The late mid-century, low-slung beach houses along Ponte Vedra Boulevard, a mile or so south of the Club, would sit empty for months at a time. Some never seemed to be occupied at all. Yet they never showed any signs of deterioration or neglect. The houses matured with time and were speckled along the beach with their fronts facing east and their backs facing west. They were asymmetrical but balanced. Their architecture told their story in more detail than any writer could possibly muster.
There were no garages or large storage rooms, only carports with utility rooms behind breeze-block walls and ligustrum hedges.
One of these subtropical contemporary ranches had an inground pool in a large atrium with a screened enclosure above the water, open to the elements. A small one-room efficiency off the pool shared a wall with the carport.
The atrium acted as a breezeway to the living room in the center of the house. The entire place functioned more like a greenhouse than anything else. Like the other moderns on the Boulevard, its roofline sloped north and south with large plate-glass, interior sliding doors and jalousie windows in the bedrooms that could be used to direct the sea breeze through the house with great efficiency.
Cypress tongue-and-groove paneling seemed to be standard, as was North Carolina fieldstone for the hearth and San Marco brick for the fireplace and chimney. This was the heart of the house.
The small galley-style kitchen had a side entrance and a row of stone pavers that wrapped back around to the room off the pool. Terrazzo floors were crafted throughout, and the feeling inside was one of general well-being. It was a seaside domestic shelter in its purest form, a livable pavilion.
There was nothing extravagant in any of these houses, and they were designed and built with executive acumen and affordability within the Ponte Vedra Beach standard of excellence. Their function as drivers of generational leisure was exhibited in their contemporary craftsmanship and construction. They sat on thick slabs of McCormick cement. Each had the unique feel of a yacht. Their design provenance flowed more comfortably from “Fort Caroline” than “Castillo de San Marcos.” Stucco was not part of the pattern language. Their grammar was Usonian.
These Ponte Vedra houses were crafted for privacy, seclusion and respite. Cocktail parties happened, more often than not, in houses up the Boulevard near the Club, or back in the community off the lagoons and fairways.
These ocean fronts were “utility-simple,” sharp and always well groomed. Each had a front patio facing the Atlantic. There was no ornamentation, no clutter, no signs of heavy use, just prolonged permanence. The ocean was the entertainment. The architecture defined and dominated the experience, and these houses always seemed to sit in a perpetual state of layover. “Where to? What next?”
Without prediction, cars would appear at times parked in the carports. As kids, we would notice them almost immediately. Sometimes they would be covered with large tarps or custom car covers, as if they had been there the whole time, but the adults had been too busy to notice.
There would be a porch light left on, or we’d see an inside light shining through one of the few back windows facing the Boulevard. Sometimes, at night, the houses would be lit up so entirely that they brightened the surf at high tide. But the architecture always concealed the occupants.
It felt mysterious when it happened. Spring would bring visiting stoics to PV, and their presence would reflect their staunch character. By all accounts, they would remain nearly invisible throughout their stay. A ring of the doorbell or a knock on the door would always go unanswered. “They’re probably down at the beach.” At times, beach chairs could be seen set out above the high tide mark out front, but there were never any sitters. “They must be up at the house.”
Whatever their daily routines turned out to be, these visitors were completely untangled from those around them. We never knew with complete certainty who they were, and asking anyone about them was out of the question.
We’d see Roy Landrum’s car occasionally parked in one of the driveways or another. Roy had keys to many of the houses along this stretch of the Boulevard, including ours, and his house checks were regular but entirely unpredictable. He had been performing this service for years and was the most trusted man in Ponte Vedra Beach.
Not knowing if a house was occupied or vacant was part of the community plan. Everything in PV in the 1970s was in a state of readiness. It was the very definition of authentic hospitality.
In 1974, four federal prosecutors were in residence in PV during a complex trial being held in the Federal District Court in Jacksonville. More than 150 witnesses from some 40 states and several foreign countries would eventually be called by these prosecutors to testify against Glenn Turner Enterprises, Dare To Be Great and Koscot Interplanetary Incorporated. In addition, Glenn Turner himself and his attorney, F. Lee Bailey, would be called to testify. The prosecutors’ presence in PV was unknown to the public for five months.
Privacy and seclusion are key tenets of “keeping house” in Ponte Vedra Beach. Count Clemens Stauffenberg and his wife, Countess Clementine Stauffenberg, were guests at the Inn in ’74 while the Count recuperated from his heart bypass surgery performed at Baptist Memorial in Jacksonville. The count was in the oil and shipping business in Germany, and his family title dated back to the 11th century.
Ponte Vedrans could never anticipate the next visitor, and we rarely tried. When Bob Denver, who played Gilligan on CBS’s “Gilligan’s Island,” was spotted swimming in the adult pool at the Surf Club, he was left alone to enjoy the amenity in peace.
From its earliest days, Ponte Vedra Beach has always seemed to hold itself apart from the day-to-day by design. Like-minded individuals began redefining the ordinary and the extraordinary as early as 1928. There has always been something very special in the sands along this stretch of beach, and the sandcastles at dusk would often reveal that certain something: love.
Leisure in Ponte Vedra Beach fueled culture, and whether this observation is disagreeable or not depends on individual perspective. From the outside, PV exudes exclusivity, but from the inside, it facilitates necessity because culture moves like a tide: it finds eddies, deep channels, calm waters, shallow pools and at times rushes like a torrent. It is not exclusive in the least, but a shared condition of the soul, and it is very much inclusive and needed today, perhaps even more than it was 50 years ago.
“I fear not,” Thomas Paine famously wrote in “The American Crisis,” 1776. “I see no real cause for fear. I know our situation well and can see the way out of it.”
Writers fall into two broad categories: those who write “about” things, and those who write “of” things. The best of the lot has a foot in either camp. In the 1970s, our Zenith’s antenna received for us the news broadcast from Jacksonville. No one was immune to it. Cable was still a decade away. Walter Cronkite was the familiar face delivering the word that Picasso died, that the Paris Peace Accords were underway, that the POWs would soon begin returning home, that microwave ovens were a new technology. “Home PONG” had arrived as Atari’s first home console. Watergate had happened. We saw President Nixon wave goodbye and board a helicopter on the White House lawn. We witnessed the fall of Tehran, ending 2,500 years of monarchical rule. “Star Wars” premiered.
It would be an oversimplification to say it seemed like the decade of the 1970s had folded in on itself. America celebrated its Bicentennial, Tall Ships were making the rounds, Ted Turner skippered the “Courageous” to victory, and President Ford played Sawgrass.
All the while, the low-slung houses on the lower end of the Boulevard waited patiently for their next turn at occupancy. In time, some were torn down for the view, others remodeled beyond recognition, but their roots and purpose for being there in the first place remain unchanged.
Life in PV proper in the 1970s required an understanding and dedication to direction and trajectory. Those who lived through it found purpose in understanding their role in protecting, preserving and sharing the community with others. Hospitality and enthusiasm for the importance of leisure and finding respite from the ordinary by transforming it into the extraordinary, will always be the drumbeat and the heartbeat of this smartly casual place of all places, Ponte Vedra Beach.
