Florida’s Founding Figures

Florida’s history is a tapestry of countless threads, the lives of its men and women woven into it, often invisibly. But sometimes those threads become ropes or steel cables, if you will, vivid lives that give us both direction and character.

Almost every day now we find the country and the state stamped with this unhappy ink: Divided. Divisive.

If those words form a tattoo for our times, we’re under no obligation to let them become permanent characteristics, a fact we discover this week with just a glance at a few of the famous Floridians who refused to remain complacent or merely comfortable in the conduct of their lives. Who?

Such land and water champions as Marjory Stoneman Douglas and her younger friend, Maggie Reno Hurchalla. Such writers and storytellers as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (“The Yearling”), Zora Neale Hurston (“Their Eyes Were Watching God”) or Patrick D. Smith (“A Land Remembered”).

Such artists as the Highwaymen, or such governors as LeRoy Collins in the 1950s and ’60s, and Lawton Chiles in the 1990s.

Johnny Cypress and W. Stanley Hanson with the Cypress children.

Only one such celebrant and the profoundly committed friend of those who suffered the most in the historic development of Florida both before and after our 1845 statehood, W. Stanley Hanson.

In the first half of the last century, he and a few other Floridians almost single-handedly aimed to overcome a 19th-century effort by the United States, in three wars, to wipe out the Seminoles.

Such are the best of our Floridians.

“So when at times the mob is swayed to carry praise or blame too far,” wrote the American poet Robert Frost, “we may choose something like a star to stay our minds on and be staid.”

These men and women, all of them gone, remain stars. But in a year of many questions, where are the stars of today?

The stars

“Are such heroes lurking among us and we don’t know it?” asks Gary Mormino, a professor emeritus of history at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg and a widely celebrated author of books on Florida’s history.

Maggie Hurchalla was a world-class kayaker. She paddled the mangroves behind her Stuart home and spent her life fighting to conserve Florida’s environment. EVE SAMPLES / COURTESY PHOTO

“They had one thing in common, whatever their differences in politics, age, religion, history or sex,” he said in a recent conversation with Florida Weekly: “They cared about the good of Florida.”

Whatever their differences, indeed.

Marjorie Stoneman Douglas stood just over 5 feet tall and weighed 100 pounds. She lived 108 years, produced fiction and nonfiction alike, drank scotch and sipped sherry with close friends, and preferred not to wander around too much in the Everglades she wrote so much about in her culture-altering 1947 book, “The Everglades: River of Grass.” She didn’t like the heat, the wet and the bugs, she said, but she cherished the nature of it.

Maggie Hurchalla, on the other hand, who saved Martin County from development blight and inherited the shared leadership of the nonprofit Friends of the Everglades from Douglas (who founded it) was a world-class kayaker who could also walk straight into the ’Glades with her brother and cross more than 100 miles of trackless terrain on foot.

MORMINO

She stood almost a foot higher than Douglas at about 6 feet, still 2 inches shy of her extraordinary older sister, former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno.

Gov. Lawton Chiles, additionally, was an Army veteran of the Korean War who walked more than 1,000 miles during a U.S. Senate campaign once, from Florida Bay to Tallahassee.

Bobby Bowden, head football coach at Florida State University for 33 years, from 1976 to 2009, was a deeply religious native Alabaman who liked to say, “daggummit.” It’s a way of controlling anger and emotions, perhaps, that might be instructive to all contemporary Floridians.

They all had something else in common, too, it seems — an attitude characterized by Patrick D. Smith in his celebrated novel of once-upon-a-time Florida, “A Land Remembered.”

They didn’t give up. “(What) I’m trying to tell you is to be strong. Don’t ever let nothing get you down. Don’t be afraid or ashamed to love, or to grieve when the thing you love is gone. Just don’t let it throw you, no matter how much it hurts.”

Zora Neale Hurston FLORIDA STATE ARCHIVES / COURTESY PHOTO

That was especially true of the remarkable Black writer in a time of segregation that amounted to an American apartheid, Zora Neale Hurston. Her 1937 novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” the third of four, brought her no great fame or wealth in her lifetime.

Now, it’s counted as one of the best American novels.

In one famous line, she offered a wisdom that may apply this year, or any: “There are years that ask questions, and years that answer.”

Connections

Some people among us knew or met those stars, seemingly in the years that answered.

In their recollections and anecdotes, perhaps, as much as in the formal biographical histories of those individuals, we sometimes gain a sense of presence.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas FLORIDA STATE ARCHIVES / COURTESY PHOTO

When journalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas was born early in April 1890, only nine years had passed since the industrialist Hamilton Disstan had been able to purchase 4 million acres of what was predominantly Everglades for 25 cents an acre — arguably the beginning of a quick spin of decades spent altering and drying out vast portions of the natural landscape.

By the time Jeff McCullers met her, she was 98 years old, a woman who had done as much as any human to give us one more chance to undo the damage we’d inflicted on the natural system and indirectly to ourselves — out of ignorance fortified by greed, some historians argue, though not out of malice.

“I was the drama teacher at Cypress Lake High School in 1988 when Marjory Stoneman Douglas made an appearance there,” recalls the retired educator, who holds a doctorate and spent about 35 years in Lee County schools.

“She was the star of a day-long symposium on the Everglades, and I was to provide her with lights and sound. As usual, I had a crew of stagecraft students helping me.

W. Stanley Hanson’s father, a medical doctor, treated Indians as a matter of course. Hanson grew up with them and learned their language. WOODY HANSON / COURTESY PHOTO

“The auditorium was packed and buzzing, with reporters all over and plenty of local dignitaries showing up to make sure the reporters saw them, too.

“When she arrived, the first thing we saw was that wide-brimmed hat that became her trademark. Her eyeglasses were huge but she couldn’t see and I was struck by how small she was. This titan of Florida history was a little lady, made even smaller by the assembled crowd in the big theater.

“She spoke gently as we got her into a chair while I set up her microphone. I was worried that the crowd was going to overwhelm her.”

That didn’t happen. Almost the opposite, in fact.

“As soon as I brought up the lights, she silenced the crowd with her grace and dignity. She spoke proudly of all the work that had been done to save wild Florida — and then she spoke apocalyptically about what might happen should any of us fail to keep that work going.”

Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden addressed Florida lawmakers. FLORIDA STATE ARCHIVES / COURTESY PHOTO

One of the students turned to McCullers, he remembers.

“‘Look at everyone listening to her,’ she whispered to me. ‘She should be president.’”

Among those for whom Douglas served as both inspiration and mentor were Janet Reno and her sister Maggie Reno Hurchalla, whose parents were reporters and friends of Douglas at the Miami Herald — girls who grew up in rustic surroundings.

In his 2022 book, “Dreams of a New Century,” Mormino describes one Reno girl, Janet — ultimately a graduate of Harvard Law School who became the U.S. Attorney General under President Bill Clinton — this way:

“‘Had there been a prize for the most authentic Floridian, Janet Reno was a lock. The daughter of two competing

Miami newspaper reporters, she was born and raised in today’s Kendall on the edge of the Everglades, in an un-air-conditioned home. Lucy Morgan, a longtime friend and observer (and a late, Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist) described Reno: ‘She stood 6-foot-2 in her bare feet — and they were often bare when she made it home to the rough-hewn home her mother built.’ Mother, Jane Wood Reno, dug the foundation, wired the walls, shingled the roof, and laid the bricks in neat rows. The Reno family rule was simple enough: ‘Tell the truth and don’t cheat.’ Janet always followed the rules. Following Harvard Law School, she became state attorney for Dade County and U.S. attorney general. Wholly lacking glamour, she displayed a sense of humor, appearing on “Saturday Night Live” in 2001 as the host and rock star of the ‘Janet Reno Dance Party.’”

Except for the details, Mormino and Lucy Morgan might as well have been describing Maggie, too. Janet died in 2016, and Maggie in 2022.

Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, knew Maggie well.

“She was a force of nature and a force for nature. If you wanted to learn what she knew about Florida’s environment — and she was brimming with knowledge — there was no better way to do it than to join her on a kayaking adventure. Maggie paddled the mangrove forests behind her Stuart home in a little whitewater kayak, paddling circles around companions who were decades younger than her (I speak from experience).

“If you were lucky, you got to borrow the oversized, old kayak labeled ‘AGOTUS,’ which was missing one foot peg and previously belonged to Maggie’s sister Janet. Kayaking through the St. Lucie Inlet Preserve with Maggie eclipsed any TED Talk or Master Class. Maggie showed us the mystery of secret mangrove passages, the magic of bioluminescence on a moonless night, and the joy of traversing “Hole in the Wall” to hop in the Atlantic for a cool dip. There was often a cheap bottle of chardonnay rolling around in the boat: a paddler’s reward at the end of a journey.”

Hurchalla shared it all, from the wine to the wisdom.

“She lived her truth every day, fought the good fights, and when the bastards got her down, she knew how to rejuvenate herself — by taking others into the waters and wilderness she worked so hard to protect. I was just lucky to tag along.”

A person as different from Maggie Hurchalla or Janet Reno as the wind from the rain was the great Florida State University football coach, Bobby Bowden. He inspired not just generations of players, but generations of Seminole fans, while simultaneously depressing generations of fans of other teams.

But football is a game. For him, perhaps, preaching wasn’t.

Rick Weber, now a writer for Gartner, was a sports reporter for The News-Press on assignment in New Orleans one day in 1996 when he got a close look at the coach.

“Bobby Bowden was the most successful college football coach in the state’s history. But he could have been the most influential preacher in the state’s history. He was that kind of man.

“He always attributed his football success to his unwavering, indomitable faith. I guess that’s why — just three days before his Florida State Seminoles were to play the Florida Gators for the 1996 national championship in the Sugar Bowl — he was scheduled to give a sermon at the First Baptist Church of New Orleans.

“This fascinated me. How could he do this with his head spinning with Xs and Os and a mandate to devise a game plan that would handcuff Heisman Trophy winner Danny Wuerffel? So I trudged through pelting rain, past charming Greek Revival mansions and into an undistinguished, 42-year-old yellow-brick building.

“Bowden spoke in his distinctive Alabama drawl — minus the ‘dadgummits’ that punctuated his speech, but still so folksy, charming, welcoming. He called what he does ‘witnessing, not sermonizing.’ He spoke so passionately that he nearly knocked the pulpit off the ledge.”

Weber didn’t try to talk to the coach, afterward.

“I saw his wife, Julia Ann, standing alone, so I approached her. She told me some skeptics derisively called him St. Bobby, and reporters always wanted to know what the real Bobby Bowden was like. She said this was not a façade orchestrated for public approval. He genuinely believed it was his responsibility. And dadgummit — my word, not hers — he embraced it.”

His team also lost that Sugar Bowl contest for the national championship, 52 to 20. But no matter.

“When he died on Aug. 8, 2021, Florida didn’t lose a legendary football coach. It lost a legendary man.”

Other stars

The stars in our Florida firmament are too numerous to count, but among them, there were politicians like Governors LeRoy Collins and, later, Lawton Chiles.

In the 1950s and early ’60s, Gov. Collins, a World War II Navy veteran with no college education, proved both a powerful proponent of education and moderate but steadily progressive in his handling of racial tensions. As a result, Florida struggled a lot less than other southern states to come to terms with civil and equal rights, historians say.

Later, Gov. Chiles, who had been a United States senator before becoming governor in 1991, reformed both health care and education in Florida, and helped people and the state recover from the devastation of Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

Not only that, but the man who had literally walked 1,003 miles on the campaign trail, famously putting holes in the soles of his shoes, died with his boots on of a heart attack only 24 days before the end of his second term, on Dec. 12, 1998.

A shooting star of sorts, “Walkin’” Lawton Chiles had shown Floridians how to live the good life after they put him in the governor’s mansion.

The Highwaymen and the Hanson

And through many of those years, while people trickled and then began to flood into the state, a group of untutored but brilliant Black artists collectively known as the Highwaymen painted a Florida almost fairytale-like in its characterizations of natural places, often vast vistas of sky and the green subtropical earth beneath it.

There were artists like Alfred Hair (1941 to 1970), A.E. Backus (1906 to 1990); Harold Newston, (1934 to 1994); Robert Butler (1943 to 2014); and Mary Ann Carroll (1940- 2019).

In a 20-year period beginning in the mid-1950s when Collins was governor and Eisenhower was president, the Highwaymen produced more than 200,000 works of art.

From the National Museum of African American History: “Contrary to the feeling of serenity embodied in the paintings, the works are a product of the Jim Crow era in the South. Accessible employment for African Americans in Florida usually focused on work in citrus groves, tomato fields and factories. The Highwaymen turned to painting as a way to earn a living outside this system of demanding manual labor. The Highwaymen are known both for their artistic style and their enterprising response to oppression, seeking to ‘make a way out of no way.’”

While they worked on the view with paint, W. Stanley Hanson worked on the view of whites held by Seminoles, suggesting what a single determined soul can do in the Sunshine State, or anywhere else.

Woody Hanson, his grandson, describes what happened after his grandfather attended a Green Corn Dance.

“He was asked to join the Council of Elders — sitting as a judge — where he advised the elders not to kill an Indian, capital punishment, who had killed another Indian, because alcohol was involved. He argued that (the killer) should be required to plant a garden and feed the family of the deceased Indian. Otherwise, if they (executed) that Indian, there would be two families without a head, each requiring support from the tribe. The press made a big deal of the decision and said he had ‘the wisdom of Solomon.’ Thereafter, he was known as the White Medicine Man.”

The Indians faced terrible hardships, especially in the 1930s when the trade for animal pelts and plumes diminished or disappeared — and they had no sources of income. Hanson helped, getting them jobs at tourist attractions singing sacred songs and doing “stomp dances,” for which he was sharply criticized.

It wasn’t all he did. “I met a 92-year-old woman who had known him well,” Woody Hanson recalls. “She told me he could not sit by a window or an open door. She said that Flagler (Henry Flagler, founding partner of Standard Oil) had put a contract on him because he kept big oil, the wildcatters, off their tribal lands in the Everglades.”

All those stories and histories — those people — raise a question for us, says Mormino: “Who are we now?

“A state of competing tribes it seems, like something out of the Middle Ages. Each county has its own dukedom and army. But all these people were connected by one thread — their extraordinary love for Florida. They wanted it to be a better place, env ironmentally, politically, culturally. They weren’t out for themselves — more income, more rights, more guns.”

So what holds us together now in a seemingly divisive time, he asked?

And answered. “I am encouraged and inspired by my students who will inherit Florida. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (and others) had a famous phrase for it: ‘Reverence for the land.’” ¦

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