Get ready for SunFest (tomorrow through Sunday on the West Palm Beach waterfront) by taking a trip back to SunFest 1983 (click on the images below to see the the full pages from the Historic Archive of The Palm Beach Post):
Tags: festivals, Sunfest, West Palm Beach
The first South Florida Gladioli Festival was held in 1946 on a rodeo field on Atlantic Avenue. Forty thousand invitations were sent to “northern visitors.”
The 1947 festival featured 22 Orange Bowl floats, along with Miss Gladioli and thousands of gladioli.
By 1966 the event was a week-long art show known as the Delray Affair.
The 1981 Delray Affair section of The Palm Beach Post recounts the history of the festival, including the story of Ignatz, the formerly ubiquitous Delray Affair symbol.
By 1985 the annual event was drawing 100,000 people, and the 25th Delray Affair in 1988 featured the 60s band The Association (Cherish, Windy, and Never My Love).
Tags: Delray Beach, festivals
Adrienne Moore of Stuart asked about the “First Annual Palm Beach International Music and Arts Festival,” held Nov. 28-30, 1969, northwest of West Palm Beach.
The event was both the first and the last.
It drew 40,000 people to the 149-acre Palm Beach International Speedway, later the Moroso Motorsports complex and now back to its original name.
Officials fretted about health, sanitation and traffic, and were mortified by images of drugs and sex they’d seen 3½ months earlier at Woodstock.
They denied a permit to promoter David Rupp, who’d bought the track at foreclosure. He prevailed, but gained a new obstacle: Sheriff William Heidtman.
The sheriff set up surveillance cameras and positioned 150 deputies around the clock at nearby Pratt & Whitney.
Crowds tried to avoid the $20 entry, some swimming canals. Iron Butterfly came on first, 2 ½ hours after the gates opened.
Chilling rain fell and temperatures dropped into the 40s. Vendors ran short of food, and many of the 300 portable toilets were dismantled for firewood.
Helicopters flew acts — Jefferson Airplane, Sly Stone, Janis Joplin — from Singer Island.
Joplin, who’d die of an overdose in 10 months, trashed Heidtman and Gov. Claude Kirk on stage and sang while chugging Southern Comfort.
The Rolling Stones, paid $100,000, went on at 4 a.m. Monday and played a short stint for the few remaining.
The tally: 130 drug overdoses, 14 eye injuries, 42 intestinal disorders, 1,700 headaches and minor cuts, 1,000 reported conversions to Christianity, 130 drug arrests, and one death, of a teen struck by a truck. Rupp lost $300,000 to $500,000, “all the cash I had and all that I’d borrowed.”
In 1999, Heidtman — who would die at 91 in 2007 — dismissed as myths reports he planted alligators in canals and red ants in the fields, saying Florida always supplies plenty. But he did unapologetically say, “If I had it to do over again, I’d try to stop it.”
Palm Beach Post file photo: The ‘first annual’ Palm Beach International Music and Arts Festival was the first and the last event of its kind. Held in 1969, the festival featured Jefferson Airplane, Sly Stone, Janis Joplin and the Rolling Stones.
Q: Can you give us a little history of the Sun Dance Festival in the early days of West Palm Beach?
A: Decades before SunFest, there was the Seminole Sun Dance.
It lasted only from 1916 to 1923 and was held only sporadically after that.
The three-day event, held in March, was designed to attract tourists and put West Palm Beach on the map.
Its founders, 42 businessmen on the West Palm Beach Board of Trade, hoped to rival New Orleans’ Mardi Gras, with masquerades and marching bands, a yacht flotilla, and a baby parade with prizes going to “the very best specimen of babyhood in the county,” according to news accounts.
They invited newsreel crews from the fledgling film industry, director Stanley Warrick said, to “spread to the farthermost corners of ‘moving picturedom’ the advantages of our sun-kissed clime.”
Eleven committees, from publicity to “farm and fish products,” planned the event. Every citizen was urged to help organize “Joy Week.” President Woodrow Wilson was invited to attend, but had other commitments.
A member of the trade board came up with the name, Seminole Sun Dance, edging out “Palm Beach Pow-Wow,” and won “$10 in gold.”
The theme was Florida history. Ironically, organizers got an “F” in the subject. The Seminoles do not have a sun dance.
But Florida has a long history of not letting historical accuracy get in the way of a good time.
They did send an envoy to area Seminole camps to recruit “real live Indians” to perform their “picturesque rites” at the 1916 event.
Seminoles in traditional garb marched with local businessmen in straw hats, white shoes and white Palm Beach suits.
They raced their handmade canoes against the “store-bought” ones of their “pale-faced brothers.”
And they performed some sort of dance, whatever it was.
That was enough to make the event a success until the Depression knocked it out of business. It was last revived in 1960.
Palm Beach Post file photo: Baby and carriage are all decked out for the baby parade of the Seminole Sun
Dance in West Palm Beach in 1916.
Tags: festivals
