Florida made Craig Pittman famous. Or maybe it was the other way around. Between his books and blogs, Pittman has been extolling the virtues and foibles, mostly the foibles, of the Sunshine State for well over a decade. Craig Pittman will be appearing in Pensacola this month for the Friends of the West Florida Public Library’s annual fund raising gala. He spoke with WUWF’s Bob Barrett who asked if he could do this work in any other state.
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Pittman: It would be a lot less interesting, let me put it that way. I think Florida is the most interesting state, and I honestly think that should be our motto, not the Sunshine State because lord knows it rains so much here. The Sunshine State's a lie that we tell the tourists, but if we called ourselves the most interesting state, I think we could definitely back that one up. Every day is something new.
Barrett: You have a good history with Pensacola. Tell us about that.
Pittman: Sure. Well, I'm a native of Pensacola. I'm from there, grew up there, went to school there, and then after I graduated college, came back and worked for the Pensacola News Journal for five years. I covered county commission, state legislature, and local politics, which was a pretty active beat at the time. (I got to cover) some interesting folks like W.D. Childers, who, of course, made his fortune selling hula hoops, and then wound up as the most powerful man in the Florida Senate, and then as a commissioner, got in trouble with the law. So those kinds of things are par for the course for Pensacola.
Barrett: When did you realize that there was a much wider audience for the silliness that Florida does have sometimes?
Craig Pittman: Believe it or not, it was on Twitter. I got onto that platform in 2008, 2009, or something like that, and was tweeting some of the wacky stuff that happens here on a regular basis. And I would always tag it, ‘Oh Florida!’ And one of my followers was an editor at the platform Slate, and she contacted me in 2013, and said, ‘We would love it if you would do a blog for Slate for a month, Oh Florida!, about what an interesting state that is. I think the only problem with it was that I only had a month to pack everything in. And at the end of the month, she said ‘I hope you'll think about turning this into a book.’ And about that time, a New York publishing agent got in touch with me and said, ‘We think 2016 would be a good year to put out a book about Florida, and we think you're the guy to write it.’ And so that's how my Twitter account wound up becoming a book that landed on the New York Times bestseller list.
Bob Barrett: Well, let me ask you about your support for libraries. You’re coming here for the West Florida Public Library. I mean, especially in these days, tell us about the importance of supporting libraries.
Craig Pittman: Well, I mean, I would not be the reader or writer that I am today if not for the Pensacola Library. The greatest gift my mom ever gave me is when I was six years old. She took me to the library and signed me up for my first library card. And the librarian asked, ‘Should we just confine him to the children's section?’ And my mom said, ‘No, he can check out books from all over the library.’ And so I ranged all over the place and checked out books. Some of them were way over my head at the time I was reading them. Some of them I checked out over and over and over again. But I learned so much from that, and it opened up a whole world to me. And it was not just the library itself, but when I was a little older, the bookmobile, it would park in the baseball field behind our house, and I would run back there, I think, every two weeks and check out books from there. I would come back with a whole stack of them and learn so much, not just about the world, but also about how to write, about how to structure sentences, how to turn thought into words. I mean, it's such a precious gift, what you get from the library, and it's all for free.
Bob Barrett: When people come to see you at this event, what are they going to come away with?
Craig Pittman: Gosh, uh, lots of bad puns, lots of obscure pop culture references, and maybe a little sprinkling of knowledge about Florida. I mean, that's sort of the way I work is I'll throw a lot of corny jokes in, but occasionally slip in a little knowledge. I call it the ‘spoonful of sugar’ method of educating people about what a special place Florida is.
Bob Barrett: I'll end with this one, and this has got to be the question you're really tired of, but I got to do it. So what's one of the one things you have written about or seen in Florida that made you go, ‘oh, come on, really?’
Craig Pittman: Probably the one example, the one story that I wound up citing the most. Let me waffle and give you two things. One is, obviously a lot of this stuff comes off the police beat. So, probably the big thing is the guy who, because he thought it would be funny, tossed an alligator through the drive-through window at a Wendy's in Loxahatchee. Everybody remembers that. And was actually charged with assault with a deadly weapon, with the deadly weapon being the gator, even though it was only 3 feet long. But the other thing is, it's not always about the police beat. One thing I always like to remind people is Florida is the only state where the list of government jobs includes mermaid. We actually have women employed as mermaids at the Wikiwatchi Springs State Park, and I don't think any other state can make that claim.
Craig Pittman will be the guest of honor at the Friends of the West Florida Public Library Gala on Saturday, October 20 at Sanders Beach Community Center.
