A Playboy Grows Up

BY plane, train and car, thousands poured into the land of oranges and palms last week as the winter tourist season hit its peak. After a slow start, hotels and motels throughout Florida were filling up. In Miami Beach, guest lists lengthened with the names of Eleanor Roosevelt, Elizabeth Arden, Senator John Bricker. Sixty-four miles north, at Palm Beach, the Winston Guests, the Joseph Kennedys and the Duke of Windsor went off to the Polo Ball at the Boca Raton Club, where polo ponies in special stalls were the guests of honor. At Winter Haven's famed Cypress Gardens, about 6.000 people paid $2 apiece for entertainment on a somewhat simpler scale -water skiing, swimming and diving exhibitions. Said Owner Richard Pope, who as head of the state advertising commission is Florida tourism's top drumbeater: "Just look at all those $2 bills walking around!"

Despite all the fun and frolic, there was some doubt that Florida's tourist business this year will catch up with the record $952 million set in 1952-53. when 5.000,000 tourists crowded into the state. Vacancy signs still swung outside some motels and hotels, and nightclub, owners complained of tightening pursestrings.

Changing Times. With changing times and shifting wealth, Florida's tourist trade has also changed. More "people go there than ever before, but they stay for shorter periods and spend, less per capita. To handle the increasing numbers of tourists, more hotels (7.064 rooms) have been built in Greater Miami since the war than in all the rest of the U.S. Last week, in the $200.000 Miami Beach house where Harvey Firestone once wintered, building contractors pored over plans to build the city's biggest hotel, the $11 million, 554-room Fontainebleau. on the site.

But the most notable development in Florida's tourist business has been the growth of motels. Some of them, like La Coquille. opened last week by Rockefeller Heir Spelman Prentice at Palm Beach, are equipped (and priced) for the Ferrari trade, with swimming pools, air-conditioning and room service. But for miles along the highways there are others with prices more in reach of the man who is still working toward his first million (an average of $15 a day, v. $30 in hotels).

No Calamity. The change in tourism, however, is not the biggest change in Florida. In fact, the most notable thing about Florida in 1954 is that tourism is no longer the beginning and end of the state's economy. In other times, a slow-starting tourist season might have meant a statewide calamity. Now it means no such thing.

Not only has tourism been spread out over the year, so that there is a mere 10% difference between winter and summer volume; the state's economy itself has changed. Tourism accounts for one-third of the state's business and the value of manufactured products ($1.3 billion in 1952) is half again as big. With new industries springing up from one end of the state to the other, the population of Florida has grown faster in the last three years (up 30% to 3,600,000) than that of any other eastern state. Since the war. non-farm employment has soared 51% to 837,500. In short, Florida, long the playboy of the states, is fast growing into economic maturity.

Servants' Servants. Florida's new boom bears little resemblance to past periods of bubbling prosperity such as the '80s and '90s, when Oilman Henry Flagler opened up the new vacationland by building a string of hotels down the East Coast and a railroad that eventually reached Key West. It is also different from the '20s, when fun-seeking tycoons went south in private railroad cars with a staff of servants for the servants, and fell over each other to buy medieval houses and fake antique furniture from Addison Mizner. Gone are the hordes of "developers" who boomed land prices as high as $17,000 per frontage foot with dreams of billion-dollar cities, although they sometimes could not even afford the paper to plan them on.

Instead of paper plans, Florida bloomed last week with concrete results. From the white sands of Miami to the piney woods of the northwest panhandle, new industries formed the base of the new kind of boom.

Up north, in the state's financial center of Jacksonville, the red skeletons of two skyscrapers sprouted to provide office space for the Prudential and Independent life-insurance companies. Other cities had wooed them, but the companies chose Jacksonville for their southeastern headquarters because the state gives insurance companies tax advantages for locating regional offices in Florida. In turn, this law is making the city one of the nation's most important insurance centers. St. Regis Paper had opened a giant new $18 million plant; General Motors' Electro-Motive Division has nearly completed a $2,500,000 expansion to triple its capacity. General Foods had a new Maxwell House instant-coffee plant; International Harvester, a new $300,000 farm-equipment outlet.

"Hog 'n Hominy." Across the state to the west, in land long known as "hog 'n hominy country," Chemstrand's $85 million nylon plant at Pensacola was in commercial production, would soon be turning out 50 million Ibs. of yarn a year. Eight pulp and paper plants were producing at the rate of $230 million a year, having boosted capacity 50% in the past two years alone. Soon to go into production: an $18 million cellulose plant owned by Procter & Gamble.

Even such a resort center as Miami has its new industries, with small sportswear and light-metal plants fanning out into the suburbs. Miami's biggest employer (17,000) is International Airport, where Eastern Air Lines, National and Pan American all have their main repair and overhaul shops.

The Bird Dogs. Florida's agriculture has kept pace with its industry. In the center of the state, citrus groves were heavy last week with the biggest crop in history (an estimated 130 million boxes). The "bird dogs," i.e., the middlemen in the industry, sent radio-directed trucks speeding from grove to grove, lining up likely buys. Not long ago, such a huge crop would have meant vast surpluses, and the dumping of millions of bushels of fruit into Florida's lakes and rivers. But "this year, almost every orange and grapefruit will be sold at good prices -or at least safely stored in cans for future sale. For this happy prospect, citrus men can thank the $132 million frozen-concentrate industry, which in a few short years has leveled out the feast & famine industry by dotting the green landscape with 22 vast brick and aluminum cold-storage warehouses. Having poured millions into the liquid-concentrate revolution, the citrus industry may be on the threshold of another upheaval: crystal concentrates, easy to ship and inexpensive to store, that can be turned into fruit juice with the addition of water. Florida's Orange Crystal, Inc. last year offered $300,000 worth of stock to finance such a plant, sold the issue in a day.

The enormous growth of Florida's citrus industry has been paralleled by big gains in the relatively new pursuit (for Florida) of raising cattle. Until a few years ago, gunfights crackled over the Florida countryside in the best tradition of the West. But now 1,500,000 acres of good cattle land and 1,386.000 head of beef cattle are fenced in under the watchful eyes of Seminole Indian cowhands, and order reigns. Said 77-year-old Agriculture Commissioner Nathan Mayo: "We used to have nothing but scrawny herds of 4-H cattle -hide, hair, hoof and horns. Now there are more than 925 registered herds in the state." Though Florida beef is not yet up to the quality of Western meat, it is improving, and in the past 20 years 32 packing and slaughterhouses have been built.

In the Everglades, "winter vegetable capital of the U.S.," rice and sugar are fast expanding, and in central Florida, millions are made each year in tomatoes, beans and corn. Overall vegetable production has soared 500% in 30 years. One cattle breeder and farmer, Gainesville's W. A. Shands, a director of Florida Power & Light, has grossed as much as $1,000,000 on 125 acres of celery land alone.

New Crop. Florida's new kind of boom has cast up a new crop of millionaires. One of the top citrus men is Tom Swann, 52, who runs the groves and concentrate plant for Florence Foods, a big growers' cooperative, and also has 1,600 acres in groves of his own. In the state's growing cattle business, the biggest force is Florida's Lykes family, headed by John Wall Lykes (66) and nephew Charles (37). The Lykeses who also own the Lykes Bros. Steamship Co., Inc., largest shipper under the U.S. flag (54 cargo ships operating out of Gulf ports), have recently started to concentrate on concentrates. They control Dade City's $15 million Pasco citrus-processing plant, biggest in the state, which in 24 hours can turn out enough fruit products to fill three 50-car freight trains. On an average, the 83 members of the Lykes family are worth some $2,000,000 apiece.

At the top of Florida's industrial heap is 66-year-old Edward Ball, who bosses the vast interests of the estate of Alfred Irenee du Pont, and who, as head of the Florida National Bank of Jacksonville, helped many of the new industries to start. Ball, with headquarters in Jacksonville, oversees an empire that ranges from banks (a total of 23 in the Florida National Group) to pulp and paper (St. Joe Paper Co.) and one of the largest privately owned forests in the U.S.

Ore & Atoms. Florida's real -and least expected -source of wealth is just now being discovered. Long considered poor in basic raw materials, the state has been finding uses for things that once were considered worthless. Around Jacksonville, two companies are mining ilmenite and rutile, from which the wonder metal titanium is produced. To the south, near Fort Myers, an oilfield is producing commercially. Oil was also found last month in a new area not far away. To the north, slash pine is feeding the paper and chemical industries. In the Everglades, Newport Industries and other companies are turning out tough ramie fiber, a promising substitute for Indian jute.

Around cigarmaking Tampa (635 million cigars last year), vast phosphate deposits provide the U.S. with 77% of its supply. And this industry will soon become even more significant when two companies begin production of uranium as a phosphate byproduct. To supervise this, the AEC recently opened a branch office at Plant City, near the west coast.

Miami's McGregor Smith, president of Florida Power & Light Co., has one yardstick of the area's growth -and his faith in the future. In the last ten years Smith, who has done as much as any man to lure new industries to Florida, has spent $151 million on expansion, more than doubled the company's capacity to 503,000 kilowatts. In the next ten years, for another $332 million, he expects to triple capacity.

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