In my opinion, we can credit all this stuff basically to one man---Henry Flagler.
He essentially was the next iteration of St Augustine. He basically WAS the next iteration of the entire Florida East Coast, as we knew it when I lived and grew up there. One could even say that at one point he probably owned the whole damn thing, all the way from the Georgia border to the Keys.
How he did it and why he did it is some story.
My parents lived in St Augustine during the War and for a some years afterwards. I have a feeling I was conceived in St Augustine.
My Dad and a guy named Tom Carnegie owned a bunch of first iteration motels down there just after the War. I wish I could remember now what those things were called. They just played golf day in and day out but I guess that kind of thing (owning that chain of the first iteration of motels) made them feel like they actually worked or something.
Back in those days the Florida East Coast was pretty cool and mega amounts sleepier than now. Basically if you went about 2-3 miles west of old A!A there was nothing there down the entire Florida East Coast. There was no RTE 1 then and certainly no Sunshine State Parkway or I95. I even remember you had to take a ferry from around Amelia Island to Jacksonville on old A!A.
Flager with his Florida East Coast Railroad basically created so many "watering spots" up and down the Florida East Coast, in the end he sort of out-competed himself and some of his early northern ones began to fade as his more southern ones became popular.
My parents basically followed that evolution from St Augustine first, to Daytona Beach and then to Delray Beach much farther south.
I have a few very early recollections of St Augustine back in the late 1940s. It was real sleepy compared to now but it had a lot of real old fashioned charm as did those golf clubs there. They weren't in the slightet bit fancy or ostentatious or anything like that but they had some real style, the kind many on here would really appreciate today---eg simple and stylish.
Most of the people who were there like my Dad and Tom Carnegie and that whole crowd were some interesting people, and some were pretty ill-starred. They were the sons particularly, and the daughters of the old Northeast establishment who were kind of black sheep, they were not cut out to stay at home where they grew up and do the establishment thing. They were sort of adventurers.
And my God did they all love golf. In my opinion, they had so much more fun with it than we do today. In many ways it was an over-riding culture to them that bound them all together.
When my Dad was dying and hallucinating around 1992, where did he think he was? He thought he was around St Augustine back in those days with those guys in that obviously enchanted time for him. The War was over, he was just married and out of Philadelphia which he hated and away from his parents for good. Maybe it was in some ways the best times of his life since compared to earlier in his life and later in his life I think that maybe for the only time in his life he felt really free.
St Augustine had real charm back then and I bet fifty years earlier than that it must have been something pretty cool too---certainly for the real bad boy adventurers of life---the kind that sort of made a habit of getting far away from what their parents probably expected of them and playing golf endlessly.
What the hell would life be if it didn't have and hadn't had those kinds of eccentrics, bad boys and adventurers?
I'd say a bit duller, anyway---and our histories, particularly in golf, wouldn't have been so rich and fascinating.