Craig Pittman - Oh, Florida!: How Americas Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country

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This book is dedicated to the folks who made it possible: the twenty million people who live in Florida and the nearly one hundred million tourists who visit each year. You are the greatest comedy writers in history.

In 19mumblemumble, a St. Petersburg Times reporter named Tom Zucco, who was both one of the funniest people I ever met and one of the tallest, invited me to help him with an annual New Years feature that the paper called The Sour Orange Awards. Modeled on Esquire s Dubious Achievement Awards, the Sour Oranges collected some of the sickest, stupidest stories that had occurred in Florida in that year. I had always chuckled about weird Florida stories before, but thanks to Zucco I started collecting them, and for that I have to thank him. I should mention, by the way, that Tom was once married to a Weeki Wachee mermaid, so hes got that going for him.

When I joined Twitter, I naturally began posting weird Florida stories, and they always got a great response, so I posted more. In 2013, one of my Twitter followers, a Slate editor named Laura Helmuth, contacted me to say she enjoyed those items a lot, and would I please write a blog for Slate about Florida? That blog became the genesis for this book. Thanks, Laura!

Thank you to my agent, Andrew Stuart, and to Paul Starobin, who both believed strongly in this project and found it a good home, and to Daniella Rapp at St. Martins, whose great ideas and enthusiasm were inspiring.

Conversations with historians Gary Mormino and Jim Clark helped me map out the path this book would take. Many of my friends contributed through conversations in person and on Facebook, particularly Caryn Baird, Cynthia Barnett, Bill Cooke, Eric Deggans, George Bowers, Larry Kahn, Barbara Hijek, Brendan Farrington, Ron Matus, William McKeen, and Craig Waters. Caryn and Bill helped me with some particularly important research, as well.

Also I must thank the folks who allowed me to inflict my first draft chapters on them so they could check them for accuracy: Jim Clark, Anna Phillips, Craig Waters, Gary Mormino, and Kathleen McGrory. If you still find errors in the manuscript, thats my fault.

My wife, Sherry Robinson, deserves the biggest thanks of all. She not only put up with the massive pile of books scattered on both floors of our house and the long hours I spent tap-tap-tapping away on various keyboards. She also read the whole thing first and made some big improvements in the proseso you should thank her too.

Florida is a study in abnormal psychology, useful in signaling the hidden derangements of the national mood.

L AWRENCE P. L ESSING, S TATE OF F LORIDA, F ORTUNE, F EBRUARY 1948

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

H UNTER S. T HOMPSON, WHO LAUNCHED HIS GONZO JOURNALISM CAREER AT E GLIN A IR F ORCE B ASE, NEAR F ORT W ALTON B EACH, F LORIDA

A woman floats in the crystal clear waters of Weeki Wachee Springs, 1947. Florida has more first-magnitude springs than anywhere else on Earth. Photo by Toni Frissell. Photo courtesy of Library of Congress.

Florida is a strange place. I love it here, and I love how nothing makes sense.

A UTHOR R OXANE G AY, WHOSE PARENTS LIVE IN F LORIDA

One warm June afternoon, my friend Shannon called me looking for help. She said her womens group was putting on a luncheon for some folks visiting from another country. Each member of her group was supposed to sit at a table full of the visitors from, I dont know, Shteyngartistan or something, and somebody came up with the idea of arming the ladies with Fun Facts About Florida as icebreakers.

The problem, she said, was that the facts theyd compiled about Florida so far werent all that fun. Leading industries, form of government, so forth. She said, I was wondering if you

You got a pen? I asked, wiping sweat from my face. Take this down. In 1845, when Florida became a state, the first state flag that flew over the capital bore the slogan Let Us Alone.

She chuckled, aware of how ironic that sounded for a state where the economy depends on bringing in a constant flow of new residents.

I told her about Ochopee, the town with the nations smallest post office (formerly a toolshed) and Carrabelle, home of the worlds smallest police station (a phone booth), and Cassadaga, which has so many crystal balls per capita that its known as the Psychic Capital of the World. I made sure to mention Sweetwater, the town founded by a troupe of Russian circus midgets whose bus broke down. More recently its been a haven for Nicaraguan refugees.

I reeled off a dozen oddball bits of Floridiana but avoided the really weird stuffthe nude bikers, the Wiccan Klan members, the convocations of furries who throw beach parties in full costume. I didnt mention that families in the little town of Vernon became so dependent on insurance money paid out for lost limbs that people started shooting them off, which is how it became known as Nub City. I didnt bring up the allegations that both Donald Duck and Tigger groped female visitors to Walt Disney World. And I definitely did not recount for her the tale of Carl Tanzler, aka Count Carl von Cosel, a Key West X-ray technician who in 1930 fell in love with a tuberculosis patient named Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos. His love transcended death, by which I mean that when she died, he dug up her body and slept with the corpse for nine years, until her sister found out. Put on trial for grave robbing, he was exoneratedbecause the statute of limitations had expired.

No, some Florida tales are not fit for use as an icebreaker. They might have the opposite effect.

Shannon jotted down what I told her, giggling, then thanked me. I knew I could count on you, she said, hanging up.

About the time Shannon called looking for Fun Florida Facts, the fine folks at the e-zine Slate approached me with a somewhat similar request. They wanted me to blog about Florida, to explain how it can be both the Land of Flowers and the Land of Face-Eating Zombies. They picked me because I highlight both sides in my Twitter feed, @craigtimes, usually tagged as Oh #Florida! (It wasnt a conscious nod to Wallace Stevenss poem O Florida, Venereal Soil, but it works that way too.)

So in the summer of 2013, the Season of Stand Your Ground, I spent a month detailing the many ways Florida fed the national obsession with oddities. My blog was called Oh #Florida! The hard part wasnt filling a month of blog entries. The hard part was finding room to squeeze in all our outrageousness in only thirty days.

As that line on the first state flag demonstrates, Floridas residents have been weird and contradictory and muleheaded for a long time. In 1948, a writer for Forbes observed that theres something in Floridas humid, languorous air that attracts pirates, derelicts, remittance men, thieves, madams, gamblers, blue-sky promoters, moneybags, exhausted noblemen, black-market operators, profiteers [and] all the infections of Western life.