3rin's View…

Last week, I had the opportunity to visit Bok Tower Gardens over in Lake Wales. Wawa, an East Coast gas station/convenience store chain, sponsored several free admission days at this historic landmark this summer. I was fortunate to grab a ticket.

The 14-acre property that encompasses the top of Iron Mountain was purchased by Edward Bok in 1922. He became enamored with the area while staying at his winter residence in Mountain Lake, the nearby gated community.

In keeping with Bok’s “gospel of beauty”, he hired Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. to transform the native shrub land into lush gardens, multiple ponds, and meandering pathways.

The central feature of the park, the Singing Tower, was Bok’s idea in homage to his childhood home in the Netherlands. Sparing no expense, it is one of the largest carillons in the world. The heaviest of the 60 bells weighs 22,400 pounds, while the smallest weighs a mere 16.

It’s a testament to Bok’s prestige (as former editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal) that none other than President Calvin Coolidge spoke at the opening ceremony on 02/01/1929. It was estimated that 75,000 people attempted to attend the event, completely overwhelming the tiny community of Lake Wales. According to reports, cafes ran out of food and gas stations ran out of fuel.

Perhaps that’s why Wawa sponsors these free days at the Gardens?

My bosses, a husband and wife team from California, stopped by my work yesterday afternoon. Though I’ve been with them for almost a year, this was the first time we’ve met in person.

It was a pleasant visit and they left me with a little bouquet as a parting gift. Such a sweet gesture!

Some prankster took advantage of a missing informational sign. Despite the poor spelling, I agree that the design would offer a great perch for a small mammal to view the river.

In light of how packed the southern tip of the Pinellas peninsula is now, it’s amazing how hard it was for the early settlers to convince others to join them.

The main difficulty was accessibility; depending on the route there are at least 5 miles of gulf that separate this area from the mainland while the overland journey is over 25 miles. In the 1860s, whether by steamboat or horse drawn wagon, travel would take most of a day.

It wasn’t until May 1, 1888 when the Orange Belt Railway was completed that the journey was shortened to a mere 3 hours. (Though, according to the St. Petersburg Museum of History, it took over a month for the first train to reach the town, loaded with freight and just one passenger.)

So, it’s easy to understand why St. Petersburg was eager to embrace air travel. In late 1913 the town was approached P.E. Falser and Tom Benoist, the inventor of the eponymous airboat. The duo landed on St. Pete/Tampa as the perfect location to test their novel idea, a regularly scheduled air service.

Just 10 years after the Wright brothers took flight, the deal was signed creating the St. Petersburg-Tampa Airboat Line – the world’s first airline!

The first plane left St. Pete on the first day of 1914, cutting travel time down to a mere 23 minutes! Benoist commented, “Some day people will be crossing oceans on airliners like they do on steamships today.” Sadly, the SPT Airboat Line only flew into May of that year but the airline industry was born.

The weather finally played nice and afforded me the opportunity to visit my beach. It had either been too ridiculously hot or there was too much lightning (no rain, mind you, just threats).

Tonight was just right and I enjoyed every minute of it, even if it wasn’t the most vivid of sunsets.

What should one do on a hot summer afternoon? Explore somewhere cool, like the St. Petersburg Museum of History. I had the exhibits pretty much to myself as I wandered through the city’s past.

One odd-shaped curio cabinet caught my eye and, of course, I couldn’t resist the “Press Here to View” button. I didn’t know what to expect but I was not prepared for a mummy; the actual 3,000-year-old mummified remains of an Egyptian woman.

How in the world did she end up here? Well, after the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, Egyptmania swept around the globe. Thousands of mummies (and related artifacts) were exported for display. In 1924, one of them ended up in a traveling carnival on a ship bound for Tampa.

When the ship docked it was in need of expensive repairs that the captain could not afford. So, in lieu of cash, the Port Authority accepted the mummy and her sarcophagus as payment. In 1925 “Our Lady of the Nile” was donated to the nascent St. Pete museum, where she’s been resting for almost 100 years.

This city never ceases to surprise me!

Even though I’m still not feeling great I took advantage of the cooler weather this morning to get some yard work done. Hey, when it’s cloudy and under 90 degrees in the summer in Florida one would be foolish not to (I’m sick, not stupid).

As I was mowing I came across this pepper shaker (talk about a random thing to find). This is how my mind works: salt shakers are typically accompanied by pepper shakers. Since Jimmy Buffett wrote Margaritaville down in Key West, it stands to reason that the salt he sings about must be somewhere in this state.

So, Jimmy, if you ever find your ‘lost shaker of salt’ and need its dark and spicy companion, give me a call.

(P.S. If none of that makes any sense to you, I blame my fever.)