STORIES OF FLORIDA
TIN CAN TOURISTS
BY NANCY DICKINSON CHAMBERLAIN
My grandparents-Marjorie (Holliday)& Arthur Vincent and their 2 grown children(with their car)& 2 young children (under 12) first come to Florida just prior to the Depression. Tourists then, were called 'Tin Can Tourist', because belongings clanged while welded on the outside of their vehicles. Their home, the first winter, meant renting a tent size plank floor in Jacksonville's Pheonix Tent & Trailer Park, and stretching their tent over top. These 'tent cities' offered a lifestyle-off the ground, but filled with danger; for they usually had small stoves (with pipe )inside the canvass. Many a night the sky would be lit, where sparks would land on someone's canvass roof, and set theirs (and often others) tents on fire. Grandma had an oven outside, brick or concrete fireplace, half in the ground, where she baked bread for the family. There would be a 'community' clothes wash house-gazebo type structure with running water, where you could set up your tub, and scrub until your knuckles shone. Baths were taken inside the tent. when the Depression hit, Grandpa (and a group of unemployed men) walked (no money for gas) the railroad trestle from Jacksonville to Orlando, where Grandpa found work as bricklayer, as the new hospital-Orange Memorial Hospital was being built. It had been a long stroll from Jacksonville to Orlando, but Grandpa landed the job he had heard rumoured existed, so the walk back with gas money in his pocket (so he could relocate his family), must have seemed like walking on clouds. (Ironically, About thirty-six years later (1964), his granddaughter (me) worked in this same hospital as Payroll supervisor.) Meanwhile, Charles & Ross (the grown children) went out of state, and found work in the coal fields & blasts furnaces in Alabama, and Sent money back to their parents
.After Gram & Gramp Vincent left Jackson-ville's 'Pheonix Park Campgrounds' & they & my Mom (ca. age 4) & her brother Everrett (ca. age 9)relocated to Orlando, once again they lived in a tent-but this time in the Pinecastle, Florida Campground, while Grandpa worked as bricklayer at the Hospital. Meanwhile, Grandma got acquainted with a semi-retired schoolteacher ftom Culpepper, Va.-Mrs. Bean. Mrs. Bean had a son Louie Bean who was uncle Charles & Ross's age; my grandparents were invited to come visit.and live...beside the Bean's in Va. on some land she offered to give them. Although, the Vincent Family did not take her up on the offer, they did stop by on their way back to N. Y. State (ca. 1929-30) to visit the Bean's at their homestead in Culpepper. The story goes, Grandma Marjorie & the 2 young ones, were out back of Mrs. Beans washing clothes when they were approached by a well dressed gentleman, thinking he a 'salesman or masher' Grandma said she pulled the children close to her, and treated him 'cool & with distance'. Later, when Mrs. Bean returned home, she said that was her brother, the then Senator from Virginia; Grandma said she felt so embarrassed upon finding out who he was. Also, some time after, Louie Bean married into the present-day Senator Robert Byrd family.
This page belongs to