Check out this postcard of downtown Jacksonville, Florida at Postcardigans!
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Marineland oceanarium opened in 1938 just south of St. Augustine, Florida. The Marine Studios were designed to serve as a underwater motion picture studio. The aquarium operates today as a part of the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta and is celebrating its 80th anniversary in 2018. Here are a selection of the Marineland postcards available through Postcardigans.
From here on, the Spit and Argue Club became a fixture on the Long Beach piers. Crowds of up to 1,500 people watched the action, and some even took part. In the 1930s the city of Long Beach attempted to control the perception of the group, renaming it the University by the Sea--a pretentious name that did not stick--and creating formal rules of engagement. A platform was built on Rainbow Pier, and each participant had ten minutes to speak or, in the case of one regular, play the flute. A moral code was enforced, with no swimwear allowed (at a beach, nonetheless) and profanity and alcohol prohibited.
The event continued after World War II, but the rise of communism and the Red Scare led to less cordial arguments. As noted in a 2010 historical article on the club in the Los Angeles Times, A 1949 petition signed by 299 people demanded that the Long Beach City Council shut down Spit 'n' Argue because they said it was an anti-American organization whose rhetoric was inflamed "by four psychopaths, two religious fanatics and a crackpot." The council refused.
The American Legion contended that the club was full of communists while another organization claimed it to be infiltrated by the KKK. The Rainbow Pier platform was demolished in 1953, though the club was eventually allowed to meet again on the pier itself.
But the golden days of the Spit and Argue Club were long gone. Television and radio became preferred mediums of entertainment, and the number of Spit and Argue Club participants and spectators declined. Older members passed away. The club was forced from the piers onto a designated area on the beach, but later development made the site all but impossible to access. By 1970 the club was all but gone. In an article in the Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram, Selah Brickman lamented, So many things are gone. So many of our old members. The people walking around the pier. The breakers, the sound of them. In 1902, a teacher, I came from Live in the Russian Ukraine to get away from the Czar, to find freedom and free speech. Here, yes, they are here! “But our members are old now. When the wind blows, they get cold. They stay home. No, no one chews tobacco any more. No one spits, here at our club. On sunny days, we still talk of everything. A few of us. But the old times have gone.
The city shut down the Spit and Argue Club in 1972, thus ending an interesting and dynamic part of Long Beach's history.
Sources:
"Before They Could Spout Off on the Airwaves, Folks Debated (and Spit) in the Open Air," Los Angeles Times, February 7, 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/07/local/la-me-then7-2010feb07. Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram, June 7, 1970, http://kenjonesfishing.com/2017/11/the-spit-%E2%80%98n%E2%80%99-argue-club-at-the-pier-%E2%80%94/. |