The First Hundred Years: Clearwater Yacht Club, 1911-2011

Postcard of the Memorial Gardens Causeway. Courtesy of the Fleming/Green family.

24 The First Hundred Years: Clearwater Yacht Club, 1911-2011 Speedboat racing became a hugely popular attraction as well as a way for developers to promote land sales in the area. “[S]oon all the waters hereabouts were slashed by roaring speedboats, 26-foot mahogany monsters with 200-horsepower engines, thundering over the water…Clearwater got into the act, of course, and the Bay offered a splendid race course that attracted all the best (and noisiest) speedboats in this area” (Ransom and Tracy, 1961:5). While the roaring speedboats were the newest “rage” in the “Roaring Twenties,” interest in competitive sailing never waned. In 1923, J. Buford As in the first decade of the twenty-first century, in the early 1920s, people all over the country went crazy with Florida land fever. Speculation was rampant and everyone wanted in on the action. “Clearwater along with the rest of Florida, entered the wildest period of its history… thousands flocked to the West Coast, each one dreaming of millions to be picked up in every boondock, every tide-washed acre” (Ransom and Tracy, 1961: 5). Money flew in from across the country and around the world. With that money came an insatiable taste for “the good life” in its myriad forms. Pinellas County and its beaches became major tourist destinations. Developers scrambled to make the area and its beaches more accessible. The old wooden bridge between the Clearwater mainland and Clearwater Beach was replaced with the “Memorial Gardens Causeway” built to honor the veterans of World War I. At the height of the boom in 1924, George S. Gandy, Sr. built a toll bridge between St. Petersburg and Tampa. Captain Ben T. Davis followed suit by starting construction on the nine and a half mile long causeway connecting Tampa and Clearwater (now called Courtney Campbell Causeway). As the longest causeway/bridge system in the nation at the time, this was a major undertaking (Dunn, 1974; Pinellas County Planning Department, 2008).