“The Artist” is a charming movie, deserving of all the Golden Globes awards it received, and then some. (Watching that otherwise uninspired awards show, who wouldn’t want to see the movie after Uggie the Dog took to the stage with the rest of the cast and got the biggest laugh of the night?) By all means, see this movie, and see it on the big screen, as my dear husband and I did recently. As a tribute to moviemaking and movie stars before “talkies”, it should be seen as it might have been back then, when going to the movies was a Big Event and a reason to get dressed up. (For those of you who loathe the inevitable audio input from uncouth audience members, “The Artist”, a mostly silent movie, was so engrossing that the audience was silent!) Better yet, if you are fortunate enough to live anywhere near one of this country’s remaining movie palaces from that era, see it there.

We saw “The Artist” in just such a movie palace, the legendary Tampa Theatre. There is one shot in “The Artist” taken from the vantage point of the stage of a similar theater, looking out at the packed house. My immediate reaction, looking at the rows of cloche-​hatted flappers and their Brillantined male companions gazing raptly at the screen, was “That’s us!” But I’m getting ahead of myself. Tampa Theatre is at its best before the lights go down.

Much has been written lately about Disneyworld’s 40^th Anniversary, officially observed at the park with a ceremony at Cinderella’s Castle on October 1^st. On the USA Today site, I found news photos of various “suits” onstage with Mickey and Minnie, along with a far more telling one of a line of “guests” outside of a Main Street bakery that stretched down the street, all of them waiting for a 40^th Anniversary cupcake. The endless queue was a familiar sight.

Surfing on to the DisneyParks blog site, I also found a rather charming commemorative map of the original Magic Kingdom that brought back memories of my own first trip to Disneyworld, back when I was a teenager and recent Florida transplant living in Miami. Sometime in those first few years the park was open, my family made the pilgrimage for a vacation that was, in fact, quite magical. (At that time, an adult admission ticket was $3.50. One also had to purchase ride tickets, which were sold in booklets of 7 for $4.75 or 11 for $5.75.)

As my dear husband and I drove along on an epic day trip through small-​town Central Florida, today, we heard wonderful news on NPR, that the Secretary of the Interior has proposed the creation of a new national wildlife refuge and conservation area of 150,000 acres in the Kissimmee River Valley, south of Orlando, as part of President Obama’s America’s Great Outdoors initiative. With this proposal, the survival of one of the few grassland and longleaf pine savanna landscapes in eastern North America would be guaranteed. This is the kind of landscape that was bulldozed into oblivion with the advent of that 20^th century phenomenon, the Theme Park, in Central Florida — initiated by Walt Disney with his acquisition of 27,000+ acres of flatlands and cattle pastures in the 1960’s. What is gratifying about the deal is that it is the result in great part to a new approach: agreements with Central Florida cattlemen to create conservation easements on their property. These “cracker cowboys”, descendants of some of Florida’s oldest cattle families, see this as a way to preserve their way of life, according to the NPR report. In so doing, they are giving an incredible gift to their fellow Floridians — folks who don’t like to see the what is most beautiful and unspoiled transformed into generic developments: commercial, residential, or theme park.

The first wave of Florida tourists may have come by ship or rail, but the true adventurers, perhaps, were those who eschewed such plush forms of transportation in favor of their own automobiles — and their resourcefulness! This vintage postcard says it best:

“Crank up the Lizzy, an’ all git aboard,
We’re goin’ down south, so hurry up an’ load! I know she rattles, an’ the radiator leaks! But she’ll git us thar safe, even if she squeaks! Git the axe an’ saw, an’ the big fryin’ pan;
An’ the tent an’ pegs. An’ oh, my lan’!
Don’t forgit the matches, an’ the olé tire pump!
Hustle around now, an’ keep on the jump!
The weather-​man says, thar’s a blizzard comin’:
So crank up the Lizzy an’ keep ‘er a-​hummin’!
Head ‘er fer Floridy, as fast as we can go;
An’ we’ll beat that blizzard, first thing we know!
We’ll pitch our tent, by a runnin’ stream,
An’ the rest of the winter, ‘ll be one long dream!”

Amen! The poet of bit of doggerel, “S.S.R,” captured a phenomenon that was also recorded by Tampa’s own photographic historians, the Burgert Brothers, at about the same time that Florida’s auto campers formally organized themselves, at Tampa’s DeSoto Park in 1919, into the Tin Can Tourists organization.