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The visitor to Greater Miami who wanted to be hypnotized could be, at the Svengali Club; he could determine his destiny through the auspices of a modest "life reader" ("I don't claim to do miracles") named Madame Avon; he could see clumsy girls competing in an amateur strip-tease contest or watch Seminoles wrestling alligators. Within the white walls of Miami Beach's Saxony Hotel the lazier man could maneuver round the clock from the Hulahut through the Bam-Boo-La Lounge, the Veranda Room, the Tropical Room, the Chuck Wagon ("All You Can Eat for Only $1.95"), Ye Noshery,— the Nite-Cap Lounge and the Pagoda Room.
Klystron Tubes & Muck. Like all good Floridians, Roy Collins is proud of Miami Beach; more than most, he is aware of the danger of resting the state's economy too heavily on a vacationland—even in a nation where winter vacations are becoming more and more routine.
Today, so much else is going on in Florida that the peril of overemphasizing the playgrounds seems to be passing. Gainesville (pop. 32,000) has a new $600,000 Sperry Rand plant making klystron tubes.
At Palatka (pop. 11,000), the Hudson Pulp & Paper Corp. is considering building a $25 million newsprint mill. Tampa (pop.
276,000) rejoices over Southland Oil Co.'s plans for Florida's first complete oil-cracking plant. Jacksonville has two new insurance company skyscrapers, a new $2,500.000 branch of General Motors' Electro-Motive Division and a General Foods instant-coffee plant.
Three out of four oranges and nine out of ten grapefruit produced in the U.S.
now come from Florida. Good farm land is expanding, notably in the swamps and jungle of the Everglades, where a $250 million drainage and reclamation project is uncovering black muck soil as fertile as anything on earth.
Florida mines ilmenite and rutile ore.
from which the light metal titanium is derived. Its monazite sands offer the promise of thorium, a source of fissionable material. Underlying more than 2,000 sq.
mi. of Florida, centering 70 miles east of St. Petersburg, there is enough phosphate to last U.S. industry 1,000 years.
"A Gradual Shaping." As governor.