Transcript
[Cover]
Cressy's History of Florida
[Illustration of a man in a hammock on a sunny beach with palm trees; the man's body is made from Cressy's signature and there is a sign below him stating "Lots For Sale."]
Will M. Cressy, Author
Address Mail Orders (Enclosing 10¢ AND Postage) To
Maude E. Condon
Publisher
St. Petersburg Florida
Providence R. I.
Price 10 Cents
15 Cents on Trains
[panels 2-4]
Cressy's History of Florida
Copyright 1923
FLORIDA is the chin-whisker of the United
States.
In shape it is a cross between a sheet of blotting-paper and a fishhook.
It is six hundred miles long, two hundred miles wide and three feet high.
It is the only State in the Union entirely surrounded by Florida Water.
It is bounded on the North by the Eighteenth Amendment and on the other three sides by the three-mile limit.
Its principal Ports of Entry are any open-faced inlets or bays, pointing toward Bimini and Cuba.
It is the only State in the Union having an East Coast and a West Coast. These two coasts are separated by two hundred miles of land and about twenty dollars a day in price.
“You can get a fair meal in the hotels for $2.00 and the same meal in a cafeteria for sixty cents.”
On the East Coast, guests do not eat after the first day.
You can purchase a good ten-cent cigar in Tampa for two-bits. At Palm Beach, cigars are kept in the safe and only issued on written orders from the Secretary of the United States Treasury.
Florida was once the bottom of the sea. It was covered with oyster beds. Many of the hotels are using the same beds yet. Florida hotels are built of whalebone, pasteboard and mortgages, and were the originators of the rubber price list.
Florida is inhabited by Indians, Afro-Americans, White Men and Feedbag tourists, sometimes called Tin Canners.
The Reds live on the Everglades, the Blacks live on the Whites, the Whites on the Tourists and the Tin Canners live on Municipal Camp Grounds.
Florida was discovered in 1492 by a gentleman friend of Queen Isabella of Spain, by the name of Christopher Columbus. Columbus had been pestering around the Palace all winter doing egg tricks, until the Queen got so sick of him that she hocked her synthetic pearls, bought him one of Henry Ford’s Eagle Boats (the only one that has
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ever been accounted for), and told him to go over and discover America. This accomplished, he instituted the first Lodge of the Knights of Columbus, started the Christopher Street Ferry in New York, erected a monument to himself at Columbus Circle, saw Ziegfield Follies, and returned to Spain, leaving Florida to slumber for the next two hundred years.
The Seminole Indians were the original settlers of Florida, but history was not included in their curriculum.
In 1664, while an advance agent for the Florida Citrus Grower’s Association was over in Spain on a Raymond & Whitcomb excursion, he met an old Spanish He-Vamp by the name of Ponce de Leon, who had been quite a “Sheik,” but was losing his punch. The reports of the St. Petersburg climate and the wonders it was doing for the “Old Boys” from Iowa, Ohio and New England who came there in wheel-chairs and went away inside of three weeks youthful enough to wear knee pants, “listened good,” so it was “The Spring of Youth’’ at St. Augustine for Old Ponzie.
Before they set sail, Poncie went over and called on Chris Columbus and got a few addresses and telephone numbers that Chris had collected on a previous visit over there, and the address of a Doctor at Orlando who was making a specialty of the Monkey Gland Shift. And thus prepared, he and the Fruit Salesman set forth.
They got along all right for the first three or four months, and then ran into storms which blew them off their course so that they landed down at Bimini instead of Florida. By the next morning Poncie did not care whether he ever got to Florida or not. But the Fruit Man did, for he collected ten per cent from old man Flagler on all guests he brought over. So he loaded Poncie back on the ship, and a couple of days later landed him, limp, lean and empty, at Jacksonville.
Jacksonville, called ‘The Gateway of Florida,” because you go through it going in and they go through you coming out, tried to hold the distinguished guest, but the Fruit Man knew the town, and unloaded old Poncie out in the freight yards, and took him down to St. Augustine in an airplane.
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The night at Bimini had left Poncie with a large desire for WATER. So the first place to lead him to was “The Spring of Youth.” Then for a couple of weeks Poncie was the life of the party, until he went color-blind and tried to vamp the soubrette of an Indian Medicine Show that was playing there. Princess Gowanga was willing enough, but her father, old Chief Kickapoo, put on his bow tie and arrow collar and shot old Poncie in the knee. So Poncie died full of years, spring water and unrequited affection.
But he had his revenge. For some four hundred years later one of his descendants, a Mister Charles Ponzi stung the natives of New England for six million dollars on another pipe dream.
The ad given to The Spring of Youth by “The Rejuvenation of Uncle Poncie” proved such an attraction that old man Flagler decided to extend his field; so he started building a railroad down along the East Coast, and building hotels as he
went. This was very expensive, as he had to build a hotel, three gambling houses and a dance hall every twenty miles of road. But the road did such a business, and got such an impetus, that when he got to the end of the main land h forgot to stop and ran it right along a hundred miles out to sea to Key West.
Key West is so called because it is on the EAST coast and is not the key to anything. .
The original name for Miami was Miazma.
Daytona was named by a man from Dayton, O.
The official emblem of Palm Beach is a hand extended—PALM UP—in welcome.
Florida’s principal sources of income are hotels, fruits, alligator skins, tourists and the best press agents east of California.
“As a money-making proposition, a Florida hotel ranks right next to a war contract. Owing to the climate, they require no heat. As there is no soil, mud or dust, no water is required for washing purposes, and its nearness to Cuba, the Bahamas and Bimini does away with it as a beverage. Owing to the prices placed upon it, very little food is required. Owing to the “Spanish Style”
of furniture used, nobody can sit or lie on it, so there is very little wear and tear on it.
But the one great outstanding feature of Florida is its fruit; orange raising coming first, of course.
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[panels 5 and 6]
Raising oranges in Florida is a cinch. All that is required is money enough to live on while raising the oranges.
By searching diligently, one can generally find a Real Estate Agent in most any town who will, under persuasion, sell one an orange tract at from $400.00 to $600.00 an acre. For $125.00 this land can be cleared. You will obtain about three hundred dollars’ worth of wood and lumber from each acre. But as no one will buy it, you have to pay to have it burned up.
You then buy your trees. These "trees" are about the size of a slate pencil and cost $1.25 each. They run about 100 to the acre.
Your tract is now planted. And all you have to do for the next six years is to water them and squirt expensive prescriptions on them and fertilize them with other expensive compounds.
At the end of this six years your trees are in bearing. And you engage some Fruit Packing concern to pick, pack, ship and sell them for you. Then you get a statement from the concern telling how much of a balance you still owe them.
The next Florida fruit in importance is the Grapefruit. A grapefruit bears about the same relationship to an orange that a capon does to a hen. It is a cross between a lemon, a dose of quinine and a pumpkin. It tastes about as much like a grape as it does like Hostetter’s Bitters. The same person must have named it who named Near Beer. It has the color and disposition of a blonde ticket seller of a moving picture theater. They cost a cent on the tree and a dollar on the table. They are usually eaten at breakfast, thus giving the double advantage of a meal and the morning shower bath at the same time.
The tangerine is a distant cousin of the orange. It wears a loose and careless ‘‘Mother Hubbard" style of wrapper, is much easier to disrobe than the orange, but is of a more dry, withered and disappointed disposition when undressed.
The Kumquat is the only thing in Florida which acts up to its name. It looks and tastes just the way it sounds.
Florida is also the home of the big game hunter, the biggest games being found at Palm
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Beach and Miami. Among the other games to be found are Dear (referring especially to hotel rates), Bare (on the bathing beaches), The Hookworm, Wild (and tough) Turkeys, Tincan Tourists and Razorback Hogs.
Florida is the only State where real estate is sold strictly on the level. There isn't a hill in the State.
Florida prides herself on her educational system. Many of her native sons and daughters speak English as well as Floridian.
Belleaire "Heights" is eighteen feet above sea level.
St. Augustine claimes to be the oldest city in the United States.
Santa Fe says St. Augustine is a liar.
Every town in Florida, except Orlando, has a Yacht Club- BUT, "there's many a man wears a Yachting Cap, who never owned a yacht."
St. Petersburg was named for St. Peter. St. Peter is dead.
St. Petersburg is celebrated for its Green Benches, Kilties Band, dried cranberry necklaces, horse-shoe pitchers, checker champions, a mayor who would not accept a salary, the best climate and the worst park system in the U. S. A., and A REAL ESTATE AGENT.
The fish bite so voraciously in Florida waters that you have to mark your bait "POISON" to keep the fish from climbing in the boat after it.
During June, July, August, and September, Florida is inhabited by "Crackers," Carpenters, Care-Takers, and "Can't Get Out-ers."
By the middle of October, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Iowa, and Ohio start moving to Florida.
For:
'Tis a Land of Golden Sunshine,
Where softest breezes blow,
Sweet with a thousand perfumes
O'er the Gulf of Mexico
A land of Rest and Happiness,
On the shores of Southern Seas,
Where you close your eyes to the lullabys
Of the wind through the Florida trees.
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