I t was as if our handful of collaborators in the late 1970’s knew that climate challenge was upon us — which at least assuredly I did not — when we met from our different places in White Springs on the Suwannee in far north-central Florida. We were intentional but also lucky, and I’ve never yet collected everyone’s hairbreadth stories.
White Springs, the first winter resort in Florida with 16 hotels and additional boarding houses across its late 19th-century heyday kept busy by four trains a day, was ravaged by fire in 1911 and ensuing calamities. Only two hotels remained, only sometimes open, though many buildings and all the churches were saved largely by those habitually left behind while many males were out hunting.
But then the mineral spring ran dry, the venerable Colonial Hotel
alongside and the imposing spring house demolished (later partially rebuilt) before a town clerk bankrupted the town. Along the way, White Springs was saved for its remaining some 800 residents by music, bicycling and potash.
Convergence
Merri Belland from Tallahassee and Peggy Bulger raised in Albany, NY, had invited me to visit their town after we met in 1977 at the inaugural Miami-Bahamas Goombay in the Grove to advise on how to attract leisure visitors.
Merri (pron. Mary) had arrived in White Springs only in 1974 on an Expansion Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts that in its debut program year was locally offered at the Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park.
For me it was a deep dive into the agonies of Southern history, its redemptions, and of cornerstone proofs that have always kicked in when needed to power up my self-worth.
Three books on the region helped prepare me: The WPA Guide to Florida by the Federal Writers Project of 1938; Cecile Hulse Matschat’s fictionalized The Suwannee River, Strange Green Land, from the American River Series of the same year, and Gloria Jahoda’s discoveries along back roads in The Other Florida, published in 1967 by Charles Scribner’s Sons.
I put the bike and me on a Greyhound that would help me absorb the region.
Where I found myself
Three days of touring led me to Falling Creek near Lake City, to a fellow who still tapped pines for turpentine, to a black bear sighting while crossing Bee Haven Bay and to Ann Greer’s two-story rocker-chair-porch Jasper Hotel on the town’s main street.
Ann was somewhat bedridden, where she lay reading her Wall Street Journal, secure with her bottle of Early Times and Great Dane Petey. Ann would talk to me admiringly about that “brave young fellow Lindbergh” who had just flown solo across the Atlantic, which was about when she arrived in town. I could use the kitchen but mustn’t scorch her pans
Ann also introduced me to historian Virgie Cone, who told me that Strange Fruit written in 1944 by a neighbor, Lillian Smith, was written about inter-racial romance and Black lynchings in Jasper but who set the novel across the state line in Georgia for her own safety.
Merri’s hairbreadth moment
Merri had lived her first 30 years in Tallahassee where she graduated with a degree in traditional crafts from Florida State University. In 1974, her van was packed and ready to go with her loom and spinning wheel for a study program at the folkloric Instituto San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, when a call changed everything. She had been awarded a grant to help keep craft traditions alive in Florida.
Merri recalled “It was an astonishing program to work with traditional craft makers in the region. Peggy was recruited a year later on a grant for fieldwork to survey traditional communities.” It was a descendant of Florida’s 11th Governor, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, Lillian Saunders, a/k/a “Miss Lillian,” with generous support from the state and from the Florida Federation of Music Clubs and Woman’s Clubs that in 1950 succeeded in having the state establish the crafts program in the memorial park.
Three years later, Miss Lillian and friends established the annual Florida Folk Festival at the memorial, one of America’s first annual folk events and one of its most successful. “Cousin Thelma” Boltin ran the event for years.
Merri drove the couple hours east for a look and still vividly remembers crossing the Suwannee, seeing the Sophia Jane Adams House (named for Miss Lillian’s mother) and the state park. “The grant was only for a year, but I knew this was home. I had never before felt so welcomed anywhere. Miss Lillian made sure that I met all the right people. Foxfire was quite the rage. This was my Foxfire moment, fitting into the community, teaching others creativity.”
The grant kept renewing for eight years, that allowed Merri a sabbatical to earn her MS in folk studies from Western Kentucky University, and when the grant ran out, Merri taught in neighboring Suwannee County.
Peggy at 25 arrived with her Ph.D. in folklore and folklife from the University of Pennsylvania, and after that ran out, was hired to manage the Florida Folklife Program at the park. Peggy went on to become director of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.
I had two plans brewing that followed each other. I had already racked up a score ahead of the first.
That was to raise awareness about the utility and pleasures of adult bicycling including in multimodal commuting and in tourism, for fitness and health, for energy conservation.
A legacy inherited
Kirk Munroe was a hero of mine. He wrote adventure stories for boys for national publication. He had co-founded the American Canoe Association and the League of American Wheelmen in 1880 while living in Cambridge and New York, before drawn for the next 25 years to Coconut Grove. After
Munroe’s death in 1930, bicycling interest in Florida renewed when cardiologist Paul Dudley White, who had advised President Eisenhower, his patient, to ride a bike, became active with an advocacy group for safe paths for cycling in Homestead in Miami’s southern ag lands that gained national attention. A nonprofit bike club named for him was active from 1962 [sic] to 2018.
In the mid-‘70s, I formed a Greater Miami Bicycling Coalition that celebrated these achievements. I had this credential newly in hand when I acted to turn White Springs into a touring hub.
Hairbreadth squared
Peggy agreed to include me on the inaugural Florida Folk Conference about the organic connection between bicycle travel and the experience of folk community. Conference speakers were overbooked. Peggy instead mailed the letter widely, landing it in the desk pile of Dale Crider, a state wildlife ecologist-musician often called to appear on programs with Gov. Bob Graham. Dale’s wife Linda saw the distinctive colorful H logo of my letterhead sticking out, and in another hairbreadth moment, pulled the letter free and called me.
Linda, Ph.D., was the governor’s physical fitness coordinator. Together we organized a Workshop on Wheels to put bicycling into mobility platforms of FDOT. Graham, to his everlasting credit, hired the best person in America to run the program. (Dan Burden would add walking to his portfolio and achieve international recognition.)
I set up the nonprofit Suwannee River Bicycle Tours. David Bearl, from FSU, became touring director. (David would go on to become training chef for at least three Presidents of the United States in the White House kitchen.)
