Skeleton Dance, or Stories I Like, Yet Am Not Entirely Convinced They Are True, Part Five

Longtime readers of my foolishness might remember this story, I first published it back in the ancient days of Myspace, but I have recently unearthed new information which begged for an updated version. While plagiarizing yourself is looked down on by the elites, sometimes loose cannons like myself have no other choice in our relentless hunt for the truth.

Several Christmases ago I was at my parents’ house with my sister and then-wife. My dad made an offhand comment about a place called the Skeleton Hotel. Apparently construction started on a hotel back in the ‘20s during one of Florida’s periodic land booms. After the inevitable bust there was no money left to complete the hotel, so it sat unfinished for years, earning the nickname “The Skeleton Hotel.”

One of us commented that with a name like The Skeleton Hotel there should really be more skeletons or ghosts running around that story. 

“No, never saw any skeletons,” he said. “But I did find a mummified hand and a coffee can full of coins there once.”

Wait, what?

So my dad and some friends were playing at the old hotel and started digging under the front stairs. That’s when they unearthed the mummified hand and can full of coins. We asked him what the coins were like, were they regular U.S. money? Doubloons? Whatever money leprechauns hide? He wasn’t really sure, or couldn't remember, or tried to throw us off the trail. They took the hand and the coins to the police, then never heard anything else about them.

He did manage to save a photo of his find, however.

We were awestruck by this story. Not only did little kid dad find actual buried treasure, an obsession that took up like 40% of my brain when I was a kid, but he also unearthed a mummy hand, with all the weird, unholy powers that was sure to bring him.

My sister and I were doubly struck by the fact that he didn’t feel this story was interesting enough to drop on us until we were in our 30s.

I can understand that a bit now – had he told me that story when I was a kid, our yard would have looked like the surface of the moon after my frantic searches for treasure.

Couple weeks ago I mentioned this story to my mom. She said she didn’t remember anything about it. She also pointed out that my dad would regularly, let’s say exaggerate stories for comedic effect, and that my sister and I could be somewhat gullible about this. For example, he got pins in his shoulder when a car slipped a jack and fell on him right before I was born. When I asked  him about the scar he told me a kid at a campfire had thrown a flaming marshmallow at him, leaving a (rather large) permanent scar.

I don’t know if this was supposed to be a joke or a lie turned into a teaching moment, but it did the trick. While I’m a fan of both shenanigans and fires, ifI felt things were getting too rowdy around an open flame, I had a vision of my dad’s marshmallow scar. “This could get dangerous,” I’d think. “I better get out of here before people start flinging flaming marshmallows.”

So in the spirit of the investigative journalism that The Goo Goo Muck is renowned for, I decided to see how true the Skeleton Hotel story was. My mom didn't offer much hope, but she could just be part of the conspiracy. The first step was to see if the Skeleton Hotel even existed. Holy crap! While I was picturing a much more Addams Family skeleton, it looks like the Skeleton Hotel was a fairly well-known landmark in Lake Meade, and stayed up until the mid-'60s.

If you listen carefully, you can hear the mummy's hand howling for his can of coins.

You can't see the haunted front steps from here, but they were probably taken down by subsequent treasure hunters.

I have no idea who my dad's friends were as a kid, so there's no way to track them down without, actual, you know, effort. However, through a half-assed Google search I found a Fort Meade Historical Museum which mentions a 1957 bank robbery where two dudes used an airplane and kidnapped a policeman. Maybe the coins were hidden then? I'm not saying the sky robbers were cursed by the unearthly mummy hand, but I think that anyone with a scientific mind can infer that they 100 percent were.

Based on this evidence, I decree that not only was Polk County a pretty strange place in the old days, but I declare my dad's story to be True. I will be contacting the sheriff soon to claim the can of coins as my dad's rightful heir. They can keep the mummy hand. I've got a hard enough life trying to stay away from flaming marshmallows without getting mummy curses on me.

Going Ape; or Stories I Like, Yet Am Not Entirely Convinced They Are True, Part Five

You don't exactly have to be a card-carrying member of PETA to have weird feelings about zoos. I mean, imagine - you're some huge animal, just chilling in Africa or South America, just being all majestic and wandering wherever you want when somebody shoots a tranquilizer in your ass. Next thing you know you're enclosed in a pen the size of a living room and getting stared at and photographed by human families.

Some of my conflicted feelings probably come from growing up in the '70s in the tail end of 'private zoos.' I'm not sure if these were all over the country or just the South, but I remember my dad pulling over so we could look at a sad black bear pacing on a cement floor in a little barred cage out in the middle of nowhere. Even though it was cool to see a bear up close, I remember thinking he didn't look too happy in his new home.

Modern zoos do a lot of work in conservation and education, and the habitats for their animals are close to what the animals are used to, rather than a homemade cage baking in the Florida sun. Plus, with loss of natural habitat, you could make a case that the animals are safer in captivity than in their home; sort of like a witness protection agency.

This attention to large, natural enclosures is a fairly recent development. In fact, in the story I heard, we'll have to go back, back to a time of more primitive zoos. Back to the '70s. Or possibly the '80s. I've heard it both ways.

Back then the Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa was like most zoos of the era, in that they still had cages instead of habitats. Except for the lions, as we've learned from Goodfellas. Most animals adjusted to their lives behind bars. Except for the orangutans. Using their smarts and Beast Strength, the apes would wait until the keepers went home, reach out of their cages, bend the locks and take off through the streets of suburban Tampa.

This always cracked me up, because I always pictured families sitting down for breakfast glancing outside at an ape just truckin' down the sidewalk.

After a while the keepers figured out what was going on and created more moats and stuff, saving families from marauding orangutans.

This sort of thing happened all the time in Tampa.

I have no idea where I originally heard this story, but like the Elvis story, I've used it for years. If I was at a fancy dinner party or event, and someone mentioned zoos, or apes, or orangutans, I'd have a great little story to bring out. And yes, that happened more than you might think.

But is it true?

Well, sort of.

Apparently I was off on the date. According to "Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives" by Thomas French, the great escape was in 1991, which for some reason isn't as funny. Basically, Rudy, a young female orangutan was having trouble fitting in with the rest of her ape roommates. She climbed a tree out of the enclosure and willingly surrendered when French showed up. It's actually kind of sweet.

As for overall truth, I'd have to give this one an almost true. There was an orangutan that got out, but the best part of the story to me was the orangutan snapping the lock and wandering down the streets, which resulted in subtracting some points from the overall score.

We hold things to a very rigorous standard of truth here.

How My Uncle Eddie Promoted World Peace and Understanding During World War Two; or Stories I Like, Yet Am Not Entirely Convinced They Are True, Part Four

My Great Uncle Eddie was awesome. He was a retired attorney for as long as I was aware of him, and in my mind was the origin of all those "Now I may be just a simple country lawyer" tropes. Always wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt, thick glasses and short cut white hair, he was a favorite of all the kids in the family.

Uncle Eddie owned a big spread of land with a house that was full of stuff; he was a hoarder before hoarding was cool. As kids, we'd drive through the orange groves (this was the late '70s/early '80s when kids were allowed to do stuff like that) or explore his garage which was full of old cars and boats or just wander around the property. I learned to drive a bulldozer there once. Like I said, different times.

Eddie had a big, booming voice, and would frequently start his stories with an exclamation that sounded like "Weayah," sort of a mixture of well and yeah.

Oh yeah, the stories.

Uncle Eddie loved to talk. His stories were legendary - when I was older he'd always start out by saying, "I hear you're studying journalism at the University of Florida." I'd say yes, and he'd be off. He'd start by talking about I.F. Stone (look him up, dummies), his trips to Cuba, Castro, Rosa Parks, Abraham Lincoln, court cases he was following in the paper, honestly, just about every topic or historical figure under the sun, never really finishing up one story before going off into another. By this time I was glancing around for a cousin or sister to pawn him off on. Looking back, I feel bad about this, because I really enjoyed his roundabout jaunts through personal and  U.S. history and now wish I had given him more time.

About a decade before Uncle Eddie died, my dad got into genealogy and thought it would be a good idea to capture some of Uncle Eddie's stories on video while he was still around. Dad wanted to focus on Uncle Eddie's World War Two stories, which apparently he would bring up almost as often as he did local court cases.

So dad filmed Uncle Eddie sitting on a couch, while dad questioned him off-camera and attempted to keep him on topic.

Best part to my sister and I watching later was Uncle Eddie discussing  his training. "Well, I met me a little nurse in San Francisco, and I was with her about ...three days."

After hanging out in San Francisco, Uncle Eddie was transferred to the Philippines, where he flew one of the coolest looking planes ever, the P-38 Lightning. Check it out:

Seriously, it's like someone took a bunch of awesome looking planes and glued them all together.

I knew about the P-38, because Uncle Eddie had told me about it years ago. Every time I'd see a picture of one, I'd imagine his voice coming through the intercom: "Weayah, just bombed us a little Japanese battleship. Kinda like when I was at the 4H Fair and saw this prize-winning steer. You know who never had any use for fairs was that ol' Abraham Lincoln..."

The part of Uncle Eddie's story that stayed with me to this day was the story of one of his last flights. He was alone and came across a lone Japanese Zero. Uncle Eddie looked at the pilot, the Japanese pilot looked at Uncle Eddie, and they both gave a 'I don't see you if you don't see me' gesture and turned around.

I liked the idea of Uncle Eddie and this unknown Japanese pilot having their own silent Christmas Truce, both of them surviving the war and going on to prosper in their own countries, perhaps thinking every once in a while of what might have happened on that day. Did the Japanese pilot ever look out into the night sky and thank Uncle Eddie for not shooting him down over the Pacific Ocean? Did Uncle Eddie pause during one of his stories and wonder what caused him to not pull the trigger?

But the more I thought about it, the more certain details bothered me. Like, why would Uncle Eddie be out all alone? And how close would he have to be to the Japanese pilot for them to see each other? Why would the Japanese pilot be all alone?

In the spirit of hard-hitting investigative journalism, I searched tirelessly through yellowing Department of Defense records until I uncovered the truth*. According to my research, the P-38 was notoriously quiet, so it is conceivable that Uncle Eddie could have possibly snuck up on the Japanese pilot. They were also used for reconnaissance, so that would explain him being alone.

Based on these two facts, I declare Uncle Eddie's story to be 100 percent true, the highest possible rating this series can bestow, and the only one I have handed out. True, I could have done a bit more verification, but hey, it's Uncle Eddie. I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt.

I am also giving his three-day San Francisco nurse story a 100 percent true rating, and two thumbs up for studliness. High five, Uncle Eddie!



*OK, a five second Wikipedia search.

Elvis has Left the Building; or Stories I Like, Yet Am Not Entirely Convinced They Are True, Part Three

I was watching Elvis on Tour a couple of weeks ago, thanks to TCM, one of the channels that justifies my sending about half my paycheck to Comcast Cable each month.

The movie documents Elvis on a 1972 US tour, a few years before he blew up and got all rambling on stage due to his 'medications.' I've always had a soft spot for '70s Elvis, mainly because his voice sounds more melancholy and ... lived in or something, and songs like "American Trilogy" will instantly transport me to falling asleep in the back of my parent's car as we drove through Mississippi. Plus, he looked all awesome:

King of Rock and Roll, King of his Castle.

At one point there's a shot of the Jacksonville official seal, which reminded me of a story I heard years ago that I've been telling ever since.

Florida Theatre is this cool old downtown Jacksonville theater that has been around since 1927. All sorts of people have played there through the years, including Elvis back in 1956, when the mayor had to be on hand to ensure Elvis' pelvis didn't inflame the Jacksonville youth to unheard of heights of juvenile delinquency and public sexiness.

The upper level of the Florida Theatre is now office space, but it used to house a radio station in the old days, according to the story. Since this was back in the days when bands had to give interviews all the time before rocking, everyone who played the Florida Theatre would go upstairs, give an interview and play a song or two in an effort to get people to come out to the show. Then I presume they ate a fried chicken dinner provided by the theater owner's wife and drank some whiskey before going on stage.

These performances were recorded onto acetate records, which were then just sort of stored away in boxes or used to prop up uneven tables or used in primitive Frisbee games.*

Years later when the theater was renovated, crews went through all the stuff in the top floors and threw it all out. Decades of posters, old props and clothing, and hundreds of unmarked records all ended up in the dumpster.

So somewhere in a North Florida landfill lie hundreds of interviews and performances from the '20s til about the late '60s. Who knows what lies unheard and broken? Elvis is definitely in there, as well as countless other irreplaceable recordings.

This is the part where I would make a dramatic pause when retelling the story and say something profound like, "If only they would have known," while gazing wistfully off in the distance.

So is the story true? I asked Raymond, a senior librarian in the Florida department via email. This is his reply:

"Sounds entirely plausible. I can't find anything on a radio station there by randomly searching city directories, but I do know there was a fully-functional small theatre upstairs in that office building portion on the side of the theatre - like a screening room. Here's a pic of it **with a mic from WJAX, the radio station the city used to own:

I guess WJAX could've set something up to record there, but I think their studio was always elsewhere.

And yes, they probably threw everything away. That's Jacksonville SOP."

The verdict? "Entirely Plausible" is close enough to give it an Unverified But True which might be the highest level of truth we're ever gonna get here.

So feel free to use this story as your own, and remember the dramatic pause and wistful gaze at the end. People really like that.

Oh, and Raymond, I guess I should have asked before using your email like that, but I think Florida's Sunshine Laws should protect me if you try to sue.

*OK, so I made up the Frisbee and table leveling part.

 **You should check out the library's Sandgren Collection. Not all of it has been digitized, but it consists of thousands of photos of old Jacksonville buildings, old school wrestlers and entertainers and general olde tyme awesomeness.

There's a(n Ice Cream) Riot Goin' On; or Stories I Like, Yet Am Not Entirely Convinced They Are True, Part Two

Jacksonville's logo, "Bold New City of the South" brings to mind several things: like Atlanta's logo "A City Too Busy to Hate," it sent a message that we weren't like the rest of the South, we were progressive, forward looking, and open for business. It also brings to mind this photo of our old mayor about to get smacked in the face with a titty while his Benny Hill-esque sidekick looks on:

I wish I knew how to embed "Yakkity Sax" here.

But Jacksonville had a darker side, a face we hid from the rest of the nation. No, I'm not talking about the paper mills, those have been gone for decades. No, not the Civil Rights struggle, white people were dicks here just like in every other Southern city.

I'm speaking of the Great Ice Cream Riot.

Local historians ignore the Great Ice Cream Riot of Sometime in the Mid '90s. This could be a deep-reaching conspiracy to protect the city's image. Or it could be because it was all made up.

I'll explain:

We had a great team at the Fine Arts Department at the old Hayden Burns Library. One of the advantages to working there was that the new Main Library was about to open, so nobody really cared about the old library. That meant we could do whatever programming we wanted.

And boy, did we.

We had a series of themed amateur film festivals, which went over well - the theme would be whatever our obsessions were at the time - Liberace, '70s truck driving movies, whatever. They were a lot of fun and got a few people into the library who otherwise might not have come. We hosted annual Halloween festivals which would combine whatever public domain movies we could play with live bands and whatever scripted foolishness and in-jokes we could get our part-time pages to perform.

Then one of the librarians mentioned something about an ice cream riot.

She vaguely remembered hearing something on the news years ago about a riot erupting at the Jacksonville Landing after the frozen treats ran out during a free ice cream day.

We had a new obsession and had to had to have a program. So, tempting fate, we decided to stage an ice cream social, combining more public access films with special guest appearances from Kenny Rogers and a cranky Thomas Edison. I'm sure Liberace was in there somewhere, along with the free ice cream. We immediately started work on the centerpiece of the program, a Ken Burns-like recreation of the Great Ice Cream Riot's aftermath.

We wanted to slowly pan over a sepia-tinted photo of kids clutching ice cream cones while lying on the ground while a narrator said something like, "Ice ... cream...Everywhere, I see the remnants of ice cream."

Then we discovered that such a film was way beyond our capabilities and some digging discovered...well, I'll let her tell you. Ladies and Gentlemen, Laura will walk us through the real story of the Great Ice Cream Riot.

 

Q: So did you have the Great Ice Cream Riot in your mind for years? Like if someone mentioned the Landing was that the first thing that came up?

Do you remember our plans to reenact the Great Riot? I seem to remember wanting to do a Ken Burns-style panning over the bodies reaching out for ice cream.

A: Yes, for some reason that story really stuck with me and it did come to mind when I thought about the Landing. Something about those 11 o’clock news stories. There was another one about a guy who donated a giant robot (like the ones they have at monster truck shows) to a small town in Texas and the police used the robot to tear down crack houses. You might want to research that for another “Great stories that might not be true.”

I’m sure the reason we never made the film about the ice cream riot was because our vision was so ambitious.

Q: So it was basically just a food fight that broke out in the food court, right? How did that make the news? And this would have been in the early ‘90s, right?

A: It was in the mid ‘90s. Maybe it was a slow news night? I wish I had saved the article Glenn found for us. The problem is I wanted to believe the riot was a result of the ice cream social so much that I forgot the truth. I think they were actually two separate news stories from the same night. We found evidence that the Winn Dixie-sponsored ice cream social happened at the Landing and Glenn found a story about some guys who started a food fight up in the food court. For some reason I’m thinking the guys were in their early 20s and the whole thing started at Sbarro but I could be making that up.

Q: I seem to remember you were pretty disappointed when you actually found the truth. There is a lesson there. Not that it stopped us from trying to portray the Great Ice Cream Riot in all our following programs. Speaking of which, am I correct in remembering that you and Matthew both feel the Thomas Edison Ice Cream program was one of our worst? I think that was a totally underrated program. 

A: You’ve been talking about how great the Edison program was for so many years that I’m starting to believe it myself.

Q: Was there a point after you found out the truth that you didn’t want to accept it or at least tell me and Matthew about it?

 

A: No, Scott. That would be crazy. My version of the story didn’t mean enough to me to consciously deny it.

Regrettably, the story of the Great Ice Cream Riot will have to be rated FALSE, which deeply pains me, as the idea of a riot breaking out over free ice cream is simply awesome. HOWEVER, even if the story itself is false, it inspired both some extensive library research and an underrated program, as well as an entertaining story, so we shouldn't be too hard on it.