Floridians: Real Stories from the Sunshine State

By Ronald W. Kenyon

"Curiosity and intelligence run deep in Ronald W. Kenyon's writing. He's a tireless world traveler with a real knack for looking at wherever he is and finding reasons to be fascinated by it." Frank Cerabino, columnist, The Palm Beach Post

The cast of characters in these seventeen stories of fascinating Floridians includes the living and the dead, the famous and the infamous-murderers, imposters, royal pretenders, a supermarket cashier, a housekeeper, a homeless former crack addict rescued by an anonymous benefactor, the woman who was elected chief of the Seminoles, a Jordanian Cordon Bleu chef, a chess champion who founded a city and the first two Jewish senators. Even John Lennon makes an appearance.

A road trip across the state results in the shocking revelation that, in the 1930s, Seminole children were prohibited from attending either "white" or "colored" schools, but ends with an unexpected surprise: the Seminole Tribe of Florida, grown wealthy by the profits of its casinos and resorts, now owns the worldwide Hard Rock Caf chain.

Some of the essays involved extensive research, often sparked by an apparently trivial observation; thus the story of the phony count and the fake countess begins when I noticed a sign with an inappropriate ampersand and leaps around the world to France, the former Belgian Congo, Yemen, the Emirate of Sharjah and Tangier.

The people in this book are Floridians, all, and some were even born in the Sunshine State. Yet most are transplants like me, native-born Americans migrating from elsewhere in the United States or immigrants fleeing Hitler's Germany, Castro's Cuba and the poverty of Guatemala. Each of them-each of us-possesses Real Stories to tell, and in this book the reader will discover some of them.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 153090790X
• ISBN13: 9781530907908
• Release Date: September 2016
• Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
• Length: 198 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.5"