The West Palm Fishing Club is one of the oldest sport fishing clubs in the country. It was founded in 1934 and soon had a clubhouse meeting room at the Royal Worth Hotel — later known as the Pennsylvania Hotel — on South Flagler Drive. On Jan. 6, 1941, the club opened its new headquarters on Flagler Drive at Fifth Street.
The original clubhouse meeting room in the old Pennsylvania Hotel in the 1930s. (Photo from West Palm Beach Fishing Club Archives. Click here to see more photos and read more about the history of the club.)
The West Palm Beach Fishing Club building in 2009. (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)
This is part three of the story of Autorama, the historic car collection nationally known tenor James Melton opened in Hypoluxo in 1953. It closed 50 years ago this month, in October 1961.
Palm Beach Post file photo
Melton sold the complex in March 1959 for $110,000. He sold the contents in June 1960 for $40,000 to former Arkansas Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller and Bill Harrah, of the casino Harrah’s. They moved the cars to Rockefeller’s Arkansas estate.
A religious group planned a $3.5 million revival center; it never opened. The building stood empty until it finally was razed in October 1966. Flagler Museum executive director John Blades said this September that the Poinciana columns were wooden and most likely did not survive.
That little building which had come from the Poinciana had been an artist’s studio and a caretaker’s cottage before becoming Autorama’s gift shop.
Former Hypoluxo Mayor James Brown bought it in 1967 and moved it to his Carefree Cove Trailer Park, where it took on a new life as a chapel.
Brown sold the park in 1988 and donated the chapel to a Palm Springs church, where it stood for nearly a quarter of a century. In August of this year, the building was moved to Lantana.
The Mural of America had an even more circuitous route.
The artist, Bernard Thomas, offered it to the Palm Beach County School Board for display in a school. Not interested. A contractor bought the mural and moved it intact for what was to be a bar. That deal fell through. In 1979, lawyer, and later Mayor Gene Moore stumbled across a wet piece of canvas behind a Boynton Beach real estate office and recognized it. Thomas spent six months restoring it, and it was donated to the Boynton Beach Woman’s Club, where it hangs in the dining room.
Bernard Thomas and the restored mural in 1979. (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)
IBM began producing small mainframe computers in leased office space in Boca Raton in September 1967. Three years later the company opened a multimillion dollar plant on 550 acres in western Boca Raton, just north of what was then the city of University Park and south of the FAU campus. Don Estridge led the team that created the first personal computer there in 1981. One of the early IBM buildings now houses Don Estridge High Tech Middle School. At its peak IBM employed 9,500 in Boca Raton, but eventually, low-priced competitors forced work force reductions and in 1988, IBM moved its PC assembly lines to North Carolina.
Aerial view of the IBM plant in 1973. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
IBM employees leaving a 1988 meeting where they were offered incentives to leave the company. IBM was trying to reduce its workforce at the Boca plant by 1600 people. (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)
The Orange Grove House of Refuge was named for the grove of sour orange trees at the site where it was built. The house burned in 1927. (Photo courtesy of the Delray Beach Historical Society)
The Gilbert’s Bar House of Refuge in 1956. Gilbert was a 19th-century pirate named who worked the waters around what is now called Hutchinson Island, where an offshore reef came to be known as Gilbert’s Bar. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
On March 9, 1991, the restored 1926 gymnasium at the Old School Square Cultural Arts Center made its debut with a 1950s-themed prom. The opening of the gymnasium marked the halfway point of the restoration of the four-acre site. The 1913 Delray Elementary building reopened in 1990 as the Cornell Museum of Art and American Culture, and the Crest Theatre in the former Delray High School opened in 1993.
This undated Palm Beach Post file photo shows the old Delray Elementary School in its early days.
Another 1920s shot of the school and all the entire student body is here.
Students file out of the main building in 1986. (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)
Some of the names inscribed on the rafters of the school gym date back to the 1930s. (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)
Dorothy Dull, a kindergarten teacher who had been at the school for 19 years, quiets her students as they exit her classroom in 1986. (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)
Bert Fashaw shines the wood floors before the start of the 1981 school year. (Palm Beach Post staff file photo).
Students run on the field behind the school in June 1983. (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)
The 1925 high school building on Swinton Avenue in 1986. (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)
