How and/or when did you get hooked on history?
I’ve been fascinated with history for as long as I can remember. As a kid it was medieval times, as I got a bit older I developed an interest in ancient history, especially Mesopotamian history. I grew up in a house of readers and my father especially was a reader of history. I think he really helped instill that appreciation in me – we shared books like Steven Pressfield’s “Tides of War” about Alcibiades and the books of Gary Jennings. A lot of historical fiction around the idea of exploration.
My mother later on went back to school and studied art history, which tells the story of our collective past in a very different way. I’ve always been interested in art as well, so she and I also shared this interest. She liked a lot of impressionists, particularly Mary Cassatt. I gravitated a bit more toward the more intense works of Caravaggio, but still we found a lot of common ground.
And as a Gen Xer, of course I also grew up watching the Indiana Jones films, which had me and all my friends firmly convinced as kids that we wanted to be archeologists when we grew up.
What role does history play or has it played in your personal life?
Different types of history have and continue to play an increasingly integral role in my world. For one thing there’s personal history – my memories of my childhood and the friends I had back then. In particular I think a lot about my close friend Steven who passed away several years ago – he and I were both awkward, geeky kids and writers. I remember the mystery and novelty of everything – the way the whole world seemed to be infused with magic and secrets to uncover. That sense of wonder is something I’ve focused on trying to recapture, and in doing so, it put me on the path to write Secret Tampa Bay.
And then there’s History (with a capitol “H”) – our shared human experience of a time and place. For me the focus has largely been on the history of a specific location. After Steven passed on and my wife and I decided we didn’t want to spend the rest of forever in Chicago, I put together a list of things you can only do in Chicago, and we started working our way through it together as a way of saying goodbye to that city. Some of the things on the list were touristy like riding the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier, or taking a mafia tour, or having a brownie at the Palmer House Hilton, and some were pretty obscure like finding the grave of Captain George W. Streeter. But all of these things showed me the city and its history in a new way. What I quickly realized was that even though I had lived in Chicago for ten years and thought I knew it pretty well, really all I knew was a couple dozen blocks of it. I had barely scratched the surface! The Haymarket Riot, the Pullman District, the Chicago Fire, and of course all the astounding architecture – so many things I’d never deeply examined before. It was a paradigm shift for me. It gave me a new way to see and understand a place, both its beauty and its ugliness. What started as a lark pretty quickly became a real passion for me.
How will history play a part of your professional life/career?
It has certainly been playing a vastly larger role than I expected. When I started writing Secret Tampa Bay, the prospect of filling ninety chapters with different local oddities and unique sites seemed pretty daunting, but by the end of it the issue was just the opposite – that I actually had more content than I could include. And the more questions I sought answers to, the more questions I found I had. The deeper I delved into the rabbit holes of local history, the deeper they seemed to go and I’ve still yet to reach the bottom of them.
I’ve just finished a first draft of my next book, “TB Scavenger,” which is essentially a massive scavenger hunt throughout the Tampa Bay area composed of sixty rhyming riddles. This was great because it let me include a lot of things that I hadn’t been able to fit into Secret Tampa Bay. It’s also a way of “gamifying” the exploration of local history and sharing not only what I’ve found along the way, but a bit of my process – how I seek these things out and the thrill of finding them.
And then next year I’m scheduled to release “Oldest Tampa Bay,” which will be a compilation of the oldest of everything in the area, from boatyards to bars to bridges and lighthouses and skyscrapers. I didn’t realize it at the time, but these books are also a way of preserving history – even in the five years I’ve lived in Tampa I’ve seen the city change, and a lot of things are vanishing. A couple years ago Airstream Ranch – a local roadside attraction, was removed. Just this past year after a century Haslam’s Bookstore closed its doors. So seeing and writing about these places is important to me, because not all of them will be around in the future.
Why is studying/knowing history important?
I like to understand not just how but why things happen, why cities get their nicknames, why the Cuban Sandwich became the official food of Tampa. That’s history – understanding why things happened, and as a result, being better able to understand what’s happening today. From politics to economics to technological innovations to environmental changes – these aren’t things that just happen spontaneously, but rather often over years and decades and even centuries. Being able to understand that – the direction of things, I guess what some would call “the arc of history,” without any interest in or sense of that, we become a sort of amnesiac culture.
Living in Tampa has opened my eyes to ancient history in a new way too. Growing up, ancient history always seemed like something that happened somewhere else – Greece, Egypt, Europe, Asia. Distant lands. But being here in Tampa I’m surrounded by shell mounds and earthworks that are every bit as old as some of the pyramids, it’s made me fundamentally rethink what “ancient” is. Living here has really shaken me out of the persistent fallacy that American History begins with the arrival of Europeans, when it had been going along for thousands of years before that.
Trying to understand the secret face of a place – that’s become a passion for me, and there’s just no way to understand a place or its people and culture without really getting familiar with its history. And in coming to understand a place, I’m finding that I come to understand new things about myself as well.
What is your favorite period or aspect of history to learn about and why?
I wouldn’t say that I have one specific time period that I’m focused on, but lately I find myself fixating more on the idea of “Americana.” By that I mean those things that are quintessentially American, from road-side attractions to the circus and tiki culture and drive-in movie theaters. Most of those are from before my time, but I’ve developed a real affinity for them. And some of it is being lost – the last of the big top circuses is gone now, for example. I guess the closest thing to that today would be something like Burning Man or one of the big music festivals, but they’re not really quite the same things.
Conversely though, the pandemic has actually brought some of these things back. Last year was the first, I believe, in decades when more drive-in theaters actually opened than closed down. That gives me hope that maybe these things aren’t really truly lost but rather waiting for the right circumstances to be reborn.
Why is that important to me? For a few reasons, I think. For one thing, these were shared experiences that in many cases transcended gender, race and especially politics. These were American experiences, and in losing them we lose these shared points of cultural reference. We lose a bit of who we are.
How did you come up with the idea to write Secret Tampa Bay: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful and Obscure.?
Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity” before? That’s very much the case with how the book came to be – it was the confluence of several different things at just the right time. As I mentioned earlier, before moving to Florida I had just started to see places in a new way and was on this mission to reawaken myself to a sense of awe and wonder and curiosity. When my wife and I moved to Tampa, we continued on this trend, creating our adventure lists. I had found several resources like Roadside America and Weird Florida and especially Atlas Obscura, and eventually I wasn’t just using that latter site but also submitting my own writeups.
A couple years into living here, my pipeline of work as a resume writer and business proposal writer started becoming less reliable, and I started thinking about ways to add in a new stream of revenue.
And then my wife and I were scheduled to go see my family in Philadelphia, but had to cancel when her dad had a health problem. I had this book I’d picked up called “Secret Philadelphia: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful and Obscure,” and as I was leafing through it, I thought to myself, I could write something like this about Tampa. Suddenly it struck me that between my blog and some of the pieces I’d been writing for Atlas Obscura, essentially I already had written it. So I looked online to see if the publisher, Reedy Press, had a title covering Tampa Bay, which they did not. I put together a mock table of contents based on the things I would want to include, then I called and asked the woman I spoke to there if they were looking for someone to write Secret Tampa Bay. I expected her to say they weren’t interested, but instead I was asked to follow up with the owner, and after some discussion, writing samples and a marketing plan, I had a signed contract. Preparation and opportunity. It is in no way hyperbole to say that call changed my life.
What are a couple of your favorite Tampa Bay secrets?
It’s hard to choose just a few, but I feel a special sense of pride about those things I really had to dig deep to discover. The Warlock’s House in Wesley Chapel – that’s the sort of thing that really only a small number of locals know about. The same with the Grave of Charlie Smith who claimed to be America’s oldest man. Kapok Gardens is another local gem – arguably one of the best places to take a date on a picnic. But almost every day it seems like I’m learning about new and unusual things, like the Weeping Icon of St. Nicholas in the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Tarpon Springs to the country’s first open-air post office in St. Petersburg (which is a remarkably beautiful building) to the prayer grotto at St. Leo University.
Ultimately, for me there’s as much of a thrill in seeking these places as in finding them, so I guess you could say that my absolute favorite Tampa Bay secret is always the one I’m going to find next.
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