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6 St. Petersburg and a New Beginning Another Move It was an emotional move. Once again, the Shinns were selling a home and searching for a new one, but this time they were out of practice. Fifteen years in one home was a new record for the Shinn family, and one can accumulate a mountain of difficult-to-move stuff during that time. Not to mention that we still had that five-hundred-pound cannon in the front yard! Moving was the bad news, but there was some good news. There were many homes on the market in St. Petersburg, and prices were way lower than in Miami. We nevertheless had some initial mixed feelings; Pat and I hadn’t seen St. Petersburg since our high school band trip there in the early 1950s. St. Petersburg had become a very popular retirement area in the 1950s, and now retirees were expiring at a rapid rate. It was all about demographics. One joke was that the major exports from St. Pete were dead bodies and cut flowers. A newspaper report stated that St. Pete was the U.S. prune juice consumption capital. I heard an entertainer in the Keys say that “they have a drink in St. Pete called the Pile Driver. It consists of prune juice and vodka.” Some rogues even called the city “the land of the living dead.” It turned out to be not that bad, probably because we were rapidly joining the older crowd and developing a taste for prune juice! We did very well selling our Miami home. In fifteen years our South Miami abode had quadrupled in value, and for the first time we could afford a home on the water—a canal connected to Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. The house we found had two stories, large trees, a swimming pool, Bootstrap Geologist: My Life in Science 192 and davits for our outboard boat. It also had a nice dock. A few years later I would be parking Papa-San, a forty-two-foot Kady Krogen trawler, behind our home. We bought Papa-San in 1996 with the money from selling my parents’ home in Port St. Lucie after their deaths. I named the boat PapaSan and its support dingy Mama-San. Living on the water and owning a live-aboard boat had been our lifelong dream. We moved into the new home on Labor Day 1989. Boy! Was it hot and humid! All we had heard about the heat and humidity was true. The west coast of Florida remains unbearably hot and humid during summer months. Miamians, including Pat, who was born in Miami, liked to call the west coast the “Backside of Florida.” The cooling trade winds that bathe the east coast are absent on the backside. The summer wind that blows westerly from the Gulf of Mexico is very different and much warmer and more humid than the easterly trades. The office space, thanks to business leaders and the University of South Florida (USF), was in a renovated two-story, red-brick building that had been a Studebaker automobile sales office that first opened in 1925. Red brick was another sign we were no longer on the east coast. The building was on the Historical Register and had been vacant for several years. It was home to rats, pigeons, mice, and cockroaches—excuse me, I mean palmetto bugs. It also served as a loft for local artists and various street people. After renovation, the ground floor, once the garage and showroom, became a machine shop and conference room. The second floor was converted into individual offices. A modern laboratory and new machine shop area were constructed several years later. Because the new building was connected to the building on the Historical Register, by law, it had to be constructed in the same red-brick style. The business community, starting at the top with the mayor, as well as USF, was exceptionally receptive. The St. Petersburg Times wrote articles about USGS geologists even before we arrived, and most everyone in the city knew when we arrived. They really put out the welcome mat! That was a change from Miami! The two-year undergraduate campus next door was enlarging, and the adjacent graduate school and marine laboratory were growing. The latter would become the USF College of Marine Science, and the two-year school became a four-year school. Over time I watched it all happen, not knowing that eventually the...

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