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

1. The Coast Jack Rivers Knew

10 he beach that Jack Rivers wanted to see again was not much by Waikiki standards. The same could be said for most of what would become the Redneck Riviera. Down on the Alabama coast there was no Royal Hawaiian, but there was the Orange Beach Hotel, which opened in 1923 and offered guests comfortable rooms with Delco System electrical lights and running water but no indoor toilets. The building took a beating in 1926, when the unnamed hurricane that did so much damage in the Miami area entered the Gulf, turned north, and made landfall again near the mouth of Mobile Bay. But the Orange Beach Hotel survived and was modernized (plumbing and all) in the 1930s, with cottages added to accommodate the growing number of families coming down. The year after the hurricane, the Gulf Shores Hotel opened. Built from lumber salvaged from a storm-damaged Mobile Bay hostelry, it was a two-story structure with a bathhouse on the lower level and private cottages—one owned by Mrs. Dixie Bibb Graves, wife of Alabama’s governor, Bibb Graves. Vacation homes were also springing up, the first built in the 1920s by a couple of Mobile businessmen. Laid out on the mill-town, shotgun-house plan with screened sitting/sleeping porches all around, they were harbingers of things to come. By the 1930s these retreats were joined by other cottages of similar design—“a green box roofed by a green pyramid and propped on creosote poles” one The Coast Jack Rivers Knew T the coast jack rivers knew 11 recalled a member of the family that built theirs “from cheap pine mill-ends and cheaper Depression labor” and named it Sand Castle. Getting to the coast was no easy matter. Travel was routine as far as Foley, some fifteen miles inland, but from there the trip continued on a teeth-rattling, wooden, corduroy road and over a one-lane pontoon swing bridge that could be opened to let boats pass up into freshwater creeks to ride out storms or clean sea worms off their hulls. Anchored and docked in the coves and bayous behind the beach, these boats were among the many reasons visitors came down. As early as 1913, and maybe earlier, there were locals who would take tourists out through the pass to fish deep water—for seventy-five cents a day. Once beyond the breakers it was only a brief run to the “100-fathom curve,” a dramatic six-hundred-foot drop in the floor of the Gulf where red snapper, grouper, and other popular fish clustered to feed. There upcountry folks, who had only fished for catfish and crappie, could catch the big ones, and as word of this bounty spread, “fishing for hire” became the Orange Beach industry. By 1938 a booklet titled “Tour Guide to South Baldwin County” told of fishing camps “opposite the Gulf of Mexico inlet [that led] to Perdido Bay,” and of “a fleet of charter boats . . . available at most reasonable rates, with experienced fishing guides and navigators in charge.” That same year captains and crew organized as the Orange Beach Fishing Association, and off into the promotional future they sailed. About this same time there began to appear among coastal folks an attitude that might have passed unnoticed had it not later become a defining characteristic of the people and the place. You could see it in Carl Taylor “Zeke” Martin who, after the 1926 hurricane, homesteaded acres of beachfront that the government told him he could keep only if he tilled the soil. But the soil was sand, and raising crops was not what Zeke had in mind. So he planted fig trees, which he proudly pointed out to the homestead inspector as evidence of his intention to do what the government told him he must do, only of course it wasn’t. When the federal official left, Martin let the birds eat the figs, such as they were, and settled back to enjoy life on the beach. Charter boat captain Herman Callaway was cut from the same cloth. In the 1930s, the federal government levied a tax on charter boats and yachts. Callaway refused to pay it. Revenue agents arrived and Callaway ran them off. Then down from Mobile came the president of Waterman Steam Ship Corporation, who had heard of Callaway’s defiance and wanted to tell 12 chapter one him...