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.

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.

Stories I Like, Yet Am Not Entirely Convinced They Are True, Part One

Years ago one of my ex-wife's friends told us a story about how her and her brother would cause all sorts of trouble for their parents growing up. Not even photographs were safe from hijinx.

"Our parents wanted a family photo. Before they took the pictures, we went to the kitchen and each got a plum. When they got the pictures developed, we were both holding a plum at waist level and laughing."

The parents made the mistake of mentioning something about the sneaky fruit in the photos, which inspired the kids to take as many plum pictures as possible. So there'd be pictures of Christmas morning with the kids slyly holding plums, or photos of the family at the Grand Canyon or whatever holding the fruit and ruining the pictures.

As much as this story cracks me up, especially thinking of these parents getting a pack of pictures back and flipping through each one, saying, "Dammit, why can't we just have ONE normal picture of you two,"  I do have several areas of concern. First of all, if they were that upset, why would they continue to buy plums? And did the kids just carry plums with them everywhere they went? Wouldn't the parents notice the kids holding plums while taking the pictures? And yes, the storyteller stressed that only plums would work. Not apples, oranges or pears. They had to be plums. Which only makes sense. Plums are much funnier than apples.

Weighing the evidence, I have decreed this story to be Mostly True. I'm thinking there were times other fruit was substituted, or perhaps even photographs when no fruit at all was displayed. This should not stop you from trying this trick on your own, especially with Instagram giving your plum photos a vintage sheen.

Next Episode: My Great-Uncle's War Stories.