Tragedy at MacDill AFB Situated strategically four miles south of Tampa, Florida, at the end of a peninsula that separates Old Tampa Bay from Hillsborough Bay is MacDill Air Force Base. Established on May 24th, 1939, for the Army Air Corps, it was initially called Southeast Air Base, Tampa. The base has overseen a variety of missions that continue today. However, this article focuses on only a short period at the outbreak of World War [...]
Pearl Harbor Day’s annual remembrance on Dec. 7 generally sends me searching for images from that horrible attack. Visiting the Pearl Harbor Naval Memorial in Hawaii some years ago was one of the most memorable moments of my life, as I gazed down at the hull of the U.S.S. Arizona, trying to imagine what it was like years before. I remember sitting outside by the harbor and listening intently to stories about that day from two Navy [...]
The First Coast of Florida, in addition to being the first U.S. coast to be settled by Europeans, was the first coast to foster a commercial shrimping industry. Spreading from Fernandina to St. Augustine in the early 20th century, following the expansion of the railroad built by capitalist Henry Flagler, the nascent commercial shrimping and shrimpboat-building industries were dominated by a number of innovative families of Mediterranean descent–including the Salvador, [...]
