Readers: Last week’s column about the Everglades mentioned Marjory Stoneman Douglas.
She’s one of two women of the same first name – different spellings and operating at opposite ends of the state – who shaped Florida’s environmental legacy. The other, Marjorie Harris Carr, worked for years to block the Cross-Florida Barge Canal and protect the Ocklawaha River in North Central Florida (see our 2020 column).
Here’s more on the two from my 1998 obituary on Douglas and Carr’s 1997 obituary in our Gannett partner newspaper, the Florida Times-Union:
Marjory Stoneman Douglas came to Florida when the Everglades stretched to the shores of Lake Okeechobee. In her lifetime, she watched it dwindle to a fenced-off polluted jewel, a fraction of its breadth. At a time when most people’s lives were winding down, she started a crusade to save what was left.
FLORIDA TIME: The Amazing Randi a world-renowned debunker
Readers: Last week we told you some of Florida great folktales, older and modern. A Fort Lauderdale resident spent his adult life debunking urban legends around the world. The Amazing Randi died in October at age 92. Here s more from a 2004 feature:
“The Amazing Randi bends a fork with his mind. Right in front of you. Except that James Randi bent it, with his hand, even though you thought you were staring right at it. He used good old distraction, the forte of any professional illusionist. Randi was once one himself. But he s spent most of his life shattering others illusions.
Florida Time: A fond farewell from our favorite Florida history buff
Eliot Kleinberg
Readers: After 33 years, I retired from the Palm Beach Post, effective Dec. 1. But because I had already written Florida Time columns well into 2021 and had them in the can, we will continue to publish.
Florida Time debuted in January 2019, and today is our 104th segment! Our newsletter now has more than 30,000 followers.
We ve been grateful for the opportunity to teach our readers a little about the history of our great state. As we ve said many times, many of our readers are from somewhere else, and whatever we tell them about our part of the world is news!
Naturally, as with everything else, many have a Florida connection.
We’ve told you about Papa Hemingway punching out a poet in Key West. But think Dashiell Hammett and you think San Francisco. After all, the former Pinkerton detective made that city a character in his noir classic, The Maltese Falcon.
But what about Burdines?
In Nathan Ward s book The Lost Detective, about Hammett s early life, he writes that in February 1934, just after Knopf published Hammett s iconic The Thin Man, the married Hammett and his girlfriend, fellow author Lillian Hellmann ( Little Foxes ) went to Miami for a four-day respite from chilly New York.
Readers: What better time than the holiday season to explore the Garden of Eden? It was in Florida. You didn’t know? Well, we’ve often called our state paradise. Why not?
It all came down to the torreya tree. Actually Torreya taxifolia. Around 1835, the owner of the Goodwood Plantation in Tallahassee named the tree for 19th century American botanist John Torrey.
It’s a conifer that’s found only in a few places in the world. One of them became what’s now the nearly-14,000-acre Torreya State Park, 45 miles west of the state capital.
Elvy Edison Callaway was a Baptist minister and unsuccessful 1936 Republican candidate for Florida governor.