OF NUTS IN THE COCONUT GROVE—OF BRADLEY’S—OF THE RELAXATION AND AMUSEMENT OF THE BEACH CLUB-FELLOWS—AND OF GAMBLING IN GENERAL
Afterone 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
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.
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.
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.
Near the Flagler estate at Palm Beach.
Near the Flagler estate at Palm Beach.
Near the Flagler estate at Palm Beach.
The Australian Pine Walk between the Poinciana and The Breakers, Palm Beach.
The Australian Pine Walk between the Poinciana and The Breakers, Palm Beach.
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 inFlorida 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 spendall 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. Afew 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 whocleaned 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.
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
Aboutthe 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 toearning 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 womentoo, 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.
THE TIN-CANNERS
OF JANUARY IN THE NORTH—OF THE WINTER PASTIMES OF MR. AND MRS. CHARLES WALNUT—AND OF A PENETRATING CHILL
SceneI 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 hasgone 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.
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
SceneII 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 thatthey 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 announceseventually. 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 withMandy Leein 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.
OF MIGRANTS AND MIGRATIONS—OF THE TRUE SUN-HUNTER AND HIS DESIRES—AND OF HIS UNIFORM, AND HIS FLUENT ASSORTMENT OF EQUIPMENT
Themanner 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 whichEurope 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 modernmigrant 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 atwenty-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 likethe 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-apartstoves, 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.
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
Itis 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 radiatorof 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
A tin-can paradise on the shore of Tampa Bay.
A tin-can paradise on the shore of Tampa Bay.
A tin-can paradise on the shore of Tampa Bay.
The apotheosis of tin-can comfort.
The apotheosis of tin-can comfort.
The apotheosis of tin-can comfort.
A tin-can camp between Palm Beach and Miami.
A tin-can camp between Palm Beach and Miami.
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 actionon 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 theTampa Tribunescornfully, “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.
OF PORTABLE BUNGALOWS—OF THE RHEUMATIC DAIRYMAN—OF THE LITTLE OLE TRUCK—OF SIMPLE PLEASURES AND LOW EXPENDITURES
Thetin-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 reasonfor 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 alongbehind 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 inthe 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.
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, inThe 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, constructedafter 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 packedeverything 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 forhis 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 ofhis 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 collapsiblefrying 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.
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
Iconferredwith 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 forlazy. 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 andnipped 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.
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
Andso 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 theycan 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