The Golden Era in St. Petersburg: Postwar Prosperity in The Sunshine City

By Jon Wilson

Between 1946 and 1963, St. Petersburg was the quintessential Sunbelt city experiencing a post-World War II boom and wrestling with the problems that accompanied rapid growth. The city's old-school techniques of promotion expanded the population from about 60,000 to more than 180,000 in eighteen years. The city developed a split personality--it aimed to be modern but retained a dated, rustic appearance. Follow St. Petersburg author and journalist Jon Wilson as he details how the city coped with relative isolation, an aging business district and cultural changes brought about by the coming of integration, the emergence of rock-and-roll, cookie-cutter subdivisions and the still-novel medium of television.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Mar 5, 2013
• ISBN: 9781614238928

Jon Wilson

Jon Wilson is currently a communications consultant for the Florida Humanities Council in St. Petersburg. He has served as a journalist for the St. Petersburg Times, Clearwater Sun and St. Petersburg Evening Independent from 1973 to 2007. He is the co-author or author of several local-interest books.

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INTRODUCTION

This book is about St. Petersburg’s immediate post–World War II years and the elements that changed its character. On January 1, 1946, St. Petersburg was still very much a city of the 1920s, shaped by that decade’s real estate boom. But after the Great Depression and world war, it was time for a fresh start.

On New Year’s Day of the first postwar year, headlines suggested a cautious optimism, and wasting no time in setting an agenda, the St. Petersburg Times published an editorial that listed things to do in 1946. Among the priorities: a bridge across lower Tampa Bay, downtown railroad track removal, completion of what was called the Gulf Coast Highway and more and better housing. Newspapers soon raised the possibility of St. Petersburg becoming a city with skyscrapers and a half million people.

Growth and prosperity would be the themes of the next eighteen years. Population surged, modern industry bloomed and new transportation links helped change an isolated resort town into an ambitious city connected to the rest of the world. All of it took place against a backdrop of social evolution. Racial segregation began to wane, and a new youth culture emerged. Television, air conditioning and a newly popular building style prevalent in burgeoning subdivisions changed the way people related to one another. Leaders tried to erase St. Petersburg’s reputation as an old folks’ home and project a vibrant image. Downtown, the established business and entertainment district, stood on the brink of decay but had an opportunity to recharge itself.

Some of the same elements that fueled St. Petersburg’s development influenced many Florida cities and other sunny regions across the nation. Taken together, their stories tell a great deal about the forces that shaped late twentieth-century America. This work is only a piece of that larger puzzle and, indeed, provides just a glimpse of St. Petersburg’s place in time. It is defined mostly through the voices of people who lived here during the eighteen years after World War II. Personal interviews and the files of the St. Petersburg Times and Evening Independent provided much of the material.

The year 1963 seemed a good place to end. The last train out of downtown during the summer of that year conveyed powerful symbolism. The city’s visionaries were saying clearly that the old days were gone, that St. Petersburg should pin its hopes on new ways of thinking. At the same time, St. Petersburg (and the rest of America) was turning a corner. In 1962, the nation had weathered the international drama that became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. A scary reminder of a dangerous world, it dented the innocence of all. Soon, John F. Kennedy, the youthful and optimistic president, would die by gunfire. Vietnam loomed, as did monumental social revolution.

St. Petersburg changed along with the rest of the country. The city was coming of age.

Chapter 1

STANDING IN TWO WORLDS

Truly, growing up in St. Pete back then was like a fairy tale…innocence, freedoms, fearless.

—Lynda McCarroll McAllister

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, a talented young designer worked into the wee hours and through weekends, crafting an exotic sports car at the edge of what was then St. Petersburg’s suburban frontier. Henry Covington named his creation El Tiburon, The Shark. Sometimes it was called the Covington Special. The sleek, low-slung vehicle drew favorable reviews from such national automotive magazines as Road and Track.

Glistening in Covington’s driveway on Fifty-eighth Street North, El Tiburon seemed out of place. It was a fantasy car in a subdivision built next to pastures and pine. Fancifully named Westgate Manor was so undeveloped that cattle sometimes escaped from an adjacent ranch. They wandered close to houses, soiled fresh St. Augustine grass and knocked down new clotheslines belonging to recently arrived middle-class residents from Long Island; or Springfield, Massachusetts; or Port Huron, Michigan.

While cows browsed carports, the space-age vehicle nearby made drivers do double takes. People slammed on their brakes to look. The car was the attraction of the whole neighborhood, said Olga Covington, Henry Covington’s wife. There wasn’t a moment of peace in the house. People would stop to offer comment. Sometimes they wanted to buy it right there, she said. Plastics engineer Glen Gums, who lived a half block from Covington, built the car’s fiberglass molds.

Henry Covington designed a space-age car, El Tiburon, in a new subdivision on the edge of a pasture. Covington’s son James is at the wheel. Courtesy of Cory Covington and Geoffrey Hacker.

The anomalous car in the tract-house neighborhood provided a perfect symbol for St. Petersburg’s immediate post–World War II character. The city had a foot in two worlds. It wanted to be modern; it wanted to be hip. But it retained a dated, occasionally rustic touch. In woods inside the city limits, lawmen sometimes broke up moonshine stills. Downtown remained lively but was starting to look worn and feel cramped. As an alternative, a modern shopping center with plenty of parking rose in the center of town, built over what many influential people considered annoying wetlands. The emerging civil rights movement picked up momentum nationwide and made important gains in St. Petersburg, but schools remained strictly segregated, people of color could not sit on the iconic green benches and a city manager declared there would be no integration on his watch.

So to whom did St. Petersburg belong? Direction and identity would emerge as critical issues after World War II ended in August 1945. Whose views prevailed might determine whether St. Petersburg became the Eden its ballyhoo proclaimed or an overrated Sun Belt city, sprawling and drab. Would old people dominate, as St. Petersburg’s national reputation often (and unfairly) suggested? How about the young Turks who wanted to change St. Petersburg’s gray image? Developers and bridge builders and highway dreamers wielded influence. So did promoters, including the daily newspapers. An old-guard cadre of downtown businessmen had its agenda. Perhaps the World War II children and the coming-of-age baby boomers had ideas; they provided a mid-twentieth-century St. Petersburg demographic that bulged nearly as dramatically as the over-sixty-fives.

One observer probably expressed the attitudes of many in the younger generation. Being in St. Petersburg was as close to growing up in a test tube or sitcom as any natural child will experience. Block after block of concrete houses painted coral pink and aquamarine, with plaster marlins and palm trees glued near their front doors, shuffleboard courts and even a few real coconuts, wrote author Richard Hill, a St. Petersburg native.

Hill’s St. Petersburg was perceived by some youths as a bland place that seemed to choke creativity. Can you imagine teenage boys in flip-flops, shorts and no shirts stalking through subdivisions, snapping their fingers like the Jets in West Side Story, defending their palm tree turf? Even an effort to imitate more atmospheric venues could turn into a joke that wasn’t exactly laughable.

Hill wrote, Ratso Rizzo’s dream was our nightmare. We hungered for a real place—Huck Finn’s Mississippi, Jack London’s Alaska, Hell’s Kitchen, anything.

Said Gregory A. Presnell, one of St. Petersburg High School’s top students in the 1950s, My impression of St. Pete at the time was not favorable. I loved the water but always felt that St. Pete was a small town in the South populated by old people from up North. After graduating from high school and going away to college, I never had any intention of returning.

Presnell, a fourth-generation Floridian, added that his opinion might have been formed by an outlook common among youths: My attitude was no doubt affected by other considerations…the need to leave the nest and venture out on my own.

At the same time, other young people drawn to traditional downtown shopping and entertainment enjoyed what at times must have been an idyllic life, even in a growing city pushing 100,000 in 1950. They liked the 1920s-era Million-Dollar Pier, choosing among a half dozen downtown movie theaters, shopping for clothes at Maas Brothers, listening to the day’s popular 45 rpm records at Lefter’s Music Store or checking out the talking mermaids and dancing chickens in James Earl Doc Webb’s superstore.

As teens or pre-teens, my friends and I would ride the bus to downtown, eat lunch at places like Kresge’s, Woolworth’s, Orange Blossom Cafeteria; see a movie at the Florida, State, Cameo theaters; buy candy; and go home, all on our one-dollar allowance, said Margery A. Bassett. Other times we would go to the Spa swimming pool or beach. There was the rec center at Bartlett Park, or we would walk to the dock on the bay and just jump in and go swimming in the summer.

The popular Spa swimming complex was on Tampa Bay on the approach to the Municipal Pier. Bartlett Park was the first of three youth centers the City of St. Petersburg built during the early postwar years.

Truly, growing up in St. Pete back then was like a fairy tale…innocence, freedoms, fearless, said Lynda McCarroll McAllister, whose family moved from Michigan in 1947. They moved into a house just west of Thirty-fourth Street North, which within a few years would become U.S. Highway 19. The family went without a refrigerator for several months. They bought large blocks of ice at an icehouse to keep perishable food in a tub in the garage. Such inconveniences did not bother the children. The neighborhood gang cleared property at the end of the block for a baseball field, mailed away for dramatic scripts and put on Annie Get Your Gun and The Wizard of Oz for their parents. We walked on stilts made by our dads, jumped double Dutch jump rope, played football and baseball, set up libraries, rode our bikes all over, McAllister recalled.

John Burke, winner of St. Petersburg’s 1950 Soap Box Derby, accepts his award from Mayor Stanley Minshall (right) as radio (and later, television) personality Burl Captain Mac McCarty stands poised to conduct an interview. Courtesy of St. Petersburg Museum of History.

After the war, John Sandy Jr.’s entire family moved to St. Petersburg, arriving from up North in a 1941 Studebaker nicknamed Puddle Jumper.

Then a giant surprise! said Sandy. Red brick streets, sailboats, streetcars, blue skies and friendly people. South Side Junior High was a dream compared to Number 10 School in Passaic, New Jersey.

Along seawalls, tanned boys flung cast nets. They threw the Evening Independent on their bicycle newspaper routes. Sometimes they pedaled fast enough to grasp the end of a trolley and get a tow; a network of tracks webbed the city until 1949. Maybe they would buy a luxurious five-cent cigar from Liggett’s Drugstore and soon turn as green as the city’s famous benches. Now and then, a curious boy would find a rifle or machine gun shell, left from the city’s wartime training days. He might take it home—or place it on the tracks to see if a trolley would make it go off, as some have confessed to doing in their younger years. More than a half century later, no stories have emerged about blasts from beneath trolleys, but there were pranks that did make the news: someone put a brassiere on the lion in front of the VFW on Beach Drive.

Even while growing rapidly and experiencing change, St. Petersburg retained a small-town feel in many ways.

My folks had no problem with me exploring all over town on my bike, alone or with a few buds, said Jerry Lane. While in grade school I could get on the bus by myself or with my younger brother and spend Saturday morning at the movies viewing a dozen cartoons, one or even two serials plus a main feature, often even a double feature, all this for twenty-five cents, not returning home until late afternoon, still all by myself.

Young African Americans found their own diversions but because of segregation did so in circumscribed venues. Church provided social occasions, and the Gibbs High School athletic teams drew a passionate following among both youths and adults. The inelegant South Mole, a point of land on Tampa Bay, provided a segregated beach at the end of the Atlantic Coast Line tracks downtown; it was within sight and swimming distance of the Municipal Pier, where black people could not go. They were allowed access to the Jim Crow beach only by following the railroad tracks along First Avenue South. Wildwood community center offered the only swimming pool in town that was open to people of color. When the 1950s began to dent segregation in St. Petersburg, Spa Beach was an