‘We went from being tolerated to being accepted to being respected.’

When Jews throughout South Florida gather this evening to mark the start of Rosh Hashana – the Jewish New Year – it will likely evoke memories of celebrations of years past; of family gatherings, perhaps, in the Northeastern cities many previously called home.

But for West Palm Beach retirees Arthur and Nola Nagler, those memories are rooted in an altogether different place, one in which the soil is so deep, dark and rich that it’s called “black gold” and the heart of the area is a lake so large that it’s more like an ocean unto itself.

In other words, they are Jews of the Glades.

“We went from being tolerated to being accepted to being respected,” says Nagler, former president of Temple Beth Sholom in Belle Glade, a synagogue that in its 44-year run – 1956 to 2000 – served as the focal point for a small, tightly knit community of Jewish families.

Some were connected to farming – specifically, as market-savvy middlemen, trained in the produce business in the northeast, who saw that the vegetables from the Glades made their way to the rest of the United States.

Others ran stores and businesses – a dry-goods shop, a dress emporium, an accounting firm – businesses typically associated with Jewish merchants and professionals.

And still others made their mark in different ways: The Gold and Dobrow families built and ran the movie theaters, including the still-surviving Prince Theatre in downtown Pahokee. Iz Nachman served as the Glades correspondent for the now-defunct Palm Beach Evening Times.

All this fits into the pattern of Jewish life in small Southern towns, says Mark I. Greenberg, a scholar who co-edited Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History (Brandeis University Press, 2006). “You don’t always find Jews where you expect to find them. But they go where they can fill an economic need,” he says.

This migration had little to do with the much larger historical movement of Northeastern Jews coming to the South Florida coastline (think Miami Beach in its early heyday). That was about fun in the sun. The Jews of the Glades – the Lake Okeechobee region an hour’s drive from either coast but in a much different socioeconomic zone – came to earn a living.

Matzos and mitzvahs

Jewish merchants started spreading beyond big cities to find work more than 150 years ago, creating ethnic enclaves in places ranging from the Florida Panhandle to Charleston, S.C. More than 100 cities in 12 Southern states had Jewish mayors at one time or another, notes the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life in Jackson, Miss.

The Glades may have been somewhat late to the trend – most Jewish merchant-class communities date from before World War II – but they are part of it nonetheless.

At its peak, the Glades Jewish community numbered about 30 to 40 families – enough to sustain a synagogue that had a part-time rabbi, a religious school program, and even the occasional bar or bat mitzvah.

(The temple also attracted Jewish residents from neighboring towns, such as Clewiston, for its High Holy Day services.)

Today, the community is all but gone. By most accounts, fewer than 10 Jewish residents remain scattered throughout the Glades.

The temple is gone, too. Well, the building still stands – it was sold to a Hispanic Christian congregation. But all that remains in the truest sense are the memories.

Former Beth Sholom members recall charity balls the temple hosted – one year, in a Palm Beach hotel! – that became the ultimate Glades social events.

And they recall the bar and bat mitzvahs: The non-Jewish invitees often needed permission from their churches to attend.

And they recall explaining the fine art of making traditional Jewish dishes to folks who probably thought a matzo ball came out of a Jewish child’s toy chest.

A Southern way of life

But they also recall, well, just a way of life, rural and Southern-tinged, in which religion played its part but no more so than anything else.

Arthur Nagler, who came from New York as a produce broker, gets a kick out of telling how he once joined in an evening of raccoon hunting.

And Edward Arons, an attorney-turned-dry-goods merchant who still calls Pahokee home, talks of his spouse’s favorite pastime. “She used to go fishing every day,” he says.

Who led the synagogue services? The temple found Jack Stateman, a Jewish mail carrier in West Palm Beach who was trained as a cantor, and tapped him to come out and serve as lay rabbi.

Stateman did, for the synagogue’s entire 44-year run. With his wife, Shirley, he also ran the Sunday religious school.

All in a building not much bigger than your standard suburban home.

“I would teach in the back of the synagogue, somebody would teach in front, and somebody would teach in the kitchen,” says Shirley Stateman, who now lives with her husband in Pembroke Pines.

Worshiping in dungarees

And while services weren’t much different from what you’d find in any synagogue – the temple considered itself Conservative, though it welcomed all Jews – the attire wasn’t always especially formal.

“On Friday nights, a couple of the (Jewish) farmers would come in with their boots and dungarees and cowboy shirts. They didn’t have time to go home and change,” Shirley Stateman recalls.

Jewish farmers? Many of the Jewish produce brokers and other merchants saw it as a logical leap. It was the local industry, after all.

And Jewish life in the Glades was closely tied to the produce business.

Arthur Nagler’s story is typical: He started out as a produce broker in New York but was constantly shuttling back and forth to the Glades for business.

In the late ’50s, a group of Glades farmers suggested he settle in the area and work directly for them as part of a cooperative they were forming.

It seemed a big stretch for a Jewish couple more accustomed to treading concrete streets than dirt roads. Nagler had once promised his wife that “this is one place you’ll never to have to live.” But when the couple did set up house, they found a town willing to assist with everything, from finding a playpen – they eventually raised four girls in Belle Glade – to seeing to it that they were well-fed.

“In the first two weeks, we never ate home,” says Nagler.

But Nagler was something of a latecomer to the Glades. Other Jewish families had been in the area for several years, meeting in each other’s homes for religious services and social events.

Children needed religion

The decision to establish a synagogue came about when they started to raise children.

“It got to the point they needed more religion,” says Nagler.

The Jewish community’s philosophy was a simple one, the former temple president explains: They never denied their faith to anyone, but they never made a point of calling undue attention to it. For example, they would never think of protesting the staging of a Christmas show at a public school. If anything, they contributed, making costumes or baking cookies.

At the same time, they made their presence known in a civic sense: There was hardly an organization in the Glades, from garden clubs to hospital boards, that didn’t have a Jewish member, if not a Jewish leader.

For a while, Belle Glade even had a Jewish mayor, Harold Rabin. (“He was a macher,” says Edward Arons, using the Yiddish term for “big shot.”) And Nagler was president of the local chamber of commerce.

The result, says Nagler, was a region that saw Jews in a different light, judging them by their actions, not by any preconceived notions of their faith and culture.

Prejudice became largely a non-issue, even with the sizable Palestinian community that also established itself, oddly enough, in Belle Glade.

Not that anti-Semitic comments weren’t occasionally overheard. And on at least one occasion, the temple was vandalized, though the synagogue leadership dismissed it as more a youthful prank than a hate incident.

Children left Glades

But Joel Kaufman, a Washington, D.C., attorney who was brought up in a Jewish farming family in Belle Glade, also recalls the time his father pointed out to him the head of the local Ku Klux Klan chapter.

The town was very much divided along color lines, but the message was clear: Jews weren’t automatically guaranteed a place at the table, either. “I wouldn’t paint the totally idyllic picture,” says Kaufman.

But it wasn’t prejudice that prompted the overall collapse of the Jewish community. Rather, it was the withering of the town’s overall middle-class base, a development attributed to the “white flight” that ensued after the integration of the public schools, and the end of small, family-run farms.

Today, the downtowns that Jewish merchants helped build in Belle Glade and Pahokee are shadows of their former selves. Which meant that even if the Jewish children wanted to take over their family businesses, there was nothing left to take over.

As it is, most of these children went on to college and sought careers in law, medicine or other of the professions that have defined Jewish life in the post-merchant class era.

Mark I. Greenberg paraphrases a line by Southern Jewish writer Eli Evans:

“The history of the Jewish South is the history of fathers who built businesses for sons who didn’t want them.”

Down to three families

By the late ’90s, it was obvious that Temple Beth Sholom could no longer survive. The congregation was down to three families.

In 2000, Arthur Nagler, who had already moved with his wife to West Palm Beach, oversaw the selling of the temple.

The synagogue was grateful that the building would retain its place in the community as a house of worship.

But Temple Beth Sholom does live on in a sense: Its Torah remains in the hands of Jack Stateman, who, at 86, still uses it in his lay rabbi role, whether he’s conducting a service at a nursing home or tutoring a bar mitzvah candidate.

Stateman also saw to it that the temple’s prayer books and other religious artifacts were distributed to needy congregations.

As for the temple’s memorial plaque, which honors departed congregants, it has found a home at Temple Beth El in West Palm Beach, where the few remaining members of Temple Beth Sholom now pray.

Nagler felt so welcomed by the West Palm Beach synagogue that he serves on its board. (But he and his wife keep their connections to the Glades: She makes a point of traveling back there weekly for art classes and a salon appointment.)

‘Extremely close temple’

Washington attorney Joel Kaufman looks back knowing he was a minority in the rural towns that made up the Glades.

But, he says, the rich life of the synagogue – “We were an extremely close temple community” – more than compensated.

He ended up marrying a Jewish woman who grew up in Portland, Maine. He ribbed her about that when they met.

And he still does.

“What kind of Jews are there from Portland?”

Published September 12, 2007
By CHARLES PASSY, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
The Palm Beach Post, Accent Section, Page 1E

Palm Beach County: More Jewish than New York

When Bill Gralnick arrived in Miami in the early ’80s, he considered Palm Beach County a no-man’s land for Jews.

“You couldn’t even get a decent bagel in this county,” Gralnick says.

Today, Gralnick, the Southeast regional director of the American Jewish Committee, sees a vastly different landscape. He points to the “multiple synagogues” in such cities as Boynton Beach and Boca Raton, where he established his main office in 1990. To a range of Jewish organizations that provide “cradle-to-grave services.” And to nearly a half-dozen Jewish schools in Boca and West Palm Beach.

But the most startling evidence of Palm Beach County’s transformation into one of the world’s leading centers of Jewish life will come next month, when the county’s two Jewish federations – one based in Boca, the other in West Palm – reveal the results of a population study.

It’s expected to show that there are 254,300 Jews in the county, representing more than 20 percent of the overall population of about 1.2 million.

That means one out of every five local residents is Jewish.

And that means Palm Beach County tops every metropolitan area in the country by a wide margin. Even the closest rival, metropolitan New York City, has a Jewish population that represents only 9.7 percent of the overall population.

“To find a more densely populated Jewish community, you’d have to go to Israel,” says Richard Jacobs, vice president of community planning for the Boca-based Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach County.

The figures, of course, can be read in other ways. In terms of the sheer number of Jewish residents, Palm Beach County still trails well behind New York (with 2 million Jews) and Los Angeles (668,000).

But the population density speaks to the fact that the county has developed a distinctly Jewish character – from food to philanthropy. And it’s a trend that has wide-ranging implications for Jews and non-Jews alike.

For Jews, it means more opportunities than ever before to express their faith or partake of their culture – the latter being just as important since Judaism is defined as both an ethnicity and a religion.

Temples, Jewish life teeming

In Palm Beach County, there are now 50 synagogues, with new ones being established and older ones expanding each year. Boca Raton, considered the county’s Jewish hub, has 16 temples, representing all the major branches of the faith – Orthodox, Conservative and Reform.

And the boom extends to northern Palm Beach County. A telling example: When Temple Beth David, a Conservative synagogue in Palm Beach Gardens, underwent a change in rabbis this past year, several members decided to form a new congregation, Shir Hadash, with the departing rabbi, sensing there was enough demand for both groups.

There’s also the growing presence of Chabad, an Orthodox movement that welcomes Jews at various centers throughout the county. In Wellington alone, the Chabad group has grown from three families to more than 100 in five years.

Indeed, some temples are finding they can barely meet the needs of the thriving Jewish communities they serve. In Boynton Beach, Temple Torah, a Conservative congregation, just started a religious school that attracted more than 100 students in no time.

As for enrollment at the center’s already established preschool? “We have 37 on the waiting list,” Rabbi Geoffrey Botnick says.

But Palm Beach County’s surging Jewish presence reveals itself in ways beyond synagogue life.

Jewish day schools also are experiencing record attendance. Enrollment at suburban West Palm Beach’s Arthur I. Meyer Jewish Academy, for example, jumped to an all-time high of 406 this year. And at Florida Atlantic University’s Boca campus, a once-fledgling Judaic studies program has become a teeming center of Jewish learning, offering undergraduate degrees in the field. The university also has a library of more than 80,000 books.

Other telling signs? Consider the ever-popular Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival, which typically draws 8,000 attendees (or just a few thousand fewer than the more heavily hyped Palm Beach International Film Festival). Or the increased attention paid locally each year to Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day). Or the numerous social groups for Jewish youth.

And though the Palm Beach County School District does not officially recognize religious holidays, it has a long-standing policy of closing on important dates on the Jewish calendar – Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Compare that to other school districts in Florida, from Escambia County in the Panhandle to Indian River County on the Treasure Coast, that remain open on those days. Or even to school districts in heavily Jewish cities nationwide – Baltimore, Chicago – that similarly ignore the Jewish holidays.

And not only is it no longer difficult to find a bagel in Palm Beach County, it’s also increasingly easier to find kosher foods. There are more than a dozen restaurants, bakeries and markets in the county that specialize in kosher offerings. In Boca, the gourmet-oriented Eilat Cafe, which even serves kosher sushi, is so busy that waits for a table during season easily can extend beyond two hours.

Of course, non-Jews are just as likely to partake in a corned-beef sandwich or a bagel with a “schmear” these days.

But that’s only one way an expanded Jewish community has changed the face of the county, especially given Judaism’s traditionally strong emphasis on culture, philanthropy and liberal politics.

Decisive impact on society

Local arts leaders say that without a Jewish presence, the county’s cultural scene would be a shadow of its impressive self. At the fore of nearly every major cultural organization, from the Kravis Center to the Palm Beach Opera to the Boca Raton Museum of Art, is a Jewish base of customers and contributors.

“They are the lifeblood of all the arts, pure and simple,” says cultural philanthropist and former Palm Beach Opera chairman Bob Montgomery. (A non-Jew who spends most of his time in Jewish circles, Montgomery jokes that he’s “got two or three Gentile friends.”)

And in the political arena, there’s little question of the Jewish impact. Some of Palm Beach County’s most prominent elected officials are Jewish, including U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler (D-Delray Beach), County Commissioner Burt Aaronson, State Attorney Barry Krischer and West Palm Beach Mayor Lois Frankel. In Palm Beach Gardens, three of the five members of the city council – Jody Barnett, Eric Jablin and David Levy – are Jewish.

More often than not, these politicians bring with them that left-leaning Jewish sensibility. And though there are notable exceptions – Boca Raton Mayor Steve Abrams is a leading Jewish Republican – it’s obvious that the county’s liberalism and Jewish influence go hand in hand. Remember the images of Jewish retirees rallying for the Democrats during the 2000 presidential election?

It wasn’t always this way.

Palm Beach County’s Jewish history dates back to West Palm Beach’s pioneer days – Jewish merchants thrived on Clematis Street in 1900. Still, in 1923, when the county’s first synagogue, Temple Israel, was established, only 200 of West Palm Beach’s 10,000 residents were Jewish.

Across the Intracoastal, the island of Palm Beach became famous as a WASP bastion – and became famously cool to Jews.

“When I came down, you couldn’t go (to certain places) if your name was Cohen or anything that sounded Semitic,” says Sydelle Meyer, a major Palm Beach Jewish philanthropist – her husband is the one behind the Meyer Academy – who moved to the area 32 years ago.

Palm Beach’s Jewish families established their own social center, the Palm Beach Country Club, in 1954, after being denied entry to other country clubs.

The first major influx of Jews came in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when thousands of middle-income Jewish retirees from the Northeast began flocking to sunny Florida, encouraged by developers such as H. Irwin Levy, who founded Century Village in suburban West Palm Beach, still a largely Jewish enclave.

The next shift took place in the early ’80s, when the Miami area, South Florida’s oldest Jewish center, began to take on a decidedly more Latin and urban flavor. Jews moved north to Palm Beach County.

The county, in turn, welcomed them – with safely ensconced gated communities that, until the recent housing boom, were relatively affordable.

At some point, there was a mass of Jews large enough to send the message that many more were welcome. The Jewish population snowballed.

“Jews will go where they think there are other Jews,” says Andrea Greenbaum, an assistant professor of English at Miami’s Barry University who edited the recent book, Jews of South Florida.

County’s widespread appeal

Soon, Jewish professionals – doctors, lawyers, financial planners – moved south to serve the Jewish retirees. And younger Jews moved to the county to be close to their retired parents.

The result: The local Jewish population has gotten slightly less geriatric. In the West Palm-based federation’s service area (from Boynton to Tequesta), the median age has dropped from 70 to 68, according to the new study. (Such figures have not been officially released but were cited in a recent federation publication.)

Although Palm Beach County is becoming more and more Jewish, it is not necessarily becoming a place where Jews spend more time inside the temple.

If Jews can assert their heritage by going to a show at the Kravis featuring a Jewish comedian or by enjoying a bowl of matzo-ball soup at their local deli, they may not feel the need to join a synagogue, local Jewish leaders say. Add to that the challenges the religion has faced in recent decades from interfaith marriages.

That perhaps explains why the county’s affiliation rate – the percentage of Jews who belong to a local temple – is a paltry 18 percent.

“We have a lower rate than one would expect,” says Bill Bernstein, president of the Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach County.

Yet the frenetic growth of the Jewish population means the county is a place where newcomers, observant or not, can readily establish themselves. Rather than being deeply entrenched, the county’s Jewish community is very much about the here and now.

This appeal helped lure Jonathan Marriott, an Orthodox Jew from London, to Boca Raton.

Marriott, his wife and two children moved to Boca a year-and-a-half ago, and in that short time, he has landed on the board of his temple – the Boca Raton Synagogue – and his wife has become PTA president of the Jewish school their children attend.

“You try and do that somewhere else, it would take generations,” he says.

How Palm Beach County’s Jewish population has grown

Palm Beach County 1987 1995 1999 2004

Total population 789,533 962,802 1,042,196 1,242,270

Jewish population 72,000 116,000 166,300 254,300

Percent of population

that is Jewish 9.1% 12.0% 16.0% 20.5%

Jewish life in Palm Beach County

Number of Jewish residents: 254,300

Number of synagogues/congregations: 50

Number of kosher restaurants/bakeries/markets: 12-plus

Number of Jewish schools with partial or full K-12 programs: 5

Number of Jewish community centers: 3

Number of Jewish federations: 2

Sources: Jewish Community Studies, Jewish Federations of Palm Beach County and South Palm Beach County, 1987, 1995 and 1999; University of Florida Estimates of Population; The Florida Jewish Directory; various Web resources.

Published October 23, 2005
By CHARLES PASSY, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
The Palm Beach Post, page 1A

‘I believe these are evidence of the great flood.’

The teeth of time lie scattered on Mary Stanton’s patio table, ancient chompers and grinders that belonged to large, hungry, thirsty creatures who gave up the ghost thousands and thousands of years ago, when Palm Beach County was a near-jungle, red in tooth and claw and tusk.

They were found in 1969 at an ancient watering hole 2 miles west of the Florida’s Turnpike entrance just off Okeechobee Boulevard. Stanton, a Palm Beach Atlantic College history teacher, dug them up, along with the remains of “Sue,” a female mastodon that is today on display at the South Florida Science Museum at Dreher Park, the only female of the species visible in a Florida museum.

At the time, nobody was sure whether “Sue” had been a male or a female. Johnny Cash’s song, A Boy Named Sue, was popular. So Stanton decided to straddle the fence and name the creature “Sue.”

Today “Sue,” affectionately known as “Suzie,” is the prized, premier exhibit at the museum, the bony centerpiece of the whole collection. “The very first postcard we printed was of Sue,” says museum spokeswoman Elizabeth Dashiell. “The children just go wild over her. They think she’s a dinosaur.”

Her remains are definitely Pre-Golf, Pre-Sprawl, pre-Wal-Mart. They are around 9,000 years old, at the very least.

“The place where we found them is beyond recognition today,” Stanton says. “We were fortunate to have been able to work there when we did. There are all kinds of homes and shops on top of it now.

“We wanted to dig on an adjacent property, but the owner refused. He didn’t want his land tied up by what we might find there.”

Stanton, of Palm Beach Gardens, is 84 now, but age is relative: Her finds are more than 100 times as old as she is. Indeed, compared to her discoveries, she is the merest wisp of a girl, scarcely even born yet. She has perfectly white hair, very clear blue eyes and one of those faces that never really gets old because the cheekbone structure beneath it is so very fine.

She’s a Minnesotan, who earned two degrees, one in anthropology and another in Bible studies at the University of Dubuque and Wheaton College in Iowa. She was one of the first faculty members of Palm Beach Atlantic College.

But the bones are her greatest find. This is how they came to light:

A 13-year-old boy named Charles Wilkins lived on a farm about half a mile from where shell rock was being mined for road fill. Wilkins was joyriding on a little tractor up and down the spoil mounds thrown up by a canal excavation on the property when he spotted some “brown stones,” and took them home. Wilkins’ parents recognized the stones as ancient fossils.

Shortly afterward, a dragline operator named Coot Vernor cut through a rich pocket of bones at the shell rock pit and told his employer, P.C. Smith. Smith telephoned the Rev. Jess Moody, a prominent local Baptist preacher who had co-founded Palm Beach Atlantic College the previous year.

“P.C. was a character. He’s dead now,” Moody recalled. “He called me up and said, ‘I’ve found a bunch of funny bones. I’ve never seen anything like ‘em. You interested?’

“So I went out there. And I know nothing about bones, but I said, ‘This is weird.’ So I called up Mary Stanton and she said, ‘Eureka!’ and dug it up. Our students helped her,” Moody said.

Stanton was director of the college’s social sciences department. She secured permission from the Florida State Museum in Gainesville to direct the dig. Howard Converse, director of the preservation department of UF’s Museum of Florida History, helped identify the fossils.

Pumps were brought in to siphon off the ground water that, at a depth of about 17 feet below the surface, kept seeping into the excavation. Students from the college worked as volunteers. Neighborhood children were a constant pest, invading the site and carrying off trophies, including a huge mastodon femur 53 inches long. It has never resurfaced.

“It wasn’t a hole. It was a slough. I could tell whenever there was a high tide, because the water level would rise. I think it was an ancient watering hole,” Stanton says.

Bones date to Great Flood

She fingers some of the extraordinarily old bits of bone and shell on her table. These are the merest crumbs, the leftovers from a treasure-trove of old bones. The wavy, cracked, elegant architecture of the fossilized teeth feels cool beneath your fingers. Animals long gone chewed with these things, walked with these skeletons.

Then Stanton drops an intellectual bombshell.

“I believe these are evidence of the Great Flood,” she says. “I’m a scientific creationist.”

A devout Christian and a firm, literal believer in the Bible, Stanton thinks that her mastodon is proof that a great catastrophe of the kind mentioned in the Book of Genesis really happened.

She believes that because so many diverse species were found on the same spot at relatively the same level – bison, turtles, deer, tapirs, gigantic alligators, mastodons, fish, frogs and many others, the biblical flood must have occurred. She dates the bones to 4,000 B.C., the traditional date of the flood.

“It is as if they were all gathered there, waiting for something to happen,” Stanton says.

Paving over discoveries

Other scientists take a more cautious, skeptical view of the meaning of Stanton’s undeniably rich finds. Russ McCarty, a senior biologist at the University of Florida’s preparation laboratory for fossils, says the one indisputable conclusion to be drawn from the bony remains discovered at the Okeechobee Boulevard marl-pit would be simply that “animals lived here in times past.”

“After that you have to use carbon-14 dating to determine the age of the fossils,” McCarty says. “What we know is that mammoths and mastodons both lived together in Florida about 9,000 years ago. The mastodons were forest-dwellers, whose teeth were adapted to chewing the woody pulp of plants. The mammoths were grass-eaters, who tended to range out over the open spaces.”

Despite her unshakable faith, Stanton kept an open mind. She was careful to call in the University of Florida and enlist the aid of skilled paleontologists, particularly David Webb, now retired.

Thanks to Stanton and the other scientists she enlisted, the finds were well-documented. The results, including Sue the Mastodon, were carefully packed in plaster, preserved, stored in a vacant hangar at the local airport, then stripped of their wrappings, treated and polished with beeswax. The site was so rich there were plenty of leftovers. Stanton used them as teaching aids throughout county schools in many lectures. Age prevents her lecturing today, but she recalls those times fondly.

“Sue” is one of the showpieces of the Science Museum today.

“She’s one of the ‘wow’ factors of the museum,” says Jim Rollings, president and CEO of the institution. “She is the only female mastodon on display in any museum in the entire state of Florida.”

Mary Stanton is glad that her mastodon is still delighting visitors, but she wonders how much more lies beneath the earth here in Palm Beach County. She feels a certain regret, that the frenzy of development is paving over so much history.

“I do, I do regret it. Especially because of the way they treated us when we tried to get the next site. They just turned us down flat,” Stanton remembers. “Money on building is more important than this. Do builders think of history? Maybe if somebody would be cautious enough, before the builders get in . . .

Then, gesturing to the scattered old teeth on her table, she says: “This, this is beyond price.”

THE PALM BEACH POST
Published Monday, May 9, 2005
By MICHAEL BROWNING, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
ACCENT Section, page 1D

The last picture show: End of the Trail signals sad close of an era, leaves happy memories

The uniquely American monument to youth, freedom and the automobile – the drive-in movie theater – is soon to vanish from Palm Beach County.

The Trail Drive-In Theatre, 3438 Lake Worth Road, plans to forever silence its mammoth silver screen under the stars. Born in 1968, the Trail has offered two generations a moviegoing experience about much more than big-budget blockbusters and cushy stadium seating. At this theater, smoking is permitted. As is beer, leftover barbecue and unruly children – not to mention foggy-window lovin’ in the back seat.

The theater’s 26-year owner, the soggy-cigar chompin’ Bob McCain, is ready at age 67 to live up his retirement. And Palm Beach County is trying to buy the place to build a community center rather than turn it over to land speculators or, good heavens, a megaplex movie theater.

Either way, the end of an era will soon arrive, leaving only nine drive-ins in the Sunshine State, the nearest in Fort Lauderdale.

The county plans an $8 million campus with a senior center and a Head Start preschool. Parties have reached agreement on a price for the drive-in, but county officials expect it will take two months to work out a land swap for two adjacent parcels. County Commission Chairman Warren Newell hopes the project can kick-start redevelopment of the Lake Worth Road corridor.

“We preferred this instead of having some retail strip center,” said Newell, who remembers watching movies at the Trail while waiting for ambulance calls as a paramedic. “It will be sad to see the drive-in close.”

Heather Garcia believes she will, in fact, cry. The 33-year-old Palm Springs native has been going to the Trail since childhood. And on an overcast Wednesday night, she and her husband, Kevin, have braved the threat of rain to bring their two rambunctious little boys, ages 5 and 12, to the drive-in. (Total admission: $8.) They’ve backed up their station wagon, unfurled their lawn chairs, pulled out the pillows and blankets and cracked open the cans of soda. Around them, rows of car-hood couches and pickup-bed living rooms abound.

“It offers a lot of what you can’t get at a regular theater,” Garcia said. “It’s hometown.”

It seems something magical happens under the moonlight as rows of cars line up before the feature. What at an indoor theater would be a dark, unsocial but elbow-to-elbow experience with annoying loudmouths and fidgety people kicking the back of your chair suddenly becomes a pleasant community experience more on the order of a picnic.

“From an entertainment standpoint, the drive-in is America’s greatest icon,” said Don Sanders, author of two books about the venues and producer of a recent documentary, Drive-In Movie Memories. The film played at last month’s Palm Beach International Film Festival.

“At the drive-in, the movie was not important,” Sanders said. “It was the fact that you could go outdoors and engage in an activity that was fun in a relaxed atmosphere.”

The first drive-in theater opened June 6, 1933, in Camden, N.J. Watching movies outside wasn’t new; doing it in cars was.

After World War II, a car-crazed country fleeing to the suburbs fueled the drive-in’s explosive popularity, peaking in 1958 with more than 4,000 drive-ins nationwide. It was an era of big fantail cars, B movies, monster flicks and necking in the back seat.

The Trail came along in 1968 when Lake Worth Road was a two-lane street and little existed beyond its namesake, Military Trail.

The theater eventually fought through Florida’s summers with an underground air-conditioning system that piped cold air through tubes and out the car-window speakers in 250 of the theater’s 525 spaces. The Trail also sold – and continues to sell – mosquito coils that smoke away the skeeters from your dashboard.

Juanita Calderon, 47, remembers sneaking into the Trail in the trunk of her boyfriend’s car because he was too cheap to pay full price. She remembers bringing her children for countless shows. Now, Calderon, her daughter and her granddaughter all work nights at the Trail’s famous concessions of homemade hamburgers and old-fashioned movie popcorn.

“This was the only hip place to go when you were a teenager,” Calderon said. “It was getting away from home, coming to meet all the guys and girls. It was so much fun.”

In the 1980s, cable TV, VCRs, air-conditioned mega-theaters and high land values combined almost overnight to turn drive-ins nationwide into empty, overgrown parking lots. Their numbers dwindled from 3,500 to 900.

Some, like the Trail and the world’s largest drive-in, the Thunderbird in Fort Lauderdale, survived partly by using all that land during the daylight for flea markets or car shows.

At the Trail, business is still good. One of the country’s hottest flicks, Spider-Man, has filled the lot the past three weekends. Cars line up on Lake Worth Road waiting to get in.

“We’ve been turning people away,” said McCain, who bought the Trail in 1976. “Almost all drive-in theaters I know about have been doing well in the past few years.”

Seven new drive-ins have opened since 2000, according to drive-ins.com, a Web site operated by a brother-sister duo planning to open a drive-in in Las Vegas in the next few years.

“We decided the world needed another drive-in,” said Jennifer Sherer of drive-ins.com. “There’s something really special. Somehow, a bad movie is better at a drive-in.”

Still, more close every year than open – only about 425 remain. And the owner of Palm Beach County’s last drive-in is ready to give it up, hoping to shut down if the county deal closes.

It’s been 53 years since McCain got his start in the movie business as a concessions clerk at a drive-in in Rome, Ga.

A telling sign, perhaps, is that he doesn’t watch too many movies anymore.

“I guess people’s desires change,” he said. “There’s so many other things for people to entertain themselves with

Trail Drive-In

- 3438 Lake Worth Road, 965-4518.

- Admission: Adult, $3, under 12, $1.

- Now showing: Spider-Man, 8:20 p.m.

- Sound: FM radio required.

- Swap shop: 5 a.m. Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.

Other Florida drive-ins

- Fort Lauderdale – Thunderbird (Swap Shop) Drive-In, 3291 West Sunrise Blvd., (954) 583-7733

- Fort Myers – Northside Drive-In, 2521 N. Tamiami Trail, (941) 995-2254

- Naples – Naples Drive-In, 7700 E. Davis Blvd., (941) 774-6661

- Lakeland – Silver Moon Drive-In, 4100 New Tampa Highway, (863) 682-0849

- Ruskin – Ruskin Family Drive-In, 5011 U.S. 41 N., (813) 645-1455

- Tampa – Fun-Lan Drive-In, 2302 E. Hillsborough Ave., (813) 234-2311

- Ocala – Ocala Drive-In, 4850 S. Pine Ave., (352) 629-1325

- Dade City – Joy-Lan Drive-In, 16414 U.S. 301, (352) 567-5085

- Jacksonville – Playtime Triple Family Drive-In, 6300 Blanding Blvd., (904) 771-2300

Deceased Palm Beach County drive-ins

- Belle Glade – Lakes Drive-In

- Delray Beach – Del Ray Drive-In

- Riviera Beach – Beach Drive-In

- West Palm Beach – Boulevard Drive-In

- West Palm Beach – Beach Drive-In

ON THE WEB

For more information on drive-ins:

Drive-ins.com

Drive-In Theater

Drive-ins: The Guide to Drive-in Movie Theaters

American Drive-in Movie Theatre

Published May 20, 2002
By J. Christopher Hain, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
The Palm Beach Post, Local Section, Page 1B

Back to the wall: World Series, October 13, 1960

The Palm Beach Post
Date: Friday, October 13, 2000
Section: SPORTS
Edition: FINAL
Page: 1C
By Joe Capozzi
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

WORLD SERIES – 0CT. 13, 1960
PITTSBURGH PIRATES VS. NEW YORK YANKEES

Art Dimar throws… Here’s the swing and a high ball hit to deep left! This may do it!
– Radio broadcaster Chuck Thompson calling the final play of the 1960 World Series, Oct. 13, 1960.

“When it was hit, I figured it was just another home run to win a ballgame. And little do you know, 40 years later, that they’d be listening to it in front of the outfield wall.”
– Bill Mazeroski

Dale Hains, a math teacher at Wellington High School for 12 years, is playing hooky today. He’s going to a baseball game and he paid $160 in airfare to get there.

No, Hains isn’t in Seattle for Game 3 of the American League Championship Series. He went home to Pittsburgh, for Game 7 of the 1960 World Series.

“My wife thinks I’m crazy and my son thinks I’m smoking something,” said Hains, 57. And who can blame them?

Game 7 of the 1960 World Series was played 40 years ago today, ending at 3:36 p.m. when Bill Mazeroski’s home run off Yankees pitcher Ralph Terry landed in the park beyond the outfield fence, giving the Pirates the championship in the bottom of the ninth inning.

And Forbes Field, packed with 36,683 that hazy Thursday afternoon, is gone, torn down in 1972.

But the outfield wall is still there, its red bricks streaked with ivy like they were 40 years ago and gleaming with “457 FT” and “436 FT” distance markers from home plate.

And today, for the anniversary of the most dramatic home run in World Series history, the wall is all that Hains and 1,000 other baseball pilgrims need.

That and a cassette recorder powered by eight triple-A batteries.

A few minutes before 1 p.m., the owner of the recorder, 52-year-old Saul Finkelstein of suburban Pittsburgh, will press the PLAY button. And faster than you can say “Bill Mazeroski,” a radio voice brimming with Nuclear Family optimism will float across the same airwaves where it originated.

From Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, this is Chuck Thompson along with Jack Quinlan welcoming you to the seventh and deciding Game of the 1960 World Series between the New York Yankees and the Pittsburgh Pirates, on behalf of your hosts, the General Motors Corporation and the Gillette Safety Razor Company . . .

“The game started at 1 o’clock. So if you start the tape at 1, it should end 2 hours and 36 minutes later, right when Maz hits the home run,” Finkelstein explains.

He should know. He has done this before, 14 times, to be exact. On Oct. 13, 1985, he started what would turn into an annual ritual among Pirates diehards when he planted himself at the “436″ mark in right field, on a well-kept grassy knoll near the expanded University of Pittsburgh’s Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business. (The big home run cleared the left-field wall, which is gone except for a sidewalk plaque marking the spot. And home plate is entombed under Plexiglas outside a men’s restroom in a university building across the street.) At the site, Finkelstein fed a $19.95 copy of the pitch-by-pitch broadcast into his tape player.

Once again here at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, the weatherman has given us absolutely ideal weather for baseball. The temperature just as we came on the air this afternoon, 70 degrees . . .

“I didn’t want anyone to go with me,” said Finkelstein, who watched the original game on TV. “I listened to it myself and it was a really moving experience.”

A year later, a local TV crew happened by and put him on the 6 o’clock news. The following year, a core group of 50 to 100 started showing up, returning on subsequent anniversaries with original scorecards and pennants, sitting on blankets and folding chairs, listening and cheering to a game whose outcome they already know.

“It probably is the happiest time in the collective memory of any Pittsburgher,” said Rick Mitchell, owner of the Forbes Field Tavern, where wall gatherers retire after the “game” to water their memories.

“It’s a Field of Dreams thing . . . the weirdest thing you want to see,” said writer Dan Bonk, who brings a cardboard model he made of Forbes Field.

“Everybody knows how the game is going to turn out, but people stand around for seven innings and have their pictures taken. Dads play catch with their sons. And by the ninth inning – it’s the damndest thing – they’re all quiet. And when Maz hits the home run, there’s this big hooray and you think the game was won for the first time.”

In a Field of Dreams way, it’s like a seance, conducted with such enthusiasm and effect that some of the old ghosts from 1960 actually appear.

“I’ve been going down there for the last 10 to 12 years, and it is really something to see,” said 69-year-old Bob Friend, the Pirates’ pitcher who gave up two runs in the ninth inning to set the stage for the big finish.

The ghost of honor will haunt the wall for the first time today.

“I’ll think I’ll probably show up Friday,” Mazeroski, 64, said Wednesday. “I’ve been wanting to go for a long time but I’ve been in Florida this time of the year and I never had the occasion to get there.”

Mazeroski, who helps his son coach baseball at Gulf Coast Community College in Panama City, laughed about the lasting impression his famous blast has had on Pittsburghers.

“When it was hit, I figured it was just another home run to win a ballgame. And little do you know, 40 years later, that they’d be listening to it in front of the outfield wall.”

Of all the pilgrims, Hains, who lives in Boca Raton, is making the longest journey. He’s bringing his “Beat ‘Em Bucs” necktie and 1960 Pirates yearbook, souvenirs he first collected as a 17-year-old who wondered if his Pirates could recover from losses to the mighty Yankees by scores of 16-3, 10-0 and 12-0.

And he’s quite familiar with the broadcast. A few years ago, he bought the same cassette tape Finkelstein owns. When he learned about the annual gathering at the wall, he knew he had to fly up.

“My son says, ‘Dad, why would you go to a wall to listen to a 40-year-old radio broadcast that you’ve already heard a hundred times?’ My reply is ‘I could listen to it another hundred times.’ ”

At 3:34 p.m., right after the Yankees tie it in the ninth, Hains and his fellow audio time-travelers will hear an ad for the 1961 Chevy Corvair . . . with more space, more spunk, more room in the trunk. . . .

Then Chuck Thompson: And Ralph Terry, of course, on the mound will be facing Mazeroski . . .

“I’m still taking bets that Mazeroski hits the home run, because you’re still not sure when you listen to the tape,” said wall regular Herb Soltman, whose daughter Laurie works for the Florida Marlins. “You had to be there to believe it.”

Here’s ball one, too high now to Mazeroski . . . Well, a little while ago when we mentioned that this one, in typical fashion, was going right to the wire, little did we know . . .

“”There was some action in the bullpen at the time, and I made that mistake,” said broadcaster Thompson, 79, recalling how he started to describe Art Ditmar throwing in the Yankees’ bullpen just as Ralph Terry delivered the final pitch.

Art Ditmar throws. . . . Here’s a swing and a high fly ball hit deep to left, this may do it! Back to the wall goes Berra, it is . . . OVER THE FENCE! HOME RUN! THE PIRATES WIN!

“I’ll probably jump up and down and act like an idiot and start shouting like it happened for the first time,” Hains said about his reaction today to hearing the 35 seconds of staticky Forbes Field roar, a wild celebration he first heard while leaving his final high school class of the day 40 years ago.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mazeroski has hit a one-nothing pitch over the left-field fence at Forbes Field to win the 1960 World Series for the Pittsburgh Pirates! . . . It is all over in one of the most dramatic finishes on (sic) history.

And just as Hains was at school instead of Forbes Field on Oct. 13, 1960, he admits one regret about being at the wall today instead of Wellington High School.

“I’ll miss homecoming.”

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