Hardwicks in the Living Room of the City

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Hardwicks opens in the living room of the city, most recently the site of the Burro Bar and the London Bridge. A city is a storm of historical forces meshing landscape through timeline. Former segregationist spaces open into the city’s newest gay bar. Yet Tim Hoal speaks, not with surprise, but with irony of the loving feel of the old United Cigar Store Building.

The Voice of the House Named Gleniffer

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The house named Gleniffer is for sale. I wonder if Chris can really walk away. He’s been in love with the old house for almost six decades. Gleniffer was named by her builders and first residents, Scottish immigrants, the only other family ever to live here. And isn’t the lusty roar of Big Ethel, Chris’s favorite pipe organ, the voice of Gleniffer herself?

The Book Launch for Tim Gilmore’s The Culture Wars of Warren Folks

The book launch for The Culture Wars of Warren Folks, my 22nd book, an historical work of antiracism and critical biography, happens at the Jacksonville Historical Society at 5:30 on September 14th. Click here for tickets. Here are some questions for which you might want answers.

1)     Why did the weekly racist news rag The Jacksonville Chronicle, of the 1950s and ’60s, eventually turn into a “sex scandal sheet”?

2)     Why did Warren Folks, shortly before running for sheriff himself, send notes to Sheriff Dale Carson, saying “Sheriff Carson – If you Want Warren Folks Killed – Why Don’t You Gun him down Yourself?”

3)     Just how different were Folks’s “Christ, America and the White Race” campaigns from today’s political slogans and campaigns?

Click here for your tickets to the upcoming book launch of The Culture Wars of Warren Folks.

4)     What happened when Black Power activist H. Rap Brown spoke in Jacksonville in 1968 and Governor Claude Kirk hopped the fence at Durkee Field to confront him?

5)     Why, when crime novelist Mickey Spillane came to town in response to Folks demanding his books be banned, did he wear that tight mesh polo shirt fronted with shoelace-style threads?

6)     Why did WIVY disc jockey Jamie Brooks, who frequently introduced rock bands at the old Jax Coliseum, challenge Warren Folks to a pie fight?

7)     Why did Folks tell a judge in federal court that he believed federal marshals had hidden evidence of government overreach by eating 420 pounds of apricot seeds?

8)     Who was the only Black person Warren Folks ever voted for, and what does it mean that Florida’s most infamous self-avowed white supremacist once voted for a Black person?

The Hope and History Mural Project | Jax Examiner

9)     What did Civil Rights icon Rodney Hurst do when Warren Folks showed up at the 40th commemoration of Ax Handle Saturday and reached out to shake Hurst’s hand?

10)  What exactly did Warren Folks, while still in the Navy, have to do with the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands?

After 75 years, it's time to clean Bikini - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Click here for your tickets to the upcoming book launch of The Culture Wars of Warren Folks.

Zora Neale Hurston, Pearl Randolph and the Prophetesses

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When novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston first lived in Jacksonville, she said it “made me know that I was a little colored girl.” In their 1936 booklet, Negro Folk Customs and Folk Lore, Hurston and Pearl Randolph told the stories of Mollie Peartree and Wilhelmina Kaiser, two robed Black women in Jax considered “prophetesses,” whom people saw as healers. Here are their stories:

Mollie Peartree’s House

Wilhelmina Kaiser’s House

 

The Story of Lone Star Stables, and the Legendary Claris Jaques

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Claris Jaques was a legend in the landscape. Even people who didn’t know her knew “the woman on horseback.” Her daughter, Joan Vinson, who’d ridden bareback behind her mother since before she could walk, came to know horses best when her parents got her Lightning, and when she witnessed “the Great Stallion Fight.” She buried a horseshoe at her mother’s headstone.

The Story of Tree Hill

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This is the story of Tree Hill, of impounding the creeks for a mill pond 200 years ago; the famed herpetologist and the boa constrictor; the woman on horseback who knew all the land’s secrets; the strange translucent pyramid; of the annual butterfly festival, of a thousand native butterflies taking flight at once.

Ice Cream and Death Cars

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Ice cream, murder, and the Great Fake Serial Killer. Banana splits and the Ottis Toole Death Car. Histories all connect. Somewhere. Often the connections make for the strangest hyperlinks. In the new location of the historic Jax ice cream shop, the Dreamette, the following stories merge:

https://jaxpsychogeo.com/west/murray-hill-dreamette-creamette/

https://jaxpsychogeo.com/north/garys-ice-cream-creamette/

https://jaxpsychogeo.com/north/springfield-spence-auto-sales-and-ottis-toole-death-car/

How the Killing of Thomas Kimble Coleman Changed the Course of a Family’s History

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He didn’t remember the killing at all. How could he? Harry Frank Long blacked out on whiskey every day. But Thomas Kimble Coleman’s murder at the Texan Motel on New Year’s Eve, 70 years ago, changed the course of his family. Three generations later, the Colemans say, “Justice keeps on being served.”

Decades of TV Repair, from Yulee to Chicago

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Bill’s been in business 60 years. Jeff’s dad, also a TV repair man 60 years ago, died in 1973. When the artist visits McCormick’s TV Repair in Yulee, he feels he’s revisiting his childhood. Both men have kept up: Jeff through newer ideas of depictions of self, Bill through technological changes that have brought him third-gen customers.

Old Jax Police Substation and David Ponsler’s Metalworks

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Blacksmith and sculptor David Ponsler lives and works in the only historic police substation remaining in Jacksonville. From the building’s police years come stories of counterfeiters and drunks and a fatal interrogation. Now, David liquefies steel here and makes art in fire.