Even mini road trips offer fun of vintage discoveries
One summer long ago, my family loaded into an aqua convertible and headed north to visit the Pennsylvania relatives. Maybe that’s why I still get the itch for a good road trip, especially in summer. The imprint of that trip runs deep: I can still remember looking up at the tall pines towering over the tourist cabins where we made our first stop.
Romance of the road
The romance of the road seems to have become baked into American popular culture, as a plethora of online articles attest. USAToday.com offers its top-10 “bucket-list” road trips, including the 120-mile Overseas Highway from Miami to Key West, as well as dramatic western routes such as California’s Pacific Coast Highway through Big Sur.
A recent study of 2,000 Americans found that 73 percent of participants preferred road-tripping over flying, according to Oprah Magazine, and I just stumbled across an article with a title declaring that “People Who Go on Road Trips Are Spontaneous, Optimistic and Wise.”
I don’t know about that, but whatever smidgen of wisdom I possess tells me that, these days, my vertebrae and I benefit from mini car trips rather than the marathon journeys of my youth. Even a hour’s drive can satisfy my road-trip itch.
On one such recent jaunt south from Interstate 4 on U.S. Highway 17 in Winter Haven, my mouth gaped as I spied the sign for Andy’s Drive-In Restaurant. We are talking Beefy King-quality signage, folks, which it turns out is attached to an eatery that hails from the golden age of American road trips: the 1950s.
Survivor from 1951
“Roger ‘Andy’ Anderson opened the restaurant as a Dairy Queen in 1951, when it was surrounded by orange groves,” according to the online Floridiana Magazine (floridianamagazine.com).
The restaurant, which is part breakfast-and-burger diner and part ice-cream dispenser (“Andy’s Igloo”) now sits at 703 3rd St. Southwest (U.S. 17) at the busy intersection of Avenue G. “It was, and still is, a favorite gathering place for folks in Winter Haven and the surrounding communities,” the Floridiana article notes.
Andy’s is the kind of place where the menu notes that if you’re hungry, you’re in the right place, and features homey line drawings such as a stack of pancakes dripping with butter. As a good 1950s-era establishment should, Andy’s has also embraced the aqua and red of its vintage sign in the interior décor, which includes booths, Formica, and rustic wood-paneled walls.
After a stack of pancakes I had no business eating, I discovered another Winter Haven landmark at few blocks from Andy’s.
Jenkins’ dream store
The 1940 building at 197 W. Central Ave. in Winter Haven once housed Publix founder George Jenkins’s “dream store,” according to a heritage marker at the site placed by the Polk County Historical Commission.
Jenkins had opened earlier stores, the marker notes, but this was “a supermarket unlike any before,” featuring air-conditioning, pastel colors, fluorescent lighting, soft music, terrazzo tile, marble and an electric-eye door that opened automatically.
Lady Liberty’s turnabout?
A recent Flashback about Orlando’s own small Statue of Liberty, by Lake Ivanhoe, brought these memories.
“I recall seeing the decline of Lady Liberty in the 1970s when I would drive home at 6 a.m. after working all night at WDBO radio just down the street on Lake Ivanhoe Blvd.
“I was surprised during her reconstruction that, while originally she faced Interstate 4, she was rotated to face Orlando. It was as if previously she was there welcoming incoming crowds, but now in the 1980s she turned into a protective city goddess, like Athena in Greece, to guard her town against the outside world. The photograph of her goes into my scrapbook of pictures of female figures in cities across the United States, particularly state capitols.”