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Information presented in the following program is for entertainment purposes only and should not be taken as a statement of fact. It is rumored that in one year, 380,000 college students descended upon Fort Lauderdale beach to celebrate Easter. It all started with a bang with one movie around 1960, and ended with a whimper around 1989. This is the tale of Fort Lauderdale spring break. Welcome to Tales from South Florida. I'm your host, Bill Monti. Now, look, if you've lived in South Florida as long as I have, then you remember a time when at Easter you really kind of avoided the Fort Lauderdale strip. And there was a very good reason for that. For so long and for so many years, tens to hundreds of thousands of college students descended upon Fort Laudeau beach to celebrate spring break. So how does spring break get started anyway? Why was everyone coming to Fort Lauderdale? A lot of people think it's because of one movie that came out around 1960. And yes, that might have been the catalyst for a lot of it. But the fact of the matter is, the idea for spring break actually goes back to the mid-1930s, when a swimming coach from Colgate University in frigid upstate New York decided to bring his team down to Florida for some early training at a brand new Olympic sized pool in sunny Fort Lauderdale. The idea caught on with other college swim coaches, and soon the spring training migration became an annual tradition for swimmers nationwide. But since you can only swim so much, pruned fingers and shrinkage are a real thing. The college athletes also excelled in partying. They'd go back to their campuses up north and started spreading the word that South Florida was not a bad place to spend Easter break. And before you know it, starting in the 40s and the 50s, the flow of northern college students to southern beaches began. But back in 1958, the game changed. An English professor at Michigan State University, Glendon Swarthurt, decided he wanted to tag along with his students and witnessed their beatnik era shenanigans. Man in Fort Lauderdale. Now, back then, hooking up was called playing house. Okay? And professor witnessed enough playing house, beach cruising and beer chugging in Fort Lauderdale to fill a novel. It turned out to be a breakout novel, turned out to be a best seller, which he entitled Unholy Spring. Okay, not a great title book, did well. Anyway, in 1960, MGM thought, well, let's take this book, which seems to be pretty popular among everyone, and let's turn it into a film. They changed the title from Unholy Spring to Where the Boys Are. It became a blockbuster romantic comedy that made spring break in Florida seem like paradise, or at least a version of paradise where you sleep 20 people to a hotel room and the cute guy has a lot of money and probably a yacht. So where the Boys Are starred Connie Francis, who became a very famous singer. She had a small role in the. In the film. Dolores Hart was quite a big star at the time. Apprentice became famous in her own right and married the director and comic actor Richard Benjamin. Yvette Mimu, who I remember from the time machine. Hubba hubba. Remember the blonde, Eloy, Jim Hutton, Frank Gorshin, who would find fame later on as a great impressionist and also as the Riddler on the Batman TV show. And a young good looking fellow named George Hamilton. I was involved in a project several years ago where, where we actually had a cutout of George Hamilton. He was coming down to do something down here and we took it around Fort Lauderdale, remembering where the boys are. So we took it to the Elbow Room, the gateway Theater, Pier 66, all around and had people stand in front of it. It was one of the first social media campaigns that I was ever involved with. That cutout still exists somewhere. I wonder where it is. But anyway, the film came out and it opened the floodgates. People thought, this is one of the great things of our time. They weren't talking about the movie, they were talking about Fort Lauderdale. As the 60s moved on, more and more kids came down. And by the 70s, it was really the party that made my father nervous. Not want us to go anywhere near Fort Lauderdale. When spring break was happening, you could see it on the news all the time. Anyone remember Ralph Renick and all those people, they would take the cameras down and show all the kids on the beach and they were just packed. I remember as a kid seeing films of Coney island that had to be, I guess, back in the 40s or something like that during the World War II times. And that the beaches were just packed. Now I was used to going to Hollywood beach and Dania beach and you know, I mean, sometimes it was a little crowded, but you wouldn't call it packed. But in those old films of Coney island, they were just. People were just stacked one right next to each other along the beach and. And that's what these films look like of all those college kids laying on the sand in Fort Lauderdale. And then the streets at night, it got even worse along the Strip. I wouldn't find out until I was in my late teens. And that's the first time that we went to enjoy Spring break while the people were down. And it was a unique experience, not one I would like to relive all the time back then, but I'm glad I went when I did. But at night, that's when it really got going. The sidewalks were packed. You could barely walk. Everyone was wearing almost nothing. The guys were walking around in shorts or bathing suits and flip flops, maybe a tank top. Most of them, no shirt at all. Probably because everyone was so sunburned they couldn't wear that many clothes. The girls were walking around in bikinis, maybe shorts over the bottoms, flip flops. And that was about it. Oh, it was hot outside, so of course it made it. But man, it seemed like the goal was to wear as little as and as the nights went on, you tried to remove much more than just that little bit you were wearing. That's where it all came into play. A lot of the bars and nightclubs and hotels that really were making the money off of spring break. We're going to talk about a couple of those when we come back right after this message. Cirque du Soleil Echo under the Big Top at Gulfstream park from February 22 to April 21, 2024. Cirque du Soleil Echo is a spectacular performance combining poetry, stagecraft, daring acrobatics and technology, exploring the delicate balance between people, animals and the world. We all share tales from South Florida. Listeners also have access to special discounted single tickets and group tickets. To learn more, join our Facebook page, Tales from South Florida, or we will be giving away a pair of tickets. All you need to do to be entered is to write talesfromsouthfloridagmail.com and say, I want to go to the Cirque Cirque du Soleil Echo under the Big top, Gulfstream Park February 22nd to April 21st. Be there. Hi, Bill Monte here and I invite you to join me for my podcast, Bill Monte's Guide for Getting Older. Each episode I'll be talking about topics that affect older Americans. But don't worry, we'll keep it light, educational and entertaining. It's not about being old, it's about getting older. And sometimes you need a guide to get you to where you're going. And that's me, Bill Monte's Guide for Getting Older, the podcast for young people who have been alive a very long time. In those times when we would head down to the Strip to enjoy a little bit of spring break for ourselves as young men in our late teens, maybe early 20s, it was amazing how open the partying was, as I mentioned before, the streets were packed, the sidewalks were packed. Cars moved at about one to two miles per hour. Young men hanging out of the cars, yelling all kinds of horrible things at the women who were passing by. Some who didn't seem to mind it at all would wave back and laugh. We'd park our car and we'd start walking among the crowds. We'd try to get into the bars, have a drink or two. But the real partying and the real openness of it all was we would just walk into a hotel and you would just wander the floors and if you saw an open door, you'd poke your head in. If there were a couple of kids in there partying, you'd ask them if you could join the party. 10 times out of 10 they said yes, and we would have just a great time. It was an incredible experience. You know, I don't understand. I didn't understand when I was younger. I don't understand now. People who go to Times Square to celebrate New Year's Eve, it's so packed, it's so claustrophobic to me anyway. But I guess that's the closest that we get down here to that Times Square experience on New Year's Eve would have been the spring break time back in the 70s and especially the 80s. There were so many people packed into one area. There was so much partying going on. Now. There were the bars that we'd like to go to and hang out at. I guess the most famous ones were pin rods. There was the Button, that was a great one, of course, the Elbow Room that got famous and where the Boys Are. And I think that's the only bar that's still standing from that. The heyday of spring break there on los Olas and A1A and probably the most famous or infamous bar was the Candy Store. It sat at 1 N. Atlantic Blvd. On Fort Lauderdale Beach. It was adjacent to a hotel called the Caribbean West Trade Winds Hotel. The Candy Store was probably the one place most popular for its wet T shirt contests. They all did them. The Teeny Weeny bikini contest, the Belly Flop, the beer guzzling contest, and a lineup of other slothful student activities that just drew thousands of people. The Candy store reportedly drew 2,000 people a during the day and 3,000 at night. At the height of its popularity in 1986, there was reportedly more than 325,000 college students and young people swarming the beach for the six week celebration of spring break. Again, to experience that, if you ever did, please let Me know, drop me a line at talesfromsouthfloridagmail.com and let me know your experience where. If you were a female, did you ever participate? If you were a male, you were the guy jumping in the pool for the belly flop contest. The bigger the flop, the bigger the guy, the bigger the prize. And of course, the beer guzzling contest. I was strictly someone who went there to watch. I didn't participate in any of those. Okay, one wet T shirt contest, but that's a drunken night we won't talk about. I'm kidding. Candy store. It epitomized everything great about spring break. If you aren't thinking, you know, you got to think back to the time. Certainly wouldn't last long. Now with the MeToo movement going on and hopefully we're a little more aware that we shouldn't be doing things like wet T shirt contest and all those sort of things. Back then, though, it was very acceptable and that was where the party was. But not everyone was partying. There were people starting to get nervous about things in Fort Lauderdale. The older people who lived in the area hated spring break. Even if you weren't that old and you lived in the area, you hated spring break. Fort Lauderdale commissioners had pretty much had enough of the party image that spring break brought along with all of those hundreds of thousands of kids. Don't get me wrong, everyone knew it. They were bringing money with them. The hotels, the bars, the restaurants. Everyone loved how much money these kids brought in. But in the late 80s, this was no longer the image that Fort Lauderdale wanted to have of itself. It was no longer attracting the development needed to expand its tax base, for instance. And also things started getting a little hairy. The drunker that people got. Well, let's just say they didn't make wise decisions. All right? I remember you'd see it on the news. Kids would get the idea that they could leap from the balcony of their room into the pool. Now, we all know that's not a great idea, but they did it, or they tried to leap from balcony to balcony and not make it. These things were starting to happen. And these pretty much started signaling the end of spring break in Fort Lauderdale. As a matter of fact, Fort Lauderdale got pretty vocal about it. Streets were reconfigured to discourage cruising. Strict laws against public drinking were enacted. The mayor even went on Good Morning America on ABC to declare that students were no longer welcome in Fort Lauderdale. Around 1987, about 2,500 students were arrested for violating the laws that were put into effect and they started taking their party elsewhere, Daytona beach, up to the Panhandle, Panama City to Mexico, to South Padre island in Texas. And it started leaving here. The problem was Fort Lauderdale wasn't ready for the huge loss of revenue that was coming when it went away. It was and it made a lot of people nervous. I remember hearing people talking about it a lot. But Fort Lauderdale did have a plan. And if you go to the beach now, you know that plan worked. They built a huge beautiful convention center that has brought in a lot of business. All of those bars are now home to four and five star hotels and resorts. Where the candy store once stood is now the Ritz Carlton. So it all worked out for the city of Fort Lauderdale. I'm sure there are still some college students that come down here, but they know that the rules are a little bit different now. We're not doing that kind of party and we don't put up with that kind of drunkenness. Well, not from the visitors anyway. If you live here long enough, you know, we're still putting up with a lot of the citizens. No, I couldn't help but notice that they were also having some talks down in Miami beach recently about curtailing the activities down there. It's getting a bit out of hand. The crime, you know, it obviously would hurt south beach to change it too much. And so I hope they don't look to what Fort Lauderdale did as their template for how to change and make it better down there. That's what worked back in the 1980s and 90s. I don't think you could do that then. South beach is absolutely established here as a great vacation place in Fort Lauderdale. Back then you didn't have families flocking to the Fort Lauderdale beach area when spring break went away. Right now you do have that in South Beach. They just have to figure it all out and they will just try not to be too reactionary. You don't want to cut off your nose despite your face. Hey, a quick wrap up too for some stuff. Thanks for everyone with a great reaction to our last episode talking about South Florida radio and Neil Rogers and Rick Shaw and wshe. I appreciate all the comments. So many comments that we will be Planning a Part 2 on South Florida radio and probably a solo episode on Neil Rogers himself. I do want to make one correction. In the episode I mentioned that there is a podcast that that replays Neil Rogers shows and I mentioned that it was started by Barry Rose. That name is wrong. It's Michael Alan Smith. Barry Rose is a great guy and he has some great Facebook sites looking back at the wonderful times in Sunny Isles and other Facebook sites along the road. But Michael Allen Smith is the one who's bringing Uncle Neil back to us. And I encourage you to look for the Neil Rogers show podcast. If you were a Neil Rogers fan, go back and relive some of the great moments with Neil, the Bird Rick and Suds and all the other great cast of characters. I hope you enjoyed this talk down memory Lane on another Tales from South Florida. And remember, whenever possible, be kind. It's always possible. Take care of yourselves. Peace out. We'll catch you next time around.