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This week in history: West Palm Beach Municipal Stadium opens

March 8, 2010

The Milwaukee (later Atlanta) Braves played their first spring training game at the new West Palm Beach Municipal Stadium on March 9, 1963. The Kansas City Athletics, featuring local boys Haywood Sullivan and Dick Howser, defeated the Braves 3-0. Warren Spahn was the losing pitcher. wpbmunistadium1968 The stadium was demolished in 1999. (1968 Palm Beach Post file photo)...

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Memories of Palm Beach County, 1943-1954

March 5, 2010

By BILL MCGOUN The history of Palm Beach County since World War II has been one of continuous growth. In a series of articles beginning with this one, I’d like to give a picture, as well as I can, of how Palm Beach County looked before that great boom got started. In his book Pioneer Life in Southeast Florida, Charles Pierce defined a pioneer as someone who was in South Florida before the railroad came through in the 1890s. I agree. Someone who moved into Palm Beach County in 1943, as I did, is in no way a pioneer. We had paved roads, electricity, telephones (sort of, see below), water and sewer systems. In many ways the area looked as it does today. Yet, in many other ways, it was vastly different. There were miles of open beachfront and relatively few people living between the CSX (then Seaboard Air Line) tracks and the Lake Okeechobee communities. There were six miles of open country between Delray Beach and Boca Raton, the latter then a sleepy community of roughly 1,000. World War II visible here World War II was the dominant reality everywhere in 1943. Today’s Palm Beach International Airport was Morrison Field. Much of Boca Raton, including today’s Florida Atlantic University, was an Army Signal Corps base. Resort hospitals had been converted into hospitals or convalescent facilities. I will try to re-create those days for people who never knew them, and to remind those who did know as to how it was. I have focused on the...

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This week in history: Florida admitted to the Union as 27th state

March 1, 2010

On March 3, 1845, Florida became a state. William D. Moseley was the first governor, and the population was about 66,000, almost half of whom were African-American slaves on cotton and sugar plantations. 1845survstatusmapnlg Map of Florida in 1845, showing the state's geographical boundary lines and internal divisions that had been established at that time. (United States Geological Survey map) ...

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