‘Oh, Florida!’ is a warts-and-all celebration of our state

Florida, Craig Pittman likes to point out, is the only place in the whole country that has state employees whose actual job title is “mermaid.”

It sounds like a joke, but it’s not. Weeki Wachee Springs in Hernando County was one of the first generation of Florida tourist attractions, famous for its underwater mermaid shows. When the attraction into financial trouble eight years ago, the state took it over, making it part of the state park system. The mermaids became state employees.

Pittman is a long-time writer for the Tampa Bay Times, where he writes about environmental issues. It seems as though writing about Florida’s environment would keep a guy plenty busy, but Pittman finds time to write books every now and then. His fourth, which came out in June, is titled, “Oh, Florida!” Just this month, it made its way onto the New York Times’ Best Sellers list.

“Oh, Florida!” is full of those stories about how wacky Florida is. Among the items in the index are “spontaneous human combustion,” (page 153), “Voodoo” (pages 101 and 239) and “Great Depression, possums and” (page 105).

But despite all those tales of strange stuff in the Sunshine State that delight us but make us all cringe a little when our social media friends share them (often, these days, with the hashtag “FloridaMan”), “Oh, Florida!” is very much a celebration of our home state. It’s subtitle is “How Florida’s Weirdest State Influences the Rest of the Country.”

“You could call it a ‘warts and all celebration,’ ” Pittman said. “Yes, we’re weird. But the weirdness is part of what makes us interesting. You can’t have something cool like manatees without having something weird like people trying to ride manatees.” (Just in case you don’t catch the reference, four years ago a St. Petersburg woman was recorded trying to ride a Manatee at Fort DeSoto Park. The video went viral. She turned herself into to police, and was arrested on misdemeanor charges.)

Sure, Pittman said, we have no shortage of stories that make Florida “The Punch Line State,” as the book’s prologue is titled. There’s Rudy Eugene, the man who was shot dead by Miami police when they found him naked and chewing off the face off another, still living, man. There’s the actual-size fake dinosaur that was somehow stolen and has never been found. There are notorious affairs that brought down presidential candidate Gary Hart and televangelist Jim Bakker. There’s the pet shop that held a promotion that included giving away a python to the person who could eat the most cockroaches, and the guy who won the contest and promptly died. (The medical examiner said the guy died from choking on insect parts, Pittman said, and the pet store decided to keep the python.) There are sinkholes that open up suddenly, swallowing cars, houses and the occasional human being, or allowing huge amounts of poisonous water to flood into our aquifer.

That kind of stuff just doesn’t seem to happen in, say, North Dakota.

But Florida also has a history and a culture richer than that of most almost any other state, and the people who make up that history include as Ponce de Leon, Teddy Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, Jim Morrison and Kate Upton. Every person who has ever walked on the moon started his journey in Florida. The iconic and often copied cover of Elvis Presley’s first album was photographed here (which doesn’t happen to be mentioned in the book) and filmed a movie here (which is mentioned).

“Oh, Florida!” encourages us to think of ourselves as unique, not weird.

By the way, back to that story about our state employing mermaids. There’s a story Pittman tells that he couldn’t fit into the book. A young woman in FishHawk Ranch, a community in Hillsborough County, dreamed of becoming a Weeki Wachee mermaid. She would practice swimming in her costume in one of the community’s pool.

“The homeowners association sent her a letter and told her to stop,” Pittman said. “They said her costume violated the rules against using fins in the pool.”

This story was originally published August 12, 2016 at 4:59 PM with the headline "‘Oh, Florida!’ is a warts-and-all celebration of our state."