Orange Bowl plan: to extend Miami tourist season

Coca Cola Float Orange Bowl Parade 1939
Florida State Archives

By Jane Feehan

Miami’s tourist season used to span six weeks, beginning in February and running concurrent with horse racing at Hialeah Park. Times were tough for the young city after the 1926 hurricane and during the Great Depression so the city’s movers and shakers got together at the Biltmore Hotel in 1933 to brainstorm a way to extend the winter season. The winning idea was a football game on New Year’s Day.

The first Palm Festival game was held in 1933 and was a match up between the University of Miami and Manhattan College. Manhattan was guaranteed $3,200—the Hurricanes nothing—but the Florida team routed the northern college with a 7-0 victory. The Palm Festival was held that year and the following in Moore Park at NW 36th Street and 7th Avenue. Both games were a sellout of 8,000 seats.

A charter was issued to 27 Miamians forming the new Orange Bowl Committee, which included Miami Herald editor and namesake of the John Pennekamp Coral Reef Park. Oranges were not a big crop in South Florida then but the name resonated with the committee headed by Director Ernest Seiler. The inaugural Orange Bowl Festival game was held Jan. 1, 1935 between Bucknell University and Miami; Bucknell prevailed 26-0. Ground was broken for a stadium in 1936 at 1501 NW 3rd Street; the sports facility was named Burdine Stadium until 1959. (Orange Bowl Stadium closed in 2008.)

Seiler was able to keep the new stadium filled; he was the consummate public relations practitioner. He developed elaborate 12-minute shows for halftime that were heralded as a popular highlight of the games. His PR skills paid off for the 1939 game when he traveled to Oklahoma to meet with the Sooners and enticed them south with pictures of beaches and palm trees for a bowl game. Seiler asked the team coach to call Tennessee to suggest they play their big game in Miami and it was a go; the bowl game of 1939 propelled the Orange Bowl into the nation’s lineup of major bowl games.

Seiler kept adding to the Orange Bowl festivities with a parade along the Miracle Mile in Coral Gables, a boating regatta, beauty pageant and more. By the 1940s, it was the place to be New Year’s Day. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower was the honored guest in 1947; President-Elect John Kennedy attended in 1961.

Today the Orange Bowl is a tradition in Miami and across the nation – and the winter tourist season runs five or six months instead of six weeks. The game is now played at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens at 199th Street or 347 Don Shula Drive.

www.orangebowl.org

Sources:
Miami News, Jan. 2, 1963
Miami News, Dec. 27, 1946
www.orangebowl.com


Tags: Miami history, Orange Bowl history, Orange Bowl sponsor, Palm Festival, first Orange Bowl game, Florida film researcher, film researcher

Orange Bowl, 1960 Miami,
Florida State Archives, Florida Memories
Dept. of Commerce

"Silver-tongued orator" William Jennings Bryan promotes early Coral Gables ... for a BIG fee

 

Villa Serena, Bryan home 1920
Florida State Archives/Florida Memory

By Jane Feehan

The Great Commoner, William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925), three-time Democrat candidate for U.S. President,  played a part in Florida’s land boom of the 1920s.

The political celebrity from Nebraska (born in Illinois) and his family moved to Coconut Grove, Florida in 1913 where he eventually became a full-time citizen of the state. 

Watching attempts to drain the Florida Everglades for agriculture, Bryan, who once served as secretary of state under President Woodrow Wilson,  announced the project as “one of the greatest enterprises on record.”  Bryan was so certain about Everglades’ real estate prospects that he purchased marshland south of Lake Okeechobee.

Of more certainty after the drainage project waned was the $100,000 fee the silver orator was paid in the mid-1920s by developer George Merrick* to promote Coral Gables, the first planned community in the U.S. (That fee was nearly double the salary paid Babe Ruth at the time.)

Bryan in 1913

By 1925, the South Florida land rush slowed to a crawl but Bryan’s fame kept him busy and in the national spotlight.  Dubbed the "silver-tongued orator" because of his excellent speaking skills and known as an anti-evolutionist, Bryan represented the World Christian Fundamentals Society for the prosecution in the Scopes Monkey Trial in July 1925.  Bryan won the case against teaching evolution but died five days later.

On a personal note, I had the pleasure of working for an acquaintance of William Jennings Bryan, Ira D. Beynon of Lincoln, Nebraska during the 1980s. He too, was a Florida commercial property owner. A young lawyer in Lincoln, Beynon knew Bryan in the 1920s. Mr. Beynon was well into his 90s when I knew him. Six degrees of separation … over six decades.

Villa Serena 1940
Florida State Archives/
Florida Memory

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 Sources:

Miami Metropolis, June 15, 1915

Miami News, June 4, 1921, p.13.

Miami News, Apr 18, 1925, p. 10. 

Grunwald, Michael. The Swamp.New York: Simon and Schuster (2006), pp. 141, 145, 167

Tags: Florida in the 1920s, Miami in 1920s, Coral Gables history, William Jennings Bryan

What Depression? Miami economy kicks it - 1937

Though most of the nation was struggling to climb out of the depths of the Great Depression during the late 1930s, Miami’s Mayor Robert R. Williams waxed optimistic about greater Miami's  growth:

In 1937:

• Hotel inventory reached 350, with 60 built that year.
• Visitors could also find lodging among 6,000 available apartment units.
• More houses were constructed—3,500—in 1937 than in any year of its history.
• Eastern Airlines was doubling round trip winter flights between New York (five) and Chicago (three)  and  Miami; it was adding five new 21-passenger Douglas DC-3s
• October air passenger traffic to South America from Miami was up 20 percent  from the previous October.
• Florida East Coast and Seaboard Airline railways added extra equipment to transport passengers from Jacksonville to Miami.
• Out of  eight million pounds of fish caught and shipped from Florida, five million were fished from waters off Miami.
• The first of many expected mega yachts arrived at the Miami Yacht Basin, the 188-foot Arcadia owned by Mrs. Huntington Reed Hardwick of Boston.
• Bayfront Park at Biscayne Bay was to host 45 operas and concerts that winter season.
• The Orange Bowl (played since 1935), the Lipton Trophy sailing race, and the Miami to Nassau sailing race were expected to draw thousands of spectators.

Sources: Wall Street Journal, Dec. 18, 1937

Tags: Miami in the 1930s, Miami tourism, Miami history, Jane Feehan, film researcher, Eastern Airlines, Douglas Aircraft