Floridians: Real Stories from the Sunshine State
About this ebook
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 1920’s, 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, 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.
About the author
Writer-photographer-lecturer Ronald W. Kenyon was born and raised in Ashland, Kentucky. He was admitted to the Honors Program at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he specialized in English, political science, French and Spanish and won two Hopwood writing awards. The recipient of a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship, he attended graduate school at Stanford University. He also studied at Saint Lawrence University under a National Defense Education Act scholarship.
Ronald W. Kenyon spent over thirty years living and working in France and the Middle East and has visited 48 countries in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa. Although nominally retired, he continues his writing and photography: projects in both areas are in progress. Like most of the characters in this book, he is a transplanted Floridian.
Ronald W. Kenyon is a member of Artists of Palm Beach County.
