Our town is an old one. One of the oldest in Florida, actually. People come here because our clocks are stuck at twenty years past the current decade. The pleasures here, like the people, are simple.
An ice cream cone and "Putt-Putt" golf are the only seaside diversions you'll find, unless you are an alcoholic, in which case you're gonna like this place plenty.
Our Putt-Putt is the official kind, one of the last handful remaining in the country and one of only two in the entire state.That official status means tournaments come to town at least once a year, bringing a fair count of at least sixty tourists and their dollars to our sleepy little red-ink town. Pretty remarkable, when you stop to think about it. I mean, we don't have anything. The other one is in Oddlando, who has at least one of everything. Just think, little old us, keeping up with big, fancy them.
Our DayGlo orange bumpers have held their own for decades against seaside elements and hurricanes; the white iron obstacles standing sentinel through of the abandonment of generations of summer children and locals alike, who grow up and learn to drive themselves across the bridge to Anywhere But Here.
The course is pretty basic. We don't have fake animals or any props at all, really, just the scorecard stands in between each hole. And the holes are slightly- ever so slightly- out of order, but you really can't tell, unless you came to nit-pick. Which you might be surprised to find, that's all some folks want to do once they get here. But for all we lack, we've got 36 holes, a long history and something no other Putt-Putt in the country can brag about: we've got Murphy.
Murphy was probably at the grand opening in 1957. No one really knows his age, but we all treat him with the respect due to elders, because he's definitely eld. Murphy does odd jobs around the course as needed; he changes light bulbs, sweeps the inevitable sand dunes from the Astroturf greens and hauls the ice cream tubs from the monthly cold truck into the walk-in freezer. He's a strong eld man.
