Word: florida
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Servants' Servants. Florida's new boom bears little resemblance to past periods of bubbling prosperity such as the '80s and '90s, when Oilman Henry Flagler opened up the new vacationland by building a string of hotels down the East Coast and a railroad that eventually reached Key West. It is also different from the '20s, when fun-seeking tycoons went south in private railroad cars with a staff of servants for the servants, and fell over each other to buy medieval houses and fake antique furniture from Addison Mizner. Gone are the hordes of "developers...
Instead of paper plans, Florida bloomed last week with concrete results. From the white sands of Miami to the piney woods of the northwest panhandle, new industries formed the base of the new kind of boom...
...center of Jacksonville, the red skeletons of two skyscrapers sprouted to provide office space for the Prudential and Independent life-insurance companies. Other cities had wooed them, but the companies chose Jacksonville for their southeastern headquarters because the state gives insurance companies tax advantages for locating regional offices in Florida. In turn, this law is making the city one of the nation's most important insurance centers. St. Regis Paper had opened a giant new $18 million plant; General Motors' Electro-Motive Division has nearly completed a $2,500,000 expansion to triple its capacity. General Foods...
...Bird Dogs. Florida's agriculture has kept pace with its industry. In the center of the state, citrus groves were heavy last week with the biggest crop in history (an estimated 130 million boxes). The "bird dogs," i.e., the middlemen in the industry, sent radio-directed trucks speeding from grove to grove, lining up likely buys. Not long ago, such a huge crop would have meant vast surpluses, and the dumping of millions of bushels of fruit into Florida's lakes and rivers. But "this year, almost every orange and grapefruit will be sold at good prices...
...enormous growth of Florida's citrus industry has been paralleled by big gains in the relatively new pursuit (for Florida) of raising cattle. Until a few years ago, gunfights crackled over the Florida countryside in the best tradition of the West. But now 1,500,000 acres of good cattle land and 1,386.000 head of beef cattle are fenced in under the watchful eyes of Seminole Indian cowhands, and order reigns. Said 77-year-old Agriculture Commissioner Nathan Mayo: "We used to have nothing but scrawny herds of 4-H cattle−hide, hair, hoof and horns...