James Etheridge

For Boomers coming of age in the Seventies, there were two vacation meccas, Panama City and Daytona Beach. I went to Panama City a couple of times during that time, but Daytona was the hot spot. There was a big group of us that all went together, guys and girls. We would plan the trips months in advance. There are a ton of stories about Daytona Beach, most of which I cannot and will not share. There was a saying about Daytona not unlike the saying about Las Vegas. And that was “What happens in Daytona, stays in Daytona. That was never more true than in the 1970s and those stories, for the most part, are still not repeated today, except by the parties involved. That being said, there are a few tales that can be related. The names have been omitted to protect the not-so-innocent. If you were there, you know.

Daytona was not just a destination for those of us who were lucky enough to live in relative close proximity. People came there from all over the country, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio and Pennsylvania, even Minneapolis. Now that’s a hell of a drive and, I’m sure, was well worth it in the end. On a trip to the beach you could meet folks, become best of friends for a week and then never see or hear from each other again. Sometimes that was a good thing. On a trip in ’76, the first day by the pool my buddy J and I met a couple of cool guys from New Jersey. I realized that I had forgotten to bring a radio. One of them sold me his, a Sharp X-1000 for ten dollars, which was probably double what he paid for it. I didn’t care, we needed a radio and after a week of good use by the pool I brought the radio home. My father used it in his workshop for years. After that, it sat on top of our fridge playing music and is now in Jackie’s office, still functioning. In ’76, even Sharp built things to last.

Daytona Beach was the place to be for fun and games from spring break through the summer, particularly the first week of June after school let out, even for those in our early to mid-twenties who had long since left school behind. There was the week of the Fourth of July and the next-to-last week in August before school started up again. I went a couple of times over the long Labor Day weekend, but by then things were pretty much deserted. Most everyone had gone back home to reality.

In the fall of ’73 my buddy W and I drove to Daytona for Labor Day in my ’69 Mustang. About halfway there, the car lost power and went completely dead. We pulled over and after a few minutes, it cranked back up and we continued on. After about fifty or seventy miles it happened again. This continued all the way down I-75, across I-10 and down I-95. By the time we got to Daytona it was happening about every ten miles. We took the car to a gas station in town and the mechanic told us the carburetor needed re-building. It cost fifty bucks, which was a lot of money back then. We picked the car up a few days later when we were ready to leave and headed back home. On the interstate it started happening again and we made it as far as Tifton before the car finally died for good. I called my father from a pay phone and we spent the night in a Day’s Inn. The next morning he picked us up in his Chevy Apache pickup and we towed the car home with a Navy rope. You could do things like that back then.

We took the car to my uncle’s the following afternoon. He took one look at it and said, “It’s the coil. When they go bad, they overheat and break down. The plugs get no spark. After the coil cools down, it works for a while before it overheats again.” He replaced the coil, the car fired right up and ran beautifully. The coil cost me four bucks. At least I had a fifty-dollar Daytona Beach rebuilt carburetor.

The next time I went to Daytona was a couple of years later with two friends, D and S, in D’s ’72 Monte Carlo. On the way back home the same thing happened again. “It’s the coil,” I told D and related the fifty dollar carburetor story. We walked about a mile to a gas station at the next exit and bought a coil off an old 350 block out back. We had no tools except for a screwdriver, but D managed to get the old coil off and the new coil back on. The car fired right up and we made it home fine. I began to believe I was cursed.

There was a group of us staying at The Summit one year and we were all in the pool. Several, myself included, had taken over the kiddie pool. Trust me, there were no kids around. One of the guys, N, had to go up to his room to use the restroom (so he said). A little bit later we heard a big splash in the deep end of the pool, followed by screams, cheers and laughter. N had jumped from the balcony of his fourth floor room into the pool. That was right before one of my so-called good friends pantsed me in the kiddie pool in front of a bunch of girls.

One day in ’77, my buddy W I ran into a friend on the beach named S who was a senior at Cedar Grove high school. He was a few years younger than me and was there with a bunch of Grove people there on their graduation trip. “Come on up to the room!” he said. “We’ve got a huge party going on and there’s a bunch of girls!” After awhile W and I wandered up to their room at the Treasure Island hotel and there was indeed a huge party going on. They had about four rooms next to each other and the doors between them were all open. There was a pot of shrimp boiling in one of the kitchenettes and the smell about knocked our heads off when we walked in. “Come on, get you some punch!” S exclaimed. He took us into the bathroom where the bathtub was filled with ice, punch and fruit. I don’t know what were the exact ingredients, but it definitely wasn’t Presbyterian Punch. I’m pretty sure it involved Hawaiian Punch and grain alcohol. We politely declined, had a couple of beers and excused ourselves.

In ’78 my friend J drove his Ford F-150 four-wheel-drive pickup down and that was our group’s ride for the week. Anytime we went anywhere that required driving we all piled in the back of his truck and headed out. One day we were all out on the beach and in the afternoon the high tide started to come in. There was a bunch of hippies running around an old Ford station wagon that was caught in the rising water. You would see that invariably happen at least once during every trip to Daytona. People who didn’t understand the tides would pull out to the edge of the surf during low tide and when high tide came in they had to scramble to get their cars back onto the beach. These longhairs’ Country Squire wagon was in real danger of being washed out to sea. J’s four-wheel pickup had a big winch on the front, so he pulled into the surf, somehow managed to get the winch’s cable around the rear of the wagon and with three good snatches backward in the truck, managed to pull the wagon out of the water to safety. Were the hipsters grateful that their wagon didn’t take a long, strange trip to Gilligan’s Island? Not hardly. The head flower child started yelling at us. “Hey, man, you bent our bumper!” he screamed. “I got it out of the water, didn’t I?” J yelled back. “Yeah, man, but you bent the bumper! Now we can’t get the tailgate open!” So much for peace and love.

That night we were on the beach. Someone had brought vinyl wraps that went around beer cans and disguised them as soft drinks. To get around the copyrights the names on the wrappers were Caco-Calo, Peppi-Calo, Dr. Peeper, Mounting Pew and so on. Drinking on the beach was not and still is not allowed and Daytona Beach cops were not known for their sense of humor, especially toward tourists from Atlanta. We were all gathered around the front of the F-150, drinking our Peppi-Calos and Mounting Pews. The idea worked brilliantly until a patrol car pulled up. I didn’t see it because I was looking away, up the beach toward The Pier. My so-called friends all ran and hid behind the truck and left me standing there high and dry. Officer Baywatch swaggered toward me with his partner not far behind. “Whatcha drinkin’ there, son?” he asked. “A Pepsi, officer,” I replied, trying to be polite.
“You sure it’s a Pepsi and not a beer?”
“No sir, it’s a Pepsi.”
He snatched the can out of my hand, smelled the top of it, ripped the vinyl cover away revealing the half-empty can of Budweiser underneath. He obviously had seen those vinyl covers before. “Can you see any reason I shouldn’t haul your ass to jail right now?” he asked.
“Uh, because I’m not really bothering anybody, sir?” I answered sheepishly. “I tell you what,” he said. “We’re gonna ride down the beach and be back here in five minutes. If you and them hiding behind the back of the truck aren’t gone, I’m lockin’ all y’all up.” He left and so did we.

When J and I were in Daytona for the Fourth of July, 1976, the Bicentennial, we stayed in a beachfront hotel called The Desert Isle. It’s still there and functional but now called Sandals. It still looks pretty much the same but with a fresh coat of paint. A group of three of our friends showed up unannounced two days later and wound up staying with us for the week. That was cool because it cut our share of the bill pretty much in half. We had a blast and it was that week that began my lifelong love of convertibles. Another friend named P was down for the week in his ’72 Chevy Impala convertible. It was as big as a yacht and in the evening we would drop the top, all pile in and cruise up and down the beach. Girls would jump in and ride with us. For a young man who had just turned twenty-one, that was heaven on earth. One evening we were going out to The Pier and one of the guys, M, was in the shower. J and I kept filling up the ice bucket with cold water out of the cooler, opening up the door and throwing it on him. After third time M slammed the door, cracked the glass and broke one of the hinges. Two weeks after we got home I got a letter in the mail from the hotel informing me that since the room was registered in my name, I owed them forty-five dollars for a new shower door. I ignored the letter and two weeks later got another letter in a much nastier tone. I ignored it again and two weeks later received another letter, this time (supposedly) from a lawyer. I sent them the forty-five bucks.

That was the year that I first saw the Budweiser Clydesdales. J, M and I were heading home up I-75 in J’s Cutlass Supreme with the t-tops off and the radio blasting. We came upon three tractor-trailer rigs, two of which were big horse trailers and the third a standard trailer. They were painted white and emblazoned on the side was the Anheuser-Bush logo and the words “The World Renowned Budweiser Clydesdales.” We rode past the rigs blowing the horn and hanging out the window, yelling and yanking our arms up and down. They all acknowledged us by giving us blasts on their air horns. Though we didn’t actually see the Clydesdales themselves, they were inside the trailers and in transit, so as far as we were concerned, it counted.

There was plenty of nightlife in Daytona in those days and the central spot was The Pier. The dance hall featured a huge dance floor and two stages with bands on both stages. The bands alternated sets, so the music was constant all night. There was plenty to do during the daytime as well. A space needle was at the entrance to The Pier. It went up about a hundred feet and operated both day and night. The sky lift went from the boardwalk, over the dance hall to the end of The Pier before returning to the boardwalk. And, of course, there was plenty of fishing from The Pier. You could even go for a donkey ride, as you can see from the picture.

By 1978 my buddy W bought a white on white ’73 Monte Carlo, a car that was built for cruising to Daytona. We left from my house on the southside Friday evening after work and headed south on I-75 at Stockbridge. That was when Henry County was still rural and there was no massive cluster of traffic like there is today. The white on white Monte Carlo floated down the freeway with us and ZZ Top’s Tejas inside. We arrived at The Red Carpet Inn about two in the morning, slept until around eight or nine and got up, ready to meet our friends for a week at the beach.

That year, a couple of girls who were with us, C and T, went to the dog track. A few hours later, they burst through the door giddy and excited. “We won a hundred dollars!” C exclaimed. “How much did you spend?” I asked.
“Seventy-five dollars.”
“So you only won twenty-five dollars.”
“No, we won a hundred!”
I let it drop. I figured why bust their bubble? They’re on vacation.

One of the guys that went with us in ’78 named B was like a vampire. B would not go out of the room during the day. “It’s too hot out there,” he said. He would lay on the bed under the air conditioner all day, watching TV and would only go out at night. B also took three showers a day for some reason. He would take one in the morning, one before he went out in the evening and one when he got back to the room. Once or twice when we were at the pool we would see him on the balcony for about five minutes. I finally asked him why he even bothered to come to the beach. I figured you could stay home in front of the air conditioner and only go out at night for a lot less trouble and money.

That year there was a group of us at a party at a friend’s room in The International. The door was open. A lot of the rooms’ doors stayed open back then and you could move from room to room and party to party. Two guys that we didn’t know walked in and leaned up against the wall. “Where are you guys from?” one of them asked, in an accent which told us they were from north of the Mason-Dixon line. “Mars,” said Big D. Big D was a huge guy with a beard and a mullet haircut before anybody knew what a mullet was. “We’re the fry-babies from Mars, man.” We all laughed. They looked at him and around at us warily and then left the room. That probably was a good idea.

It’s funny how in the days of AM/FM radio you would hear a song that got a lot of airplay during a trip to the beach and it stuck with you. Anytime you heard the song after that, it would remind you of that trip to the beach that particular year. There are two such songs that will stick with me as such for the rest of my life. One is Brandy by Looking Glass, which was all over the airwaves in August of ’72 when I was seventeen and went to Panama City with family friends. The other is Thin Lizzy’s The Boys Are Back In Town, which was played constantly during our Bicentennial Daytona trip of ’76. Anytime I hear either one of those songs to this day, my mind goes to those trips to the beach.

Labor Day of ’79 my friend T and I went down for the long weekend and stayed at The Summit hotel. That was the year that Hurricane David hit. On Monday morning, Labor Day, security was running up and down the halls, banging on doors and telling everyone to pack up and check out, they were evacuating. We were checking out anyway and managed to get out of town before the rush. T had a ’72 Buick Skylark and as we got on I-10 at Jacksonville, the sky was clear and the sun was bright, at least ahead of us. I looked out of her rear window and the sky was absolutely black. We managed to outrun the storm and made it back to Atlanta safe and dry.

That was the last time I went to Daytona. A trip to Destin in 1980 made me fall in love with the Gulf, the clear beautiful water and the white sand beaches. Destin was still a sleepy fishing town then, but we returned every year even as the growth exploded. A friend bought a condo in Panama City in the early nineties and we went there for a number of years. A few years back for July Fourth we went to Apalachicola and the Forgotten Coast, experiencing a part of Florida that we had never seen before. It was peaceful and calm, a far cry from the wild and crazy days of Daytona Beach and misspent youth in the 1970s. But the memories are there. They always will be.