The Rise and Decline of the Redneck Riviera: An Insider's History of the Florida-Alabama Coast

Introduction: Alabama Dreaming

1 n septeber 1944, on the island of Oahu, half a world away from his south Alabama home, a lonely Corporal Jewel Rivers, “Jack” to his friends, wrote his wife and infant son of the wonders he had seen—the coast, an active volcano, and Honolulu, which he described as “quite a town.” His journey had been a long one; it would be longer still. “This is only a stepping stone to where I am going,” he told them. The war with Japan had brought him this far, and it would take him the rest of the way. While his mind was on what came next, it was also on what would be waiting in the States when the fighting was over. He had seen Waikiki Beach, with its curving stretch of sand dominated by the famous Royal Hawaiian Hotel and Diamond Head. Waikiki was “very pretty,” but there was somewhere else he would rather be. “I’ll take the good old Gulf Shores any old day,” he wrote. “Give me Ala., in the U.S.A., and I’ll be satisfied.” Not long after he mailed that letter Corporal Rivers shipped out to New Guinea. Promoted to sergeant, he served as the waist gunner on a b-24 Liberator, flying with the Ninetieth Bomber Group. On November 19, his plane took off to attack a Japanese base on Mindanao Island in the Philippines. It did not return. Jack Rivers never saw Gulf Shores again. But many who served in that war did come back; and in the years that followed, veterans of the front lines and of the home introduction Alabama Dreaming 2 introduction front sought out sand and surf to relax and recover. Along the Alabama and Florida Gulf Coast, from the mouth of Mobile Bay east to St. Andrews Bay at Panama City, residents of the lower South made the beach their own. Children of the Depression and of conflict, more hopeful, indeed optimistic , than they had been in a decade, they drove down on New Deal–paved, military-improved roads in automobiles they bought on easy credit or with cashed-in war bonds. They came on vacations from jobs that they were trained and educated for under the gi Bill. They left behind homes financed through that same program. Few if any cared that their ticket to the middle class had been punched by the federal government. Along this coast folks from the lower South found a way of life, a culture and context, much like the one they left back home—segregated (where blacks existed at all), small town, provincial, self-centered, and unassuming . Only the landscape was different. Few of the postwar visitors, even the ones who had served in the Mediterranean, would likely have made the connection that was made by a prewar wpa writer who saw in Gulf Shores and Orange Beach reflections of “little fishing villages that reminded the visitor of the southern coast of France.” Nor is it likely that they would have made the alliterative association that years later Howell Raines, writing for the New York Times, made when he referred to this stretch of the Alabama shoreline as the “Redneck Riviera.” From there east to Panama City Beach was, as historian Patrick Moore of the University of West Florida described it, “a provincial environment committed to tradition, conservative values, and a close tie to regional identity.” Or that is what it has been for as long as I have known it, which is pretty much the length of time covered in this book. Let me explain. I grew up in south Alabama, in a little town about a three-hour drive from GulfShores.Thatbeachbecameourbeach—ourDisneyWorld,afriendfrom childhood called it. Though I was just a tot, I still recall going down with the family in those years after my father returned from defeating Hitler. Later I went back again and again, to deep-sea fish from Orange Beach, to dance at the Hangout, and to sleep in my car or on the sand. Meanwhile, even as all this was occurring, my attention was being drawn east, over to a spot in Florida, between Destin and Panama City Beach, where ancient dunes had formed a high bluff and where a developer was selling lots. In 1954 my grandmother bought one. In 1956 she built a cottage alabaa dreaing 3 there, and from then until...