On a Saturday in May of 1963, somewhere around fifteen thousand people crowded onto a barrier island at the mouth of Tampa Bay to watch a movie star pour dirt into a cup.
The island was Mullet Key, the occasion was the official dedication of Fort De Soto Park, and the movie star was Henry Fonda. By the account local journalist Bill DeYoung pieced together from the St. Petersburg Times coverage of the day, Fonda had been lured down to Florida less by civic duty than by the promise of a day's tarpon fishing. Whatever got him there, he showed up, gave a short speech, and then took part in one of the stranger ceremonial gestures in the park's history.
Fonda had arrived carrying a handful of dirt from Wyoming, where he'd recently finished shooting the film Spencer's Mountain. While news cameras rolled, he poured that soil into a silver chalice, where it was mixed with sand from the Fort De Soto beach and, for good measure, what was billed as “sand from Spain,” produced by a local re-enactor dressed as the 16th-century explorer Hernando de Soto, the park's distant namesake. It was the kind of symbolic flourish that sounds profound until you think about it for more than a second. Fort De Soto, in truth, had about as much real connection to the historical de Soto as it did to Henry Fonda's box-office returns.
The dedication was not a small affair. Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians, one of the most popular dance bands in America, performed. Thirteen local young women competed for the title of Miss Fort De Soto, then posed for photographs with a visibly uncomfortable Fonda. There was a waterski show brought in from Cypress Gardens to keep the crowd's attention through the heat, which by every account was considerable, another brutally hot Florida Saturday with little shade to be found.
The spectacle made sense in context. The county had acquired Mullet Key back in 1948, buying it from the federal government after its stint as a World War II bombing range, but for years it had remained difficult to reach, accessible mainly by boat. The first toll road and causeway opened in 1962, and suddenly the island that had been a fishing-and-boating destination for the determined few was within easy driving distance of every family in St. Petersburg. The 1963 dedication was the formal announcement of that shift. Fort De Soto was being rolled into the “Holiday Isles,” the county's aggressive mid-century campaign to market its beaches to tourists, and a Hollywood name, a famous orchestra, and a beauty pageant were exactly the tools that campaign reached for.
What's striking, looking back, is how little of that promotional machinery stuck to the place. The kiddie train rides, the pageants, the ribbon-cutting pomp all faded within a decade or two. The waterski shows didn't become an institution. Henry Fonda, who died in 1982, never came back. What endured instead was the thing the marketing was wrapped around: the beach itself, the old mortar batteries, the scrub and mangrove and the wading birds. The park that draws somewhere between two and three million visitors a year now looks far more like the wild island the boaters knew than the carnival the county staged in 1963.
There's something almost reassuring in that. For one hot afternoon, Pinellas County tried to turn Fort De Soto into a show, complete with a star, a band, and a cup of imported dirt. The show didn't last. The island did.