Fort Lauderdale opened a time capsule this week that had been tucked away in the City Hall that opened in the late 1960s and is now being demolished.
Inside the buried artifacts: a fresh-looking copy of the Fort Lauderdale News dated Thursday, June 20, 1968. The 80 pages of news, photos, and features captured just another day in the life of Broward County.
Fifty-six years isn’t long enough for a time capsule to stay hidden, but everything’s relative. Fort Lauderdale became a city only in 1911, so 1968 falls almost midway in the city’s 113-year history.
I did a bit more excavating to get a better sense of what life around here was like back in ’68, one of the most tumultuous years in American history.
So much has changed, beginning with that newspaper.
The News was the afternoon “sister” paper of the morning Sun Sentinel, and it had a devoted following.
Readers back then still liked to sit down with the afternoon paper, but PMs, as they were known, were doomed. They fell victim to changing tastes and the growing popularity of network TV news.
The paper that city leaders stuck inside the time capsule was known as the Red Star Final.
It sold for — get this — 10 cents, and was designed to boost sales at newsstands, which were still popular then. The paper was on the street after 5 p.m. with blaring headlines, late-breaking news, and closing stocks (the Dow Jones Industrial Average was at around 900 in those days).
This was at the height of the Vietnam war, and one story said that 25,068 American GIs had died so far. A Page One bulletin reported on former President Dwight Eisenhower’s heart problems.
A story that caught my attention was about a Southern governors’ conference in Charleston, S.C., where former Texas Gov. John Connally correctly warned of a growing political threat posed by Alabama Gov. George Wallace.
Then as now, third-party candidates were treacherous spoilers.
Richard Nixon would win the White House, defeating Hubert Humphrey, and Wallace nearly won Florida. He carried five Southern states, some of which Humphrey should have won, and got nearly 14% of the popular vote.
This day’s newspaper was two weeks after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, and two months after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot to death in Memphis. “This is the most volatile political atmosphere I have seen in my lifetime,” Connally said.
Florida’s governor at the time was Claude Kirk, the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction, and Broward’s population in 1968 was less than 600,000 — roughly one-fourth of what it is today.
Culturally, the place was much more Southern then, and it was solidly Republican, too.
Few foresaw such a diverse county of more than 2 million, but page after page of the News provided glimpses of life. You can plainly see today’s problems in their early stages.
East-west traffic was a huge problem, and transportation planners debated what to do.
One solution was to build the “Rock Island Expressway” along Northwest 19th Street, between Sunrise and Oakland Park boulevards. Needless to say, it was never built.
For fun, the Punchinellos, a popular musical duo, were playing nightly at the Wreck Bar at the Yankee Clipper on the beach.
The new Morrison’s Cafeteria just opened at 1700 N. Federal Highway, with its three dining rooms.
At the sparkling new Garden Aire Village in Pompano Beach (still there), it cost $16,100 for a two-bedroom, two-bath “condominium apartment.” The word “condo” had not yet entered the South Florida lexicon.
Newspapers then still reported the vacation travels of everyday people. A news item said that “Mrs. Esther Ainscough of Altoona, Pa., is enjoying a two-month visit.” (In June? Before year-round air conditioning?)
Atlantic gas stations offered free hurricane lamps to customers who bought eight gallons of gas, which then cost about 34 cents a gallon.
The city of Sunrise was called Sunrise Golf Village then, and a tiny news item buried in the back pages hinted at a very volatile future.
It said John Lomelo was the city’s first full-time administrator. Lomelo would be one of the most colorful and notorious politicians in Broward history in the ’70s and ’80s before heading to federal prison for extortion and mail fraud in 1985.
More news: Two men robbed Big Daddy’s Lounge at 3109 W. Broward Blvd., but dropped the money when sheriff’s deputies fired shots at them.
The police chief “out” in Davie, Charles Brookover, was in plenty of hot water at Town Hall because he pulled both of the town’s patrol cars off the road to provide traffic control at a movie filming location.
Many news stories provided only scant details, but they said a lot about the times.
A two-paragraph filler story reported that a 27-year-old truck driver faced 50 years in prison for robbing a Hallandale gas station of $45. Raymond “Beerbelly” Kilpatrick wanted a new trial, but the judge said no.
A time capsule, all right.
Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. Contact him at sbousquet@sunsentinel.com or (850) 567-2240 and follow him on X @stevebousquet.