The announcement was a proclamation. “Let’s go” was the promise of an experience that was at minimum guaranteed to last a day, and if we were lucky, it would turn into an overnight excursion at the very edge of it all.
If you were a kid living inland in Jacksonville in the late ’60s, the words promised an adventure, and for most of us, there were only two ways to get to the surf: Atlantic Boulevard or Beach Boulevard. Some who lived farther south around Julington Creek or down in Switzerland would head down to St. Augustine or Flagler Beach. From Palatka, it was often over to Daytona Beach and excitement there. But our destination was in the sand of what had grown out of Pablo Beach.
We were Jax Beach bathers. Our family had been so since our grandfather, Gene McIntyre, had first met Alpha Paynter, the Stocktons, the Woolvertons and others in 1938. He had assumed the management of the Ward Baking Company plant in Jacksonville’s bakery district in Springfield, having been transferred by the company from Columbus, Ohio. Our father, Byron, first visited the Ponte Vedra Club as a young boy in the late ’30s and in our grandfather’s obituary in 1964, the Ponte Vedra Club membership was mentioned.
Five years later, in the last year of a tumultuous decade for Jacksonville, our family’s route east was along Beach Boulevard. It was a direct shot from San Marco where our grandmother still lived, and parts of the 21-mile drive were still very much wilderness. Heavy pine and cabbage palm thickets with dense palmetto underbrush abutted the ditches on either side of the double roadway. It was not the place to break down. The midway stretches were desolate.
J. Turner Butler Boulevard was still just a dream in the minds of transportation planners and Dee Dot Ranch was somewhere off in the woods on the right. Not many people knew exactly where it was, and even a fewer number knew how to get there. Epping Forest was enchanting and the Swisher place charming in its architecture, but Ponte Vedra Beach was the gem.
The look and feel of Beach Boulevard in 1969 was similar in character then to how State Road 301 is today south from I-10 down towards Starke. The long stretches of woodland reinforced the sense of distance. It was a long way out to the beach but somewhere along the drive, we’d begin wondering which of us would smell the salt air first. Our family’s lots along Ponte Vedra Boulevard were still undeveloped and construction on our house was a year away. Mandarin was also a favorite destination, and Dad had designed a house for us on our lot on Village Lane there as well, but it was never built.
1969 was closing out the decade. The City of Jacksonville was still navigating its first full year of consolidation. The violence that erupted on Florida Avenue had taken its toll on civic pride. The cost of living had risen from 114.7 to 127.4 in two years. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins had returned safely from their mission to the Moon; Hanz Tanzer was a household name, and we were heading to the beach.
Our minds had turned east from Jacksonville, and my brothers and I would be attending Ponte Vedra Palm Valley Elementary. I was still enrolled at Englewood Elementary while also being tutored by Robin Vail and Dr. Skinner in Arlington. Our older brother, Eric, was at Assumption Elementary, and our younger brother, Scott, would be starting his first grade in Ponte Vedra.
Mrs. Young’s third grade class would be my introduction to both Ponte Vedra and Palm Valley kids. Our house at 556 would not be ready for moving into until October of 1970, so for a short time, we rented ½ of the upper floor at the Ocean Spray Apartments on Ocean Avenue in South Jax Beach.
Hurricane Dora’s aftermath was still visible and acclimating to this new environment with a beach lowered by several yards would take a period of adjustment. Locals joked that the Jax Beach sand had ended up two miles south and beyond.
Our first glimpse of the ocean would always happen on the Beach Boulevard drawbridge, about the moment our tires crossed the bridge’s metal grating. The loud musical tone announced our center point above the Intracoastal Waterway. The bridgetender’s cabin on the bridge became a guardhouse in our young minds. When the bridge was up, there was no passage. There was a moat between us and the outside world.
From the bridge’s high point, everything seemed so close. For a few moments we could scan the horizon during that high-pitched sound of tire rubber on steel. If we were quick enough, we could then look down through the grating and see the water beneath us as our car’s speed made the steel transparent. It was exhilarating. Terrifying. Fascinating. We were going to the beach.
Descending on the eastern approach, we had a clear view of the large 74-foot white fiberglass trawler that had been dry-docked at Harrell Marine awaiting its leisure conversion. It was a project locals were following with interest as the boat’s owner, Dan Blocker, who played Hoss Cartwright on the NBC series Bonanza, was bringing acclaim to the yard’s shipwrights who were turning fiberglass repair into a local specialty.
On the right and down aways was the large neon sign that announced, “The Homestead.” The large brightly colored concrete dinosaurs and putt-putt culture next door celebrated a type of leisure and recreation that visitors had come to expect from Florida’s tourism economy. The Homestead’s family-style hospitality had been welcoming visitors since Alpha Paynter had first built her boarding house on the site in 1938. She needed bread and the Ward Baking Company had bread. The Copper Kettle, and eventually the Ponte Vedra Club, could attest to that.
At The Homestead, the drive out from Jacksonville intensified. The atmosphere seemed lighter, more casual, and almost immediately the signs and symbols began pointing to the surf. Color palettes began changing. The blue-green of Neptune Beach seeped south. Decades of old advertisements along the road were still enticing visitors. Coppertone was king. Tropic Tan had made its debut as a $500 start-up 90 miles south, and A & W Root Beer was still served in frosty mugs at their Beach Boulevard roadside stand.
We were now only a couple of miles from the crossroads at 3rd Street where traveling farther east would put us on the beach. It was either north to visit our cousins in their cedar-shingled beachfront Rambler at the top end of Atlantic Beach, or south to the lower Avenues and Ocean Drive. Farther down, we would visit our lot on the Boulevard, a mile and a quarter south of the Club, pulling off onto the sandy grass patches filled with sandspurs. Sure enough, the neighbors had indeed encroached the lot line with a new row of Spanish bayonets in anticipation of our new build.
Atlantic Beach and Ponte Vedra Beach were the Jax Beach bookends with Neptune Beach tucked in for good measure, and South Jax Beach being more of a neighborhood than anything else. It was all equally unique in its off-season isolation in 1969. Midway between the two, bathers eager to feel the sand needed to climb down the large granite boulders set in place after Hurricane Dora. Boarding houses were popular and having an ocean front apartment and sleeping with open windows and no air-conditioning in earshot of the surf was a memorable first experience. Are the waves getting closer? I think the waves are getting closer. What if there’s a tidal wave? By morning, the tide had receded and the beach stretched out to the surf almost the length of a football field.
Each evening, the boardwalk near the auditorium began coming alive at dusk and by full-dark, it was the main show. Open-air beachfront arcades acted as the southern doppelganger of the Atlantic City experience for visitors from that climate. The activity created sounds, smells and, in some cases on vintage equipment from another era entirely, sights of old raree shows that could still be found under bare-bulbed yellow lighting against back walls collecting nickels from young fingers eager to turn the cranks and watch the individual images flip into view one by one at a speed that generated exotic movement.
We were all tourists. The arcades held us. There were concessions and rides and hundreds, if not thousands, of people gathering nightly along these collections of city blocks. When walking north and when we got to the end of the activity, the darkness prompted us to turn around. All would be repeated nightly with Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights being the most engaging. Same lights, same sounds, same sensations; but each night was a new instance. Crowds mingled, shuffled, laughed, and occasionally the sound of a firecracker preceded shouting adults and running kids. The experience caught our attention and wouldn’t let go. For some, Ponte Vedra proper a few miles to the south seemed sound asleep.
Everyone around us on those evenings was experiencing the same enthusiasm that had driven earlier generations. The phenomenon did not come into being overnight, or even over one generation. It was systemic to the economy of Pablo Beach since Flagler, and now, it was rebranded in anticipation of the 1970s.
Popcorn, candied peanuts, hot dogs, fries, saltwater taffy, cotton candy, peanut brittle, caramel butter fudge; all could be had for nickels, dimes and quarters. A handful of 50-cent pieces would go a long way. Our grandmother had a particularly favorite treat she could only find on the boardwalk. It was a whole dill pickle with the tip cut off. It was held with a paper holder and had a hollow candy peppermint stick stuck in it like a straw. It was the original sweet and sour.
Games of skill went for a dime, sometimes a quarter. Skee-ball, basketball toss, pin ball machines, all announced by barkers enticed the crowds, “Test your skill. Ten cents a game.”
The rides radiated dread while waiting in the lines and watching previous riders disembark. Danger ahead. Exhilaration assured. Flashing lights. Polaroid pictures became instant keepsakes. The chemical smell of the peel-apart film would linger on our fingers as we waited impatiently. There were storefront booths selling shells, bumper stickers, beach wear, accessories, lotions and souvenir after souvenir after souvenir.
To this day, modern souvenir-style resonates with me as value elevated above the chaff. Each item was a community calling card. The Jacksonville Beach Fla. snow globes were particularly unusual. Small taxidermied alligators were for sale, Florida State flags stood out as bold declarations labeled, in case there was any doubt, “Souvenir of Jacksonville Beach, Fla.” Visitors from all backgrounds became material ambassadors of the beachfront experience. Locals stood around the edges, watching from a distance and helping monitor the ever-overflowing trash receptacles. Community appearance was important. The hyper-local economy of Jacksonville Beach was built on surfside recreation, and it would swell from May until September. It would be unfair and disrespectful to call it a money grab. It was hospitality and the tourists expected it.
Across the county line in St. Johns County, a different type of economy was beginning to age into maturity. The decade of ’60s was behind us and the ’70s represented a new season of opportunity. The boardwalk was always just a quick bicycle ride away, but it seemed as far from PV as Jax Beach was from Jacksonville. Changes were underway in PV and some were not happy about it. A new chapter was on the verge of beginning in this smartly casual place of all places, Ponte Vedra Beach.
