CHAPTER I

SUN HUNTING

[Illustration]

[Illustration: President Harding, an occasional sun-hunter, slices one

into the palmettos on one of Miami Beach’s three links.]

SUN HUNTING

Adventures and Observations among the Native

and Migratory Tribes of Florida, including the

Stoical Time-Killers of Palm Beach, the

Gentle and Gregarious Tin-Canners

of the Remote Interior, and the

Vivacious and Semi-Violent

Peoples of Miami and

Its Purlieus

By

Kenneth L. Roberts

Author of _Why Europe Leaves Home_

INDIANAPOLIS

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1922

BY THE CURTIS PUBLISHING COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1922

BY THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY

_Printed in the United States of America._

PRESS OF

BRAUNWORTH & CO.

BOOK MANUFACTURERS

BROOKLYN, N. Y.

TO

JUAN PONCE DE LEON

WHO FOUND IN 1513

THAT FLORIDA WASN’T ALL IT WAS

CRACKED UP TO BE

BUT WHO LIKED IT WELL ENOUGH

TO GO BACK

THIS BOOK IS APPRECIATIVELY

DEDICATED

CONTENTS

BOOK ONE

THE TIME-KILLERS

Chapter Page

I Of time-killing in the French and English

manner--and of ancient and modern American

time-slaughterers 3

II Of the passage from winter to summer in one

day’s time--and of the habitat of some rare

specimens 8

III Of the peculiar differences between two sides

of a lake--of money odors--and of the

questers after Charley Schwab 13

IV Of the apotheosis of the bicycle--of the uses of

wheel-chairs--and of the mental activities

of chair-chauffeurs 18

V Of the telegram-expecters--of the date-guessers--and

of the statistic weevils 22

VI Of the changing of clothes--of the way they

wear ’em--and of the females of the dress-ferret

species 26

VII Of the fascinations of the beach--of the sand-hounds

from Odessa and elsewhere--and of

prudes and stylish stouts 30

VIII Of the Three Day Suckers--of true smartness--and

of the Buckwheats and the dead line 36

IX Of the smartest thing in Palm Beach--of large

amounts of money--and of the Old Guard 41

X Of those who wish to crash into society--and of

those who furnish the palpitating society

items 47

XI Of the Alibi Window--of the trick flasks and

canes--of drinkers frail and fat--and of one

conception of simplicity 50

XII Of nuts in the Coconut Grove--of Bradley’s--of

the relaxation and amusement of the

Beach Club-fellows--and of gambling in

general 55

XIII Of the divergences between Bradley’s and

Monte Carlo--of the idiosyncrasies of the

little white pill--of the oddities of fat players--of

time-killing pastimes--and of the wisdom

of Dionysius the Elder 62

BOOK TWO

THE TIN-CANNERS

I Of January in the North--of the winter pastimes

of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Walnut--and

of a penetrating chill 71

II Of a pronounced change of scene--of a daring

game of chance amid tropical scents--and

of the gloating of Charles Walnut and Herman

Blister 75

III Of migrants and migrations--of the true sun-hunter

and his desires--and of his uniform,

and his fluent assortment of equipment 79

IV Of the Tin-Can Tourists of the World--of immigrants

and other unsupervised and unsolicited

visitors, national and local--of cheap

skates--and of the reason why tin-canners do

not abound in Palm Beach 87

V Of portable bungalows--of the rheumatic dairyman--of

the little ole truck--of simple

pleasures and low expenditures 96

VI Of Mrs. Jarley, the original tin-canner--of the

two schools of tin-can thought--of the hard-boiled

bachelor with the condensed outfit--and

of folk who ride on the backs of their

necks 103

VII Of the migrant from Marion--of his fears--of

land at a nickel an acre--of sand fleas and

sand spurs--of loneliness and honeymooners--and

of the doctor who was run to death 110

VIII Of the marvelous sitting ability of the tin-canners--of

the parks in which they sit--of

the horseshoe bugs and the checker and

domino beetles--of the delicate movements

of a celebrated horseshoe tosser--and of the

International Horseshoe Club 115

BOOK THREE

TROPICAL GROWTH

I Of the enthusiasm of all growing things in

Florida--of paw-paws and prospectuses and

perfect thirty-fours--of fiends in human

shape--and of the watchfulness of the natives

for insults 125

II Of hotel rates--of mosquitoes--and of the

outcry against the Shipping Board for daring

to mention Europe 130

III Of palm trees--of varieties of fish--and of fruit

and liars and Baron Munchausen 134

IV Of Miami and of tropical growth--of the growing

of a shingle into a bungalow--of the

population of Miami in 1980--and of the

pronunciation of Miami 137

V Of real-estate dealers--of the large handsome

salesmen--of noisy auctions--of absolute

and unabsolute auctions--and of prices for

every pocketbook 143

VI Of subdivisions, wise and otherwise--of landscape

atrocities--of small farms and farmers--and

of fascinating strawberry and tomato

statistics 150

VII Of the suspicious stories concerning the mango--of

the pet mango of the Miamians--and

of its superiority to other things 156

VIII Of the Everglades and of the two seasons obtaining

in that damp locality--and of grass,

fancy and otherwise 161

IX Of the old Miami and the new Miami--of differences

between Miami Beach and Palm

Beach--of the scenic possibilities in floating

coconuts and the activities of John S.

Collins 165

X Of the arrival of Carl Fisher in Miami--of

Fisher’s feverish imagination and violent

dreams--of the despair of Fisher’s friends--and

of the evolution of a jungle 172

XI Of expensive expenses and heated ice-rinks--of

lily on lily that o’erlace the sea--and of

the boneheadedness of most of the human

race 178

XII Of one-piece and two-fifths-piece bathing suits--of

the Honorable William Jennings Bryan

and his activities--of bootleggers--of the

sanctimonious Haig and Haig boys--and of

rum in general 183

XIII Of Florida fishing--of the tigerish barracuda

and the surprised-looking dolphin--of the

unconventional habits of the whip-ray and

the varying estimates of Cap’n Charley

Thompson--and of the conservative raving

of the Miami prospectuses 191

BOOK ONE

THE TIME-KILLERS

SUN HUNTING

CHAPTER I

OF TIME-KILLING IN THE FRENCH AND ENGLISH MANNER--AND OF ANCIENT AND

MODERN AMERICAN TIME-SLAUGHTERERS

People who have any time to kill are usually filled with a deep and

intense desire to kill it in some spot far removed from their usual

haunts.

This desire is not so much due to their wish to avoid making a mess

around the house as it is to the peculiar mental obsession known to the

French as “homesickness for elsewhere.” French society has been

afflicted for years with a passionate desire to be somewhere that it

isn’t. A Parisian with time to kill aims to move up to the clear cold

air of the mountains where he can kill lots of it. When he gets to the

mountains, it suddenly occurs to him that possibly he might find a

little more time to kill at the seashore, where the eye may roam at will

across the boundless and unobstructed waves. So he moves to the seashore

and at once begins to suspect that in Paris one can find more weapons

with which to cause time to die a lingering and horrible death. So he

moves back to Paris, where he once more hunts restlessly for other means

to kill time. He has the homesickness for elsewhere.

The English, too, have it to a marked degree. All Englishmen who have

incomes larger than two hundred guineas a year own tea baskets with

which they go off to distant heaths or popular woods on bank holidays

and week-ends for the purpose of killing time and burying it with the

appropriate funeral exercises. They are all the time running up to the

moors for a bit of rough shooting, or over to Switzerland for a bit of

sheeing, or off to a country-house for a bit of punting or

Scotch-drinking, or down to Brighton for a week-end. An English week-end

is sadly misnamed, inasmuch as it usually consists of Friday, Saturday,

Sunday and Monday, with a bit of Thursday and Tuesday thrown in for good

measure.

Of late years, the American people have been growing increasingly

proficient at time-killing. Forty years ago, the average American,

confronted with a little extra time, didn’t know what to do with it.

Usually he took it into the front parlor and sat around on haircloth

furniture with it, and became so sick of it that he never wanted to see

its face again. If he felt within him the primitive urge to take it

somewhere and kill it, he hesitated to do so because the roads were bad,

automobiles hadn’t been invented, and the South was only regarded as the

place where the Civil War started. Distances were great. Few people

cared to travel, because it was generally believed that a person who

absented himself from business more than one working day out of every

five years was a loose, dangerous and depraved character. One of the

most exciting things to do forty years ago was to put on a striped

flannel coat and play croquet on the front lawn.

To-day, however, America has caught the germs of “homesickness for

elsewhere” from the French and English. Florida has been reclaimed from

the swamps and the Indians, the small automobile has been put within the

means of stevedores, cooks, second-story workers and moderately

successful story-writers, and golf trousers may be worn in western towns

without causing the wearer to be shot. A road is cursed fluently by an

automobilist if it is bad enough to get his wheel-spokes muddy. The

business man who can’t knock off work for two or three months a year is

regarded pityingly as being either a back number, feeble-minded, or a

poor man. All of these things being so, Americans with time to kill can

take it farther from home and kill it with more thoroughness than any

other people on earth. They go into their time-killing with more energy

than do Europeans. The European is usually content to do his

time-killing within three hundred miles of home. The American is never

content unless he can travel from fifteen hundred to three thousand

miles, and wind up with an orgy of time-killing that would make a

professional executioner look by comparison like the president of a

Dorcas society.

CHAPTER II

OF THE PASSAGE FROM WINTER TO SUMMER IN ONE DAY’S TIME--AND OF THE

HABITAT OF SOME RARE SPECIMENS

It is in Florida that the American time-killer may be found in all his

glory; and the largest, most perfect and most brilliantly colored

specimens are to be found at Palm Beach. It is at Palm Beach that one

finds the very rare variety measuring twenty minutes from tip to tip.

One can best understand why it is that winter-bound northerners select

Florida as the scene of their time-killing by following in their

footsteps and boarding a Florida-bound night train in a northern city

during a heavy blizzard.

Early the next morning, when one disentangles the bedclothes from his

neck and elevates the trick shade of the sleeping-car window after the

usual severe struggle, one finds that the snow has nearly disappeared.

The eye is wearied by the flat plains of North Carolina, relieved only

by negro shanties and scrub pines. By afternoon North Carolina has

merged into South Carolina. The flatness continues with unbounded

enthusiasm; but there is no snow and the air is milder. The pines are

marked with peculiar herring-bone gashes, whence flows turpentine, the

painter’s delight. Piney odors, vaguely reminiscent of tar soap, sheep

dip and cold-remedies, float through the half-opened windows. Later that

evening, as one returns to the dining-car to recover the hat which one

has forgotten in the excitement of tipping the waiter, one hears

frequent shrill frog-choruses from the pools beside the tracks. By

midnight one is ringing for the porter to tear himself from his slumbers

among the shoes in the smoking compartment and start the electric fans.

One’s rest is troubled by the heat and the increasing shrillness of the

frog-choruses.

On the second morning the rising sun discloses a limitless expanse of

flatness, dotted with occasional palm trees and covered with a scrubby

growth of near-palms or palmettos. The sun is hot and red. A black

ribbon of asphalt road parallels the railroad; and at intervals along it

appear flocks of flivvers nesting drowsily among the palms and the

tin-can tourists. There is plenty of glaring white sand, and plenty of

stagnant water. The air is full of swallows, and an occasional pelican

flops languidly alongside the train, gazing pessimistically at the

passengers.

The traveler perspires lightly and marvels at the thought that it was

only night before last when he slipped on a piece of ice and got half a

peck of snow down the back of his neck. He remembers that it is a great

and glorious country--a fact which his contemplation of the antics of

Congress had caused him to forget.

Occasionally the train flashes past little towns sitting hotly in the

sun and sand among a few orange and grapefruit trees. This is Florida,

and the land looks as though it were worth about a nickel an acre--just

as it has always looked until some one develops it and begins to sell

off corner lots at a paltry five thousand dollars apiece.

Around breakfast time--a mere thirty-six hours since the train emerged

from its northern blizzard and snow-drifts--the train crosses a

shimmering strip of blue water and comes to rest beside a hotel that

seems, at first glance, to be at least ten miles long. It stretches off

so far into the distance that people up at the other end appear to be

hull-down. In reality it is only about half a mile long, and only about

five hundred times larger than the Mousam House at Kennebunk, Maine.

On the station platform are women in satin skirts, gauzy waists and

diamond bracelets. Young men in white trousers dash up and down the

platform on bicycles. The air is soft and balmy. Palm trees stretch off

into the distance in every direction. Wheel-chairs, propelled by

dignified-looking negroes who sit on bicycle-seats directly behind the

chairs and pedal vigorously, move hither and yon in a stately manner.

Through the palm trees one catches glimpses of white yachts riding at

anchor on blue water.

A wheel-chair stops at the edge of the station platform. In it are

seated a dignified gentleman in white flannels, and a gracious lady in a

satin skirt and a sweater covered with neat lightning effects in red,

green and orange zigzags. One wonders whether this can be J. Pierpont

Morgan or Charley Schwab. Then one hears the gracious lady whisper

excitedly to the dignified gentleman: “Do you suppose that’s Charley

Schwab or J. Pierpont Morgan over there?” and hears the dignified

gentleman reply in a hoarse undertone: “Shut up, or they’ll think we’re

boobs!”

This is Palm Beach, the very center of the winter time-killing

industry.

CHAPTER III

OF THE PECULIAR DIFFERENCES BETWEEN TWO SIDES OF A LAKE--OF MONEY

ODORS--AND OF THE QUESTERS AFTER CHARLEY SCHWAB

Palm Beach is a long narrow strip of land which is separated from the

mainland by a long narrow body of water known as Lake Worth, and by a

sudden increase in living expenses. On the mainland side of Lake Worth

is the rising young city of West Palm Beach, where one is not afraid--as

he usually is in Palm Beach--to offer a storekeeper or a newsboy a

nickel lest he should regard it as some strange, unknown foreign coin.

West Palm Beach is full of ordinary people who are unacquainted with

wheel-chairs and think nothing of walking two or three blocks, or even

as much as half a mile if the necessity arises. They frequently get

along for days at a time without spending more than two dollars and

eighty-five cents a day.

West Palm Beach has the same sort of climate that Palm Beach has, but

the air of the place is somehow different. At Palm Beach one has the

feeling that he is breathing the very same air that the world’s greatest

bankers and society people are breathing, whereas over in West Palm

Beach one doesn’t know or care who has been breathing the air. That is

why so many people find the Palm Beach climate very invigorating, but

always feel that the climate of West Palm Beach leaves them a little

weak and tired.

Palm Beach, then, is a long narrow strip of land with the ocean on one

side and Lake Worth on the other. The largest hotel, which has room for

thirteen hundred paying guests at any one time, fronts on Lake Worth;

while the next largest hotel is directly across the narrow strip of

land, fronting on the ocean. In between are golf links, and roadways

edged with palms and avenues of towering, feathery, bluish-green

Australian pines and simple little cottages that couldn’t have cost a

cent more than forty or fifty thousand dollars, and modest little shacks

that might have set their owners back half a million or so, and

club-houses and bathing pavilions and more palms and broad white

roadways and men in white flannels and women in diamonds and perfumery

and clinging gowns--and more palms.

Over everything there is an odor of money. Every breeze that blows is

freighted with its rich, fragrant musky smell; and every person that one

encounters on the street or in a hotel lobby seems to be about to spend

a lot of it or to have just finished spending a lot of it. Some people

seem to like the odor and some don’t seem to care so much for it. Some,

in fact, seem from their expressions to think that this money-odor has a

great deal in common with smoldering rubber or asafetida.

The impression that Palm Beach is bound to make on any newcomer is one

of general discomfort. Everybody seems to be staring critically and

curiously at everybody else--due, of course, to the fact that almost

everybody hopes or suspects that everybody else may prove to be Charley

Schwab or Percy Rockefeller or E. T. Stotesbury or one of those

prominent society people who part their names on the side.

People who enter and leave the hotel dining-room don’t seem to know what

to do with their hands. They pretend to an embarrassing ease of manner,

which leaves everybody acutely conscious that they are very uneasy. The

people at the tables can’t keep their eyes off the people at other

tables. The hotel lobbies are congested before lunch and after dinner

with persons who have no interest in any scenery except that which other

people are wearing. Although the beach at Palm Beach is many miles in

length, all the bathers, near bathers and bather-watchers cram

themselves each noon into a few square yards of beach and watch one

another like a gathering of lynxes.

People dawdle along the palm-fringed avenues and stare at one another

blankly and questioningly. People sit self-consciously in wheel-chairs

and look searchingly at people in other wheel-chairs. Bicyclists wheel

languidly along the white roads and gaze intently at every one. “Are you

Charley Schwab?” each eye seems to ask mutely. “Are you one of the

Stotesburys? Are you anybody?”

CHAPTER IV

OF THE APOTHEOSIS OF THE BICYCLE--OF THE USES OF WHEEL-CHAIRS--AND OF

THE MENTAL ACTIVITIES OF CHAIR-CHAUFFEURS

Palm Beach is the heaven of the bicycle. In other parts of the world it

has sunk in popular esteem until it is little else than a conveyer of

telegraph boys and an instrument for the removal of skin from children’s

knees. But in Palm Beach it shares with the wheel-chair the honor of

being the chariot of wealth and beauty.

Flocks of bicycles are parked beside every hotel entrance. Broad and

flawless sidewalks are reserved for bicycles and wheel-chairs. The

pedestrian who sets foot on them does so at his own risk, and is more

than apt, if he does so, to have his coat driven several inches into his

back by the front wheel of a bicycle.

There is no bicycle costume. Beautiful lady bicyclists wear anything:

rakish sport clothes, fragile afternoon gowns, flowing costumes with

long capes, and more extreme evening gowns. Large numbers of girls

persist in bicycling while wearing tight skirts, so that the general

effect is somewhat similar to that of a pony ballet made up as messenger

boys.

On side-streets, one frequently sees the almost forgotten spectacle of a

frail débutante learning to ride. On the dance floor she would float

along as lightly as a tuft of thistledown. On a bicycle she wabbles

heavily and helplessly from side to side, collapsing at intervals

against her instructor with all the crushing weight of a California

Redwood.

The wheel-chair is the favorite Palm Beach method of locomotion, and it

is the only form of exercise ever taken by many Palm Beach visitors.

Many old inhabitants claim that wheel-chair riding is excellent for the

liver, and devote at least two hours to it every afternoon. The negro

chair chauffeurs drive the chair along by vigorous pedaling, and the

alternate leg stroke gives the chair a gentle side to side motion which

acts as a mild massage on the occupant. Two hours of such exercise is

considered to be about enough by the most conservative Palm Beachers. It

is their belief that the persons who ride for three hours run a great

risk of over-exerting themselves.

The chair-chauffeurs, in addition to possessing tireless legs, are

usually supplied with a vast fund of knowledge. This is most desirable;

for many visitors speak to no one except the hotel clerks, the

news-stand girls, the waiters and their wheel-chair chauffeurs during

their entire stay. It frequently happens that their chair chauffeurs are

their only guides, philosophers and friends; so the chauffeurs find it

very valuable to be fairly familiar with all Palm Beach estates, to have

a comprehensive grasp of the flora and

[Illustration: The living-room of the Everglades Club, smart and

exclusive retreat of Palm Beach’s smartest habitués.]

[Illustration: Bradley’s, the Monte Carlo of America.]

[Illustration: The Casino at Palm Beach, where the photographers catch

the society favorites reading from left to right.]

fauna of the south, and to be conversant with all financial and social

matters appertaining to the old-timer. They have also found that a frank

exposition of their own philosophical meditations on men and things will

sometimes arouse the interest and stimulate the generosity of their

charges. “What sort of ducks are those, George?” usually brings the

intelligent answer: “Those ain’t no sort, suh. Those is just ducks.” A

query as to whether a wheel-chair is harder to push with one or two

people in it brought the reply that there “wasn’t no difference.” But to

push an empty one is the hardest. Yes, suh! Must be because no money is

being made. Yes, suh!

CHAPTER V

OF THE TELEGRAM-EXPECTERS--OF THE DATE-GUESSERS--AND OF THE

STATISTIC-WEEVILS

There are many lonely men and women at Palm Beach who almost cry with

gratitude when somebody speaks to them. They are like many Congressmen,

who are big people at home, but of less account in Washington than a

head porter. Out of all the people who flock to Palm Beach to spend

large amounts of money and bask in the soothing rays that emanate from

the socially prominent, ninety per cent. might be compared to very small

potatoes in a two hundred-acre lot. Even the majority of the people

whose names are names to conjure with in Palm Beach society can’t be

found in the pages of _Who’s Who_.

The majority of men who pay the bills at the big hotels are forced to

struggle hard to kill time when they have finished their golf-playing

for the day. Enormous numbers of them seem to spend most of their spare

time sitting dolefully around hotel lobbies and expecting telegrams that

never come. If you fall into conversation with any man in any Palm Beach

hotel lobby, he invariably explains his inactivity by saying that he is

expecting a telegram.

Next to expecting telegrams, the most popular Palm Beach time-killer

seems to consist of wondering what day of the week it is. Sneak up

behind any two important-looking men who seem to be discussing affairs

of moment, and the chances are ten to one that you will hear the

following weighty conversation:

“Is to-day Tuesday or Wednesday? I sort of lose track down here.”

“To-day? Why to-day’s Wednesday. No; hold on! It’s Thursday, isn’t it?”

“No, I don’t think so. I think it’s either Tuesday or Wednesday. Still,

I don’t know: it might be Thursday.”

“No, I don’t believe it’s Thursday. I was expecting a telegram on

Tuesday, and it would have had to come before Thursday. I guess it’s

Wednesday.”

“Yes, I guess it is. I thought for a while it was Tuesday.”

“Oh, I don’t believe it’s Tuesday.”

“No, I guess it’s Wednesday, all right. That telegram ought to be here

by now. How long are you staying here?”

“I don’t know. I’m expecting a telegram and I can’t tell till it gets

here.”

Having reached a comparatively ripe intimacy by this time, it is almost

inevitable that one of them should advance one of the thousand

statistical questions that are so frequently encountered at Palm Beach,

such as “Did you ever stop to think how many nails it took to build this

hotel?” A few seconds later both of them have produced envelopes and are

figuring busily.

Men who have traveled thousands of miles for the purpose of killing time

at Palm Beach will frequently argue for two or three hours, and figure

all over the backs of eight or ten envelopes and a couple of golf scores

in an attempt to decide whether or not the value of all the diamond

bracelets in Palm Beach would be sufficient to secure economic control

of Russia. Newcomers to Palm Beach, knowing that America’s greatest

financiers flock there during the season, frequently make the mistake of

thinking that two men knitting their brows over a lot of figures are

probably two great money-kings working up a scheme to corner the

nation’s hop crop. In reality they are two ordinary citizens killing a

little time by choking it to death with useless statistics.

CHAPTER VI

OF THE CHANGING OF CLOTHES--OF THE WAY THEY WEAR ’EM--AND OF THE FEMALES

OF THE DRESS-FERRET SPECIES

Compared with the good old days when dresses hooked up the back in such

an intricate fashion that one needed blueprints, diagrams and charts in

order to hook up a dress properly, there is practically no

dress-changing at Palm Beach nowadays. In the old days the womenfolk

spent at least forty per cent. of their waking hours changing their

clothes. They changed their clothes whenever the wind changed. They

changed their clothes every time a train came in. They couldn’t eat or

go out in a wheel-chair or put on a string of beads or take a drink

without changing their clothes. Their menfolk were kept constantly busy

hooking them up the back.

To-day things are different. Dresses no longer hook up the back with

their erstwhile whole-heartedness. Careful and competent observers state

that many present-day dresses are safely attached to the human frame by

as few as three hooks, all of which can be reached without dislocating

an arm or displacing any vertebrae, and that an equal number of dresses

are merely slid on over the head and worn just as they fall, without any

further formality. A great many women at Palm Beach wear only two

costumes each day--one for morning and afternoon that shows almost

everything below the hips and one for evening that shows almost

everything above the waist.

Not so many years ago a woman who wore only two dresses in one day at

Palm Beach would have been regarded as mentally unbalanced or

disgustingly pauperized.

The real snappy dressers, however, get in and out of three costumes a

day; while it is not at all unusual to find prominent society

camp-followers staggering in and out of as many as five and six daily

costumes. How they ever do it will ever remain a mystery to us simple

writers and oatmeal-manufacturers and mattress-makers from the buckwheat

belt.

Every morning directly after breakfast, the hotel lobbies fill up with

women who want to talk about dress. The Palm Beach dailies and weeklies

cater to their pitiable weakness by specializing on thrilling

information of this nature. So far as the female contingent at Palm

Beach is concerned, an economic conference in Europe or a presidential

utterance on the Bonus hasn’t a chance with such news as what Mrs. Harry

Payne Whitney wore at the Beach Club last night.

Outside the warm sun may be beating down upon golden sands and an azure

sea, the wind rustling softly through the palms and the bland air

thrilling to the melodious murmur of the wheel-chair boys as they point

out the Stotesbury cottage with caustic comments on the height of the

Stotesbury wall. Yet the dress-ferrets sit on with bated breaths in the

cool gloom of the hotel lobbies while the papers inform their enthralled

readers that:

“Very smart was the slate colored strictly tailored suit worn by Mrs.

Aurelius Vandersouse, Jr., at a recent Poinciana luncheon. Her hat was

of a tone of straw perfectly harmonizing with the suit and bore only a

flat bow of tomato-wire for trimming. The Honorable Mrs. D. Dryver

Flubyer’s suit was fashioned of an imported bed-ticking fabric guiltless

of any embellishment. Her chapeau was fashioned of the same fabric. Mrs.

J. Eaton Swank wore a clinging gown of fromage-de-brie crêpe in a light

heliotrope shade, fashioned in a one-piece style, with flowing sleeves

and uneven hem, whose folds clung gracefully to the tall slender

wearer.”

That’s the stuff to give the Palm Beach Battalion of Dress. Like Bosco,

they eat it alive. They are veritable cormorants for it.

CHAPTER VII

OF THE FASCINATIONS OF THE BEACH--OF THE SAND-HOUNDS FROM ODESSA AND

ELSEWHERE--AND OF PRUDES AND STYLISH STOUTS

At half past eleven every morning, stimulated by the early morning talk

of dress, all the feminine population of Palm Beach, accompanied by all

obtainable male escorts, set out from their hotels and homes in

wheel-chairs for their daily pilgrimage to the beach.

The beach is not prized by Palm Beach visitors because of its bathing

facilities, but because of the perfect spirit of camaraderie and

democracy which reigns there. A Philadelphia Biddle is just as apt as

not to come along and accidentally rub damp sand on a South Bend Smith.

Anything may happen. A Vanderbilt may ask you what time it is.

There is no distinction on the beach itself between the people who

emigrated from Montana to Fifth Avenue back in ’01 and the people who

emigrated from Odessa to Houston Street back in ’91. Both of them have

the same funny knobs on their knees; and there are lots of

them--especially of the Odessa set.

The beach is the only place in Palm Beach where everybody has an equal

chance; and there everybody uses the same ocean and sits around in the

same sand in almost hopeless confusion. Things are so congested that if

one leans back carelessly and braces himself by sticking his hand down

in the sand, the chances are excellent that a couple of ladies from

Kansas City or Boston will come staggering along with their eyes fixed

raptly on Mrs. B. Gurney Munn or Mrs. Jerome Bonaparte and sheer off two

or three of one’s fingers with their French heels.

The only portion of the beach which anybody considers worth using is the

portion directly in front of the casino, which is a large, gorgeous,

white plaster bath-house with an outdoor swimming pool and polite

attendants who are always appearing at inopportune moments and helping

patrons to do things which they could do much better alone--such, for

example, as removing a towel from a hook or lifting a brush and comb

from a shelf.

Many people garbed in elaborate dresses stand on the terrace in front of

the casino and stare down at the people on the beach, while the people

on the beach stare up at them. On chairs on the beach there are many

other elaborately gowned women who examine every one closely and are

closely examined by every one.

Down in front of the entire mob stand large numbers of professional

photographers who keep a careful lookout for exciting costumes and

prominent faces, and constantly snap little groups of laughing people

who subsequently appear in leading Sunday papers or monthly magazines

over legends like: “Far from Northern Snows: a happy society group on

the Palm Beach sands: from left to right, J. Edge Smush, Mrs. B. Goodwin

Eezy, the Honorable Mrs. Claribel Custard, I. Winken Ogle, Miss Patricia

Swaddle. Behind the feet at the right, Perry Peevish, Jr.”

Every little while the photographers find some one who is prominent and

pretty without being too much overweight and overdressed; and when they

do, they coax her out to an unoccupied section of beach and arrange her

in a position of unstudied ease and graceful carelessness, and shoot

half a dozen pictures of her admiring the distant horizon with a gay,

unaffected, girlish laugh.

Everything on the beach is so simple and natural and wholesome that one

can’t help but like it. Then, too, one never gets that offensive, salty,

seaweedy odor of ocean that one is apt to get on the New England coast,

owing to the ocean odors being completely overwhelmed by the rare and

powerful French perfumes that are worn by many elements of Palm Beach

society. If one closed his eyes, he might think that he was at a

perfumery show and that somebody had kicked over all the bottles.

Palm Beach is not exactly what one would call a Prude’s Paradise, but a

prude can feel more at ease on the beach at Palm Beach than at any other

resort in Florida. This is due to the fact that women are not allowed to

appear on the beach with any portion of the leg uncovered. A policeman

is stationed on the beach to see that this rule is enforced, and there

is a great rejoicing among all the local prudes, who--like all prudes

throughout the world--see evil where there is none, and pass blindly by

the evils that every one except themselves can see.

This rule has brought about one great benefit in that it has prevented

large numbers of ill-advised and otherwise charming stylish stouts from

rolling down their bathing stockings and exposing too much knee. Any

rule that does this is a good rule--and it is generally agreed that

there are more stylish stouts at Palm Beach than at any other resort on

earth.

CHAPTER VIII

OF THE THREE DAY SUCKERS--OF TRUE SMARTNESS--AND OF THE BUCKWHEATS AND

THE DEAD-LINE

When the bathing hour has passed into history, the merry bathers and

clothes-wearers sally forth in search of lunch. The ordinary run of Palm

Beach visitors eat their lunch at their hotels. This act almost

automatically stamps them as Buckwheats, or Three Day Suckers, or people

who aren’t Smart. A Buckwheat is a coarse, rude, barbaric person who is

addicted to the secret and loathsome vices of eating buckwheat cakes for

breakfast and not spending money recklessly.

A Three Day Sucker is a person who only stays a few days at Palm Beach.

As a time-killer he is not regarded with any respect. He travels so far

to kill time that he hasn’t any time left to kill when he gets there.

This is not regarded as smart. Any one who stays less than two weeks is

not viewed with favor by people who stay a month or more, and who know

how important smartness is. If one wishes to have the respect of the

cigar-counter clerks and the mail clerks and the head waiters and other

Palm Beach people who--as the ultra-refined advertisements say--matter,

one must above all things be smart. You might as well be dead at Palm

Beach as not be smart.

Certain things are smart and certain things are not smart. It is smart,

for example, for a man to go without a hat. It is smart to ride a

bicycle. Any article of feminine wearing apparel that is essentially

useless is smart. It is smart to speak of a thing as smart. It is not at

all smart to tell a Palm Beacher that you would gladly disembowel him

when you hear him use the word “smart” for the fiftieth time.

None of the big Palm Beach hotels rents rooms without meals. One must

pay for his meals as well. Two people at most of the big hotels pay a

minimum rate of about thirty-five dollars a day for the two--which is

about the amount from which the same people would have to separate

themselves at any of the big New York or Chicago or Boston or Washington

hotels by the time they had finished paying for their food. But if one

wishes to be smart at Palm Beach, one mustn’t lunch or dine at the hotel

where one’s meals are included on his bill. It is very buckwheat to do

such a thing: very uncouth: very hick and very rough-neck: not, in a

word, smart. That is why the desirable Palm Beach habitués, at the

height of the season, find it difficult to spend less than a hundred

dollars apiece per day. One can’t indulge in games of chance or keep

many wheel-chairs on that amount; but if one is reasonably careful and

content to be only moderately smart, one can get along fairly well for a

hundred dollars a day.

The truly smart person strives always to pay for two meals where one

would normally be paid for. He strives to pay for one that he eats and

for one that nobody eats. If one is living at the Poinciana, one should

make an effort to lunch or dine at the Breakers or at the Country Club

or at the Beach Club or at the Everglades Club, or one of the cottages.

It is a fascinating system, and is based on the familiar society theory

that the more useless a thing is, the smarter it is.

One of the smartest--in a society sense--of all the persons that come to

Palm Beach is a man who never eats at the hotel where he lives, and who

keeps a flock of twelve wheel-chairs always in attendance on him. Day

and night his twelve wheel-chairs are waiting for him and his friends.

They are used about an hour a day--but it is very smart to keep them

waiting: frightfully smart. Useless and therefore smart.

The head waiters in the restaurants become very proficient at

distinguishing those who are smart from those who are not smart. In the

dining-room of the largest hotel there is a cross-strip of green carpet

which is known as the dead-line. The people who sit between the entrance

and the dead-line have been carefully looked over by the head waiter and

put in the smart class. But the people who are put on the kitchen side

of the dead-line are dubs and Buckwheats in the judgment of the head

waiter. Once people are put below the dead-line, they rarely have a

chance to come up for air, but are doomed to stay down among the other

Buckwheats for the remainder of their visit.

CHAPTER IX

OF THE SMARTEST THING IN PALM BEACH--OF LARGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY--AND OF

THE OLD GUARD

The smartest thing at Palm Beach is the Everglades Club. The Everglades

Club is so smart that it almost gives itself a pain. It has only a few

over four hundred members, but these four hundred include names that

make a society editor’s scalp tingle, and control so much money and

jewels that the mere mention of them is enough to make any normal

burglar tremble all over.

The Everglades Club building was started in the summer of 1918 by Paris

Singer, who is a wealthy society man, as a hospital for convalescent

officers. The war was over, however, before the building was ever used

as a hospital; and it immediately occurred to the smartest of the Palm

Beach colony that the building was exactly the thing to use for a smart

club where really smart people could go off by themselves and be too

exclusive for words. The proposition was put up to Paris Singer, who saw

the force of it; and that’s how the Everglades Club started. The

initiation fee and yearly dues might be expected to be about as large as

the national debt, but in reality they amount to something like one

hundred dollars initiation fee and fifty dollars yearly dues. The club

has built a very smart and attractive apartmenthouse within a stone’s

throw of the parent building; and in it club members can rent small but

smart apartments for a mere twenty-five hundred dollars a season--and

there are several Maine summer resorts where one pays as much and gets

much less for his money.

The club has its own golf links and tennis courts; and it has a

restaurant whose chef could easily enter a cheffing contest with the

leading Parisian chefs with an excellent chance to win the

diamond-studded skillet, or the seventeen-jeweled egg-beater. It is my

fixed belief that if old M’sieu Marguery, who invented Filet of Sole

Marguery, could have been led into the dining-room of the Everglades

Club and placed where he could look out through the palms to the placid

waters of Lake Worth, and handed a platter of Pompano Meuniere--it is my

fixed belief, I say, that old M’sieu Marguery would have put his head

down in his hands and cried like a child to think that he could have

doubled his fortune if he could have started serving Pompano that way

thirty years ago.

The interior fixtures of the Everglades Club are of the proper sort to

go with such food. The walls are hung with sixteenth century tapestries,

and the dining-room is wainscoted with oak from the interior of a

Spanish monastery.

There was some talk at one time of covering the wall of one room with

silver plates made by flattening the silver cocktail shakers of the

club members. This was never done, however; and it is probable that the

members found other uses for their shakers.

It would be idle to attempt to estimate with any accuracy the amount of

money represented by members of the Everglades Club. If they were

pushed, they could easily dig up one billion dollars among them.

While we are speaking in billions instead of in mere beggarly millions,

it might be appropriate to mention that the most astute Palm Beach

estimaters figure that the thirteen hundred guests who fill the Royal

Poinciana Hotel at the height of the season, if placed in one room and

carefully assayed, would yield at least two billion dollars.

The Country Club is another smart place at which to lunch or dine. There

is no restaurant in Europe to my knowledge that is able to produce a

better dinner than the Palm Beach Country Club, especially if one leaves

it, as the saying goes, to François. François is the head waiter; and

he works in conjunction with a chef named Marius, who inherited most of

his recipes from a gifted relative in the south of France, and who

spends a large part of his time when not cooking in fearing that

somebody will solve the recipes. The chief object of the Country Club is

to provide a golfing retreat from the Buckwheats and the Three Day

Suckers, who usually break for the hotel golf links immediately on

arrival. Consequently the links which are open to the Buckwheats are apt

to become so congested that if one doesn’t stick rigidly in his place in

the golf procession, he is more than apt to get a couple of golf balls

in the side of the head and then have to stand aside for two hours while

a long parade of golfers and near-golfers hacks its way past him. So the

smart golfers go to the Country Club. It is there that one finds the Old

Guard of Palm Beach.

The Old Guard is a hide-bound organization of ardent golfers who know

all the intimate personal scandal about practically every dollar that

has changed hands in North America since the Dutch purchased Manhattan

Island from the Indians for twenty-four dollars, and threw in enough rum

to provide magnificent hang-overs for the families of the original

owners.

One must have been a resident of Palm Beach for five years before he is

allowed to join the Old Guard, the theory being that unless a golfer has

lived there for five years, he is not thoroughly conversant with the

essential features of Palm Beach gossip and will be apt to interrupt a

calm and quiet game of golf to ask who the G. Daley Squabbles are going

to marry when they have divorced each other, or some other equally

irrelevant and unnecessary question.

CHAPTER X

OF THOSE WHO WISH TO CRASH INTO SOCIETY--AND OF THOSE WHO FURNISH THE

PALPITATING SOCIETY ITEMS

The business of being smart and appearing at the proper places at the

proper hour is merely the accepted method of killing time with many Palm

Beachers; but with many others it is as serious as the death of a near

relative. Palm Beach is well sprinkled with people who are determined to

break into New York society, and who have selected Palm Beach as the

place to drive the entering wedge because results can be obtained there

with greater speed, with less expense and with more noise than in any

other section of the country.

A young New Yorker with a small income broke into society with a crash

and married, not so very long ago, a beautiful widow with a

strangle-hold on society and a fortune that kept a couple of income tax

experts working a month each year. He explained his system to a friend

of mine with the peculiar half childish and half idiotic frankness that

may frequently be encountered in the upper crust of society. If he had

attempted to break in by way of New York, he said, he would have spent

all his money on dinners and luncheons; and about as much notice would

have been taken of his struggles as would be taken of a stray dish of

prunes at a banquet. But by coming to Palm Beach and getting on the

right side of the society reporters, he was able to give one fair-sized

and comparatively inexpensive luncheon and have the news telegraphed

immediately to the New York papers. By doing this a couple of times a

season, he was able to repay all the invitations which he accepted in

New York; and it was apparent to all New York newspaper readers that he

was making a society splash at Palm Beach. So he was soon accepted as

being socially prominent, whereupon he picked out the richest thing in

sight, married it and stopped worrying.

Many people at Palm Beach feel that they must have press agents to keep

them in the limelight. There is one enterprising Palm Beach press agent

who supplies the newspapers with palpitating items about seven or eight

social climbers, and whose earnings from this source are over thirty

thousand a year. When one reads of a socially prominent Palm Beacher

doing something fearfully original, like giving a dinner to all her

friends’ dogs, one may know that she has been hiring a press agent to

fill her mind with valuable ideas.

CHAPTER XI

OF THE ALIBI WINDOW--OF THE TRICK FLASKS AND CANES--OF DRINKERS FRAIL

AND FAT--AND OF ONE CONCEPTION OF SIMPLICITY

The Palm Beach crowd is always ready to part with money for anything

that looks sufficiently smart and interesting. In order to facilitate

the parting, some of the country’s leading costumers and rug merchants

and hat makers and jewelers have moved their branch stores into the

hotel lobbies, so that the passers-by can separate themselves from their

money with a minimum of exertion.

There is one Palm Beach window that is known as the Alibi Window. It is

full of gorgeous diamond pendants and diamond bracelets and simple

little ten-thousand-dollar rings; and the Palm Beach theory is that the

shop’s best customers are men who have been raising what is somewhat

loosely known as the dickens. As is well known, a man whose conscience

is troubling him can frequently keep it quiet by getting his wife a

pendant of diamonds set in platinum. At night, when the shop is locked

up, all the jewelry is removed from the window and replaced with a large

flock of frosted silver cocktail-shakers whose appearance alone is

warranted to give even a Prohibition Enforcement Agent a thirst. This

spectacle is supposed to make the observer hunt up some whisky and get

himself nicely boiled, and possibly to make him fall so low as to speak

disrespectfully of the society leaders. On the following day he buys

jewelry to square himself with his wife.

Large, curved pocket flasks, two of which would make fine protective

armor for the entire upper part of the body if worn on opposite sides,

are popular at Palm Beach, as is a new trick cane that unscrews at a

joint and reveals a long, slender bottle three-quarters of an inch in

diameter and two feet long. The popularity of these canes, which come in

half-pint and pint sizes, indicate clearly that some enterprising hat

manufacturer will soon get out a two-pint straw hat for Florida wear.

There is a great deal of fire-water in sight at Palm Beach at all hours

of the day and night; and the débutante who can’t absorb eight cocktails

without raising her voice or falling over the chairs is regarded as

being handicapped by some sort of inherited weakness. One of the most

frequently pointed-out personages at Palm Beach is a very fat man who

can--according to the claims made for him by his admirers--drink

thirty-five cocktails at one sitting without blinking. The price of

Scotch whisky starts down around forty dollars a case in the summer time

and works gradually upward until at the height of the season one is

paying from seventy to one hundred dollars a case for it.

The building-boom that has struck Palm Beach in the last five years is

claimed by most of the loose claimers and enthusiastic drinkers to be

due to Prohibition. A great many cottages have been erected by persons

of wealth and social prominence in these five years; and the prevalent

architectural idea for a simple little Palm Beach cottage seems to be a

Spanish modification of a Union Station, or a Court of Jewels at a

successful World’s Fair.

To hear the drinkers tell it, these houses have been built so that the

owners could have a place in which to drink without being watched or

hurried or made to feel uncomfortable. This may be possible; but if it

is, the house builders are the only ones who haven’t felt free to drink

when and where they choose.

The truth of the matter unquestionably is that the people who built

houses liked the place and the climate, and so built in order to enjoy

them more thoroughly than they could be enjoyed in a hotel room

smelling faintly of damp carpets and previous occupants.

CHAPTER XII

OF NUTS IN THE COCONUT GROVE--OF BRADLEY’S--OF THE RELAXATION AND

AMUSEMENT OF THE BEACH CLUB-FELLOWS--AND OF GAMBLING IN GENERAL

After one has spent a fatiguing afternoon pricing whisky flasks, or

being pushed along avenues of palms and Australian pines in a

wheel-chair, or indulging in a little steady bridge and drinking, or

some other equally arduous pursuit, the smart thing to do is to go to

the Coconut Grove and participate in a little tea and dancing.

The Coconut Grove consists of a large and beautiful grove of coconut

trees surrounding a polished dance floor. All the coconuts have been

removed from the trees, owing to their well-known habit of falling off

unexpectedly and utterly ruining any one who may be lingering beneath

them. Thus the only nuts in the grove are the ones who come there to

dance.

The Coconut Grove starts doing business at half past five every

afternoon in the bright sunlight; but in a few minutes the tropic night

closes down just as advertised in all books on the South Seas. By a

little after six o’clock the only illumination comes from strings of red

electric light bulbs strung through the palms and from the occasional

flare of a match as some distinguished social butterfly tries to find

out how much whisky he has left in his cane.

Later in the evening, the smart thing to do is to go over to what is

formally known as the Beach Club, but universally spoken of as

Bradley’s. As trains from the north enter the Palm Beach station, the

enormous bulk of the Royal Poinciana Hotel stretches out at the right of

the train. On the left of the train, directly opposite the station and

so close to the train that the traveler could toss even a lightweight

biscuit on to its roof from the car window, is a long, low, white frame

building with a large revolving

[Illustration: The Coconut Grove at Palm Beach. The nuts have been

removed from the trees; but plenty may be found at the tables on any

winter afternoon.]

[Illustration: Near the Flagler estate at Palm Beach.]

[Illustration: The Australian Pine Walk between the Poinciana and The

Breakers, Palm Beach.]

ventilator in one end. This is Bradley’s, Palm Beach’s oldest, most

celebrated and most popular charitable institution--charitable because

it assists people who have more money than they know what to do with to

get rid of part of it in a quiet and eminently respectable way.

Every large resort in the world that caters to wealthy people has its

gambling houses. In Europe the municipalities run them, recognizing the

fact that all people of means who are on a holiday are bound to gamble.

At America’s resorts the gambling houses are usually concealed; but they

exist none the less; and usually, because of the secrecy that surrounds

them, they are lurking-places for troublesome aggregations of trimmers,

bloodsuckers and crooks of various sorts.

Bradley’s is different. It is run exclusively for the wealthy northern

patrons of Palm Beach; and the person whose legal residence or place of

business is located in Florida is supposed to be barred. Almost

everybody who goes there can afford to lose and lose heavily; and a list

of the names of the people who play there every night would read like a

list of America’s leading celebrities, social lights and millionaires.

There may be some who can’t afford to play; but if there are any such,

their folly in visiting Palm Beach marks them as persons who deserve to

be ruined as expeditiously as possible.

A crook would be about as much at home in Bradley’s as an icicle would

be in the crater of Mt. Vesuvius.

All things considered, it is probably the only gambling house in the

United States whose closing would be a calamity to the community.

Bradley’s is a club. In order to be made a member, one must be

introduced by a member. It is one of the few existing clubs which has no

initiation fees and no dues; but for all that, the members usually

spend all they have in their clothes every time they go in for an

evening of good fellowship and club life; so it isn’t as inexpensive as

it sounds.

Anybody in Palm Beach, from the wheel-chair boys to the policemen, can

supply the inquirer with all the standard Beach Club stories, usually

starting with the one about the man who lost six thousand dollars in one

evening and left Palm Beach hurriedly the next morning. A few hours

later, one of the Bradley brothers was visited by a young woman who was

obviously in great distress. Her eyes were red and swollen and she was

sobbing convulsively. She explained that her husband had lost six

thousand dollars the night before, that the money didn’t belong to him

and that unless she could get the money back for him, he would have to

go to prison. So Bradley gave back the six thousand dollars after

telling the young woman to tell her husband never again to set foot in

the Beach Club. A few days afterward the same man turned up in the

Beach Club and began to play. Bradley summoned him to his office and

asked him how he dared to do such a thing after his losses had been

returned to his wife. “What do you mean?” asked the man, “I’m not

married.”

“Then you didn’t leave town because you were ruined?” asked Bradley.

“You bet I didn’t!” said the man. “I went down to Long Key fishing with

my business partner, who came down here with me.”

A woman in an adjoining room had heard the two men talking before their

departure, and had cashed in on the conversation.

Then there is the story about the wife who used to extract uncashed

chips from her husband’s clothes whenever he played at Bradley’s, and

who cashed them in for twenty-five thousand dollars without her husband

knowing that he had lost anything. And the one about the gentleman who

cleaned up seventy thousand dollars in one week.

It is not at all unusual to see one of the big steel men or oil men

placing five hundred dollars in chips on the board at each turn of the

wheel, and dropping fifteen or twenty thousand dollars in half an hour.

CHAPTER XIII

OF THE DIVERGENCES BETWEEN BRADLEY’S AND MONTE CARLO--OF THE

IDIOSYNCRASIES OF THE LITTLE WHITE PILL--OF THE ODDITIES OF FAT

PLAYERS--OF TIME-KILLING PASTIMES--AND OF THE WISDOM OF DIONYSIUS THE

ELDER

About the only similarity between Bradley’s and the Monte Carlo Casino

is the squareness of the game and the roundness of the roulette wheels.

A majority of the people who gamble at Bradley’s are the extreme

opposite of the majority of the people who gamble at Monte Carlo; and in

these two gambling houses any observer may discover an outstanding

difference between the European’s and the American’s attitude toward

money. For years Americans have been disparaged by Europeans as

money-grubbers. As a matter of fact, the people of all nations,

generally speaking, are money-grubbers, in that they devote themselves

to earning money on which to live. The European, however, pursues his

money with an unrelenting ferocity; and when he over-takes it, he seizes

it with such an iron grip that the head on each coin almost bursts into

shrill screams of agony. The European makes money in order to save it;

and he never lets go of it if he can help it. The American regards

money-making as a fascinating game; and he makes it in order to spend

it.

At Monte Carlo almost every gambler, out of the thousands that play

there, plays a system. He uses a system book, checking each turn of the

wheel in it, and writing down column upon column of figures. He devotes

hours to computing his chances of winning; and practically every system

player believes implicitly that he isn’t risking his money, but that he

has a sure system that will enable him to get something from the Casino

for nothing. He gambles for profit; not for pleasure.

At Bradley’s, nobody plays a system. All of the club-members--oil

millionaires, steel millionaires, short-haired and short-skirted

débutantes, and fat dowagers half concealed behind interlacing ropes of

pearls and diamonds--play only for the thrill of playing. A person who

used a system book would probably be regarded as being either insane or

drunk. Nine-tenths of the women don’t know enough about the game to play

anything except a number full on the nose, or red and black. In roulette

a number can be played full on the nose; and if it turns up on the

wheel, the player receives thirty-five for one. If one is satisfied with

smaller odds, and with better chances of winning, one can place his

money between two numbers, or in the middle of four numbers, or on a

transversal of three numbers, or on a double transversal of six numbers,

or in various other ways. At Monte Carlo the favorite woman’s bet is the

single and double transversal. At Bradley’s the men, and women too, bet

almost entirely on single numbers. They want the big thrill that comes

from collecting thirty-five dollars for each dollar that they put up.

They become foolishly stubborn about it, sticking to a single number so

long that it would have to turn up three or four times in succession in

order to enable them to break even. Fat ladies at Bradley’s love to take

a fat roll of chips in one hand and run the hand down a column of

numbers, allowing the chips to slip off their fingertips and stay where

they drop.

There are two gambling rooms in Bradley’s--the big octagonal outer room

in which there are six roulette tables and two French Hazard tables, and

the small inner room for men only, in which there are three roulette

tables and one French Hazard table. The inner room provides a retreat

for the men whose attention is constantly distracted in the outer room

by the frequent demand on the part of their wives and daughters for

another fifty dollars.

By half past nine o’clock every night, Bradley’s is so crowded that one

must almost fight his way from table to table. No matter where one threw

a brick in the assemblage, it would be certain to hit a millionaire and

carom against two other millionaires before falling to the floor. Until

midnight there are usually more women than men engaged in observing the

idiosyncrasies of the little ivory ball; and the hold-up man who

succeeded in holding up the clientele of the Beach Club at eleven

o’clock at night would have no difficulty at all in picking up at least

ten million dollars’ worth of loot in jewelry alone. Many of the women

wear their strings of pearls in double and triple loops so that they

wont trip on them when they walk, and most of them seem to think that

they may get rheumatism if they don’t wear at least five diamond

bracelets on their left wrists.

One frequently sees these ladies rolling up the Lake Trail at midnight

in wheel-chairs with a quarter million or a half million dollars’ worth

of jewels sparkling in the moonlight. They are merely out taking the

air, so that they can go back to the party which they just left and

renew their activities without falling asleep. They dance and play cards

and slip a few cocktails and exchange light persiflage until four and

five and six o’clock in the morning.

They grow stronger and stronger as the season grows older, until toward

the end they may be found going in bathing in their ballgowns at dawn

and indulging in other tireless activities. If a tough, hardy Indian

scout or Alpine mountain climber tried to follow them for three days,

he’d drop in his tracks with fatigue.

Such is life among the time-killers of Palm Beach. They go there to kill

time, and they are diligent at it. Old man Plutarch states that

“Dionysius the Elder, being asked whether he was at leisure, replied,

‘God forbid that it should ever befall me.’”

The Palm Beach time-killers operate on the same principle. The last

thing in the world that they desire is leisure, and the person who

argues that Palm Beach is frequented by the leisure class is suffering

from warped perception. They have different ways of killing time. Some

of them talk it to death and some of them worry it to death, and some of

them smother it with money. No time gets by them: they kill it all; and

however they choose to do it, they’re the hardest working people in the

world.

BOOK TWO

THE TIN-CANNERS

CHAPTER I

OF JANUARY IN THE NORTH--OF THE WINTER PASTIMES OF MR. AND MRS. CHARLES

WALNUT--AND OF A PENETRATING CHILL

Scene I of this drama of American manners is laid in the small and more

or less flourishing town of East Rockpile in the northern state of

Massachusetts, Illinois, Maine, Indiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey,

Vermont, Ohio or Connecticut. Or Rhode Island or Michigan. Or New

Hampshire or New York.

The month is January and there are three feet of snow on the ground. The

temperature is so low that the mercury has shriveled in the thermometer

bulb until it looks like a small silver cherry in a cocktail. The feet

of passers-by make the same sort of squeak in the frozen snow that a

mouse makes when it unexpectedly falls six feet behind a bedroom wall at

two o’clock in the morning.

Mrs. Charles Walnut, wife of East Rockpile’s popular contractor and

builder, is seated before a roaring open fire in the parlor of the

Walnut home reading a mailorder catalogue. Directly behind her chair an

oil stove emanates heat-waves and an oil-stove odor. In spite of this

Mrs. Walnut shivers perceptibly from time to time and hunches herself

more firmly into the woolen shawl that is wrapped around her shoulders.

She is studying the portion of the catalogue devoted to Gardening Tools.

There is a loud thumping and kicking outside. The front door opens and

closes with a bang, and a moment later Mr. Walnut enters the room

chafing his ears briskly. “My gorry, it’s cold!” he observed, moving his

feet up and down in a gingerly manner.

“Take off your overshoes, Charles, and don’t track snow all over the

house,” replies Mrs. Walnut “What made you so late? Did you stop at the

drug store? Wasn’t there any mail? I believe that furnace has gone out

or something, Charles, and you’d better go down and see if you can’t do

something. I had to light the oil stove to keep my back from freezing.”

“That furnace is all right,” declares Mr. Walnut, sniffling loudly and

unbuckling his overshoes. “‘Taint any use trying to heat anything in

this weather. There wasn’t anybody at the drug store on account of it

being so cold. The train was late on account of froze switches or

something. There wasn’t any mail except three seed catalogues. My gorry,

Emma, one of those catalogues has got a picture of a tomato eight inches

through. The name of it’s the Great Ruby. We want to get a lot of those

Great Rubies in May, Emma.”

“Yes,” says Mrs. Walnut despondently, “and when we get around to picking

’em, they’ll be about the size of crab apples, and we’ll feel like Great

Rubes.”

“It’s the cold weather that makes you feel that way, Emma,” says Mr.

Walnut compassionately. “In April, when the grass begins to get green

and the robins begin to sing at sun-up, you’ll feel better.”

“Maybe so, Charles,” says Mrs. Walnut, “but that’s three months away.

Sometimes I wish I could go to sleep like a bear in December and sleep

until April. Go down and fix the furnace and then come to bed. It’s the

only warm place in the house.”

Mr. Walnut leaves the room obediently, clumps noisily down the cellar

stairs, and is soon heard operating on the furnace and depleting his

coal supply. Mrs. Walnut listens with a quick succession of shivers to

the shrill squeaking of sleigh-runners on the snow. The fire-whistle

sounds three hoarse, bronchial notes, marking the arrival of nine

o’clock and of a meaningless something known as curfew. Mrs. Walnut

picks up the oil stove, clutches her shawl tightly against her chest,

goes out into the tomb-like hall, and is heard mounting the front stairs

stiffly.

CHAPTER II

OF A PRONOUNCED CHANGE OF SCENE--OF A DARING GAME OF CHANCE AMID

TROPICAL SCENTS--AND OF THE GLOATING OF CHARLES WALNUT AND HERMAN

BLISTER

Scene II of this emotional cross-section of national life is laid on the

outskirts of the thriving town of Porgy Inlet, Florida. One year has

elapsed between Scenes I and II. The month is January. A soft breeze

rustles the palm-fronds and sets the waters of the near-by inlet to

lapping soothingly against the shore. Electric lights are hung at

intervals between the palms and the moss-hung live oaks; and beneath

them are parked automobiles of all sizes and shapes. Some of the

automobiles are bloated and swollen out of all semblance to an

automobile; while others are obviously automobiles, but have spouted

great tent-like wens at the side or rear. The license plates on these

automobiles show that they come all the way from Maine, from Ohio, from

Dakota, from Massachusetts. Indiana is heavily represented, as are

Michigan and Illinois, to say nothing of Minnesota, Rhode Island, New

Jersey, New York, Oregon, Connecticut, Washington, Vermont and a number

of other states.

Around a folding camp-table beneath one of the largest and mossiest live

oaks sit Mr. and Mrs. Charles Walnut of East Rockpile and Mr. and Mrs.

Herman Blister of Tackhammer, Michigan. Mr. Walnut, as has been stated,

is a contractor and builder. Mr. Blister’s business or calling is that

of corn-farmer. The Walnuts and the Blisters are in the act of finishing

up an exciting game of hearts. “My gorry,” declares Mr. Walnut as he

slaps down his last card with great violence on Mr. Blister’s lead, “my

gorry, I certainly thought I was going to get stuck with that queen of

spades!” He figures hastily on the back of an envelope. “You folks owe

us seven cents,” he announces eventually. Mr. Blister sighs deeply,

removes a shiny black wallet from his trousers pocket and wrenches seven

cents from it reluctantly.

Mrs. Walnut waves a wisp of Spanish moss reprovingly at a mosquito that

is dancing gaily in front of her nose. “Now, Charles,” says she

dreamily, “if you’re going up the inlet after yellowtails at sun-up

to-morrow, we’ve got to be getting to bed. You know the last time you

sat up late, it made you nervous and you lost forty cents pitching

horseshoes.”

From the water’s edge sounds the tinkle of a mandolin; a distant quartet

toys successfully with _Mandy Lee_ in spite of the fact that the tenor

is decidedly sour; a baby in a near-by automobile awakes to the woes of

its new life with a series of shrill and wheezy bleats; the balmy air is

rich with the mingled scent of jasmine, orange peel, salt water and

talcum powder.

“All right, Emma,” says Mr. Walnut, pocketing his seven cents and

stretching his arms comfortably. “I think mebbe if I get a good sleep, I

might catch me enough red snappers for a mess.”

Mrs. Walnut precedes him into the khaki tent which is attached to the

side of their small automobile like a giant fungus, and as Mr. Walnut

raises the flap to follow her, he looks back at Mr. and Mrs. Blister and

bursts into hoarse laughter. “Say, Herm!” he bawls pleasantly. Mr.

Blister halts expectantly. “Back home,” says Mr. Walnut, jerking his

head over his left shoulder, “back home they’re fixing the furnace and

hoping the pipes won’t freeze.”

“Haw, haw, haw!” replies Mr. Blister with evident enjoyment.

“My gorry!” ejaculates Mr. Walnut by way of expressing combined disgust

for and despair of the human race. And the tent-flap falls behind him as

he joins Mrs. Walnut.

CHAPTER III

OF MIGRANTS AND MIGRATIONS--OF THE TRUE SUN-HUNTER AND HIS DESIRES--AND

OF HIS UNIFORM, AND HIS FLUENT ASSORTMENT OF EQUIPMENT

The manner in which modern migrations are stimulated is pretty much the

same all over the world. A resident of Poland, having no money and no

job, borrows enough money from a relative in America to make the trip.

Having made it, he writes back pityingly to his friends in Poland.

“Why,” he asks in his letter, “should you stay in Poland? It is a rotten

place. Borrow some money and come over here quick. The place is full of

rich suckers who will buy anything you show them. All of the Americans

have got money. Come quickly before somebody gets all of it away from

them.” As soon as it becomes known that America can offer advantages

which Europe doesn’t possess, the European is filled with a passionate

desire to capture a few of them. Philosophers who have made a careful

study of human motives and emotions have embalmed the philosophy of

migrations in a few phrases, such as “distance lends enchantment,” and

“they all look good when they’re far away.” These phrases are true; but

the thing that lends the greatest amount of enchantment to a distant

piece of real-estate is a letter from Cousin Walt or Friend Herbert

saying, “You ought to see the fish we catch down here. A full course

dinner only costs seventy-five cents. Don’t miss this next year.”

The northern states, in the past few years, have developed a new type of

migrant. Instead of being hot on the trail of any sort of coin, currency

or legal tender, as is the modern European immigrant, and instead of

being in search of political or religious freedom, as were many European

immigrants during the past century, the modern migrant is after warm

weather during the winter months. He is a sun-hunter. He is sick of four

months of snow and ice. He is heartily tired of cold feet, numb ears,

red flannel underwear, rheumatism, stiff necks, coal bills, coughs,

colds, influenza, draughts, mittens, ear-tabs, snow shovels, shaking

down the furnace, carrying out ashes, and falling down on an icy

sidewalk and spraining his back. It gives him a prolonged pain to wear

his overshoes and a muffler and to have to thaw out the radiator of his

automobile every two or three days. The bane of his existence is sitting

around the house for four months waiting for April to come along and

unstiffen his joints. He wants sun and lots of it. If he must spend four

months doing nothing, he prefers to spend it amid the Spanish moss and

the palm trees, harkening dreamily to the cheerful twittering of the

dicky-birds and to the stirring thuds of coconuts, oranges and

grapefruit as they fall heavily to the ground.

In the big hotels in Palm Beach, Miami, Ormond, Daytona, St. Augustine

and other Florida resorts are the time-killers, with their jewel-lariats

and their acres of white trousers: with their flask-trimmed tea-dances

and their hard-boiled social aspirations and their refined gambling

houses, and their trick whisky-canes. The sun, to the time-killers, is

not of the utmost importance. If they were unable to change their

clothes several times a day they would feel ill-at-ease; if they were

unable to be charged a little matter of forty dollars a day for a double

room and bath, they would feel that they were being slighted in some

way; if they couldn’t have the knowledge that they were inhaling the

same air which was being inhaled by the leading millionaires and society

pets, they would feel cheated.

Not so the sun-hunter. The sun-hunter knows the value of a dollar. He

usually knows the value of a nickel, also. It is said that before he

relinquishes his hold on a twenty-five-cent piece, he gives it a

farewell squeeze of such violence that the eagle on it frequently emits

a strangled squawk of anguish. This statement, I believe, is a gross

exaggeration. The fact remains, however, that one never finds the

sun-hunter throwing his money around in the loose, spasmodic manner

which always characterizes the genuine time-killer. And the sun-hunter

wants just two things: sun and air. He knows nothing about Charley

Schwab or Harry Payne Whitney or the Stotesburys, and he would take no

interest whatever in them unless they got between him and the sun.

He might entertain the notion of running over to Miami Beach to view the

residence of Bob Hassler, who invented a Ford shockabsorber; but other

plutocrats and social luminaries leave him cold.

Clothes mean nothing in his life. The male sun-hunter is usually garbed

in dark trousers which hang loosely on his legs like the trousers

always inflicted on sculptured statesmen by sculptors of the Horace

Greeley period. He may or he may not wear a coat, depending entirely on

his whim of the moment; but he almost invariably affects the

old-fashioned gallus, or suspender. He will be found in this garb on

Sunday morning, when fishing for yellowtails on the edge of a creek with

a bamboo pole; he will be found in it on Wednesday afternoon, when

visiting the movies; and he will be found in it on Friday evening when

engaged in an exciting game of euchre with a pair of brother and sister

sun-hunters. He may change it, but there are few who are aware of it if

he does. It is the sun-hunter’s uniform.

The sun-hunters are not recruited from any one class of citizens. The

natives of Florida, with their unflagging determination to place

everything in the most favorable light, tell you that they are bankers,

merchants, doctors, lawyers and what-not. They’d have you think that

most of them are bankers. As a matter of fact, there are some bankers

among them--and some burglars, too. The bulk of them are farmers; for a

farmer can, if he wishes, arrange matters so that he has little or

nothing to do during the winter months. Next to them come contractors,

builders and carpenters. The sun-hunters are the people who can get away

from home with the least amount of trouble; and among them one finds

retired business men of all sorts, dairymen, doctors, bankers, lawyers

and similar folk.

Such is the modern American migrant, and Florida is the goal of his

migration. As soon as the first snow begins to fall in the North, or

when the earth has tightened up under a black frost, the sun-hunters

prepare for their flight to the South. Great numbers of them travel by

automobile; and their automobiles are completely stocked with folding

chairs, collapsible beds, accordeon-mattresses, knock-down tents,

come-apart stoves, telescopic dishwashers and a score of dishpans,

tables, dinner-sets, tin cups, water-buckets and toilet articles that

fold up into one another and look like a bushel of scrap-tin. In

addition to this, each automobile carries a large assortment of canned

goods. There are canned goods under the seats, slung against the top,

packed along the sides, tucked behind cushions and stacked along the

floor. Some of the automobiles are so well stocked with canned things

that they could make a dash for the Pole. And as one passes some of them

on the road, they sound as though their owners were carrying a reserve

supply of canned goods under the hood--loose.

CHAPTER IV

OF THE TIN-CAN TOURISTS OF THE WORLD--OF IMMIGRANTS AND OTHER

UNSUPERVISED VISITORS, NATIONAL AND LOCAL--OF CHEAP SKATES--AND OF THE

REASON WHY TIN-CANNERS DO NOT ABOUND IN PALM BEACH

It is due to the heavy weight of cans carried by these automobiles that

the true, stamped-in-the-can sun-hunter is known to himself, to his

friends and to his enemies as a tin-can tourist. He lives in more or

less permanent settlements known as tin-can towns; and his interests are

safeguarded by a flourishing organization rejoicing in the impressive

title of Tin-Can Tourists of the World.

The badge of the Tin-Can Tourists of the World is a small white

celluloid button with the letters T C T tastefully disposed on it in

dark blue. The insignia of the order is a small soup-can mounted on the

radiator of the member’s automobile. There is also a password which the

members bawl at one another when they pass on the road; but this is one

of the secrets of the fraternity that should not be profaned by

publication.

The Tin-Canners organized in 1919 at the Tampa Tin-Can Town and have

held conventions there ever since. The present membership of the order

is estimated by some of the most important officials or Khans of the

Tin-Can Tourists to be in excess of thirty thousand.

Practically every Florida town and city, large and small, located inland

or on the gulf or on the ocean, provides a tin-can town or a tin-can

village for the tin-can tourists. Occasionally these towns are free and

provide not only all the comforts of home, but comforts that home never

possessed for most of the tin-canners. The largest and most celebrated

tin-can town is in De Soto Park, East Tampa, on the shore of Tampa Bay.

Hundreds of automobiles are lined

[Illustration: A tin-can paradise on the shore of Tampa Bay.]

[Illustration: The apotheosis of tin-can comfort.]

[Illustration: A tin-can camp between Palm Beach and Miami.]

up side by side throughout the winter in De Soto Park. The camp, which

is carefully regulated and policed by the municipal authorities, is

free. A trolley line connects it with the business section of Tampa. In

the center of the camp is a pavilion where entertainments are given. The

camp has electric lights, running water, city sewerage, shower baths and

an enormous hot-water tank. Tourists are permitted to send their

children to the excellent schools on payment of fifty cents a

week--which is too little.

Oddly enough, fifty cents a week, or twenty-five dollars a year, is the

amount that naturalization experts want to charge aliens for their

schooling, but that Congress considers too high. It’s not enough for

American tin-canners; but it’s too much for aliens. How does Congress

get that way?

About the only things that aren’t furnished for the tin-canners are free

telephones, a free morning paper and free butler and valet service.

During the 1920-1921 season there were great numbers of free tin-can

camps throughout Florida; but Florida towns found, as the United States

itself is beginning to find, that an open-handed and unsupervised

welcome to any person who can scratch up enough money to take advantage

of the welcome will bring nothing but annoyances, losses and misery in

its train. The Tampa camp was a success because it was very carefully

regulated and policed. Many of the other free camps, however, suddenly

woke up to the truth of the old adage that people never appreciate the

things that they get for nothing. This is, of course, the old problem of

immigration reduced to a personal basis.

The United States talks for a century about the necessity of restricting

immigration and forcing aliens to pay for the privilege of enjoying

America’s benefits, but in that hundred years, she does next to nothing.

Florida towns, confronted with a mild edition of the same problem, take

action overnight.

What happened was this--and the same thing to a far greater degree and

with far more evil and wide-spread results, is happening to the United

States and will keep on happening until immigration is rigidly

restricted:

Word began to go forth in the northern states that free camping-grounds

were to be had in Florida towns and cities; that if one bought a

second-hand flivver at the beginning of winter and beat his way to these

camps, he could live more cheaply than he could live in the North, could

afford to accept lower pay for his services than could the Florida

natives, and could go back North in the spring with money in his pocket

and sell his flivver for what he paid for it. These are almost exactly

the same reasons that brought a million immigrants a year to America

from Eastern and Southern Europe before the war.

Florida has made it plain that she wants no more of these seasonal

laborers who can’t make a satisfactory living in their own communities.

Most of them are so hard-boiled that a diamond-pointed drill is needed

to penetrate their shells; and most of them have as much regard for

neatness, cleanliness and the rights of others as a Berkshire hog has

for a potato-peel. Tin-can towns have begun to charge various prices for

the privilege of staying in them--prices ranging from twenty-five cents

a night to seventy-five cents a night, or from four dollars to ten

dollars a month. Even the free towns won’t admit residents who wish to

go to work each day. They’ve got to be tourists, or devote themselves to

taking the air. As a result the seasonal laborers who went to Florida

for the 1921-1922 season were taking themselves homeward early in 1922

and hurling many a deep, guttural, rough-neck curse at the state of

Florida as they went. America would get very rapid and satisfactory

action on her immigration problem if her citizens could be brought in

personal contact with its rottenness.

These automobile hoboes are about as welcome in Florida as a rattlesnake

at a strawberry festival. The Florida newspapers, usually very slow

indeed to find any flaws in anybody or anything that has secured a

foothold in the state, emit poignant shrieks of rage at the very thought

of them. Early in 1922 a North Carolina paper, with the smugness which

characterizes the utterances of a resort newspaper when it thinks it is

administering a painful black eye to another resort, stepped forward

with a tale to the effect that 1922 was seeing a great exodus from

Florida of broke, hungry and disheartened tourists. Instantly the

Florida papers threw their palpitating typewriters into the breach. “The

only Florida tourists beating it back to the North,” declared the _Tampa

Tribune_ scornfully, “are the cut-rate, fly-by-night cheap-skates who

have been coming to the state and preying off the public for the past

many years.... The state has enough of its own honest labor to take care

of without opening its doors to the floater who is here to take the

bread out of his brother’s mouth for less than the honest price. This

winter Florida is taking care of its own out-of-work men and women. The

riff-raff, the confidence men, the fakir, the wage cutter and the public

mendicant all get the cold shoulder in Florida.”

The true sun-hunter and the tin-can tourist in good and accepted

standing are received in most parts of the state with the same quiet

welcome that would greet the arrival of a new citrus fruit. The big

resorts like Palm Beach and Miami Beach don’t welcome the tin-canners;

but those resorts don’t welcome any one who isn’t able to spend at least

fifty dollars a day on the merest essentials. And there are a number of

young men employed by the leading Palm Beach hostelries who have nothing

but unutterable contempt for the person who doesn’t spend one hundred

dollars a day while he is at Palm Beach.

So far as I know, tin-canners have never attempted to wield their

can-openers at Palm Beach or Miami Beach; and it is highly probable that

the regular Palm Beach set would give the tin-canners even more of a

pain than the tin-canners would give the Palm Beach set. One can imagine

the anguish on both sides if Mrs. J. Vanderplank Fritter of Park Avenue

and a party of her prominent friends, should, after going in bathing in

full evening dress, at one a. m., emerge in a still-potted state and run

smack into a flivver loaded with that well-known tin-canner, Herman

Blister, of Tackhammer, Michigan, and his wife, sister, daughter and

maiden aunt. The Fritter party might feel that its entire evening had

been spoiled; but the Blister family would probably feel that a sinister

cloud had descended on their entire season.

CHAPTER V

OF PORTABLE BUNGALOWS--OF THE RHEUMATIC DAIRYMAN--OF THE LITTLE OLE

TRUCK--OF SIMPLE PLEASURES AND LOW EXPENDITURES

The tin-canner spends, for his winter of travel, about the same amount

of money that a seasoned Palm Beach mixer frequently spends in a couple

of days. This isn’t exaggeration, either.

On the road between Miami and Palm Beach I encountered a commodious

portable bungalow lumbering noisily along in the general direction of

Palm Beach at the rate of about fifteen miles an hour. It filled the

entire road, which was nine feet wide at that point. There are many

stretches of fine macadamized road in Florida which are exactly nine

feet wide, so that when two machines pass each other, one or both of

them has to take to the ditch. The reason for such peculiar

road-building is supposed to be due to the fact that the road-engineers

took a look at the surrounding country, decided that nobody would ever

be willing to live in it, and figured that all traffic along the road

would run in only one direction--north. They were mistaken, as people

usually are about the development of Florida.

At any rate, this portable bungalow filled the road, and it continued to

fill the road until it found a good hard place beside the road that

would permit it to get out of the way without tearing itself to pieces.

It had a thermometer hanging beside its back door in an attractive

manner, and three neighborly-looking people were sitting placidly on its

glassed-in front porch. Across the base of the front porch, in large

gold letters, was painted the owners’ address, Bellevue, Ohio, from

which fact one might suspect that the owners were not persons who were

striving to hide their lights beneath a bushel, or who would shrink

timidly from publicity.

When questioned, the suspicion became a certainty. The owners of the

portable bungalow proved to be typical tin-can tourists, equally ready

to share with you their last tin of Norwegian sardines or Chicago baked

beans in the Boston manner, or to furnish you with concise and intimate

information concerning their own or their neighbors’ business and family

affairs from the panic of 1907 down to the present day.

The owner of the portable bungalow was a dairyman near Sandusky, Ohio,

who had grown tired of developing rheumatism, chilblains and a grouch

during the long winter months, and had decided three years before to

spend the winter in Florida. He had enjoyed his first winter so much

that he had persuaded a couple of friends to make the trip with him

during the second winter; and this winter there were two other couples

in his party. The other four people traveled ahead in a little sedan;

while he and his wife and his eighteen-year-old son pounded along

behind in the ole truck. “Yessir, this house here is nothing but our ole

delivery truck with a camping top put on it, and she certainly is the

greatest ole truck you ever saw! Why, my gracious, she’ll just go

through anything, this ole truck will. Why, coming through the

Everglades this ole truck ran into....”

That is one of the hall-marks of the simon-pure tin-can tourist. No

matter how battered and dilapidated his automobile may be, it has

qualities which place it above all other cars--even above other and

newer cars of the same make. It can extricate itself from thicker mud

and from deeper sand than other automobiles. Its feats of endurance are

super-automotive. They verge--to hear the tin-canner tell it--on the

miraculous. After the tin-canner has dwelt for some time on the

almost-human intelligence of the little ole car, one thinks of it as

standing up on its hind wheels and honking with delight when its master

says a kind word to it.

The dairyman’s portable bungalow, which would slough its skin with the

advent of spring and return to its less romantic duties of trucking

milk, contained a portable stove, countless canned things, a fully

equipped sink and kitchen cabinet, three hammocks, bedding for seven

people, and a phonograph, to say nothing of numerous odds and ends like

chairs, dishes, pans, suit-cases and what-not.

In the party that used this portable bungalow as a base there were, as I

have said, seven people. The seven of them had started from near

Sandusky on the twenty-second of November, worked down to the west coast

of Florida, lingering at the larger and better resorts, crossed over to

the east coast and were slowly working back up through Palm Beach and

Ormond. I met them on the eighth of February, so that they had been on

the road for two months and a half. The expenses were borne equally by

all of the travelers, except the dairyman’s son, who worked out his

keep by doing the dirty work around the cars. Each of the other six

chipped five dollars apiece into a general pool as money was needed. In

the two and one-half months a grand total of five hundred and ten

dollars had been chipped in; and this sum covered the total expenditures

of the trip--gasoline for both automobiles; inner tubes, tires and

repairs for both automobiles; street-car fares when needed; food for

seven people; and movies whenever the spirit and the movies moved

together. This meant an average of seventy-three dollars apiece for two

and one-half months’ travel in the sunny South, or almost exactly a

dollar a day apiece. Such an expenditure contrasts startlingly with

expenditures in the big resorts, where one week’s expense for a man and

his wife may easily cause a thousand-dollar bill to degenerate into a

two-ounce package of chicken-feed.

The dairyman declared that to travel in the way he was traveling cost

him about one-third as much as it would have cost him to travel to

Florida in trains and to live at hotels and boarding-houses. From this

statement it can be seen that one doesn’t necessarily have to be a

millionaire in order to spend a winter in Florida.

CHAPTER VI

OF MRS. JARLEY, THE ORIGINAL TIN-CANNER--OF THE TWO SCHOOLS OF TIN-CAN

THOUGHT--OF THE HARD-BOILED BACHELOR WITH THE CONDENSED OUTFIT--AND OF

FOLK WHO RIDE ON THE BACKS OF THEIR NECKS

Mr. Charles Dickens, in _The Old Curiosity Shop_, described the original

luxurious tin-canning vehicle; but Dickens knew the contraption as a

caravan. And instead of being motor-driven, it was, of course,

horse-drawn. The original tin-can tourist appears to have been Mrs.

Jarley, proprietress of Jarley’s Waxwork, who “rode in a smart little

house upon wheels, with white dimity curtains festooning the windows,

and window shutters of green picked out with panels of a staring red, in

which happily contrasted colors the whole concern shone brilliant....

One-half of it ... was carpeted, and so partitioned off at the further

end as to accommodate a sleeping-place, constructed after the fashion

of a berth on board ship, which was shaded, like the little windows,

with fair white curtains, and looked comfortable enough, though by what

kind of gymnastic exercise the lady of the caravan ever contrived to get

into it, was an unfathomable mystery. The other half served for a

kitchen, and was fitted up with a stove whose small chimney passed

through the room. It held also a closet or larder, several chests, a

great pitcher of water, and a few cooking utensils and articles of

crockery.”

Heated discussions arise among the tin-canners as to the proper size of

a camping outfit. The man with a portable bungalow scorns the man who

jams all his belongings into a small space as being an old woman and a

tight-wad; while the man who packs his camping outfit into the small

machine views the portable bungalow owner with the utmost contempt as

being inefficient, spoiled by luxury, a road hog and a slave to his

belongings.

In Lemon City, a suburb of Miami, I found a tin-canner whose tin-canning

outfit was probably the extreme opposite of the portable bungalow

outfit. His home was Chicago, and since early autumn he had jounced from

Chicago down to Texas, around the eastern side of the Gulf of Mexico,

down the west coast of Florida and up the east coast.

He was a hard-boiled bachelor of the sort who announces loudly that he

doesn’t propose to bother anybody and that he doesn’t want anybody to

bother him. His means of locomotion was a small Ford runabout with a

box-like contraption behind the seat similar to that used by salesmen

who carry their samples around with them. Nothing was strapped to the

sides or the running boards of the machine; it was an ordinary runabout

with the top up and with an inconspicuous box attached behind. Into this

box, which a carpenter had built for him for a matter of seven dollars,

the tin-canner had packed everything that he needed for a five months’

camping trip. He had lain awake at night for years doping out exactly

where he was going to carry the butter and how he could fry the eggs

with the least commotion; and the final result was a masterpiece of

compactness--or such compactness that if any one but the inventor had

tried to repack the camping outfit, he might have sweated over the

problem for two hours and still had enough left over to fill a freight

car.

The front of the box came off and proved to be shelves packed with tin

cans and other matters pertaining to the kitchen. A khaki top and sides

pulled out of the top of the box, extending straight backward from the

machine top, and were held in place by collapsible uprights. The seat of

the machine, laid along the top of his kitchen shelves, formed his bed;

and on this was placed what he called a shoulder-and-hip mattress. All a

person needed, he explained, was a mattress that made a comfortable

resting-place for his hips and shoulders: it made no difference what

became of his legs. His cooking utensils, including a collapsible stove

no bigger than a fair-sized inkwell, came out of a small tin suit-case.

He had every move planned out in detail.

“In the morning,” he explained, fondling his outfit with the proud and

gentle hands of a parent, “I get up and eat one of these individual

packages of breakfast food. While I’m doing that the water is boiling

for my coffee, and as soon as the coffee is done, I put on my frying pan

with bacon and eggs in it. I use two paper napkins for my tablecloth.

When I have finished breakfast, I put the eggshells in the

breakfast-food box, wipe out the frying-pan with the napkins, put them

into the box on top of the eggshells, and touch a match to the box. That

cleans everything up.” He knew exactly how, when and where he was going

to do everything, and he was delighted to knock off a couple of days to

explain any or all of his well-ordered regimen to any one who wanted to

know about it. He would even deign to explain it as fully as possible to

some who didn’t want to know about it. One of his greatest pleasures was

to unpack and pack the tin suit-case that contained his kitchen

utensils. It seemed impossible that any human agency could get all of

them into the space at his disposal, but he could do it almost every

time. Occasionally he would find himself with a frying-pan left over

when the packing was finished; but instead of getting excited he would

unpack calmly and coolly and fit the things together with a practised

hand until there was nothing left over. He had a collapsible chair that

dropped into the side pocket of his coat and took up less space than a

note-book. He had a diminutive double-ended ice-cream freezer. This was

his ice-chest. Butter went in one end and milk or cream in the other.

The biggest day in the life of this genius will, I believe, be when he

discovers a collapsible frying pan that will fold into a one-pound

bacon box.

The ordinary tin-canner, unlike these two extreme examples, is content

with an ordinary, small touring car, which, when in motion, has a part

of his camping outfit attached to every exposed part of his machine. The

tent and a couple of suit-cases are attached to one running board;

mattresses and blankets are attached to the other; cases of canned

goods, kitchen utensils and other odds and ends are fixed to the rear or

concealed beneath a false floor in the tonneau. The false floor is

frequently carried to such an extreme that the occupants of the

automobile convey the impression of riding around the world on the backs

of their necks. When the ordinary tin-canners break out their camping

outfit, the tent extends out at right angles from the side door of the

car, so that the occupants of the tent can use the car as a combination

lavatory, sitting-room, chiffonier, clothes closet, pantry and

safe-deposit vault.

CHAPTER VII

OF THE MIGRANT FROM MARION--OF HIS FEARS--OF LAND AT A NICKEL AN

ACRE--OF SAND FLEAS AND SAND SPURS--OF LONELINESS AND HONEYMOONERS--AND

OF THE DOCTOR WHO WAS RUN TO DEATH

I conferred with a mild-spoken tin-canner at a Miami tin-can camp one

hot February afternoon as to tin-canning in general. His wife, who was a

capable and keen-witted lady in a blue gingham dress, sat with us and

dug the soft substance out of tiny pine cones, her idea being to

sandpaper them and varnish them at a later date, and make them into

fascinating strings of beads. This is one of the most popular diversions

among lady tin-canners--almost as popular as is horseshoe pitching among

the male tin-canners.

The tin-canner was a non-committal corn farmer from the vicinity of that

newly-famous Ohio town, Marion. Careful thought on his part, assisted

by frequent promptings from his wife, brought out the following

information: He had broken away from the farm for the winter because he

preferred sitting around where it was comfortably warm to sitting around

where it was uncomfortably cold. He wasn’t particularly struck with

Florida land, but he liked the Florida air. Looking at Florida land with

the eye of an Ohio farmer, he felt that he wouldn’t particularly care to

pay much more than a nickel an acre for most of it. He met up with a lot

of Michigan and Ohio farmers along the road, and they felt the same way

about it. Still, it was kind of restful and soothing to look at, and the

sun and the air more than made up for the drawbacks of the land. The sun

was nicer just to sit in than the Ohio sun, and there was more of it.

This Florida sun made a person feel kind of trifling--trifling being

southern and mid-western slang for lazy. He wouldn’t want any Florida

people to hear him say that some of the land looked worthless, because

they would probably pass an act through the legislature forbidding him

to come back into the state again--and he wouldn’t like that because it

was a real pleasant place to come back to--in the winter. Besides, you

couldn’t tell much about this Florida land from looking at it. Something

that was a swamp one year would be nice solid land the next year and

selling for fifty dollars a front foot. These Florida people were real

touchy people and you had to be mighty careful what you said when they

were around. The sand flies pricked holes in him every afternoon, but he

preferred not to mention it when any Florida people were around for fear

they would say he was a California man that had been paid to come over

and cast slurs on Florida’s fair name. And for the same reason he

disliked to mention the sand fleas that came up out of the sand around

sun-down and nipped him all over the legs, or of the sand spurs that

caught in the trousers and felt as though several people were prodding

him with ice-picks.

There was one bad feature connected with tin-canning, and that was

loneliness. There were a lot of honeymooners among the tin-canners, and

they were about the only ones who didn’t seem to get lonely. Unless you

had a couple of friends to travel with, or were honeymooners, you were

apt to get lonely and homesick, and go back where it was cold, and be

sore at yourself for going back.

They were traveling with a doctor and his wife from back home. The

doctor was the only doctor in the neighborhood and he had been just run

to death. Folks wouldn’t let him alone. He was just run to death.

Somebody was getting sick every minute, and they’d call him up at all

hours of the day and night and just run him to death. For years he’d

been planning to take a vacation and rest up, but they ran him so he

couldn’t. So finally when he heard that they were going to Florida, he

just up and went. Oh, he was run to death, but a few weeks in Florida

had done him a world of good. No, he didn’t know how his former patients

were getting along. Probably they were all right. Probably there was

some young college feller looking out for them. There generally was in a

case like that. He didn’t know. Things like that didn’t worry you much

when you struck Florida and began to sit out in the sun.

CHAPTER VIII

OF THE MARVELOUS SITTING ABILITY OF THE TIN-CANNERS--OF THE PARKS IN

WHICH THEY SIT--OF THE HORSESHOE BUGS AND THE CHECKER AND DOMINO

BEETLES--OF THE DELICATE MOVEMENTS OF A CELEBRATED HORSESHOE TOSSER--AND

OF THE INTERNATIONAL HORSESHOE CLUB

And so we return to the great craving of the sun-hunters: to sit in the

sun and take the air. Golf is a matter of which they know little; tennis

is regarded as a game for muscleless smart Alecks; polo might be a sort

of dog or a movie actor--they’re not quite sure about it; sea-bathing is

a diversion in which they rarely indulge. But they are remarkable

sitters. Given a bench in the sun, they can outsit a trained athlete or

the United States Senate.

All of the towns and cities and large tin-can camps of Florida cater to

the sun-hunters by setting apart a sunny park where they can gather and

commune silently or monosyllabically with one another, chew tobacco,

discuss fertilizers, cuss the administration and indulge in the games to

which they are addicted. Some of the sun-hunters who wear the benches

shiny in these parks are tin-canners; and some are seasonal sun-hunters

who have left their farms and their businesses in the North and hired a

bungalow in Florida for two hundred or four hundred or eight hundred or

one thousand dollars a season; and some are professional sun-hunters

from the North who have made barely enough money to last them the rest

of their lives unless the country goes Bolshevik or unless Congress

taxes their savings out of existence and who have bought homes for

themselves in Florida; and a very few are rebellious husbands from the

big hotels who have sneaked away from the money-perfumed atmosphere of

the time-killers and incurred their wives’ disgust and loathing by

mingling with the rough-necks.

Take, for example, Royal Palm Park at Miami. It is larger than some of

the Florida parks for sun-hunters; but the people who use it are no

different from those who use similar parks all over Florida.

On one side of the park is Biscayne Bay, with ginger-breadish

house-boats and gleaming steam yachts and broad-winged flying boats

crowded along the shore. On another side is Miami’s principal business

street, lined with modern office buildings and up-to-the-minute

haberdasheries and modistes and drug-stores and real-estate offices and

hotels and soft-drink emporiums and parked automobiles and bustling

shoppers.

In the park itself, beneath the softly rustling palms, an audience of

silent sun-hunters, sprawled on benches which surround the edges, gaze

intently at the long double row of horseshoe pitchers and at a score of

long tables crowded with men who are brooding over obviously important

matters. The men at the tables are the skilled checker, chess and

domino players of the tin-can camps and the sun-hunters’ colonies. At

one table one afternoon I recognized a doctor who had cured my childish

ailments in Maine many years ago. Opposite him was a cattleman from

Iowa. Beside him was a crippled begger and panhandler who owned no home

at all; and busily playing checkers with the panhandler was a

prosperous-looking small-town banker from Illinois.

Checker and domino tournaments of terrifying ferocity take place at

frequent intervals. The champion checker player of Miami issues a

challenge to the champion checker player of West Palm Beach, and the

outcome is awaited with breathless interest. It is not unusual for

individuals to wager as much as fifty cents on the result.

For hair-raising excitement and action so thrilling that it frequently

causes hardened sun-hunting onlookers to swallow their chews, one must

turn to the horseshoe pitchers. Horseshoe pitching is the

[Illustration:

_Photograph by F. A. Robinson_

Miami’s main street at midday showing that there is one automobile to

every seven-eighths of an inhabitant.]

[Illustration: A portion of the Tin-Can City at Tampa, with tin-canners

engaged in their favorite pursuits.]

representative sport of the tin-canner and the sun-hunter, just as the

representative sport of the British working man is drinking Burton’s and

just as the representative sport of certain African tribes is wearing

rings in their noses.

Just as an Englishman is unable to see anything in baseball, and just as

most Americans yawn heartily at the mere mention of cricket, so is the

ordinary passer-by unable to detect the charm in horseshoe pitching. He

sees a long row of men tossing horseshoes at iron stakes and another

long row of men digging the horseshoes out of the dirt and tossing them

back at other stakes. But the sun-hunters get out immediately after

breakfast and pitch all day with feverish intensity and passionate

concentration, only quitting when the sun goes down behind the palms in

a golden haze.

Some of the horseshoe experts carry their private horseshoes with them

in leather bags, and it is not unusual for an aspiring horseshoe tosser

to seek out the experts and pay handsomely for copies of the instruments

with which they won to fame and high position. Thus it may be seen how

among horseshoe tossers, as well as among golfers, ballplayers and

others who should know better, the delusion persists that a workman may

attain perfection through his tools instead of through himself.

The more skilful tossers carry with them all the appliances of their

avocation--tape measures with which to measure the distance of the shoes

from the stake; calipers to measure their distance from one another;

chalk with which to keep score; collapsible rakes to smooth out the

tumbled dirt around the stakes. The delicate movements of a celebrated

tosser as he hitches up his galluses, spits on his right hand and tests

his muscles by sinking to a semi-squatting position and rising upright

again, are watched with the keenest interest by large crowds of

sun-hunters. When a horseshoe makes a particularly noteworthy flight, a

fusillade of applausive spitting splashes on the sun-baked ground.

There is, of course, an International Horseshoe Club. It is too

important an organization to be demeaned with a merely local name, such

as the Horseshoe Club of America. Then there are local chapters that

indulge in tournaments at which feeling runs high. At West Palm Beach,

when I was there, a new pitch was being prepared for the big impending

tournament with Lake Worth. An international polo match may get more

publicity, but there’s more quiet bitterness over a horseshoe

tournament--much more. Especially in Florida.

Those who weary of dominoes, checkers, chess and horseshoe pitching are

at liberty to cut a bamboo pole and sit in the sun beside one of the

countless rivers, streams and inlets that dent the Florida coast. These

waters are full of trout, bass, red snapper, yellowtails, pompano,

grunts--silvery and delicious fish so-called because of their noisy and

peevish growls and grunts of protest when removed from the water--and

many other fish whose eating and fighting qualities would have caused

Izaak Walton to swoon with delight.

It’s hard to believe that the North, every winter, is full of people who

hate northern winters, and of folk who don’t know what to do with

themselves. If they don’t know enough to become sun-hunters, they

deserve to suffer.

BOOK THREE

TROPICAL GROWTH

CHAPTER I

OF THE ENTHUSIASM OF ALL GROWING THINGS IN FLORIDA--OF PAW-PAWS AND

PROSPECTUSES AND PERFECT THIRTY-FOURS--OF FIENDS IN HUMAN SHAPE--AND OF

THE WATCHFULNESS OF THE NATIVES FOR INSULTS

Everything grows in Florida. That is to say, everything grows in Florida

that Florida people want to grow. That is Florida’s specialty: growing.

Occasionally a few things get out of hand and indulge in some

over-enthusiastic growing when Florida people wish that they wouldn’t;

but for the most part Florida is proud of the remarkable growths that

take place within her boundaries. This is particularly true of southern

Florida. The superlatives as well as the fish grow to surprising

proportions: so do the real-estate advertisements and the avocados. The

sun is larger and warmer than in other parts of America; and the

sky--unless the leading Florida authorities are mistaken in their

observations--is higher and bluer than elsewhere.

There are only three things that southern Florida has never made any

effort to grow. These are mountains, snow-storms and earthquakes. If

there were any particular reason for her to grow any of these things,

she could probably arrange to pump up a few square miles of ocean floor

and pile the sand up into a mountain that would look like a blood

relative--say a grandson--of Fujiyama; and she could unquestionably find

a way to raise artificial snow-storms that would make Oregon jealous,

and earthquakes that would shake out a person’s eye-teeth. Since there

isn’t any reason for them, she specializes on more useful things like

paw-paws and prospectuses and perfect thirty-four bathing-girls and

what-not, and secures some startling results.

Take Miami, for example. Before taking it, one should understand that

there is grave danger in taking any particular city in Florida to the

exclusion of any other city, because all the untaken cities immediately

feel slighted and begin to thirst for the heart’s blood of the one who

did the taking.

Each Florida city or resort is violently jealous of every other resort

or city. The residents of Palm Beach speak sneeringly of Miami as being

a bit plebeian. The residents of Miami speak compassionately of Palm

Beach, as young and pretty girls speak of decaying beauty. St.

Petersburg and Tampa and Miami have little of a favorable nature to say

concerning one another. They only unite to resist attacks from resorts

outside the state, or to say a few tart words about California.

Every little while some fiend in human shape prints a piece in a South

Carolina or North Carolina or Georgia paper falsely accusing a Florida

city of harboring a few cases of typhoid or scarlet fever, or of being

too chilly for winter bathing. Instantly the Florida people rise to

defend the state’s fair name; and the low, searing curses that are

hurled against the foul detractor are warm enough to singe a hog.

Every little while, too, Florida gets a chance to slip a knife into her

hated resort rival, California; and when the chance occurs, the air is

filled with a deadly swishing sound, due to the violence with which the

knife is inserted.

A snow-storm in California causes Florida newspapers to spread loud and

exultant head-lines entirely across their front pages, declaring

excitedly: NO LIVES LOST IN CALIFORNIA BLIZZARD. This is the negation of

news everywhere except in Florida; but Florida smacks her lips over it

with the keenest delight. She emphasizes the blizzard’s severity by

shrieking that no lives were lost, thus implying that hundreds--nay,

thousands--might have been lost save for the merest chance. She is so

anxious to have tourists realize that she is the queen of winter

resorts that she is overjoyed when another resort-state is cursed with a

phase of Nature that tends to discourage tourists.

There is another grave danger in taking any Florida city as an example.

The natives of Florida winter resorts are constantly on the qui vive for

slights and insults. They are so much on the qui vive in this respect

that there is scarcely room for any one else on it. They occupy

practically the entire qui vive.