The Camp Murphy Message: The weekly newspaper of the World War II Southern Signal Corps camp

Camp Murphy in southern Martin County was established in 1942 as the home of the Southern Signal Corps School for radar operation instruction during the early years of World War II.

We’ve been fortunate enough to receive a dozen copies of the camp’s weekly newspaper from a Wisconsin reader whose father was stationed at Camp Murphy.

The newspapers provide a wonderful snapshot of life at the camp during the last three months of 1943. We’ve scanned them so you can read every page online here.

Camp Murphy Message, October 1, 1943

Camp Murphy Message, October 8, 1943

Camp Murphy Message, October 15, 1943

Camp Murphy Message, October 22, 1943

Camp Murphy Message, October 29, 1943

Camp Murphy Message, November 5, 1943

Camp Murphy Message, November 12, 1943

Camp Murphy Message, November 26, 1943

Camp Murphy Message, December 3, 1943

Camp Murphy Message, December 10, 1943

Camp Murphy Message, December 17, 1943

Camp Murphy Message, December 24, 1943

Palm Beach County toponymy*: How local places got their names

Browse our interactive map to learn about the people and stories behind the names of Palm Beach County cities, parks, roads, schools, and other places.

View Palm Beach County Place Names in a larger map

Click on the place markers to see more information about a specific place.
Blue markers are for cities and towns.
Yellow markers are streets and roads, and green markers are bridges.
Green building icons are schools.
The green picnic table and tree icons are for parks, and the blue waves are for lakes.

Click and drag the map to see other areas, and use zoom controls at the upper left corner of the map to zoom in or out.

Update note: All the PBC cities are on the map, and dozens of parks, roads, schools and other places. More to come.

* Toponymy is the study of the origins and meanings of place names. The word ‘toponymy’ is from the Greek words tópos (place) and ónoma (name). If you’re a toponymist who has something to add to our map, please let us know in the comments below.

Palm Beach County area football players who made it to the NFL

On Thanksgiving eve in 1960, when this cartoon ran in The Palm Beach Post, the “spotlight of tradition” shone on the undefeated Seacrest and Lake Worth high school football teams vying for the Suncoast Conference championship, “old-timer Palm Beach facing newcomer Forest Hill” for the West Palm Beach championship, and Pahokee meeting Belle Glade in “another one of those traditional games in which anything can happen.”

High school football is still king in Palm Beach County, and with the 2010 season beginning, we’re bringing back our list of local football players who made the pros. For the definitive roster of every local player currently playing at the next level — college or pro — check out this list on The High School Buzz blog at The Palm Beach Post’s PBGametime.

This list is a work in progress, and we welcome your input in expanding it. Please use the form or comments below to let us know about other local football players who have made the big time. We appreciate your contributions!

The list is sorted by school, then by player’s last name.

Sources: Palm Beach Post archives, Pro-Football-Reference.com. Last updated October 4, 2010.

A mastodon named Sue: Florida’s fossil discovery of the century

Early 1970s photo of the fossilized mastodon skeleton found in 1969. Photo courtesy of South Florida Science Museum.

In 1969, a construction worker named Coot dug up some “brown stones” while digging a canal. Those stones were bones — part of what many consider Florida’s fossil discovery of the century. Today, you can visit some of those bones at the South Florida Science Museum.

What is Suzie the mastodon?

She’s the only complete mastodon skeleton standing in Florida, on display at the South Florida Science Museum in West Palm Beach. Her bones were discovered in the spring of 1969, not far from the museum.

She was a juvenile mastodon, a type of prehistoric elephant that roamed Florida and much of North America during Earth’s most recent Ice Age. Mastodons and their northern cousins, woolly mammoths, went extinct about 10,000 years ago — far more recently than the dinosaurs that died about 65 million years ago.

How was she discovered?

A dragline operator, Coot Vernor, turned up some stones while digging a drainage canal south of Okeechobee Boulevard. A few days later, young Charlie Wilkins, a 13-year-old who lived on a farm nearby, found more “brown stones” and took them home. Charlie’s parents realized they were ancient bones.

Vernor turned up another pocket of well-preserved bones, and the owner of his company called Dr.Jess Moody, president of the newly organized Palm Beach Atlantic College, to ask whether they would be interested in “a bunch of old bones.”

Under the supervision of Howard Converse Jr., several local volunteer groups, including the Gem & Mineral Society of Palm Beach County, excavated this ancient riverbed site. As it turned out, that second pocket of bones was actually the rib cage and skull of an imperial mammoth. Also uncovered were the skeletons of bison, horses and land tortoises — all of which roamed the grassy savannas of Ice-Age Florida some 20,000 years ago.

Want to see Suzie? For admission and directions to the South Florida Science Museum in West Palm Beach, go to sfsm.org or call (561) 832-1988.

A version of this story ran on page 1D of The Palm Beach Post on Monday, November 16, 2009.

Director Says No Ghosts At Whitehall

Today’s Halloween. But don’t ask John Blades, executive director of the Flagler Museum, about Henry Flagler’s ghost.

The pioneer died in 1913, his wife Mary in 1917.

But in 1974, John Roth, a night watchman at Whitehall, Flagler’s former mansion, said he saw the man “just as plain as daylight,” in a hallway.

“He was just standing there, wearing a dark suit and tie,” Roth said. “I had a good look and then he vanished.”

Silver settings reportedly moved from a top shelf to a bottom one inside a locked cabinet.

A ceiling lamp and the top to an urn crashed to the floor and plates inexplicably broke.

And another watchman, since retired, said he saw Mary Lily many times on an upstairs porch.

Roth later allowed as how he’d seen Flagler only once, when he awoke from a
nap about 3:30 a.m.

Finally, retired director Grant Bedford, blaming the sightings on overactive imaginations, said he’d give $1,000 to anyone who could show him a ghost.

“I can’t make him appear any time I feel like it,” Roth argued.

Bedford said if Flagler’s spirit had made an appearance, it would not have been in the 1970s, when the estate had become a museum, but in the 1960s, when his former mansion was a hotel and his belongings were stuffed away in attics.

“It would have infuriated him,” Bedford said.

John Blades now says emphatically, “There are no ghosts, there never have been ghosts, and there never will be ghosts at Whitehall.”