Swim Team
The story always starts with a college swim team training at Fort Lauderdale in the mid-1930s, drawn by the new Casino Pool. That anecdote is thinner than its retelling suggests, the sources disagree on the year and the causation is folklore. What is solid is the College Coaches' Swim Forum, held at Fort Lauderdale from 1938, which brought teams back every spring and gave the town a standing reason to expect students in March.
Part of Spring Break
30 moments in this segment.
- - A bathing costume of 1916. A young woman photographed in a bathing costume in 1916. Florida Memory's record gives neither a place nor an occasion, only the year, and the picture survives as a marker of what beachwear looked like long before the coast filled with students.
- - Students in a Stetson University dormitory. Young men in a dormitory room at Stetson University in DeLand, photographed around 1920. It is one of the earliest views in this archive of Florida college life, the world the spring ritual would eventually grow out of.
- - Bathers in the surf at Oldsmar. Swimmers playing in the water at Oldsmar on Tampa Bay in the 1920s, catalogued by Florida Memory as 'frolicing in the surf'. Ordinary beach recreation of the kind the state was already selling to visitors from the north.
- - Winter bathing at Daytona Beach. A colour postcard captioned 'Winter Bathing at Daytona Beach, Fla.', published around 1920. Daytona sold its hard sand and mild winters to northern visitors long before spring became the season that mattered.
- - Bathers at Miami Beach. Swimmers and onlookers on the sand at Miami Beach in 1921, photographed by William A. Fishbaugh. The resort was barely a decade old and already pulling crowds to the water.
- - Water toboggan at Miami Beach. A water toboggan slide in use at Miami Beach on 30 March 1925. Amusements built out over the sand made the shoreline an attraction in its own right, not merely a place to swim.
- - Children at Vero Beach. Children on the sand at Vero Beach in 1930. The catalogue entry is brief, but the frame shows the family beach holiday as Florida's Atlantic resorts were building it.
- - Boxing match at the Pensacola beach casino. A crowd packed around a ring at a beach casino in Pensacola around 1930. Beach pavilions of this kind put bathing, dancing and spectacle in one building at the water's edge.
- - Students of the Florida State College for Women. A group of students at the Florida State College for Women in Tallahassee, photographed around 1940. The single-sitter portrait from the same studio series was left out; this frame shows the student body itself.
- - Tarpon Club with a beach ball at Wakulla Springs. Members of the Tarpon Club tossing a beach ball at Wakulla Springs on 24 May 1947. Florida's inland springs were a swimming destination in their own right, and the state photographed them the way it photographed the coast.
- - Bubble balloon on Panama City Beach. A young woman blowing a bubble balloon on the sand at Panama City Beach on 30 August 1947, in a photograph made for the state's Department of Commerce. The Gulf town was then marketing itself hard as a holiday beach.
- - Sun-Debs training on Lido Beach. A training session of the Sarasota Sun-Debs on Lido Beach, photographed around 1949 by Joseph Janney Steinmetz. The record says little more; here the beach serves as an exercise ground as much as a resort.
- - Modelling on the sand at Miami Beach. A model posed in a bathing suit on Miami Beach on 21 December 1949 for the Department of Commerce. Pictures like this one were made to sell Florida's winter and spring seasons to readers up north.
- - Home movies of the early beach crowd. Amateur film held by a stock archive showing college students at the beach in the 1940s and 1950s. It is the kind of record that survives from before the season became a national event.
- - Fort Lauderdale beach in 1950. A young woman stretched out on the sand at Fort Lauderdale in 1950, in a Department of Commerce publicity photograph. This is the beach as it was a decade before the spring migration found it: the place, not yet the ritual.
- - A couple on the sand at Miami Beach. Two sunbathers photographed at Miami Beach in 1950. Department of Commerce images like this fixed the picture of a Florida beach holiday in the years before college crowds became the story.
- - Fort Lauderdale on 8mm, winter 1951. An 8mm home movie shot in December 1951 in St. Augustine and Fort Lauderdale and digitised decades later. It records the Florida beach towns in the decade before the 1960s surge.
- - Three young women on Saint George Island. Three young women at the water's edge on Saint George Island in July 1952, on a barely developed stretch of Florida's Panhandle coast.
- - Bathing suits in the Daytona dunes. Models photographed in bathing suits among the dunes at Daytona Beach in July 1953. Daytona promoted its sand in the same years, and often in the same breath, as its racing.
- - A film about choosing a Florida college. A colour promotional film in which a young man settles on a college after watching a reel about Florida's universities, with scenes of Florida State, Florida A&M and other campuses. Florida Memory dates it no more closely than the 1950s.
- - College students on the sand in the fifties. A short stock-library clip of American college students at the beach on spring break in the 1950s. The archive dates the material to the decade but not to a year.
- - Women in leis and bathing suits at the beach. A colour transparency of women posed in bathing suits and flower leis on a Florida beach around 1955. The record names neither the beach nor the occasion; it belongs to the Department of Commerce's steady stream of holiday publicity.
- - Families packing for a beach holiday. Families in Tallahassee loading up for a trip to the coast on 27 May 1957, photographed for the Tallahassee Democrat. The beach trip in the form Florida travel mostly took before the student season took hold.
- - Florida State students in the snow. Students at Florida State University out in a rare Tallahassee snowfall on 13 February 1958. A second frame of the same group posed with their snowman was set aside as a near-duplicate.
- - Picnic near the Colony Beach Club, Longboat Key. A family picnicking on the sand near the Colony Beach Club on Longboat Key in 1958, photographed by Joseph Janney Steinmetz.
- - High school students at a party in Tallahassee. Leon High School students at a party on 19 March 1959, photographed for the Tallahassee Democrat. A record of Florida teenage social life at the close of the decade.
- - The beach before the crowds. A vintage travel film of Fort Lauderdale beach from around the turn of the 1960s. Cars, low hotels and an uncrowded shoreline show the town on the edge of the surge that would define it.
- - Models on a Panama City dune. Women photographed in colour on a sand dune at Panama City in 1959. The Gulf town was pushing its shoreline in the years just before the strip filled out.
- - The city tells its own history. A short history of Fort Lauderdale produced with the local historical society and published by the city. Background on the beachfront town that college swim teams began visiting in the 1930s.
- - How spring break became a ritual. Slate's Decoder Ring traces spring break back to midcentury teen culture and follows how the ritual kept reinventing itself enough to survive. A 48-minute account of the phenomenon's origins and its later turns.
