• The world’s first female film director, Alice Guy Blaché, an elegant, cultured Parisian, came to the Everglades in 1917 to shoot a movie. The Everglades was not like Paris. •
Forty years later, Budd Shulberg also came to the Everglades to produce a film on bird protection. Its cast included a clown, a jockey, an alligator poacher, a professional boxer, a stripper, and even a few people who had actually acted before.
• John Gillespie came to Sarasota from Scotland only to find the state had no golf courses. He promptly built the state’s first—only two holes long.
In this third volume of the Florida Chronicles, a continuing series on the state’s history, author Stuart B. McIver tells his tales of Florida through the often tangled lives of people who could never be brushed aside as ordinary. These players in that great theatrical production called Florida include presidents, cowboys, gangsters, baseball players, writers, politicians, captains of industry, inventors, movie stars, and even a fire chief.
