C. Perry Snell, Snell Isle's visionary

C. Perry Snell

In the 1920s, dreamers and schemers descended on the Sunshine State bent on making a fortune in the burgeoning real estate market. In the earliest days of the Florida Land Boom, it seemed that one had but to imagine great wealth for it to be so. Parcels were bought and sold, sometimes within hours, at huge profits.

The real estate bubble didn’t last long—a scant five years or so—and when the end came some would-be real estate tycoons were stuck with land bought at inflated prices and no money. But there were developers who, though they had prospered during the boom, were cautious and had not been caught up in the buying frenzy.

C. Perry Snell, for instance, had been in St. Petersburg for a couple of decades before the hubbub began. He had successfully developed residential projects that eventually became known as Old Northeast. He owned land bought many years before that he had not yet developed.

About the time everything was going bust, C. Perry Snell was launching his most ambitious project—Snell Isle. It was to be a prestigious residential area on a parcel close to downtown St. Petersburg and overlooking Tampa Bay.

Oh, Perry Snell was a dreamer, to be sure, but not so much of a schemer. Snell’s projects had been solid, forward looking investments. He is credited with being among those who helped guide the city in creating the huge bayfront park lands that residents still enjoy today.

A brochure from the start of the project (and other related ephemera) is in the collection of rare and unusual items at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. The piece, printed with a full-color cover and some full-color pages inside, vividly depicts Snell’s grand vision, but a close examination also shows the risk Snell was taking with a raw piece of land, parts of which were often under water.  

Snell imagined an actual island created by cutting a canal from Coffeepot Bayou to Smacks Bayou. That canal, of course, was never completed and Snell Isle never really became an island. Still, Snell’s brochure must have stirred thoughts of European splendor:

“In imagination we step into a gondola anchored at the entrace of a lagoon, the entrance flanked by a castle-like building with parapets and a colorful and artistic Venetian landing. The slender, bright bark glides under low arched bridges and pursues its way through narrow canals and lagoons, gliding between rows of charming little Venetian shops flanking the sides of the canal or along a winding lagoon overlooking a parked golf course.”

Another part of the project that never came to fruition: the grand hotel with all the latest amenities that he envisioned for Bay Point. Today the tiny island off Snell Isle is festooned with 31 homes instead.

Nevertheless, much of Snell’s vision of making his namesake project, a premier residential neighborhood, was finally realized through this man's great determination to make his dream a reality.

Pitcher Spalding built sporting goods career

A.G. Spalding

Albert G. Spalding was already a star baseball pitcher for the Boston Red Stockings when baseball pioneer William Hulbert quietly approached him to switch to the Chicago White Stockings and to help form the organization that would become the National League.

Spalding signed to play with Chicago in 1876, and led his team to the NL’s first championship. He also started a sporting goods store with his brother and the following year started wearing a glove on his catching hand. It was just like the ones he and his brother happened to have for sale in their store.

That was the beginning of a sporting goods empire that continues today, for A.G. Spalding turned out to be a star entrepreneur as well as baseball champ. He promoted baseball and sporting goods on a trip with Major League players around the world. Under contract with the NL, he published the first official rules and regulations for baseball, which included a statement that only Spalding balls could be used for official games. Then he started publishing Spalding’s Official Baseball Guide, which wasn’t official at all but quickly became the most widely read baseball periodical.

Spalding’s success in sporting goods continued throughout his life. In 1911, long after his baseball career had ended, Spalding published America’s National Game, a history of the game that contributed to that success. Naturally, he offered the book for sale in his annual sport goods catalog. A copy of the 1914 catalog is in the collection of rare and unusual items at Lighthouse Books, ABAA.

The catalog is a testament to the sprawling Spalding sport goods enterprise, featuring pages devoted to football, basketball, ice skating, sledding, weightlifting, Indian clubs, boxing, and, of course, baseball.

Here you’ll find footballs that seem oddly round by today’s standards, those black leather helmets you might remember seeing on Ronald Reagan and Pat O’Brien in Knute Rockne, All American, the megaphones that were required equipment for cheerleaders of the era, and much more.

Spalding didn’t miss the opportunity for ancillary products for sports fans. There is an array of sporting caps and pennants to choose from as well.

Spalding knew Americans weren’t going to confine themselves to the major sports of the day. He offered toboggans, dumb bells and exercise equipment for a country just beginning to become concerned with fitness.

Spalding was once so well known throughout the country that the Boston Herald was moved to write in 1900:

“Next to Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, the name of A.G. Spalding is the most famous in American literature. It has been blazing forth on the cover of guides to all sorts of sports, upon bats and gloves. . . for many years. Young America gets its knowledge of the past in the world of athletics from something that has "Al Spalding" on it in big black letters, and for that reason, as much as any other, he is one of the national figures of our times.”

Waging the American anti-slavery campaign

In 1835, the main organization in the American abolitionist movement was facing a conundrum. Too few people throughout the country knew about the American Anti-Slavery Society or its objectives. The solution: a postal campaign to create awareness and, of course, solicit donations to help pay for the campaign.

 Arthur Tappan, left, and William L. Garrison

The organization had been founded two years earlier by a Boston abolitionist newspaper editor, William Lloyd Garrison; a New York silk importer; and journal publisher, Arthur Tappan, among others. It’s hardly surprising, with Garrison and Tappan on the team, that they selected the production of anti-slavery literature as their medium of choice, though Garrison had become an increasingly radical public speaker on the subject.

An 1835 pamphlet produced by the society to further its aims of ending slavery in America is in the collection of rare and unusual items at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. It contains eleven articles, all variations on the anti-slavery theme. The pamphlet, titled The Anti-Slavery Record, is marked Volume 1, Number 9, and was part of a continuing series.

One article, The Desperation of a Mother, tells in graphic detail the harrowing tale of a slave woman in Missouri whose children were to be taken away by a slave trader the next day and resold far away. The woman, who had been chained to keep her from interfering, managed to free herself during the night. She killed her children, and then herself, in order to prevent what she obviously considered a fate worse than death.

Another article, The Doctrine of the Bible in Regard to Slavery, sets straight the record for pro-slavery citizens who consistently and incorrectly tried to make the case that the Holy Bible supports the practice.

Ultimately, the organization achieved its goals, though not until after the Civil War and adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1870.

The society was beset by its own internal problems. The two main founders, Garrison and Tappan, had a philosophical difference of opinion. Tappan fought passionately for the emancipation of slaves but, curiously, took a dim view of giving women any say in the affairs of the nation. He opposed women's suffrage and felt women should be kept from positions of responsibility within society, including within the American Anti-Slavery Society.

That didn’t square with Garrison’s philosophy that women ought to be allowed full participation not only in the Society, but within American society in general. Some of Garrison’s friends included Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucy Stone, who, no doubt, influenced his thinking on the subject.

Tappan eventually resigned as president of the American Anti-Slavery Society and formed a separate anti-slavery organization in which no women were allowed participation. Garrison became president of the AAS and continued to publish his own abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, until 1865, when he declared his work finished, shut down his paper, resigned his presidency and went into retirement.

The first flight across the Atlantic

Walter Hinton

An obscure U.S. Mail pilot named Charles Lindbergh gets the credit for flying nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean by himself in 1927, and deservedly so, but he wasn’t the first to fly across the Atlantic.

That distinction goes to the crew of the Curtiss NC-4 floatplane, a name considerably less imaginative than the Spirit of St. Louis, and the feat took place in 1919, some eight years before Lucky Lindy’s historic excursion. A book about the accomplishment published the same year is in the collection of rare and unusual book at Lighthouse Books, ABAA. The Flight Across the Atlantic was issued by the federal Department of Education in 1919 under the auspicies of the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Corporation.

The trip took 19 days, including time for repairs and rest for the crew. Lindy’s hop took 33.5 hours. But, hey, these guys weren’t in any hurry and they weren’t carrying a load of mail.

It was a U.S. Navy project from the beginning and it was to demonstrate the plane’s transoceanic capabilities. The Curtiss floatplane was based on a design developed before World War I in Britain by a Royal Navy officer who was looking for a partner for a series of similar civilian planes. Curtiss then built them for the U.S. Navy and the Navy kept working to refine the design.

There were actually three planes that began the trip – NC-1, NC-3 and NC-4. There might have been a fourth, but the NC-2 had been cannibalized for spare parts for reparis to the NC-1.

The planes started at Naval Air Station Rockaway on Long Island and took a northerly route, making stops at Chatham Naval Air Station in Massachusetts and Halifax, Nova Scotia and Trepassey, Newfoundland, before continuing on the longest leg of the trip, a 1,200-nautical-mile flight to the Azores, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, opposite Portugal.

Naval planners, apparently a cautious lot, stationed ships every 50 miles or so along the route, with orders to be lighted up like a Hollywood extravaganza complete with searchlights, and to shoot starburst shells into the air so that the flyers could find their way across the dark ocean.

Despite their precautions, the NC-3 drifted off course into a fog bank and had to put down in the ocean short of its goal in the Azores. Fortunately, the crew rode the swells and the ship made it in under its own power. The NC-1, however, wasn’t so fortunate. It was rescued by a Greek freighter but sank three days later.

Only the NC-4 continued on to complete the mission and garner the fame.

Laid into this volume are several pieces of related ephemera that seem particularly to highlight Walter Hinton, the copilot of the NC-4; among other things, there is an envelope signed by him. Hinton, who lived until 1981, spent his retirement in Pompano Beach living in a beachfront condo and regaling local youngsters with tales of his exploits.