Have you ever wondered what stories made headlines in Jacksonville 50 years ago? It may have been a different era of history, culture and politics, but there are often parallels between the kind of stories that made then and today. As interesting as the similarities may be, so are the differences. These are some of the top stories from the week of June 1-7, 1959. The items were compiled from the Jacksonville Public Library’s periodical archives by Staff Writer Max Marbut.
• A Georgia man was scheduled to go on trial in Criminal Court on a charge of burglarizing an elderly woman’s home while he was a prisoner in the County Jail.
The defendant, Thomas Wilson Daughtery of Adel, Ga. was charged by Assistant County Solicitor Edwin Booth under a Florida law which considered that whoever assists in the commission of a crime, even if he is absent from the scene, is as guilty as the actual perpetrator of the offense.
Booth said he intended to prove at the trial that another defendant, Melvin Lee Prince, actually committed the burglary while using a detailed, handwritten description and diagram of the victim’s house drawn up by the imprisoned Daughtery.
The investigation revealed that Fannie B. Marsh, 77, of 1724 Pearl St. awoke in her bedroom around 10:30 p.m. Feb. 19 when she heard a noise in the hall, which she thought was caused by her nephew. When she turned on a light and got out of bed, she was struck on the head from behind and was knocked unconscious.
The intruder, who came in through the unlocked front door, escaped from the home with a metal box containing four watches with a total value of $200.
Booth said the investigation led to the arrest of Prince later that night. In his possession was the diagram which Prince told officers he has obtained “from a friend” in the County Jail. Officers obtained a statement from another inmate that linked Booth to the crime. Booth said the inmate had roomed at Marsh’s house was questioned closely by Daughtery about the woman’s mode of life and the fact that she owned half a dozen pieces of rental property and received payments at her house.
The note taken into evidence detailed the location of the box and also suggested the best time to carry out the crime, Mondays between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m., when Marsh usually took a nap. The note also pointed out Marsh was “hard of hearing.”
• The Jacksonville Beach City Council accepted in principal a plan to establish a United Service Organization (USO) branch and agreed to “try to find” $5,000 annually for its support.
Salvation Army Brig. Emil Miller, director of the Jacksonville USO program, outlined a program under which the three beach cities and Duval County would underwrite most of the $19,900 annual budget. He said the County would be asked for $10,000 and Atlantic Beach for $1,000. Miller also said that Neptune Beach already had appropriated $500 and the rest of the funds were anticipated from operation of a canteen. The club would be located in the ground floor of the Sandpiper Hotel in Jacksonville Beach.
The Council granted a request for $5,000 from Jacksonville Beach “predicated on the availability of the money” in the 1960 budget.
• County Judge McKenney J. Davis said fishing licenses for 1959-60 were on sale at his office in the County Courthouse. In 1958 his office sold 22,205 state residence fishing licenses.
Davis also reported selling 420 county dog licenses and that in the previous year 236 dogs were redeemed by owners at the $2 redemption fee after the unlicensed animals were picked up by the dog warden.
• According to detectives, “a stranger to Jacksonville” was responsible for the armed robbery of the Maine Lunch at 541 W. Bay St.
“Nobody familiar with that place would ever have tried to hold it up,” commented Detective Sgt. J. C. Flynn. “Normally it’s constantly crawling with cops. It’s our favorite hangout. “Two police cars had just left when the bandit chose to make his move”
About 3:30 a.m. the gunman entered the restaurant and ordered Louis Kassaras, the manager, to sit on the floor. After rifling the cash register for an undetermined amount of money the thief fled on foot.
• State Sen. Wayne Ripley passed and sent to the House for concurrence a bill to abolish the Duval County Civil Court of Record when Judge Burton Barrs resigned, expected to be Aug. 15.
Ripley also passed three other bills to permit the Duval County Board of Commissioners and the Jacksonville City Commission each to donate up to $50,000 annually to Edward Waters College and to raise City Recorder W. C. Almand’s salary from $7,600 to $8,800 a year.
Ripley also introduced a bill authorizing and directing the County Commissioners to acquire “silent sentry” signs to be installed in rural school areas. The bill required the signs to have the figure of a police officer on one side with the markings “school zone speed limit 15 miles per hour” and advertising approved by the County Commission on the other side.
• A veteran police officer with a “wide knowledge of words both good and bad” reported to the County Commission that he learned a new word with every attempt to keep small children from playing in streets and roads.
Duval County Patrol Chief william F. Johnston told of his vocabulary education when asked by commissioners if something could not be done to keep youngsters out of the streets.
The chief’s comments were made during a discussion raised by Commissioner Julian Warren, who said a dangerous traffic situation was developing with children driving “soapbox automobiles” on the major traffic arteries.
The week before, Juvenile Court Judge Marion W. Gooding had issued a warning to parents of the danger of permitting children to drive the cars which were homemade and powered by lawn mower motors.
Warren said he witnessed a near-fatal accident when an adult motorist, not seeing a tiny soapbox car, almost ran over the vehicle and the child in it. He urged that instead of “coddling the children and their parents” over the operation of the vehicles, the County Patrol should make a case against a parent for violating laws regarding vehicle registration and driver licenses, neither of which were obtained by owners and operators of the diminutive vehicles.
“In about 75 percent of the cases we are criticized by the parents for picking p the youngsters,” said Johnston. “They tell us we should be out catching real criminals.”
• A dragline supplying fill dirt for an Expressway construction job near Lee Street unearthed some graves. A number of human bones and at least two skulls were found in two truckloads of dirt along with pieces of wood and fragments of cloth. The dirt was scooped up along a fence in an open field on Rowe Avenue off Moncrief Road. The operator said he had been told that a cemetery which had been abandoned 25 years previous was on the other side. No trace of the cemetery or headstones was visible and the area was covered with grass and weeds. When the operator discovered what had happened he moved to another site.
The property where the remains were unearthed was purchased by the L. O. Burney Company for use as a pit for supplying fill dirt for the Duval Engineering and Construction Company in its construction of the highway link.
• A plan for the City to sell its two golf courses to private parties was announced but the decision came with a proviso that the new owners would operate them on a semiprivate and segregated basis.
The Brentwood and Hyde Park courses had been closed since April 7 when a U. S. District Court order decreed that all restrictions to African-Americans playing on them be removed. The “semipublic” provision of the plan would provide that the courses could not be operated as closed country clubs. The public would be allowed to play on them for the payment of reasonable green fees.
Play on the municipal courses was suspended after five African-Americans first petitioned the City Commission to be granted unrestricted admissions to them, were denied such permission, then went into federal court claiming an infringement of their civil rights. The court here in its decision followed rulings handed down by the U. S. Supreme Court and many lower courts in the South.
• An undesirable guest attempted to enter the George Washington Hotel and was killed by police.
Patrolmen J. T. Lowe and E. Boyer said witnesses told them a group of boys drove up to the entrance of the hotel, threw out two snakes, recovered one and drove off. The second snake was more than five feet long and when it wiggled toward the entrance Boyer and Lowe killed it.