“All kinds of illegal” is a great phrase.
This article reminded me of it.
It also reminded of one time when the police came to search my uncle’s house. This was the same uncle who liked to keep ammunition in the drinking cups in the kitchen cabinets.
So I asked him, “Uncle Wayne, why’re the police searching your house?”
His reply: “Well, could be any number of reasons.”
Ah, North Florida. There is nowhere else like it. For which we should all be thankful.
Whereabouts in North Florida? Panhandle or Peninsula?
Cliff, in the Lake City, FL area. It’s changed quite a lot since I lived there, though. Where there would be 1-2 houses there are now dozens; fields I used to walk through as a kid are now housing developments.
Ah, not quite panhandle, not quite peninsula either. When I lived in Gainesville I heard some hairraising stuff about the backwoods in North Florida, much wilder than where I’m from, about four counties south (Polk) half in town and half in cowboy country.
I mostly grew up in a small town on the gulf coast south of Sarasota (talk about changed, out of curiousity I had a look at neighborhoods I thought I knew on google streetview and didn’t recognize 90% of it).
Ha, yeah, about North Florida it was pretty backwards when I was kid. Probably about 20-30 years behind the rest of the country. It has since jumped ahead, modernized a lot, and is not nearly the place it used to be — for better and worse.
It lost a lot of character, but also lost as a benefit a lot of the overt racism and other prejudices, though of course the covert sort is still prevalent there.
Because I grew up there, I still miss a lot of the things that as a kid were normal to me that I suspect others who didn’t grow up there would find terrifying or at least uncivilized.