Page 44 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind

On August 27, 1949, a strong hurricane came up the Florida peninsula. It passed west
of Jacksonville over Lake City as a tropical storm, but in Jacksonville our winds gusted
as high as 85 mph, blowing down large signs, breaking store windows, and causing
much tree and roof damage around the city. When school started in September, we
moved from the Jefferson Hotel to the Floridian Hotel at the corner of Forsyth and Clay
Streets. Around this time, the bicycle I had ridden for over 5 years was stolen from the
Western Union office on Forsyth Street across from the theater. When I told Mr. Stich
about this, he accused me of selling it! I couldn’t believe he didn’t believe me. A few
weeks later, we had to sneak out of the hotel without paying our bill. All of our family
possessions were left behind. What I missed most were the movies my father had taken
of Richard and me in New Jersey. He took pictures from the days Richard was 2 years
old and I was five. We had movies of visiting the 1939 New York World Fair in New
York City.

We stayed a few weeks in an apartment on Adams Street near Broad until mother got a
job managing a rooming house at 617 Hogan Street, ironically the site of the future
home of the Ruth Lindsay auditorium of the First Baptist Church. I would occasionally
sweep and mop the floors. On the north side of Beaver Street was a Radio-Television
school, training a new generation of technicians for TV. This was before most homes
had TV sets. Television finally came to Jacksonville on September 15, 1949.
WMBR-Channel 4, the forerunner of WJXT, inaugurated a display of this new medium
in the newly renovated Cohen Brothers Department Store. This was the first building in
Jacksonville to install escalators, which ran from the basement to the third floor. Since
this was only 2 blocks from where I lived, I rode the escalator to the Mezzanine where
I saw the cameras and TV Station employees transmit pictures to television monitors
placed around the store. Little did I know that I would devote more than fifty years to
this venture with that very same station. In those days there were few TV sets in homes.
People would gather on the sidewalk to watch the pictures in store windows, like Radio
Center next to the Arcade Theater on Forsyth Street. In the neighborhoods, you could
tell who was watching television, especially on Friday nights. Interior lighting would
flicker through the windows where a TV was displaying shows like the Pabst Blue
Ribbon Friday night fights.

Our high school graduation ceremony took place at the George Washington Hotel. We
had to dress formal, but I didn’t own a pair of black shoes. So I bought a bottle of
Griffin Liquid Black Shoe polish and dyed my brown shoes black. After graduation,
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