Word: florida
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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North from Florida in a gritty whirl of orange peels and wax paper rattled a train of ancient, ill-assorted day coaches last week-the first "relief train" hauling stranded escapists home. Its faded red & green cars got to Manhattan five hours late, released some 500 battered passengers, and went back empty to haul another load away. Next day the second of the two extra coach trains allowed by ODT for the Great Evacuation arrived three hours late. The sordid shuttling will go on; by midsummer, said ODT, all the suntanned refugees may get home...
Gullible or desperate tourists paid sharpers from $5 to $15 for "reservations" (the relief trains had no reserved seats). Florida's black market business in regular Pullman reservations continued to boom. Up rose President Andrew G. O'Rourke of the Greater Miami Hotel Association to declare: most of the black market ticket-selling was the work of "an unethical gang of thugs from the North, and not by hotel porters or Miamians." He had hardly subsided when FBI men arrested as scalpers 16 Miami ticket agents and clerks, 14 Miami hotel flunkies, and one Miami cabby. J. Edgar...
Nobody except the vacationers would have cared much if they had been left to crawl home on their tanned hands & knees. But their pressure on Florida's railroads, hotels and natives was getting dangerous. The railroads estimated that the 150,000-odd civilians trying for Pullman space would take three months to move unless precious extra trains were put on. Meanwhile, those-who-sacrificed-least jammed Miami and Palm Beach hotels, refusing to move out for new comers. The newcomers spilled over into private houses, used up precious gas and tires chartering cabs to nearby cities not quite...
...overworked ticket clerk last week that she had to get to a dying daughter in Philadelphia. When he found a canceled space for her the same day, she said "Oh, but I didn't want to go until March 6" (right after the Hialeah race track closes). The Florida East Coast sold out all the seats they had in 32 minutes one morning last week...
...pressure is not all from race fans: there are soldiers' families trying to get home from Florida debarkation camps, soldiers crowding North for brief furloughs. While civilian experts for the Army & Navy cooled their heels in Miami, the Miami Herald's society columns blossomed with items about debutantes shuttling North for a week at the Waldorf and then South again for such matters of state as "parties preceding the marriage of a college roommate." ODT finally could no longer ignore the mess, ordered two extra trains daily from Florida to New York. They will be ancient, all-coach...