The St. Augustine Visitors' Bureau #4: In The Waves

Part 1 Here

Part 2 Here

Part 3 Here

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One of the people who came to meet Dr. Hayling – and to seek the guidance and support of the NAACP of Brevard County – some years later had walked a long way to get there. State Senator Lawton Chiles started a little meander in a little town on the Alabama line, and kept going through place after place, picking up media coverage and endorsements and hangers-on all the way.

He was walking for the US Senate, for the Democratic nomination to succeed a man with an equally Southern name, Spessard Holland. He was from a small town in the field country south of Orlando, and there were next to no Floridians outside his state Senate district who had heard of him at all. C. Farris Bryant had, of course, he was the Governor and Chiles’ primary opponent, but as Chiles meandered his stunt gained coverage, and he gained recognition and then he had the clout to meet with enough folks to maybe actually go on and seriously challenge Bryant, and then he was finding that he needed to build a broad base of the new Democratic party, which brought his walk through Dr. Hayling’s office.

He had skipped St. Augustine, it was out of the way, he needed to go down the spine of the state through Gainesville before he cut over through a little rural area that he needed to walk because it was the home of the Speaker of the State House, who would be endorsing him as they wound their way together through the hamlets the rotund older man represented, wearing walking boots and long-sleeved seersucker shirts to keep down the mosquitos, chewing the air as they talked.

He had skipped St. Augustine because he’d never been there, and he’d have plenty of time to cut back up that way in a car or a plane or whatever. And so he was out on the Space Coast and chatting with Dr. Hayling about “the race question” and how he would be toeing the line in the campaign but voting the right way in Washington if the rubber ever did actually hit the road. Dr. Hayling didn’t find himself inspired, but Farris Bryant had been an explicit segregationist while Chiles never was, and that didn’t hurt.

They talked for a while about St. Augustine, and Chiles said good things about the right to protest and the right to own guns, and Chiles resolved to visit St. Augustine one day, maybe, he told Dr. Hayling, when one of his many investments paid out well enough to earn him a vacation.

Continuing down the Space Coast before he cut inland, Lawton Chiles stopped in at a bar to talk to the patrons. He found a number of folks receptive to his down-home folksiness, honed inside about a dozen county-seat courtrooms. His platform didn’t seem to matter much, there really was nothing to campaigning but smiling at a jury of a few million of your peers and making them like you enough to put a checkmark by your name on election day.

He approached a tall man with a well-trimmed mustache and quickly they found that they were both brothers of the same fraternity. The man said his name was John Robarts, and he was down on vacation. At the end of a long day, a non-constituent was exactly what Chiles needed to unwind, and he ordered another drink for both of them and talked to Robarts for a while about their shared hobby of hiking through the backcountry. After a few more drinks it came out that Robarts was in fact the Premier of Ontario, down in Florida doing something like campaigning himself among Ontarian snowbirds on behalf of his party and among Quebecois snowbirds in French on behalf of the Canadian Confederation.

Chiles, seeking to master foreign policy in the state of consciousness he preferred to discuss it, asked Robarts if he was the right or the left up there, and Robarts told him, truthfully, that his party had governed Ontario for 30 years by living up to its name, he was a Progressive Conservative. 

In the general election, whenever his Republican opponent would try to tar him as a liberal, Lawton Chiles would say no, he wasn’t a liberal, he was a progressive conservative, a modern man for a modern time.

He and John Robarts agreed to meet in St. Augustine (Robarts had never been either, the snowbirds preferred it a bit further south, most times, he said, in places where speaking French was more acceptable in public) sometime, maybe down the road. Robarts said he was planning to retire into a life of advocacy for Canadian Confederation outside of elections. 

When Governor Chiles eventually made his first visit to St. Augustine it was 1997 and he was there for the ribbon cutting on the 100th Red Lobster in America. Lawton Chiles had founded Red Lobster, and the insatiable appetite of the American People for Cheddar Bay Biscuits and popcorn shrimp had paid for his famously extensive vacations from the Senate and now the Governor’s Office. As a founder and the Governor, he could of course make time to cut a ribbon. Maybe he could even meet that old Canadian who had made his long career possible with that preposterous slogan from another time, a political self-description that Chiles was still using even though it hadn’t caught on with anyone else.

The only things Lawton Chiles saw in St. Augustine were the parking lot outside the Red Lobster and the decor inside. He found himself quickly whisked away to another party, a fried chicken fundraiser in Jacksonville at a thousand dollars a quarter chicken, learning from an aide in the car back to the airport that Robarts, who he had invited down to eat at the Red Lobster with him, had ended a long battle with depression 15 years before.

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For the vast majority of Floridians, the beach is a common feature of life, especially at a young age. It’s easy, when you’ve grown up by the saltwater, to forget what the beach says to someone who lives more than an hour away. There’s something to be said, of course, about the compelling human desire for the sea, and it’s already been said better by other folks, folks from New England and Newfoundland and Ireland and Sri Lanka and other sea-dependent places.

The mystique of the beach for the inlander is related, of course, but not the same. It was debated, in the cheap seats of a beat up 2002 Ford Taurus wagon originally purchased by the driver’s Grandfather to haul his grandkids around, whether someone from inland could even understand the beach, or whether it was forever hidden from them. There were five of them in the car, and their things for a week away from the pedestrian cares of work and school in the back.

It was argued persuasively by one of the young women in the back, Doreen, a PhD student in Spanish Literature at the University of Florida, that her girlfriend Emma, who had been Kentucky state champion in the 100 and 200 yard backstroke twice before heading southward for college, was a person who understood the beach implicitly despite being raised a mountain range away from the nearest saltwater. Emma loudly agreed that all water, to a swimmer, is water. She worked for the Florida Department of Children and Families now, in the rurals around Gainesville mostly, and this was her third visit to St. Augustine. She preferred the gulf beaches, having found the first time she was there that there was more to them.

This was contested enthusiastically by the driver of the wagon. Sam, a biochemist who had grown up in the swamps on the islands just northeast of St. Augustine and now worked at a pharmaceutical company outside of Tallahassee. She wasn’t arguing that salt and fresh were enemies, she said, just that waves were important to think about, that the sounds of an ocean-facing beach were different from a river, a lake, a pool. The bigness of the tides and the sloshing of the water and the rumble of the sea (she had seen and heard it close up on calm warm days and when her mom had decided they’d stay home and drink through hurricanes) were distinguishing factors, and she preferred the sun when it beat down on her near the ocean.

This was Sam’s new boyfriend’s first trip to St. Augustine, and she and Doreen had planned an itinerary. He was a digital artist, mostly, when he was doing things, and he smoked Camels because, he said, a man with a fifties name like Craig should smoke Camels. The boyfriend wasn’t joining the argument, or even thinking about the sea at all, really.

Their first stop was going to be the lighthouse. Doreen (who had named herself after her great grandmother) liked to take in the whole city as soon as she got back, and soak its weird resiliency into her before she had to face her family. The five of them (and Sam’s friend Enrique, who had stayed local after high school and worked his way up from janitor to re-enactor at the lighthouse, so he could get them all in for free) climbed the twisty steps, pausing on the vertiginous landings to tease each other about looking down into the widening gap. They wondered, as Sam and Doreen had since they first visited together on a third grade field trip, why the lighthouse keepers hadn’t rigged up a pulley system to lift the oil up, instead of hauling the heavy buckets on the narrow stairs with their low railing.

Now they were stepping out the door into the light, and Craig was lighting a cigarette and saying there wasn’t much to look at, really, from up here, and Doreen, after kissing Emma, gave Sam a knowing look. Who couldn’t see the wonder from up here? Enrique and Luis, an electrical engineering PhD and stagehand for the community theater in Gainesville, were discussing the Fresnel lens inside, and had plenty to occupy them. They’d both seen the city from up there anyway, and Enrique was terrified of heights, a secret he was assiduously keeping from the folks who kept promoting him.

They’d test Craig again, Sam decided, down at the Alligator Farm, and the low current of skepticism that had been in her mind for a month or two now would rise more sharply to the top of her mind until then. Maybe he was just a grumpy Long Islander who’d already stood on top of better lighthouses and seen cooler cities expand out below him, more interesting and more meaningful and more historic. But if he couldn’t find the joy in the albino alligator, or if he wouldn’t pose with the babies, then maybe the city had said all it needed to already.

–

I ran into them on Vilano Beach, though I can’t say I knew it. My uncle and I had hopped in his golf cart and sped through the trailer park and across A1A to a little parking lot next to a beach access, and walked down the wooden stairs battered and partially buried by the last hurricane of the season a couple of weeks before. We walked past the group, there, and they seemed happy, both in and completely out of time. It was the day after Thanksgiving, and it was nice and warm out, and we were going into the ocean. 

I was melancholy for a moment, looking back across the Atlantic (still warmer in November than the Pacific off Los Angeles is in August) at Ireland and thinking of my ancestors, but the waves came in again and again and I bobbed up and down in them as my uncle boogie boarded. We had the time together because my aunt and my cousins and my Aunt’s mom, who I figure has some kind of relation to me but since my Uncle is the blood one I don’t really know how to classify her except as the maker of excellent meatballs, were headed to the Outlets north of Daytona for some shopping.

I’m lucky that my uncle let me in on his solitude, I think he enjoyed regaling me with tales of the corrupt and foolish local officials who populate the news in north Florida as we drove over, and my questions about them as he came out to the deeper water to catch another wave. I know I enjoyed telling him that he wasn’t alone, the officials (and the developers I interacted with) in South Carolina were similarly loose with their grasp of law and sense. I know also that he loved my stories of attempted bribes.

I spent the time bobbing up and down and occasionally treading water or diving under big waves and feeling the power of the ocean in what was left of my hair. I spent it getting a sunburn on the tops of my shoulders which would remind me of my hubris but tan out nicely. I spent it thinking about how lucky I was that I could be there with family, in an interesting and fundamentally different place, and not have to brave the wilds of Thanksgiving travel back across the country. 

I’ve told my uncle since how much I appreciated his invitation down, and told my aunt how much her letting me in on making the sourdough and sausage stuffing and the other trimmings gave me joy, and it’s impossible to disconnect those feelings from an indelible sense of place that they shared with me whenever I needed it.

The St. Augustine Visitors' Bureau #3: Elsewhere Isn't Nowhere

Part 1 Here

Part 2 Here

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Traveling to Miami to settle some of his accounts, Anton Cermak did not see himself as conducting the official business he had been elected to as Mayor of Chicago. His pass on the Illinois Central had been issued to “Mayor of Chicago” with the assumption that the IC’s old friend Big Bill Thompson would be making use of it, and they had neglected to take it away from Mayor Cermak.

The first politician to ever deploy the “I didn’t come over on the Mayflower but I got here as soon as I could” line, Anton Cermak was a distinctly colorful character, an ostensible reformer with a highly checkered past, who governed as a sewer socialist even if he refused to admit such sympathies. His victory over Big Bill Thompson – on the shoulders of his fellow immigrants who, it turned out, did want “a World’s Fair Mayor” – was the last time until a blizzard elected Jane Byrne that the Mayor of Chicago wouldn’t be handpicked by the machine.

He had backed the wrong horse at the Democratic convention in 1932, his co-religionist Al Smith had been his choice, but Chicago was struggling. A right-wing revolt aligned with the defeated Mayor Thompson had significantly slowed collection of property tax, and Cermak sought federal assistance.

It was in service of that goal that he was traveling to Miami to meet the President-Elect. He slept most of the way down, his sixteen hour days on the fifth floor of City Hall trying to figure out how to stretch a budget pulled apart by the tax revolt had worn him down, he was realizing, to nothing. And then the train was turning South again, and pulling into the station in Gainesville for a meal and he was waking up ravenous.

As he gobbled down a plate of salisbury steak and rice and greens, he saw a poster behind the cook in the dining room with a lighthouse, striped in black and white swirls, rising over a giant Spanish-style manse and a small fort. St. Augustine, said the top of the poster in a sea-green font, Relax In Old World Luxury, said the bottom. He thought as he brought the salisbury steak – salty but otherwise under-spiced compared to what he was used to in the beer halls of Pilsen on the South Side of Chicago – to his mouth that he could really use an extra week there, relaxing. He would go to St. Augustine on the return trip, delay for a while, sit near the beach and remember his wife and how she loved the sea.

The little city was real to him as he got back on the train, and realer still as the train cut over to run along the coast toward Miami, and he was imagining vacationing, promise in his pocket to fill the municipal coffers with this New Deal of Roosevelt’s as he waited next to the stage in Miami, and he was thinking of climbing to the top of the lighthouse in St. Augustine, the one he’d seen in the poster in the station in Gainesville, as he extended his hand to shake FDR’s, and then he was thinking of nothing at all, the bullet famously redirected at the last moment by the whack on the arm holding the pistol delivered by a sharp-eyed woman’s swift purse, the assassin hitting the Mayor of Chicago instead of the future President of the United States.

In Miami today there is a monument at the spot where Anton Cermak was gunned down. The inscription is “Thank God it was me and not you” and perhaps that is a charitable interpretation of whatever Czech words issued from his mouth in the general direction of President-Elect Roosevelt as he fell clutching his chest, the anglophone Chicago Tribune reporter assuming a string of expletives and wanting to present a brave face to the world, when really what the falling mayor gasped with one of his last breaths was “I would like to have seen St. Augustine.”

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A. Philip Randolph, still the President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters after all these years, and Dr. Robert Hayling, a local dentist, were sitting down to a simple lunch in a small cafe on Riberia Street in the first week of December, 1963. Riberia Street south of King (named for the King of England by Tories), of course, in the Lincolnville section of St. Augustine. They were there to plan in comfort. Randolph, a child of Crescent City who had left for greener pastures, was on vacation and enjoying the town. Dr. Hayling had reminded him that it was a working vacation, and so they were working.

It was Randolph who had gotten Jackie Robinson to denounce the imprisonment of four teenagers who sat in at a Woolworth's, and it was Randolph who had connected Dr. Hayling directly to Martin Luther King. Dr. Hayling needed that connection to be made because the NAACP had threatened the revocation of the chapter of its St. Augustine branch. Dr. Hayling had had the temerity, after getting kidnapped and publicly beaten by the KKK, to insist on armed self-defense for the residents of the Lincolnville neighborhood, particularly on those nights when the Klan sent riders through the neighborhood shooting and throwing bombs.

They were planning for a visit by Dr. King to St. Augustine in the new year, and the problem kept coming up that they had never known someone from far away who had come for a visit. There wasn’t much in the Green Book about St. Augustine, and they’d been fighting this battle on their own. They’d been heard about and talked at from all around the country, from every corner of the movement, just for standing up for themselves. 

They lived, Dr. Hayling reminded Randolph, on a peninsula, surrounded by rivers and then by one of the most viciously and actively and aggressively racist communities of white folks in the entire country. Dr. Hayling was beginning to describe the details of his kidnapping by the KKK (and his later arrest by the Sheriff of St. John’s County for “assaulting” a mob of hundreds with his back as they hit him) when there was a loud rumble in the gravel parking lot outside and a pickup truck hauling a trailer pulled in.

On the trailer was a gleaming-if-slightly-battered Carolina blue 1963 Chevrolet Bel Air with the number 34 painted on the side in Unocal orange. A tall, balding man with a wide mustache stepped out of the pickup, and a second man, shorter and wider and darker, with an Esso ballcap on, got out of the passenger side. They walked around to the racecar, checked it was tied down well, and came inside. Dr. Hayling was up to greet them as they came through the door.

Dr. Hayling smiled past the taller man at Randolph and asked if he wasn’t standing in front of the fastest Black man in America. As a racing fan he was pretty sure he was, but he also knew that  he would annoy Randolph a little by saying a race car driver – whose machine topped out around 75 miles an hour on a good asphalt track – was faster than any Sleeping Car Porter in Randolph’s Brotherhood when a streamlined engine pulling Pullman cars could hit 120 on a flat straightaway. And then Wendell Scott told the dentist that as of this past Sunday in Jacksonville he was standing in front of the single fastest man in America regardless of color or creed.

Dr. Hayling offered to buy lunch for the race car driver and his one-man pit crew so that he could hear the story he’d already read in the paper, and Wendell Scott was happy to tell it. He had won, he said, but they had given ol’ Buck Baker the trophy until he protested, and they went back and counted the laps again and saw that it was, in fact, Wendell Scott who had crossed the line first, and then gone on to drive two more laps entirely while waiting for the checkered flag. They had revised the results, he said, and given him the money but left the trophy with Buck.

A. Philip Randolph turned slowly to Scott and said that there was no way they’d let him smile at a white lady anyway, and a knowing smile broke on Scott’s face as he remembered that Miss Florida had presented the trophy to Baker at the end of the race.

Dr. Hayling asked Scott why he was back, and he said something about meatloaf and reminded the dentist that he’d been in town working the weekend before, on the dirt track oval in St. Augustine, but he hadn’t gotten to see much of the town. He’d eaten some meatloaf over at the track they said was from this cafe, though, and it reminded him of his grandma’s so much that he had to come back. He couldn’t possibly stay too long, though, this was a detour already (though a celebratory one) through to Daytona to pick up replacement camshafts before he turned back north toward Savannah Motor Speedway.

They ate lunch and talked racing (Dr. Hayling was a fan of Scott’s and asked if he’d finally be getting real sponsorship after this win, and perhaps a car that wasn’t a hand-me-down from one of the other racers) and then the driver and his one-man entourage left and by that time Randolph had figured it out.

They can come if they mean to go somewhere else, he told Dr. Hayling, and they went to work. Dr. Hayling would invite Spring Breakers to visit him on the St. Augustine beaches, to come from far and wide and integrate Amelia Island and St. Augustine Beach and Vilano before they had their fun in Jacksonville and Daytona and Panama City.

–

The kids came, as requested, in solidarity with the folks who lived there but not to stay. Some of them ended up having to, so many were arrested integrating the beaches that a special camp was installed outside the jail. Eventually the power in the town just decided they’d drive hundreds of the Spring Breakers into the ocean, hoping they would drown. None did, there on the beach, those who could swim helped those who could not. The sheriff let out the folks from away, and hoped they hadn’t seen, but they’d known the place for what it was as soon as they got there.

Others came to learn for themselves how they could help by their actions. Among those arrested for sitting somewhere, together, which was illegal, were the mother of the governor of Massachusetts and three of her Main Line friends, all wives of Episcopalian bishops. 

Dr. King, who had come down to help in person, was arrested at a restaurant attached to a motor lodge in an old house built in the Flagler style, imitating the Spaniards but with elements of colonial revival. Dr. King had been trying to integrate the restaurant along with local activists.

From the jail in St. Augustine Dr. King wrote a Rabbi friend of his about the meaning of supporting the movement right there. The county made the largest mass arrest of Rabbis since the destruction of the second temple a little while later. They saw the place for what it looked like while they were there.

It’s hard to say that anyone else didn’t, after the manager of that same motor lodge famously spilled hydrochloric acid into the pool, so offended was he at the idea of people swimming together.

The circumstances, and the individuals who were responsible for them, chased Dr. Hayling out of town. And while it was bitter, he knew he’d figured the place out. He cheered the passage of the Civil Rights Act and was personally honored by the committee celebrating the 400th anniversary of the City (after the Governor of Florida, C. Farris Bryant, heard from President Johnson that he better make them) and then he disappeared to practice dentistry peacefully for another 20 years elsewhere, down the coast a ways, far away, near the new and growing communities working on the Space Coast.

The owners of the town papered over the problems of St. Augustine, and never really tried to do any more solving than they’d already tried, commissions and dialogue and anything, anything but action. Everyone who passed through had no choice but knowing what they were getting into.