Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Floridians: Real Stories from the Sunshine State

Floridians: Real Stories from the Sunshine State

Kenyon, Ronald W.

Paperback

Letters & EssaysRegional: South

ISBN10: 153090790X
ISBN13: 9781530907908
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Published: Sep 26 2016
Pages: 198
Weight: 0.52
Height: 0.42 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
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 Café 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.

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