Snapshots & Stories from Days Gone By

“Bill DeYoung is a master of the feature story, as you’ll see in this third installment of Vintage St. Pete. His instinct for ferreting out the fascinating, yet often untold, stories of St. Petersburg’s history is unerring. Lucky for us, he does the hard work of committing these stories to print; weaving together the facts, context, setting, and quotes that make a story sing.”

From the Foreword by historian Monica Kile

The third volume in the Vintage St. Pete series takes another long, loving, deeply nostalgic look at life in Florida’s fastest-growing city before the dawn of the twenty-first century. These lavishly-illustrated stories will strike a chord with anyone who’s ever called St. Petersburg, or Pinellas County, home. Here are the cherished traditions and legends: The annual Festival of States parade, fancy dinners at the world-famous Kapok Tree Inn and one-of-a-kind casual restaurants The Penguin and Ted Peters Famous Smoked Fish. Hometown heroes like organ-playing comedian Lenny Dee, beloved newspaper columnist Dick Bothwell and Tom Reese, the eccentric master of ceremonies at the uber-bohemian Beaux Arts Gallery; media icons Salty Sol, Ernie Lee, Shock Armstrong and the rest of the “WTVT Big 13” gang (the top-rated local TV station for 25 years). The whole historic saga of Tarpon Springs, once the world’s sponge-diving capital; behind the scenes of Dolphin Tale, Spring Breakers, The Strange One and other Hollywood movies filmed in town … so much rich, entertaining local history you won’t read about anywhere else, in 25 all-new chapters!