Some days I love my job. Yesterday was one of those days. Now, here's where I could write about the new sports organization for kids in Gulfport and how watching the coaches with the kids made me feel some scrap of hope for a lost demographic. I could describe the great photo I took of a puppy licking a cherub-like toddler's face. I could tell you about the kid dressed as Batman in the fishing derby. Yeah, that's so not how this blog entry is going to go down. No, I'm going to talk about the folks who staged a protest on Gulfport beach to protest the city's beach tobacco ban. Let me assure you that I totally respect people's right to gather and protest, but I do have some serious doubts that outlawing smoking on a public beach violates any civil liberties. How is smoking on a beach more a civil liberty...
READ MORE...Monthly Archives: April 2012
What’s This, Now?
What's this, now? In the 1930s the Works Progress Administration paid writers to travel and create driving tours of each state. The Federal Writers Project hired unemployed writers. To narrow the field almost imperceptibly, the program only considered at writers who were poor and had no prospects. Florida chose Zora Neale Hurston and Stetson Kennedy. They crisscrossed the state separately – Jim Crow would not allow black Zora to travel with white Stetson – carving the routes they would immortalize in the Guide to the Southernmost State. Over seventy years later, I decided I wanted to go, too. I broke out my shiny red Florida Gazeteer and started trying to recreate the twenty-two tours, studying towns and researching old route numbers. In many cases, I could only recreate the Depression-era routes by jumping from city to city, sort of a geographic connect-the-dots. Roads are living things, and for one to assume that she can look...
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What’s this, now?
In the 1930s the Works Progress Administration paid writers to travel and create driving tours of each state. The Federal Writers Project hired unemployed writers. To narrow the field almost imperceptibly, the program only considered at writers who were poor and had no prospects.
Florida chose Zora Neale Hurston and Stetson Kennedy.
They crisscrossed the state separately – Jim Crow would not allow black Zora to travel with white Stetson – carving the routes they would immortalize in the Guide to the Southernmost State.
Over seventy years later, I decided I wanted to go, too. I broke out my shiny red Florida Gazeteer and started trying to recreate the twenty-two tours, studying towns and researching old route numbers. In many cases, I could only recreate the Depression-era routes by jumping from city to city, sort of a geographic connect-the-dots.
Roads are living things,... READ MORE...