Florida Man

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Brian Balogh: From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstory.

Nathan Connolly: Welcome to Backstory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

Brian Balogh: I’m Brian Balogh.

Joanne Freeman: I’m Joanne Freeman.

Brian Balogh: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians. Each week, along with our colleague Ed Ayers, we drill down to one topic in American history.

Reporter: Florida man. You know who he is, the guy who makes headlines for committing some unbelievable crimes.

Reporter: A man accused of destroying a liquor store in Okaloosa County told police he was in Alice in Wonderland.

Reporter: A Florida man discovers his Ferrari won’t float, and it’s all caught on camera.

Reporter: Two neighbors get into a violent confrontation in an Oakland Park neighborhood.

Reporter: What makes this one stand out is the weapon involved, one of the men brandishing a sword.

Reporter: Oh Florida man, you brought us such headlines over the years in Florida.

Reporter: You know what? Can’t beat those beaches.

Brian Balogh: Aha, yes, Florida, my home state, where I spent much of my childhood, a place that made me who I am today.

Nathan Connolly: You’re the reason Florida has a reputation for being a little different than every other state.

Brian Balogh: Very funny, Nathan. I actually was curious about this whole Florida is weird phenomenon. I reached out to Craig Pittman. He’s a native Floridian and longtime reporter with the Tampa Bay Times. Here’s his take on what makes Florida so weird.

Craig Pittman: There are a lot of reasons. One of the big ones is we’ve undergone a wrenching demographic change in just the last 50 or 60 years. In 1940 we were the least populated Southern state, and then in 2014 we passed New York to become the third most populous state.

Brian Balogh: Wow.

Craig Pittman: We’ve had 22 million people move here. We’ve got about 100 million tourists visiting every year. We’re not evenly spread over the whole peninsula. We’re crammed in that 30-mile-wide swath along the coast and along Interstate 4 where the theme parks are. You pack that many different people from that many different backgrounds and cultures into that small a space and they’re bound to start ramming into each other’s cars and chasing each other with machetes and arguing over whose dog pooped on whose lawn.

Brian Balogh: You didn’t mention alligators, and that seems to be a central theme of a lot of Florida stories.

Craig Pittman: In order to accommodate all that growth, we’ve had to build a lot of homes in wild animal habitat, like build in the alligator habitat, the panther habitat, the bear habitat. Then people are shocked when they see a bear show up and sit in their hot tub, like, “Hey, this is my place. I was here first.”

Brian Balogh: With all of that, what are the wackiest stories you’ve ever covered during your career?

Craig Pittman: Oh gosh. This was one of my top ones for the past year, where the police stopped a pickup truck that had made an illegal turn, and it turned out that the woman in the passenger seat had a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles backpack that had 41 illegally collected freshwater turtles in it. The officer, having found the turtles, said, “What else have you got?” She said, “Well,” and reached into her yoga pants and pulled out a one-foot alligator.

Brian Balogh: Oh, god! Alligators I told you always show up, but I didn’t see them coming out of yoga pants.

Craig Pittman: No, not out of … That’s the thing about Florida is these things can come from anywhere. You know about our iguanas, right?

Brian Balogh: I used to love iguanas when I was growing up.

Craig Pittman: We’ve got lots of iguanas here that are an invasive species, like pythons. There was a guy, he was driving along one winter day and happened to see about 40 of them lying on the side of the road, because they were stunned by the cold, because when the temperature dips to a certain level-

Brian Balogh: They’re a cold-blooded anima.

Craig Pittman: Right. They go into this stupor and actually fall out of trees. They actually warn people to look out for the iguanas falling out of the trees. This guy sees about 40 of them, 40 cold stone iguanas by the side of the road, he thinks, “Hey, barbecue.” He stops his car and collects them and puts them in the car and takes off. He forgot that he had his heater on in the car. The iguanas all wake up and start racing around. He wrecks the car and they all get away.

Brian Balogh: Now undoubtedly you’ve heard of this social media phenomenon called the Florida man. It’s become a meme. Why don’t you describe for our listeners what the Florida man meme is and more importantly how it came about.

Craig Pittman: In say 2013 there was a guy who started a Twitter account by that name. Florida Man: The World’s Worst Superhero was the subtitle, where he would highlight these stories about people doing wacky, goofy, and generally self-destructive things that turned up in police reports. Then there was the whole Florida Man Challenge last year where you were supposed to look up your date of birth and the words Florida man and see what Florida man stories pop up for that day. Here’s the thing is some of them … I looked up the one for my date of birth. It was horribly tragic. That’s the thing is a lot of times in Florida, tragedy wears the mask of comedy. You have to figure out where’s the line where you stop laughing, because one of the other things that you have to know about why Florida produces so much weird news is we’re generally ranked 49th in the nation in spending for mental health treatment.

Brian Balogh: Putting on your social cultural analyst hat, why did the Florida man meme take off in 2014 or so? Why’d it become so popular?

Craig Pittman: I think because, A, a lot of that stuff is just so weird and so funny that you couldn’t help but laugh, like the one about the burglar from Silver Shores who broke into a house and discovered that there were ashes there for human and for a dog and he snorted them, thinking they were drugs. See? See?

Brian Balogh: Stop it.

Craig Pittman: See, that’s a real story. You couldn’t make that up. I think some of that was that, and some of it is people kind of want to laugh at people they deem to be stupider than themselves. In a way it’s reassuring to let you know that maybe your life choices weren’t as bad as they seem in comparison.

Brian Balogh: You actually alluded to this. The Florida man meme’s actually drawn criticism for being mean-spirited, for laughing down at homeless people, people who struggle with drug addiction, mental illness. Where do you [crosstalk 00:06:57]?

Craig Pittman: I think if the people involved are homeless or if they’ve been Baker Acted, which means there’s some mental problem involved, then that’s not something I’ll laugh about or post on Twitter or whatever. You see a lot of these stories pop up where they talk about, “Oh, this couple had sex in public, ha ha ha,” then it turns out they’re homeless, so gee, where are they supposed to have sex? Those are the ones that just aren’t that funny. All sorts of bizarre phenomenon occurs here in Florida. We had one of the earliest cases of someone claiming they were abducted by a UFO, a guy who then built a replica of the UFO in front of his house, complete with lights.

Brian Balogh: Let me guess, it’s a tourist attraction now.

Craig Pittman: It’s not there anymore, unfortunately. It really weirded out all the drivers who came by at night, didn’t know what they were seeing, drive off the road.

Brian Balogh: This might drive us off the road, but I grew up going to the Parrot Jungle, the Serpentarium, the Monkey Jungle. How much did these bizarro tourist attractions contribute to the very thing we’re talking about today?

Craig Pittman: I think a lot. Plus the whole attitude of, “Hey, we got to do it for the tourists. We got to make them happy.” Remember in the 1980s our ad slogan was, “Florida, the rules are different here.”

Brian Balogh: Yeah, they certainly are.

Craig Pittman: Yeah, and so a lot of people thought there are no rules at all. It’s a whole you only live once kind of philosophy if you’re catering to tourists.

Brian Balogh: Let’s do a thought experiment here, because you work in Florida, you presumably commute in Florida, you shop at the grocery store in Florida, you get your car repaired. Seriously, how would you describe Florida to let’s say somebody in New Hampshire who’s thinking of moving down to Florida? What are they getting into, taking the whole Florida experience, because there’s so much in Florida that is no different than Georgia or Alabama or New Hampshire.

Craig Pittman: I would tell them that we have the most beautiful beaches in the world. We have an award-winning State Park system. We have absolutely glorious sunsets and sunrises. We have the most interesting police logs they’ve ever seen. I always tell people, if you want to live someplace where every day the news is the same, you open the paper and it’s the same stuff day after day, then go to one of those square states out West, go to Nebraska or someplace, but if you want to live in a place where every day you open the paper or turn on the news and there’s something really interesting going on, come to Florida. We are the most interesting state.

Nathan Connolly: Today on the show, as much as the country is bundled up in the dead of winter, we’re putting on our flip-flops and diving into the history of the Sunshine State.

Brian Balogh: We’ll hear how Florida became a mecca for senior citizens.

Nathan Connolly: We’ll find out how one woman’s activism helped save Florida’s natural environment.