Dave Shealy claims to have seen the ever-elusive skunk ape of Florida legend in 1974. He based the Skunk Ape Analysis Headquarters/vacationer lure to capitalize on the lore of Florida’s large, bushy man-beast. However don’t get it twisted; those that imagine in skunk apes say the creatures have 4 toes, not 5 just like the Pacific Northwest’s Sasquatch. The skunk ape additionally, apparently, prefers hanging out in bushes to lumbering round on the bottom.
Welcome to Florida, the place a skunk ape sighting is only one of a number of loopy occasions that outlined life within the Sunshine State in the course of the Nineteen Seventies. Disney World opened in 1971. Drug trafficking soared as cocaine dominated the hedonistic Miami social gathering scene. Ted Bundy was finally apprehended in Pensacola in 1978 after escaping jail in Colorado. Be part of us for a dive into the very best tales illustrating the mayhem that was Florida throughout this turbulent time.
Isabelle Lee
OZY Reporter
infamous floridians
1 – Anita Bryant
She was the orange juice queen, leaving an aftertaste that was something however candy. The chief of the anti-gay Save Our Kids motion in Miami in the course of the Nineteen Seventies, Anita Bryant is unlikely to be receiving a wedding invitation from her homosexual granddaughter this 12 months. Bryant, a former magnificence queen, used her beauty and allure to rally individuals in opposition to pro-LGBTQ legislation. Miami had handed a regulation barring discrimination in opposition to homosexual residents in 1977. As a campaigner, Bryant efficiently spearheaded public efforts that noticed the law repealed. Bryant was a spokeswoman for Florida orange juice, so homosexual rights activists initiated a boycott. She was dropped by the corporate years later, not for her place on homosexual rights, however because of fallout from her personal messy divorce.
Miami’s godmother of cocaine was answerable for no less than 40 (and a few allege as much as 200) murders within the ’70s and ’80s. Born in Colombia in 1943, Blanco is alleged to have taken her first life on the age of 11. She was ruthless in her pursuit of cash and management of the cocaine commerce between Miami and Colombia. Famed for allegedly inventing the motorcycle drive-by fashion of assassination, Blanco additionally employed way more grisly homicide strategies as she established her community, which smuggled cocaine valued at $80 million each month into Miami. As with many supercriminals, the regulation caught up with Blanco. She fled to Colombia to keep away from drug trafficking costs, however returned to the U.S. within the late ’70s and was ultimately arrested. After serving time in New York, she was deported to Colombia in 2004, the place she was shot and killed in 2012 at age 69 — by a motorbike murderer.
3 – Aileen Wuornos
The story behind America’s most infamous feminine serial killer, Aileen Wuornos, is as tragic as it’s twisted. When she was 3, Wuornos and her older brother had been deserted by their mom and went to reside with their grandparents, as their father had killed himself whereas serving time in jail for committing intercourse crimes in opposition to kids. Wuornos was later sexually abused by each her brother and grandfather. Nevertheless it was within the Nineteen Seventies that the troubled Wuornos’ crime spree began. Following an arrest for a DUI, assault and disorderly conduct in Colorado in 1974, she hitchhiked to Florida, the place she married Lewis Gratz Fell, a rich yachtsman 50 years her senior in 1976. After Wuornos hit Fell together with his personal strolling cane simply weeks after their marriage ceremony day, he filed for divorce and she or he discovered herself again on the streets. Quickly after, she as soon as once more turned to prostitution to help herself and have become the “damsel of demise,” murdering seven men who she claimed tried to rape her within the following decade.
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Earlier than the Buccaneers NFL franchise landed Tom Brady in 2020, it boasted a less-than-enviable report. In 1976, the workforce went 0-14 in its debut season. In truth, the Buccaneers continued shedding effectively into the following season, amassing 26 straight losses — an NFL report on the time — earlier than lastly beating the New Orleans Saints in December 1977. In your entire first season, the Bucs by no means managed to attain greater than 20 factors per sport. On the time, coach John McKay — identified for his horn-rimmed glasses and dry, reducing wit — referenced the poor season by joking to reporter Michael Katz in a New York Occasions article that he had began asking his spouse to begin his automobile and style his meals. “That method, if she doesn’t get sick, I do know it is all proper for me to eat,” he mentioned. Forty-five years later, the 1976 Buccaneers are nonetheless thought-about one of many worst teams of all time.
2 – The Undefeated Miami Dolphins
A really completely different story unfolded farther south. Within the 1972 NFL season, the Miami Dolphins gained each sport — the very first workforce within the league to realize the feat. Coach Don Shula helmed the proper workforce to 17 straight victories, culminating in a Tremendous Bowl victory over the Washington R——s. Shula inherited a mediocre workforce in 1970 earlier than rapidly whipping it into form. The key? The Dolphins “Labored more durable than the opposite workforce, we practiced more durable than the opposite workforce, and we’re on the market later,” Shula said. Cliched or not, more durable was definitely the phrase: Shula wouldn’t permit gamers to drink water on the sphere throughout observe. Whereas his strategies might have been brutal, they clearly labored, incomes him a spot within the Professional Soccer Corridor of Fame.
3 – Open for Enjoyable
You’ve seen sufficient movies of fogeys stunning their children with journeys to Disney World to know simply how extremely significant the world-famous theme park is to generations of youngsters (and adults too, if we’re being trustworthy). The park opened in October 1971 after seven years of development involving 9,000 employees. But it had a poor begin: Simply 10,000 individuals confirmed up on the opening day — a far cry from the 300,000 guests the Florida Highway Patrol had predicted. The price to get in? Fifty cents to park your automobile and $3.50 for a ticket to mingle with a few of 5,000 “solid members” portraying basic Disney characters.
The 12 months was 1972, and a political firestorm had descended upon Miami Seaside. The Democratic Nationwide Conference for the upcoming presidential election had come to city. South Dakota Sen. George McGovern gained the social gathering’s nomination by a good margin, and his anti-Vietnam battle stance triggered pandemonium on the conference flooring. McGovern’s nomination triggered strife within the social gathering due to his anti-war stance. The controversy meant he didn’t ship his acceptance speech until nearly 3 a.m. to a rustic that had principally gone to mattress. In the course of the three-day occasion, there have been fireworks away from the politics too. Two members of the Black separatist motion referred to as the Republic of New Africa had been arrested for gun law violations on the lodge the place McGovern was staying. However that small incident amounted to an actual victory for the Miami Seaside Sheriff’s division: The earlier DNC in Chicago noticed 680 arrests and 1,327 individuals injured.
2 – Then Got here the Republicans
The Republican Occasion held its personal nationwide conference in Miami Seaside only a month after its political rivals. On the occasion, President Nixon accepted his social gathering’s nomination for his third presidential run. However outdoors on the streets, bedlam dominated. Hundreds of anti-Vietnam Battle protesters marched on and overran the convention. Black Panther Occasion co-founder Bobby Seale, who was contemporary out of jail having served time for inciting a riot on the aforementioned 1968 Democratic Nationwide Conference in Chicago, led protesters within the chant, “One, two, three, 4. We don’t need your f—ing battle.” On the night time of the nomination, police arrested 900 protesters who failed of their efforts to delay the proceedings however succeeded in publicizing their anti-war sentiments on national TV.
3 – Miami’s First Hispanic Mayor
On Nov. 8, 1973, Miami elected Maurice Ferré as its first ever Hispanic mayor. On the time of his election, solely 3% of Miami’s registered voters had been Hispanic. Throughout what would grow to be a 12-year stint in workplace, Ferré reworked Miami from a one-trick vacationer vacation spot right into a thriving cosmopolitan city by fostering high-rise development and opening town’s ports to worldwide enterprise. He labored to desegregate a number of metropolis departments by appointing the primary Black metropolis legal professional, the primary Black metropolis supervisor and Miami’s first two Black police chiefs. He welcomed immigrants fleeing repression and financial collapse in Fidel Castro’s Cuba and initiated tasks to construct reasonably priced housing. Earlier than he handed away of most cancers in 2019 at 84, Ferré spoke to The New York Times about his legacy, recalling that he had typically been referred to as “a visionary.” He’ll perpetually be remembered because the “the daddy of modern-day Miami.”
In the 1970s, Miami was dominated by cocaine — individuals had been trafficking cocaine, snorting cocaine and spending absurd quantities of cash on cocaine. The infamous cocaine kingpins’ beachside playground within the Coconut Grove district, The Mutiny Hotel, is the place drug wheelings and dealings and related mayhem went down. Quickly after opening in 1969, it turned the epicenter of the business in Florida. All through the Nineteen Seventies, its hallways swarmed with traffickers, assassins and celebrities. Largely because of the prison actions, the department of the Federal Reserve Bank that coated Miami boasted a $5 billion cash surplus by 1980, and accommodations just like the Mutiny had been the proper place to blow money on costly Dom Pérignon or by chartering flights from Miami to close by islands. Understandably, the real-life institution was a magnet for solid and crew of Brian De Palma’s narcotrafficing epic Scarface and the basic collection Miami Vice.
2 – From Coke to Woke
From the surface, Cuba-born Jorge Valdes led a daily life. After faculty, he went to work for a former accounting professor who obtained him a job as a bookkeeper for a grocery retailer referred to as La Puerta Del Sol in Miami. As was widespread on the time, the shop was a entrance for drug smuggling. Valdes, for his half, was transport cocaine into Miami for Colombia’s Medellín Cartel and by 1977, he had been employed to handle the cartel’s complete U.S. operation. However his time on prime was short-lived. He was arrested in April 1979 for his half within the cartel’s actions, which he handed on to Miami’s most prolific sellers, Sal Magluta and Willie Falcon. After 5 years behind bars, Valdes is now a reformed man. He’s an writer, pastor, motivational speaker and nonprofit founder with a Ph.D. in Bible research.
3 – Dying Doesn’t Lie
Fisherman and drug trafficker Raymond Grady Stansel Jr. was indicted on costs of smuggling 12 tons of marijuana on his boat by Daytona, Florida, in 1974. Then, on the morning of his trial, his lawyer introduced he had allegedly drowned in a diving accident in Nicaragua, regardless of having surrendered his passport earlier than being launched on bail months earlier. As a substitute of sticking round Florida, Stansel had slipped his police element and caught a flight on a pal’s airplane to Key West, Florida, the place he satisfied his girlfriend to fulfill him on the run, obtained again on the airplane, and eventually took off for Honduras. From there, the couple bounced round Central America earlier than lastly settling in Mossman, a distant city in Australia. There, Stansel modified his identify and have become Dennis “Lee” Lafferty, a fisherman and champion of the environment. That was till he died in a automobile accident in 2015. His 40-year ruse unraveled as police pieced collectively nameless suggestions, lastly stumbling throughout the information of Lafferty’s second, formally verified demise.
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