For Sale —American Paradise (41 page)

Florida boosters, including Edwin Menninger, were looking for ways to reassure themselves about their stumbling economy. In late September 1927, Menninger met briefly with Solomon Davies Warfield in New York, and on October 3 he had a longer meeting with Warfield in Baltimore. Warfield told Menninger he'd try to stop by Stuart during a trip to Florida he'd planned for mid-
October.

But Warfield had to cancel his trip. He was feeling a lot of discomfort because of a double hernia, and on October 12 he was admitted to Union Hospital in Baltimore for surgery.

On October 21, while Warfield was still in the hospital, Menninger's
South Florida Developer
reported that the Seaboard Air Line Railroad's plans were going to be a major boost to Martin County and Florida. Warfield's railroad had moved its Florida headquarters from West Palm Beach to Indiantown. The company also transferred its maintenance and repair crews from Wildwood to Indiantown.

The
Developer
said that Eugene Kifer, vice president of the Land Company of Florida and a land agent for Seaboard, told an audience in nearby West Palm
Beach that Stuart and other cities would “reap great benefits from the development of Indiantown and its farm lands.”

Kifer said that Seaboard had already spent about $1.9 million—more than $25 million in twenty-first-century dollars—on its plans for Indiantown, and they were just getting started. Seaboard's work in and around Indiantown already had prompted construction of housing, a school, and a hotel, the
Developer
said.

Seaboard also sent agents to large cities in the Northeast and Midwest to speak to audiences about the company's plans for Florida, and those lectures had prompted hundreds of people to move to Indiantown, Kifer said. The company would spend $500,000—about $6.6 million today—advertising its efforts in a national advertising campaign, he said.

“Mr. Kifer urged the abandonment of any doubt as to the successful future of the state,” the
Developer
said.

Only a week after the
Developer
's confident prediction of prosperity in Martin County and Florida, however, came stunning news. Solomon Davies Warfield was dead.

Warfield's doctor told the
New York Times
that Warfield's recovery from hernia surgery had been “uneventful,” and that around 6:30 p.m. on October 24, he'd been sitting up in bed, chatting with a nurse and a vice president of Seaboard.

Suddenly, Warfield lost consciousness. Physicians rushed to his bedside, but there was nothing they could do. A blood clot had formed in Warfield's heart, and he was dead.

Edwin Menninger looked for optimism in the face of what he realized could be a disaster for Martin County.

“Stuart as a community will feel this blow, coming as it does when it was known to be Mr. Warfield's policy to extend the Seaboard into this city,” Menninger wrote on the
South Florida Developer
's editorial page on October 28. “But doubtless the policies already outlined will be carried out and other men will be raised up to continue the great work of this mastermind in railroad building.”

The Seaboard Air Line Railroad had sunk too much money into its plans for Florida and Martin County to walk away after Warfield's death, Menninger wrote.

CHAPTER TEN

S
UNSETS ARE ROUTINELY SPECTACULAR IN THE
E
VERGLADES
.

As the sun descends, its slanting rays splash colors across the western horizon that span the visible spectrum, from reds and yellows and oranges and pinks nearest the horizon to greens and shades of blue higher in the sky. The departing sun's rays also touch the clouds, lighting their undersides with flaming reds.

There's usually an expanse of water somewhere that reflects the sky, so that heaven and Earth become, for a few minutes, a riot of color.

Maybe the Everglades sunset lifted the spirits of the Boston Braves on March 27, 1928. The Braves had absorbed an 11–2 drubbing from the Philadelphia Athletics in a spring-training exhibition game in Fort Myers. After the game, the Braves players boarded a bus for a historic trip to Miami, where they would play an exhibition game the following day against the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Their bus would be one of the first vehicles to make the trip over the Tamiami Trail through the Everglades from Florida's Gulf Coast to its Atlantic coast. The general public wouldn't be able to use the Trail until late April, so the Braves' management had to get special permission.

Although the Tamiami Trail supposedly was going to open in less than a month, it was far from completed. In some places, large boulders still lay on the road. Potholes and rough spots were a problem. Still, the Braves arrived in Miami late that night and squared off against the Dodgers at three p.m. the following day at Miami's Tatum Field.

The Boston-Brooklyn matchup was only an exhibition game, but Miami's boosters were confident that a large crowd at the ballpark might prompt the Braves and the Dodgers to move their spring-
training camp from Florida's west coast to Miami or a nearby city on the peninsula's east coast.

“The attendance at the exhibition games is a big item toward defraying the expenses, and the ball club owners realize that in the well-populated east coast the crowds will be better, because of the fact that this coast is a drawing card for the sporting element of the nation,” the
Miami Daily News
said on the day of the
game. “It is here that the vacationists flock, and it is here that the big leaguers receive the proper attention from the sporting element.”

Brooklyn won the game, 9–0, but intermittent rain held down attendance.

Despite the untimely death of Solomon Davies Warfield a few months earlier, Edwin Menninger was still bullish on Florida's future. Menninger and many other Florida boosters were convinced that the good times would return when the Tamiami Trail opened.

“If Adam and Eve could have seen Florida, they might not have mourned the loss of Eden,” Menninger wrote in the January 13, 1928, edition of the
South Florida Developer
.

Menninger said he'd been registering at a hotel in Philadelphia recently when a woman standing near him overheard that he was from Florida. “Oh, I am so sorry for you folks down there in Florida,” the woman said to him. “You are having such a hard time. People are selling their automobiles to get money to come back north.”

Menninger told the woman he had no idea what she was talking about.

“Florida people are not so ‘hard up' as many northern people seem to think they are,” he wrote in the
Developer
. “There has been a depression, to be sure, but not anything like the extent that is imagined over the country.”

Menninger said Florida residents probably lived better than residents of any other state. “This is a wonderfully good country for moneymaking—more so than outsiders yet realize—and the majority of the people here are accustomed to good incomes,” he wrote. “What would be called hard times here would be called good times in some other sections of the country.”

And better times were coming for Stuart, Martin County, and Florida. Menninger also reported that the Brown-Cummer Company, a bond house in Wichita, Kansas, had agreed to buy $1 million worth of bonds from the St. Lucie Inlet Commission to pay for deepening the channel of the St. Lucie Inlet. Deepening the channel to allow oceangoing ships would be a major step in Stuart's ambitions to surpass Miami and Savannah as a deepwater port. The contract for the work was awarded to United Dredging Company of New York City in January 1928. Plans called for the channel to be two hundred feet wide and twenty feet deep.

But bad news came on the heels of the announcement about the dredging work. The great industrial city in western Martin County would not happen. The Seaboard Air Line Railroad closed its offices and railroad shops in Indiantown on February 3 and moved its operations to Tampa.

Still, the 1927–28 tourist season was getting off to a roaring start. The
Stuart Daily News
reported on January 5, 1928, that about ninety thousand visitors had entered Florida since November, and two months later Edwin Menninger reported in the
South Florida Developer
that a tourist camp in Stuart was doing
a booming business. “There are more tourists in Stuart this winter than ever
before,” he noted.

Shrewd observers outside Florida also thought they perceived a return to better times.

In January 1928, humorist Will Rogers said he'd been avoiding jokes at Florida's expense for more than two years because of the state's difficulties.

“But I have just seen the state and noticed conditions down here now, and my sympathy is getting back to the old envy again,” he wrote in his nationally syndicated column. “With this climate Florida needs the sympathy of no one, and the jokes of no one can hurt it.”

Those improving conditions had drawn a shady but charismatic winter visitor to Miami, and he was becoming pals with the son of a former mayor of Miami. Their friendship would cause quite a stir in the city during the 1927–28 season.

Parker Henderson, who was mayor of Miami in 1917, probably had high hopes for his teenage son's future when he enrolled young Parker Jr. at Georgia Military Academy. The school advertised itself as “The South's Most Splendidly Equipped Prep School” where “careful, individual attention is given to each student.”

The school, in the Blue Ridge foothills just outside Atlanta, boasted that it could prepare young men for careers in business, engineering, and other professions. And it offered “an ideal social and moral atmosphere” to shape the character of its students.

But a few years after Parker Henderson Jr. finished his studies, there were indications that maybe he hadn't fully absorbed the benefits of the academy's salubrious environment.

In August 1927, shortly after his father's death, the junior Henderson, at the age of twenty-four, signed a five-year lease to operate the Ponce de Leon Hotel in downtown Miami.

Henderson told the
Miami Daily News
that the hotel would open under his management in time for the 1927–28 tourist season, and that he intended to run a “first-
class commercial house.”

Henderson pledged “not to rob the public.” But he said nothing about not deceiving them.

Not long after Henderson took over management of the Ponce de Leon, a businessman who'd apparently done very well selling secondhand furniture came to him to negotiate a deal for renting a suite of rooms on the top floor of the hotel. Henderson was fascinated by the swarthy, affable tenant who loved wearing colorful suits and was known to hand out $100 bills like they were after-dinner mints.

When he first arrived in Miami, the so-called furniture dealer had said his name was Al Brown, but by January 1928 he'd decided to drop the alias. His
name was Al Capone, known in some circles as “Scarface,” and his business was, as he put it, providing the public with what it wanted.

What the public wanted—what they still wanted after eight years of Prohibition—was booze, and lots of it. Capone provided it for them, and he was rewarded handsomely. In 1928 he was making money like he had a license to print it.