Weekly Guide of the Palm Beaches: Pocket Size Summer Edition, 1952.
BOLLING, Jack and Connie.
Weekly Guide of the Palm Beaches: Pocket Size Summer Edition, 1952.
Weekly Guide of the Palm Beaches for the Summer of 1952, a Pocket Visitors Guide to the Midcentury Palm Beaches
West Palm Beach: Jack and Connie Bolling, 1952.
$375.00
In Stock
Item Number: 152217
Summer 1952 issue of the Weekly Guide of the Palm Beaches, the pocket-sized visitors’ guide distributed free throughout the resorts: Volume 3, Number 28, the Summer Edition covering August 17 through September 6, 1952. Duodecimo, original orange pictorial wrappers. Published by Jack and Connie Bolling of West Palm Beach with the approval of the Palm Beach and West Palm Beach Chambers of Commerce, the guide gathers the practical life of the Palm Beaches in the early 1950s: tide charts for the Inlet, airline, railway and Greyhound schedules, the theatre program, church and club directories, news of the Palm Beach Speedway and the West Palm Beach Indians baseball club, a “Welcome, Traveler” column recording arrivals at the hotels and courts by name, and a military activities column reflecting the Korean War years at the Palm Beach Air Force Base. Among the advertisers are the Worth Avenue establishments of the day, including Ocean News at 112 Worth Avenue and Ramon’s Camera Shop at 110 Worth Avenue, “63 steps from the Atlantic Ocean.” In near fine condition. A vivid survival of everyday life in the midcentury Palm Beaches.
By the early 1950s the Palm Beaches had grown from Henry Flagler’s winter colony into a year-round resort community, and the existence of a summer edition of the Weekly Guide is itself evidence of the season’s extension beyond the old December-to-April social calendar. The guide’s pages preserve the texture of the era: the Palm Beach Speedway then running championship races west of town, the West Palm Beach Indians of the Florida International League, the shops of Worth Avenue, and the servicemen of the Palm Beach Air Force Base during the Korean War. Ephemeral by design and distributed free, such guides rarely survive.
