Report

By last week most of the old crowd were already there. Mrs. Edward T. Stotesbury, the Joseph P. Kennedys, the Sumner Welleses, were at Palm Beach. Jersey City's Mayor Frank Hague, with Mrs. Hague and daughter Peggy Anne, checked in at Miami Beach. So did the small-fry tourists, the race-track touts, the racketeers both gross and petty. The sub-urbane Town & Country told its readers that simply "everybody" came down before Christmas this year. Miami hotels, turned back to their owners by the Army, were booked solid all the way to the end of the winter season. There were as many ways to break rent ceilings as there are stucco villas on Biscayne Boulevard.

Despite "don't travel" pleas by ODT, despite the hoarding of train reservations by ticket scalpers, Florida was swarming with a full 50% more visitors than a year ago and was having its best season since 1929.

At Miami's Tropical Park on New Year's Day morning 10,900 racegoers--tourists, servicemen and shipyard workers on their way home from the night shift--shoved $453,103 at the clerks behind the pari-mutuel windows--twice as much as they bet last New Year's Day. Many of them drove their cars to the track, though the gasoline shortage in Florida is so acute that big trucks operated by the Overseas Transportation Co. to carry food to isolated Key West are unable to get enough gas to keep to their schedules. That afternoon 28,000 cheering football fans jammed the Orange Bowl for the Louisiana State-Texas Aggies game.

After dark the dog tracks and nightclubs are booming. At the West Flagler Kennel Club dog track an average of 3,500 fans nightly bet $100,000. The only wartime brake on nightclub hilarity is the lack of big-name entertainers. Liquor is plentiful, except Scotch, which sells on the black market at $120 a case.

In Miami Beach Lou Walter's Latin Quarter, and Giro's, a dazzling new nightspot, have become the places-one-must-be-seen-in. The exclusive, million-dollar Surf Club, closed last year, is open again, has 100 new members. The snooty, conservative Bath Club is having a terrific year, reminiscent of the plushest days of the '20s.

The Florida boom was so big that Press-agent Steve Hannagan no longer has to work at his job of puffing Miami Beach. The Army Air Forces flyers, transferred to Miami by Hap Arnold for rest and relaxation after battle experience, were paying as much as $40 a day for small hotel rooms, $3 to $4 for meals. This hurt: many service wives could not afford to stay near their husbands. Even old Floridians, used to the routine annual outrage, thought things had gone too far. Many a furloughing airmaa was returning to his bomber station dead broke. Some servicemen stationed in Miami were hit even harder. Seasonal rents (to May 1)--nominal last year, when most tourists stayed home and the beaches were scummed with oil from sunken tankers-- had soared to rentals of $1,500 to $4,000 for tiny apartments.

With the dimout lifted, the multicolored floodlights again played softly over the waving palm fronds. It was like old times.

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