By BILL McGOUN
Third in a series.
Part 1, Memories of Palm Beach County, 1943-1954
Part 2, The war years
Part 3, Before the urban sprawl
Part 4, The wide-open coastline
Part 5, The wide-open west
Part 6, Changing times
Lake Worth neighborhoods tend to be a hodgepodge of housing styles. That’s because the city was built in spurts. First, there were the original homes put up shortly after the 1912 drawing that kicked off the city. Then there were the houses built during the 1920s land boom. Finally, the remaining lots were filled in after World War II.
When we arrived in August of 1943, the first two phases had been completed. There were two vacant lots across from our home in the 200 block of S. O Street. Next to them was one of the oldest houses in town, home of Naomi Shipman Smith, one of the seven girls in Lake Worth High’s first graduating class in 1923.
Around the corner, at Palmway and Third Avenue S., was a palmetto-scrub lot in which I played as a child, and once got my foot speared by a cactus thorn that went through my sneaker. Such lots were common throughout the city.
The southwest was the least developed of the city’s quadrants. There was one big undeveloped tract bounded by B and F streets and 6th and 12th avenues, broken up only by a few sandy trails. The Whispering Pines subdivision south of 12th Avenue was yet to be built. The effect was that the Osborne section, then home to the city’s only African-Americans, was physically separated from the rest of Lake Worth.
What I remember most about the Whispering Pines land was how Dad would take me with him in December to cut one of the pines for a Christmas tree. These were slash pines and they were so crooked that the tree had to be tied up to keep it standing. In those days, we didn’t know slash pines would become endangered trees that no one in his right mind would cut today.
Undeveloped areas dotted the county
Other cities were similarly spotty in development. In the south end of West Palm Beach was a large undeveloped area bounded by Dixie Highway, Olive Avenue and Beverly and Gregory roads. The site of St. Juliana’s church and school was a golf driving range.
Driving down U.S. 1 in Palm Beach County there were several miles of open country between the villages of Jupiter and Juno Beach (today’s State Road A1A along the ocean was U.S. 1 then). After Juno Beach were several more miles of open country until you hit Lake Park.
From Lake Park through Lantana the highway as solidly urbanized. But there then were miles of open country between Lantana and Boynton Beach, between Boynton Beach and Delray Beach, and between Delray Beach and Boca Raton.
The first subdivision between Delray Beach and Boca Raton was Hidden Valley, which led to the observation that if there had been a valley in that area, it certainly had remained well hidden.
When sculptor Leno Lazzari and his wife were murdered in their U.S. 1 home in 1948, no one heard the shots and the bodies were not found until the next day. The home was at least a mile from any neighbors. It sat on the east side of the highway just south of today’s intersection with NE 20th Street and 5th Avenue in Boca Raton.
Most cities in those days were self-sufficient, and Lake Worth was no exception. Lake Avenue between Dixie Highway and L Street included three supermarkets, the chain-operated Lovett’s and Margaret Ann and the locally-owned Central Market. There were two movie theaters, the Fountain’s clothing store and two 5-and-10 cent stores.
One of the latter was built shortly after the war on the site of an outdoor bowling alley with concrete lanes and duckpins as well as standard tenpins. Yes, those lanes were just about as crude as they sound. I did my first tenpin bowling and my only duckpin bowling there, with the expected degree of success.
Each September, Mother and I would trek to The Book Store — that was its name — between K and L streets on the south side of Lake Avenue, to get my school supplies. Evidently the schools had been in touch with the store beforehand, as everything needed always was on hand, from pencils to paste pots to protractors.
Once I was old enough to go alone, I would spend my Friday afternoons in the Worth Theater, the building that now houses the Lake Worth Playhouse. My mother would give me a quarter. The double-feature bill of a Western and often a Bowery Boys film, plus a serial, cost nine cents. A big mug of A&W root beer was a nickel and a big candy bar another nickel. Sometimes I had no idea what to with the other six cents.
On family outings we would go to see a first-run film at the Lake Theater, now a shuttered museum at Lake and L. There a child’s admission was higher, 14 cents.
Downtown West Palm Beach was the big city
When Lake Worth was not enough, there was always downtown West Palm Beach. Mother and I would catch a bus a block from our house that would deposit us at Banyan Boulevard (then First Street) and Olive Avenue. Here we had out choice of three major department stores within a block. Montgomery Ward was on the east side of Olive where the city parking garage now sits. Burdine’s was on the northwest corner of Olive and Clematis Street and Penney’s was just to its north on the west side of Olive.
Later, Burdine’s would move to Dixie Highway, to the site of the just-opened City Center. Penney’s would move onto Clematis east of Olive and Belk’s would take over and combine the old Burdine’s and Penney’s spaces.
West Palm Beach was big time to someone from Lake Worth. It had three 5-and-10s and four movie theaters. There was the Florida, in the wedge formed by South Clematis and Narcissus, the Rialto on the east side of Narcissus north of Clematis, the Arcade behind the Comeau Building and the Coral on the north side of Clematis between Dixie and the FEC Railway tracks.
The only theater building remaining downtown is the Cuillo Center. It was built as the new Florida Theater in the 1950s and the Florida was renamed the Palms.
I don’t remember ever going to a movie in West Palm Beach then. Generally, Mother and I went north just to shop for clothes, usually at Montgomery Ward.
I got my first and only baseball glove, a Johnny Pesky model that I still have, at the Montgomery Ward sporting goods store that sat on the First Street (now Banyan Boulevard) side of what now is the parking lot of the just-vacated City Hall.
When we were finished shopping, Mother and I would walk to First Street and Dixie, near the Firestone tire store, to catch the southbound bus home.
For a brief time, Palm Beach Mercantile, a store that had been a downtown fixture since 1896, would be somewhat of a tourist attraction. That was due to a major expansion in 1950 that included, among other things, the first escalator in the county. Apparently too many people went to look and too few to shop, as the store went out of business in 1957.
In fact, major changes would come to all Palm Beach County downtowns in the years following the big war. In the concluding chapter of this series I will deal with those changes.
NEXT: The Wide-Open Coastline
Bill McGoun is a retired editorial writer for The Palm Beach Post. He is the author of four history books, including Lake Worth High School: A History and Southeast Florida Pioneers, which tells the history of Palm Beach County, the Treasure Coast and the Lake Okeechobee region through the lives of noted individuals. He is working on a history of the Palm Beach County school system.
Burdine’s photo courtesy of the Historical Society of Palm Beach County. Montgomery Ward photo courtesy of Pleasant Family Shopping (http://pleasantfamilyshopping.blogspot.com/).
Tags: downtown, Lake Worth, store, West Palm Beach
By BILL MCGOUN
Second in a Series.
Part 1, Memories of Palm Beach County, 1943-1954
Part 2, The war years
Part 3, Before the urban sprawl
Part 4, The wide-open coastline
Part 5, The wide-open west
Part 6, Changing times
We must have looked like the Joads, chugging down Federal Highway one August day in 1943 in a 1933 Ford with two black cats and all our worldly possessions. I had forgotten how small that car was until I saw one in the movie “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” some years back. It was small.
Dad had made a wooden frame to fit over the driveshaft between the front seats, and that is where I rode. The back seat was given over to our clothes, plus the cage in which Tinker Bell and Bambi rode.
I never knew for sure why we moved south. Dad and said it was because Mother and I keep harping about how wonderful Florida was. Mother said it was because of Dad’s health. There probably was some truth in both versions. I do know that Dad had a series of ailments, including asthma, serious enough that he was rejected when he volunteered for military service after Pearl Harbor.
In Florida, his health improved to the extent that he almost was drafted at the end of the war, deferred only because lessening manpower requirements had led to a change in criteria, specifically exempting people of his age with children.
Anyway, once the decision was made two tasks remained. The first was to dispose of our furniture. The second was to get permission for the fuel necessary for the trip; gasoline was rationed during the war. This last must have come soon before we left, as Mother already had registered me for first grade in Sharon, Pa.
Arriving in Palm Beach County
Our first night in Palm Beach County was in a wooden tourist court – that’s what they called motels in those days – in Jupiter. In 1943 Old Dixie Highway split from U.S. 1 just north of the Loxahatchee River bridge and the tourist court was located in the wedge of land bounded by the two roads and the river.
A tourist court much like the one the McGoun family stayed in, Inlet Village Tourist Court in Boynton Beach, April 1942. (Florida Photographic Collection)
I don’t remember where we had spent the previous night, but it probably was somewhere in North Florida. In those days it took a full day to drive the 300 miles from Jacksonville to West Palm Beach. The only route was U.S. 1, most of which was still a two-lane road, and you had to go right through every town.
One of the few things in Palm Beach County that hasn’t grown since the 1940s is U.S. 1 traffic. Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach and Lake Worth was more congested then than it is today, with almost all through traffic on either I-95 or the turnpike.
We arrived in Lake Worth early the next day. The McIntoshes, our hosts in the winter of 1941-2, didn’t have any vacancies but there was an upstairs apartment behind Campbell’s Grocery, across the street. We stayed there a short time and then found a rental home at 211 S. O St., just behind the McIntoshes.
It was a so-called “shotgun house,” a narrow structure only one room wide on a 25-foot-wide lot. The name came from the saying that with all the doors open you could fire a shotgun through the house without hitting anything. Next to it, at 209, was another shotgun house occupied by the Blosseys, a couple from Indiana who owned both buildings.
Humble it was, but home it would be for 11 years, until we moved to North O Street in 1954.
Today, the only one of those buildings still standing is the grocery store, which has undergone several names changes in the decades since. The McIntosh property and the shotgun houses all were razed early in the new century.
World War II close to home
World War II had come very close to Palm Beach County in 1942, when German submarines sank seven ships in one week alone. The explosions were heard all over town. Survivors were brought ashore in anything that would float.
The tanker Gulfland burning in the water off Hobe Sound in 1942 after it was struck by another tanker, the Gulf Bell, because both were traveling without lights to avoid German submarines during World War II. (Florida Photographic Collection)
By 1943 the threat had receded, as Germany had pulled its U-boats back for the defense of Europe, but many wartime precautions remained. The top half of headlights had to be blacked out and streetlights were stopped down so they threw only a cone of light directly downward. Both were precautions against creating light against which an Allied ship would be silhouetted.
Dad remembered the streetlights well. One night he fell off a curb in the dark. Fortunately, he was not injured.
One thing that was no problem in 1943 was finding a job. With the vacancies created by absent servicemen and the tremendous need for help on the home front, there was full employment. Dad got work as a warehouseman at Morrison Field, the Army Air Corps base located on what is now Palm Beach International Airport.
West Palm Beach was a major transit point for aircraft bound for Europe by the southern route, down to South America and across the narrowest part of the Atlantic to Africa and hence north. Airplanes in those days did not have the range to fly from North America to Europe nonstop.
One night, Dad remembered seeing a special forklift brought out to the flight line to await an arriving passenger plane. The forklift was to lift the wheelchair-bound President Franklin Delano Roosevelt off the plane to rest while it was refueled for the next leg of a trip to some secret summit meeting.
South Grade School
In September of 1943 I started my schooling at South Grade School. Dad would drive me to within a block of the school and I would walk the rest of the way. That was because our car still had Pennsylvania license plates. Florida law required Florida tags for parents of students because a portion of tag revenue went to education.
Soon I was making the half-mile walk and, by the end of second grade, I had my first bicycle. It was a used one with 20-inch wheels and my father paid $50 for it. That was a lot of money in those days, but bicycles were in short supply and there were no new ones to be had, as production for civilian use was halted during the war.
There also were no inner-tubes to be had, as all the rubber available was going into the war effort. After a while, the average bike tube would be made up as much of patches as of the original rubber.
The South Grade of 1943 was confined to a block bounded by K and L streets and 7th and 8th avenues. It consisted of only the original 1920s building. Still, there was plenty of room for the first six grades plus kindergarten.
Schools, as were every other aspect of society, were on a war footing. I recall the Norman Rockwell paintings of FDR’s Four Freedoms in the principal’s office. We brought coins to school to buy war stamps, which in turn were redeemed for war bonds. By war’s end I had bought three $25 bonds, which I cashed in a decade later to get my first car, a 1947 Crosley.
V-E Day
I was still too young to understand fully the meaning when, one spring day in 1945, we were told to go home. It was V-E Day, Germany had surrendered and the war in Europe was over. Japan would formally surrender on Sept. 2, two days after my eighth birthday.
Unbeknown to us, peace would bring great changes to a town so sleepy that once Mother saw a dog sleeping on the centerline of Federal Highway.
NEXT: Self-Contained Cities
Bill McGoun is a retired editorial writer for The Palm Beach Post. He is the author of four history books, including Lake Worth High School: A History and Southeast Florida Pioneers, which tells the history of Palm Beach County, the Treasure Coast and the Lake Okeechobee region through the lives of noted individuals. He is working on a history of the Palm Beach County school system.
Tags: Lake Worth, schools, World War II, WWII
William Stafford, whose grandfather owned and published the Lake Worth Leader and weathered the 1928 hurricane, writes all the way from New Zealand to ask about a “ghost town” neighborhood in Lake Worth.
“Captain” Stafford says it’s where Interstate 95 runs now, from 12th Avenue South to 6th Avenue South, just east of the old Seaboard Coast Line, now CSX Transportation.
“As kids in the ’60s, we played amongst the old foundations of homes, covered the cisterns over with beam-supported wood (excellent hide-outs for skipping school), and noticed modern concrete curbing in overgrown and abandoned streets which were sand-sealed with tar.
“A row of mature Australian pines ran along the northern (section) of the abandoned street, and we as kids found many 1920s-style Coca-Cola bottles, telephone and power pole glass insulators from the 1920s, and occasionally a few coins dated between 1915 and 1932 (pennies and buffalo nickels) around the
foundations of the former homes.
“The area is long gone, but as kids on our Schwinn Stingrays in the ’60s it was a pretty neat place to go, minding the rattlesnakes and spiders.
“I know that the west side of Ridge Street was removed for I-95, and the
ghost town went with it.
“But it was an interesting place nonetheless, and the overgrowth, infrastructure and dated remnants of items found placed it around the time Lake Worth was severely damaged by the ’28 storm.”
Beverly Mustaine at the Museum of the City of Lake Worth was as stumped as we were.
Readers: Can you help?
Tags: Lake Worth, unanswered questions
Every once in awhile, we get questions that stump all our usual Post-Time sources and we turn to you for help.
George Moore, a retired commercial seaman now living in Jacksonville, called to say that in the 1950s and 1960s he made regular runs down the coast to Palm Beach and out to the Bahamas. He says that some time in the summer of 1961, his tug barely survived a 25-foot wave that crashed onto the beach at Palm Beach and did some damage. He said he remembered reading about it in The Post before he went back to North Florida. A search of our archives and a check with the National Weather Service’s Miami office turned up nothing about it.
And Daniel John Gorham, now of San Ignacio, Belize, who was Palm Beach County’s supervisor of registration – the precursor to supervisor of elections – from 1960 to 1965, asks about a statue. It was a stone duck. It stood from around 1930 to around 1940 on Lucerne Avenue in Lake Worth, at the approach to the Intracoastal Waterway bridge. How did it get there? Why and when was it removed, and to where? Or was it destroyed?
Readers: Can you help?
Tags: bridges, Lake Worth, unanswered questions
