FLORIDA: Refugees

North from Florida in a gritty whirl of orange peels and wax paper rattled a train of ancient, ill-assorted day coaches last week—the first “relief train” hauling stranded escapists home. Its faded red & green cars got to Manhattan five hours late, released some 500 battered passengers, and went back empty to haul another load away. Next day the second of the two extra coach trains allowed by ODT for the Great Evacuation arrived three hours late. The sordid shuttling will go on; by midsummer, said ODT, all the suntanned refugees may get home.

Gullible or desperate tourists paid sharpers from $5 to $15 for “reservations” (the relief trains had no reserved seats). Florida’s black market business in regular Pullman reservations continued to boom. Up rose President Andrew G. O’Rourke of the Greater Miami Hotel Association to declare: most of the black market ticket-selling was the work of “an unethical gang of thugs from the North, and not by hotel porters or Miamians.” He had hardly subsided when FBI men arrested as scalpers 16 Miami ticket agents and clerks, 14 Miami hotel flunkies, and one Miami cabby. J. Edgar Hoover said the Miami gang had been making a profit of $15,000 to $20,000 a month; three of the scalpers were even planning to buy a hotel with their swag.

Auto drivers stranded in the South were in even worse plight; they got no sympathy from the rationers—i.e., no gas.

War is Hell. The situation had become almost a national scandal. The majority of the war-working U.S. didn’t give a hoot for all the vacationers’ sufferings. Rhode Island waxed so wroth over the stranded-tourist situation that its State Senate passed a resolution condemning Florida for withholding gas for return, trips. (Rhode Island’s Governor J. Howard McGrath canceled a hard-won reservation at Miami Beach’s swank Roney Plaza.)

Simply everybody was in Florida, it seemed. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. escaped easily, returned to Washington with tan and plans for the next War Bond Drive. Jersey City’s Mayor Frank Hague kept an eye on the horses at Hialeah. Chicago’s Mayor Ed Kelly popped in & out again. Ex-Ambassadors Joe Davies and Joe Kennedy were at their Palm Beach houses, as was ex-Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles. Grover Whalen was down for a couple of weeks. President Alfonso López of Colombia suddenly left for home when he heard that the Colombian political situation needed his attention. But Otto of Austria stayed on.

The glittery sets of Newport, Hollywood, Park Avenue, and Broadway were all well represented. Sugar Heiress Geraldine Spreckels moved from Miami to Palm Beach on her way to Beverly Hills. At Palm Beach were James H. R. (“Jimmie”) Cromwell, busy Extramen Randolph (“Randy”) Burke and Alastair Mackintosh. Lily Pons, Jeanette MacDonald were at Miami; so was Broadway’s Choo Choo Johnson. Drew Pearson and Walter Winchell, whose work often takes him to Florida in the winter season, went on writing columns denouncing other people’s interference with the war effort. Ranking victim of the transportation squeeze was wealthy Mrs. Edward T. Stotesbury, “Queen of Palm Beach Society,” who was desperate for lack of a train reservation to the nation’s capital. Her daughter, Washington’s Louise Cromwell Atwill, first wife of General MacArthur, third wife of Lionel Atwill, was going to be married there this week.

Drinking was a trial. Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. reported from Miami that he paid $4 for a pony of Bisquit brandy, $2.50 for a Stinger cocktail. One liquor store asked $50 for a thimble-sized bottle of Cointreau. In the Miami Herald a diamond broker advertised a choice selection of bracelets and pendants at from $18,000 to $70,000, tax included.