Remembering Paradise- Ernie Lyons, March 4, 1905 - April 6, 1990
Newspaper editor Ernie Lyons captured Old Florida in his columns about nature and small-town life in Stuart.
The feisty historian and author, whose prize-winning columns were collected in two books, came to Stuart in 1915 from Laurel, Miss., with his family at age 10. He worked as a writer and editor for The Stuart News for 44 years.
A conservationist in the days when Florida fishing still was the stuff of legends, he experienced - and wrote about - life on area waters in an era that drew rich fishermen from around the globe to Stuart, then the sailfish capital of the world.
Lyons was an early critic of a canal federal engineers built to dump water from area ranch lands and Lake Okeechobee into the St. Lucie River - and he was right. What has been an environmental disaster for the river now leads a federal and state “fix it” list of projects to re-engineer South Florida drainage.
Lyons, a founding president of the Florida Outdoor Writer’s Association, wrote lyrical descriptions of the area’s “jungle rivers” and abundant wildlife.
He also wrote about such local characters as Shorty Joe, who risked his life during the fierce 1933 hurricane to save a squealing lady lying behind a shed, learning only after he dragged her to safety that she was a 250-pound pig the wind blew into town. (Shorty Joe had hoisted a few during the big blow.)
Ralph Hartman Jr., a retired real estate agent whose friendship with the writer spanned six decades, used to give Lyons’ books, My Florida and The Last Cracker Barrel, to people who bought houses in Martin County. Hartman introduced one new resident, a neurosurgeon, to the writer.
“Ernie asked the doctor what a neurosurgeon does,” Hartman said. “The doctor explained he operates on people’s brains. ‘You’ll make a fortune here in Martin County,’ Ernie told him. ‘We got hundreds of people who need their brains fixed.’ ”
A bridge is named for him on Hutchinson Island.
- SALLY D. SWARTZ
“MY FLORIDA is the winding tropical river, heavy with the musky scent of palm blossoms,
with water turkeys sunning themselves, striped necked turtles plopping from logs, grey squirrels barking and the rat-tat-tat of the pileated woodpecker resounding.
It is not a CBS, all-electric Medallion home.
MY FLORIDA is the tarpon rolling, the mullet leaping for fun, pelicans diving, red-beaked skimmer gulls skimming the surface with their bills, a manatee blowing, and an eagle stealing a fish from an osprey high in air.
It is not a four-lane highway . . .
. . . MY FLORIDA is cruising offshore in a small boat just as the sun comes up, grabbing a bending rod and boating a king mackerel, watching sea turtles and manta rays, coming back in through a boisterous inlet “on a wing and a prayer.”
It is not playing shuffleboard.
MY FLORIDA is wading a sand-bottomed backwoods pond, flycasting a cork-bodied bug on a well greased GAF line, catching three or four “yearling-and-up” bass, enjoying their beauty and liking their musky smell - and then eating them fried to a tasty brown by the pond side.
It is not a Royal Castle hamburger or a Lum’s frankfurter . . . .
. . . MY FLORIDA is surf casting from the sea beach with no one in sight a mile either way.
It is not taking a dip in a swimming pool, covering yourself with lotion and sunbathing in a reclining chair.
MY FLORIDA is going fast.”
- FROM MY FLORIDA, BY ERNEST LYONS,
COPYRIGHT 1969, STUART NEWS COMPANY
