Palm Beach County as it was: Changing times

By BILL McGOUN

Sixth 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

The first decade after World War II was not a time of big change as far as downtowns were concerned. Palm Coast Plaza, the first shopping center, was not opened until 1959, and Palm Beach Mall, the first mall, did not come on the scene until 1967.

In residential areas, however, change was the norm as the vacant lots and blocks of the coastal cities began filling in quickly. The two vacant lots across from our house on South O Street in Lake Worth became the sites of a two-story apartment building and a one-story prefabricated house.

The vacant lot at S. Palmway and 3rd Avenue where I often played sprouted a one-story group of apartments. In the southwest, new streets — C, D and E — were cut between 6th and 12th Avenues S., and
the Whispering Palms subdivision was built on the south side of 12th Avenue.

The same pattern would hold true in other coastal cities, as most neighborhoods filled up to reach their present configuration. The great leap west would come later.

As for the downtowns, there was some infill and some realignment. In addition to the department-store changes noted previously, downtown West Palm Beach would add the Surf Theater in the 300 block of Datura Street and Mike Pucci’s Bowlarama on Evernia Street between Dixie and the Florida East Coast railway. It was there that I did my first indoor bowling and had my first pizza.

Back in Lake Worth, the chief change would be the demise of the outdoor bowling alley, replaced by a five-and-dime. Otherwise, downtown remained pretty much the same into the 1950s, when the Lovett’s and Margaret Ann chains were combined and both Lake Avenue stores were closed.

The new company, Winn-Lovett, built a Kwik-Chek store on the east side of North Dixie Highway just north of 2nd Avenue. Later in the decade, Winn-Lovett would merge with Dixie Home to form Winn-Dixie and the Dixie Highway store would be renamed.

School days

I spent six years at South Grade. The school was of such a size that occasionally it had too many students in a given grade for one class but too few for two. As a result, some classes were split. I attended fourth grade in a class that was half sixth-graders and sixth grade in a class that was half fifth-graders.

The school safety patrol was drawn from boys in grades five and six. I was on the patrol for all of the fifth grade and six days of the sixth. Why? Because South Grade had a new principal who was a hard-liner on any infraction of rules. Any lapse of attention and you were off the patrol. Ditto for being late twice, my Waterloo.

That was the year that South Grade got its first girls on patrol, a change born of necessity. By mid-year all the boys in grades five and six had been kicked off.

The only field trip of the year was an excursion by bicycle to Sunset Ridge Park for a May Day picnic. This was before people got paranoid about celebrating May Day because the Communists made such a big deal
out of it. I would come home exhausted and sunburned.

In 1949 I headed to the hill on the west side of town to attend what then was Lake Worth Junior-Senior High School, housed in the two oldest buildings on the present campus. I was there for six years, graduating in 1955.

My youth included the usual mix of odd jobs, including what then were the two traditional ones, paper boy and bag boy, tasks now taken over by adults. I bagged groceries at the Kwik-Chek on Dixie Highway and was for a time one of the best paper carriers The Palm Beach Post ever had.

That’s because I was delivering The Miami Herald. I also briefly delivered the erstwhile Lake Worth Leader, a daily published out of a Quonset hut on N. G Street along the Florida East Coast railway.

The Quonset hut, a World War II innovation, became popular for low-cost construction after the war. When Lake Worth Junior-Senior High School added a metalworking shop about 1950, it was in the form of a Quonset.

Cities would adopt various strategies as they began to get built out. Some would aggressively annex while others, such as Lake Worth, were content to remain within their boundaries.

Boynton Beach and Boca Raton had more aggressive policies than did Delray Beach, which is why today Delray Beach’s city lines are closer to Atlantic Avenue than to either Ocean Avenue in Boynton Beach or
Palmetto Park Road in Boca Raton.

As to high-school education, the byword was addition by subtraction. In 1950 the downtown high schools in Delray Beach and Boynton Beach were closed and replaced by Seacrest High School, built roughly halfway between the two downtowns. The same year Industrial High School, the African-American school in West Palm Beach, was replaced by Roosevelt High School.

The “race question”

Jim Crow still was the rule in those years. Like most white youths I didn’t have to think much about race, so I didn’t. If you are African-American you can’t ignore race, as it confront you constantly.

Larry Rivers, a Florida A&M University professor, once told me in regard to the Confederate flag, “I’d like to forget about it, but everybody keeps shoving it in my face.”

If you lived in Lake Worth then, the race question was all but academic. The only African-Americans lived in the Osborne section, which was physically separated from the rest of the city. They went to the Osborne school through eighth grade and then to either Carver High School in Delray Beach or Roosevelt High, if they could arrange transportation.

Lake Worth never had the separate water fountains, rest rooms or railway waiting rooms that West Palm Beach had. About the only time we ever went into an African-American neighborhood was to eat at Harvey’s, a Tamarind Avenue institution in West Palm Beach with some of the finest barbecue I ever have eaten.

Of course, we had to order takeout or eat in our car. Only African-Americans were allowed inside. The first time I ever was inside was in the 1980s, but that was after Harvey had died and the food was decidedly inferior.

The evolution of the two-car family

A watershed event in my life, though I didn’t realize it at the time, came in 1953 when the Blosseys, our landlords on S. O Street, were killed in a traffic accident in Indiana. The new owners had other plans for the property, so we had to find a new home.

Dad bought a house at 1603 N. O Street and we moved in the summer of 1954, as I was entering my senior year in high school. For the first time, we lived somewhere where Mother, who never drove, could not walk to shopping.

In a way, it was symbolic of the rush to the wide-open spaces that would engulf Palm Beach County, and the nation, the decades to come. The two-car family would become the norm, due both to desire and to
necessity. Like all downtowns, Lake Worth’s would decline and come back in specialized form, stressing dining and entertainment.

Fortunately for my own mobility, by that time I had a car, if a 1947 Crosley could be called a car. It seems appropriate that it was built by an appliance firm, as it was about as large and as stylish as a refrigerator crate.

As I said in the first part of this series, I wouldn’t trade today for the “good old days.” I enjoy modern medicine and the Internet too much. Also, today’s society is a more just society, having excised the demons of Jim Crow for the most part.

I like to recall the days of my youth, but once around that block was enough.

- - -

A reader identified as Valesha corrected me on an item in the first part of this series. I had said the 1963 bus wreck in which 27 farm workers occurred when the bus missed the turn onto the old Six-Mile Bend bridge east of Belle Glade. In fact, as she noted, it happened when the bus collided with a truck. The wreck occurred several miles from the bridge on Brown’s Farm Road.

Memory can be a tricky thing. I tried to check my facts as much as possible but on this one I goofed. Valesha had a personal reason for remembering, as four of her relatives were among the 27 killed. Thanks for setting me straight.

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: African Americans, Lake Worth, Palm Beach County as it was, schools, store

Eta Phi Beta Sorority awards scholarships

The West Palm Beach Delta Chapter of the Eta Phi Beta Sorority awarded $5,000 in scholarships at its Founder’s Day and Reomia Stevens Bennett Scholarship Luncheon on Saturday, April 17, 2010.

Standing from left to right: Jeanette Eagle, Chapter President; Courtney I. Winfrey, Palm Beach Lakes; Jade A. Taylor, Suncoast; Alexis Banks, Palm Beach Lakes High Schools; and Mary S. Braziel, Scholarship Awards Chairperson. Seated from left to right: Victoria Higgs, Palm Beach Lakes and Shandrea S. King, Palm Beach Gardens.

The women of the Delta Chapter of the Eta Phi Beta Sorority.

Tags: African Americans, awards, schools

Palm Beach County as it was: The war years

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

Okeechobee schoolhouse a cherished structure

Our July 23 column give a brief history of Okeechobee County, a sparsely populated but historically important part of our region.

Perhaps its most cherished structure is the one-story white-frame, one-room schoolhouse at Southwest Fifth Street and South Parrott Avenue.

It now houses the Okeechobee County Historical Society’s administrative offices and its collection of historical materials.

On Dec. 3, it held a 100th birthday party for the school.

The settlement originally was called the Bend, because it is on a peninsula at the confluence of the Kissimmee River, Taylor Creek and Lake Okeechobee.

Students originally met in a thatched-roof shack.

The schoolhouse was built in 1909, eight years before the county was formed from parts of Palm Beach, St. Lucie and Osceola counties.

The St. Lucie County school system designated it School 14.

By then, the settlement had been renamed “Tantie,” and the name stuck to the school as well.

Teacher Tantie Huckaby of South Carolina had given her name to the post office in 1902.

The town became Okeechobee in 1911. By the fall of 1915, the school had become so crowded a tent was set up for the overflow.

Construction began March 18, 1916, on a new two-story brick building. The Okeechobee Public School opened later that year.

The former schoolhouse eventually became a private home.

It stayed that way until the mid-1970s, when W.R. “Ronnie” Watts, who had been a toddler when his parents moved in to the building around 1922, agreed to sell it to the historical society.

The home needed a lot of restoration and other work, including repositioning it on its block foundation; the 1928 hurricane had knocked it askew.

Okeechobee Historical Society Museum & Schoolhouse: 1850 Highway 98 N., Okeechobee. (863)763-4344. Guided tours by appointment.

Read more: History of Okeechobee County, by Kyle Van Landingham and Alma Hetherington.

The 1909 Okeechobee schoolhouse, originally designated School 14, was the first to be built in Okeechobee County. After a new school was built in 1916, it became a private home, and it stayed that until the mid 1970s. This picture was taken Sept. 20, 1976, as the schoolhouse was being moved to a new site. It now houses the Okeechobee County Historical Society’s administrative offices and its collection of historical materials. (Palm Beach Post file photo)

Tags: buildings, Okeechobee County, schools

Homegrown football heroes

By Michelle Quigley

It’s hard to escape football fever in south Florida — what with the Pro Bowl and the Super Bowl at Sun Life Stadium — so let’s take a look at some local football players who have made history.

Indianapolis Colt receiver Pierre Garcon, a 2004 John I. Leonard graduate, and New Orleans Saints fullback Heath Evans, a King’s Academy grad, will be at the Super Bowl on Feb. 7 (Evans won’t be playing though; he’s out with an injury), but they’re not the only local boys to make it big.

Pittsburgh Steeler wide receiver Santonio Holmes of Glades Central was last year’s Super Bowl MVP, after he made an amazing tip-toe catch in the end zone for the winning touchdown.

And 15 area players made the Florida High School Athletic Association’s list of the 100 greatest football players in Florida history, including past stars — Carver’s Barry Hill, Kennedy’s Lemar Parrish and Atlantic’s Bobby Butler — and present ones — Pahokee’s Anquan Boldin, Suncoast’s Devin Hester and Santaluces’ Vince Wilfork.

Other area high school football players who made the list:

Ottis Anderson (Forest Hill, pictured at right with St. Louis Cardinals owner William V. Bidwell as he holds up the jersey that he would wear for the 1979 season)
John Carney (Cardinal Newman)
Anthony Carter (Suncoast)
Eddie Edwards (Fort Pierce Central)
Jessie Hester (Glades Central)
Rickey Jackson (Pahokee)
Don Latimer (Fort Pierce Central)
Fred Taylor (Glades Central)

We know there are a lot more local football players who have made the big time, and we’d like your help in compiling a list of them. You can see the list we have so far here.

Tags: football, schools, sports