Florida’s tacky, amazing tourist past rediscovered in Hollis book

Florida’s tacky, amazing tourist past rediscovered in Hollis book

By MIKE WALKER

Florida's Miracle Strip: From Redneck Riviera to Emerald Coast

by Tim Hollis
University Press of Mississippi, 2004
$25.00, paperback

The Emerald Coast-the northwest Gulf Coast of panhandle Florida-is nowadays home to some very impressive homes, hotels, and entire concept towns such as Seaside. While more rural, more sparse, than its southwestern and Atlantic Floridian counterparts, there are the senses of typical beach-oriented money and high land values in this jewel of a coast nonetheless. However, such was not always the case: ever since early Spanish explorers met folly after hardship in this neck of the woods from everything one could imagine-from various diseases to dense swamps and endless heat and rain-the coastal panhandle has remained one of the less-known parts of Florida. To some who knew this region as recently as the 1970s, such as the historian Gloria Jahoda, the fact that a viable beach-based tourism economy has been established here might come as something of a surprise, yet it was not the high-end condos and planned communities that pioneered tourism in this area but working-class tourist destinations of the 1950s and 1960s.

Tim Hollis, a cultural historian who has written about the roadside attractions of the early Interstate age and other aspects of popular culture unique to America in the Cold War era, takes on the task of exploring the Emerald Coast and its early days as an epicenter of tacky though amazing tourist traps with names like Snake-a-Torium, Castle Dracula, and Tombstone Territory. The former, of course, was the type of reptile zoo only Florida could offer while the Castle was home to an odd cast of creatures from various horror movies and the Tombstone Territory was an obvious effort to cash in on the allure that Hollywood Westerns held for America during the 1950s and 1960s. As Hollis' own parents vacationed in this part of Florida during his childhood, the author has the advantage of a swell collection of old postcards, ads, and photos plus his own personal memories of attractions and hotels long gone.

To assume Hollis' book however to be simply an odd catalog of camp and nostalgia would be quite incorrect: Hollis digs deep into how such quirky attractions came to be and why they held enough allure to draw scores of vacationing Americans to them long before the fantasy worlds of Walt Disney were even on the Florida map. Hollis has one of the most keen and nuanced manners of writing with wit and humor while still bringing in all the greater concepts and more difficult aspects of a topic such as his; we see a lot of connections through his writing between television culture, family vacations, and the rise of the American middle-class without him beating these topics into his reader with a stick as "cultural" historians are sadly often prone to doing in such works. Instead of offering expansive and long-winded theories on the connections between seaside resorts, fantasy, and mass entertainment, Hollis only demonstrates via careful consideration of each property and theme he investigates how these odd and yes, tacky, vacation meccas were for their time a novel and exciting experience-and he communicates his exploration with an adroit sense of humor which is worth the price of admission in itself.

The amount of work Hollis took on in his research is itself impressive: interviews with many former owners and workers at the seaside attractions he addresses plus with visitors to the same, a real treasure trove of old postcards and photos, and a sense of bringing both humor and a serious academic approach to his topic make "Florida's Miracle Strip" far more than a curiousity of a coffee-table book.

The physical architecture of the types of attractions Hollis concerns himself with is also of note: when years ago the architects Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour, and Denise Scott Brown wrote their now-seminal book "Learning from Las Vegas" about how tourist culture and other aspects of "selling" an experience are built nail-and-timber into the design of a lot of contemporary American architecture, they opened up the first serious study of the tourist industry's impact on the cultural landscape. One of my professors at the Savannah College of Art and Design in my studies in architectural history there, Dr. Daves Rossell, often delighted in reminding his students of the richness of popular culture in architectural form and such is very clear in the design of these tourist attractions: all of them are escapes from the real and journeys into some moment of fantasy. New, though often "low-tech," building technologies allowed for the construction of cheap though somewhat realistic models of things as varied as dinosaurs to ghost towns to fairytale enchanted woods. While all this may seem trite now, the marvels of a more innocent time still have much to say about those who constructed them and those who visited them.

This book should interest anyone who lives in the region it covers plus those with a broader interest in Floridian history, economics, and/or tourism. However, it is also a book (if you had not guessed this by now!) that is just plain fun. Still, "Florida's Miracle Strip" brought me to some serious consideration of how tourism has evolved in our state and where it may go in the future: Disney and every major attraction in the Orlando area after it has taken upon some of the same core concepts that campy attractions of yesterday along the lines of "Tombstone Territory" with its Wild West theme first represented. Whatever else we look for in Disney or Universal or really any theme park, we seek a fantasy and a thrill.

The progress of television, then cable, then video games, then the Internet and Myspace and all else has brought us to a cultural literacy far beyond being impressed with a train-ride through a plywood ghost town, but the premise more or less really remains the same whether we're at Castle Dracula or Universal's newest movie-based attraction. The fulcrum that most of Florida's non-beach or eco-tourism attractions rest upon is their ability to create and convey consummate fantasy worlds: even Spaceport USA-despite NASA being a very real agency-rather functions in this mode. The ability to see the early era of such tourism and how it was tied to the beach and the whole "sun 'n' fun" concept of Florida really helps put everything else in order and reminds me, once more, that Florida is Tourism USA for the rest of the country and now, the world.

MIKE WALKER is a Gainesville, Florida writer and journalist. He covers ecology, science, natural history, and travel for this and other regional and national publications. He may be reached via email at: cloudrace@prontomail