names from his era – the Silver Meteor and the Silver Star – names that still trail a hint of adventure. And he would be happy about the survival of a station where thousands of travelers  – old, young, rich, poor, black, white – have come and gone over the years, as they rode their father’s magic carpets made of steel.

 

The Marvelous Richard Halliburton

Channeling Halliburton In one of my favorite childhood photos, a friend and I are playing dress up. She’s princess-elegant in a long dress, but I’m swathed in a scarf and shorts, a smiling child with a too-curly perm trying to channel some Indian elephant boy out of Kipling. Now I think perhaps I was channeling my inner Richard Halliburton. Although once a renowned emblem of travel adventure, my Halliburton has nothing to do with the aluminum travel cases of that name, or with the multinational Halliburton Corp. He has to do with the worlds he opened for me and many other children through his Complete Book of Marvels.  First published in 1941, it has long been out of print but still rates stellar reviews on Amazon.com. “My favorite book of all time,” notes one, in a thought echoed by others.

Richard Halliburton's Book of MarvelsHalliburton’s Marvels  educated generations of young Americans about geography, history, and culture, as the Wikipedia article on him notes. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Halliburton)

Reading Halliburton never felt like “education,” though. It was like diving into magical adventures, and Halliburton did literally dive in – to the Panama Canal, to a pool by the moonlit Taj Mahal, where great white lotus blossoms drifted on the water. He rode elephants and perched on the Golden Gate Bridge during its construction. And he took along his young readers in friendly prose that never condescended.

To see the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids or even the Golden Gate Bridge – these were goals outside my family’s experience. For us, moving from Pennsylvania to Florida was a magical as it got – and nothing to be sneezed at. Travel, beyond family visits, was something other people did.

And, in truth, Halliburton’s kind of adventurous travel was beyond most of us. When I read him as a child, I didn’t realize he had already died. His last adventure began in March 1939, when he and a crew set out from Hong Kong on a Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, to sail across the Pacific. Instead, they vanished, and Halliburton was declared dead in October 1939. He was 39 years old.

I had always thought of him as my own private childhood passion – me and my inner elephant boy – and was shocked and pleased to discover, in 2001, a magazine article by the literary icon Susan Sontag, titled “Homage to Halliburton.”

She had loved him too. And his sad end, she noted, could not taint the “lessons of pluck and avidity” that she and I and so many others drew from reading him.

Sontag’s essay helped me see that Halliburton’s most important gift was opening for us not only the world of travel but the idea of being a writer. “What is a writer but a mental traveler?” she asks. “When I acknowledge to myself that I’m interested in everything, what am I saying but that I want to travel everywhere. Like Richard Halliburton.”

What indeed.

halliburton

To Old Florida and Beyond

Joy Wallace Dickinson (left) with grandparents Bill and Alice Wallace and the truck for the family's new business, the B&D Market in Winter Park.

Joy Wallace Dickinson (left) about 1950 with grandparents Bill and Alice Wallace and the truck for the family’s new business, the B&D Market in Winter Park.

Welcome! If your memories or interests include sandy beaches, orange blossoms, and all that’s old and “real” Florida, I hope you’ll find this a fun, interesting spot to perch every so often in your travels across the vast, astonishing worldwide web.

I love writing about Central Florida’s past, and my heart remains there, even when I wander. Right now, I’ve wandered on a visit to California, where I once lived.

I’ve been reunited with three dear women friends to celebrated friendships forged more than 50 years ago, at Orlando’s Howard Junior High School. My ties to one of these friends, Debbie Staton Cook, reach back to a bond forged between our families in the 1940s when her uncle, Ted Staton, sold my grandparents the house in which I now live.

We four have talked a lot about how our youth in Orlando shaped our lives: about the teachers who inspired us, about good times at the Central Florida Fair, playing records at Bill Baer’s on Orange Avenue, about trips to the beach, about listening to our teacher read us The Lion’s Paw in elementary school. And yes, we’ve probably talked, too, about the pumpernickel rolls at Ronnie’s restaurant.

I carry my Central Florida past with me wherever I wander.

Joy Dickinson's 2012 painting of Orlando's Spanish Mission Train Station used a vintage postcard for inspiration.

Joy Dickinson’s 2012 painting of Orlando’s Spanish Mission Train Station used a vintage postcard for inspiration. (Credit: Joy Wallace Dickinson)

I admire folks whose roots go deep into Florida’s sand, and I cherish too my heritage as one whose family came from the North, from the steel country of Pennsylvania. My father and grandparents traveled in my granddad’s woodie station wagon, but my mother and I journeyed by train and arrived at the Sligh Boulevard station. Modeled on the missions of California, this 1920s station remains my most-loved Orlando building.

Especially for my grandfather, Bill Wallace, Orlando was truly a city of dreams. Back in Pennsylvania when I was a small child, he often asked me, “Now, where are you going to go to college?” And I would respond with the much-rehearsed, “University of Florida.” In the end, my college was Florida State, but it was all the same to him. It was in Florida, his final and best-loved home. May we never forget its history, including the parts that may be difficult to embrace and understand.

Vintage roadside signs, including the iconic jaws at Orlando's Gatorland, are among the topics that inspire Joy in Florida. (Credit: Joy Wallace Dickinson)

Vintage roadside signs, including the iconic jaws at Orlando’s Gatorland, are among the topics that inspire Joy in Florida. (Credit: Joy Wallace Dickinson)

In this space, my goal is to embrace my name (not always easy) and focus on what’s joyful in Florida and beyond. We’ll probably venture into wide-ranging subjects including travel as a single, older woman; books, especially cozy mysteries; Florida-related art and pop culture; vintage roadside signs and other uses of typography; Orlando’s historic Lake Eola Park; the other sunshine state, California, so like and so different from Florida; writing tips and inspiration; and the occasional historic or family recipe. And maybe even coffee. This is one writer who is fueled by coffee. Let’s have a cup. I’m so happy you’re here.