Take, for example, Royal Palm Park at Miami. It is larger than some of the Florida parks for sun-hunters; but the people who use it are no different from those who use similar parks all over Florida.
On one side of the park is Biscayne Bay, with ginger-breadish house-boats and gleaming steam yachts and broad-winged flying boats crowded along the shore. On another side is Miami’s principal business street, lined with modern office buildings and up-to-the-minute haberdasheries and modistes and drug-stores and real-estate offices and hotels and soft-drink emporiums and parked automobiles and bustling shoppers.
In the park itself, beneath the softly rustling palms, an audience of silent sun-hunters, sprawled on benches which surround the edges, gaze intently at the long double row of horseshoe pitchers and at a score of long tables crowded with men who are brooding over obviously important matters. The men at the tables are the skilled checker, chess and domino players of the tin-can camps and the sun-hunters’ colonies. At one table one afternoon I recognized a doctor who had cured my childish ailments in Maine many years ago. Opposite him was a cattleman from Iowa. Beside him was a crippled begger and panhandler who owned no home at all; and busily playing checkers with the panhandler was a prosperous-looking small-town banker from Illinois.
Checker and domino tournaments of terrifying ferocity take place at frequent intervals. The champion checker player of Miami issues a challenge to the champion checker player of West Palm Beach, and the outcome is awaited with breathless interest. It is not unusual for individuals to wager as much as fifty cents on the result.
For hair-raising excitement and action so thrilling that it frequently causes hardened sun-hunting onlookers to swallow their chews, one must turn to the horseshoe pitchers. Horseshoe pitching is the
Photograph by F. A. Robinson
Miami’s main street at midday showing that there is one automobile to every seven-eighths of an inhabitant.
A portion of the Tin-Can City at Tampa, with tin-canners engaged in their favorite pursuits.