Joy Wallace Dickinson and the Secrets of the Flamingo Cafe

When I began writing this book, The Secrets of the Flamingo Cafe, I thought about a story that would be sort of rooted in Orlando and a mystery that would happen in Florida… Excerpt from Joy Wallace Dickinson’s presentation to the Orlando Remembered organization at the Orlando Public Library on November 19, 2025.

Joy Wallace Dickinson received the 2025 Florida Historical Society’s Patrick D. Smith Award for her book: Secrets of the Flamingo Cafe: An Old Florida Mystery. Joy is an author and historian known throughout Central Florida for her popular Florida Flashback columns on local history which appeared weekly in The Orlando Sentinel. Her work as a respected historian includes both American and Florida history. In this presentation, she highlights the connection between local news events and mystery fiction in the works of successful Florida authors.

Listen:

You know my family came here in 1949 and 50s. I did a book group with a bunch of real nice women in their forties and a lot of them had lived here very long, I mean, they think it’s long, but it’s like ten years. The Orlando that’s pictured in this book that I am going to talk about today, they’re just amazed. I mean, they’re amazed that there were people here in some ways or downtown. So, thanks for being here. And thanks for that amazing introduction. There are plenty of people who don’t know who I am believe me. And the more I talk to groups there are plenty of people that are, you know, who? What? Anyway, thanks for being here.

Orlando Sentinel Database

I did want to stress what Jane said, a plug about this database [Orlando Sentinel database] I found a lot of people don’t know about this. If you are doing research and you have a library card, you can get into all kinds of wonderful databases online including The Sentinel from 1985. Now you can get all of my columns. You can get all of Jim Robinson’s columns if you’re doing Seminole history, Osceola history. So if you’re doing research, it’s a wonderful thing.

My Novel

So I am going to talk with you today a little bit about this novel that I let myself write, The Secrets of the Flamingo Cafe and how that happened; and some of the real history behind it which some of you will know a little bit about. By that, I don’t mean, that I assume you knew underground figures. But one of the things I say when I talk about this is, they are not in my family. They were people that were sort of household names. And one of them was Harlan Blackburn, because sort of everybody knew who he was. And if you don’t know who he was I will tell you in a minute…

“Come on Down to Florida…”

So this novel is fiction and I really want to stress that. But as we’ll see today, fiction for Florida rarely has to stretch very far to find something unbelievable. Florida provides plenty of that on it’s own. So like I said, I am not a native Floridian, but pretty close. My family moved here in 1949. And my grandfather, was really the person who wanted the move. And this was the time, especially in the post war years when everybody was, you know, people from the north were encouraged to: “Come on down to Florida where the cool summer breezes blow!” which is always, always amusing to me. I did not feel any cool breezes. I trust you didn’t either unless it was from the AC.

My Grandfather

But anyhow, so here it is, you know, Florida, the land of sun and fun. But my grandfather, he was only in his fifities then when I think about it, but he was really the one in the family that wanted to come to Florida. He had moved as a boy around World War I from the hills of Tennesssee from this little settlement. He was literally born in a log cabin and he moved to Pennsylvania steel country. I think to get a job. And he ended up being a salesperson and covering all kinds of territory in Pennsylvania and throughout Ohio for a company that made materials for the steel manufacturing process.

Florida as the last Eastern Frontier State

So, he really saw, he really thought, Florida to him, it was sort of a frontier, I think. And in 1948-49, which is when this novel is set, Florida was sort of the last Eastern Frontier State. I mean, it was certainly, had cities and people. But, it sort of was, I think, envisioned as a place where you could not only find sunshine and fewer snow shovels, but sort of a new beginining, a new life for the family.

Atlantic Coast Railroad Station on Sligh Boulevard

So he and my dad decided to, we came on the train… The train station – and I thank Sun Rail all the time and the forces that have kept that station and Amtrak that have kept that station in existence because it really meant a lot to me. And it appears in the novel. In the first scene in the novel, my protaganist gets off the train at the train staton. And I think I did rely on my mother’s memory that she thought that she had stepped into the gates of hell because it was just so hot. It was late September. And pullman cars must have been air conditioned because it was cool in there, even then it was cool. So we, my mother and I came on the train, the rest of the family came in a station wagon…

B & D Market

So they had a market, we had a market called the B&D Market named for my grandfather and my dad, Bill and Dickinson. And the Keystone emblem in the middle there is for the Keystone State. So you sort of, I think, when you came down at that time, you advertised and one of your bonds with people was if they were from Pennsylvania, too. I remember if my mom saw a Pennsylvania license plate, she would, I remember at least once she’d follow the car and talk to them. Because I think that was the other thing, you know, it was a great new home, but it was exotic if you’d grown up in, near Pittsburgh where they had… Our market was on 17-92. I went to Winter Park last night and I drove up Mills and 17-92. And you all know this, but do avoid the intersection of Colonial and Mills anytime if you can. I made the mistake last night of going through there. But anyway, I’ve ridden that strip for, you know, my entire life…

Post War Florida

My first grade was at the original Hillcrest School. So that just tells you something about me and the world we came into. And it was the post-war Florida which means, we sort of arrived like I said in that historical window where my novel is set. If I’d been just a little older, I might have gone into the Flamingo Cafe myself, the real Flamingo Cafe. Although probably not to the back room of the Flamingo Cafe, unless I had a lot more courage than I do and a knack for poker. I also think, one of the things that interests me is I think the back room was sort of reserved for the gentlemen. I wonder what would have happened if a lady had said, “I want to go back there.”

World War II Service People Increase Population

But anyhow… a lot of folks who were stationed here of course was one of the reasons Florida had such a big boom after World War II was a lot of service people had been here and they really liked it at all the bases and they wanted to come back. That wasn’t true in our case. My grandfather had just heard about it I think from his wealthy bosses who had people, men that owned the company who had winter houses in Palm Beach. Anyway, he’d heard about Florida. No veterans stationed here in our family. So this was a time in the late 40s and early 50s when World War II really increased the population…

Orlando in the late Forties

The city at that time, Lake Eola in the late forties, the twenties bandstand up there that was designed by the architects Isabel Roberts and Ida Ryan… It was a time when the solarium was on the causeway of Lake Estelle and famous because you could do sunbathing au natural on the roof I gather. Although my family never experienced that. There were a lot of jokes about low flying planes and everything. And it was a very nice beach… There was a beach on the other side of the causeway on Lake Estelle and we went to the Vogue Theater a lot, that sort of thing.

Mystery Writing in Florida

So, again I am branching from nostalgia for the period to, I want to talk just a little bit about Florida being a land of mystery, mystery books. Florida and mystery writing had been long time companions. We were talking about a fellow from the Sentinel, Dana [Dana Summers] who writes mysteries. So many people, Floridians of all kinds follow mystery writing. As the writer Stuart McIver once put it, “Strange, wonderful, weird, horrifying, disgusting, embarrassing, funny things happen in Florida.” He meant it as a compliment and it is.

Carl Hiaasen

So there have been many great mystery writers. A current favorite, of course, is Carl Hiaasen, a favorite of mine anyway. But Hiaasen famously takes real things that happened, you know he worked for the Miami Herald, and he famously sort of keeps clippings and puts it into his novels. Not everything in his novels really happened, obviously. But he puts things that have really happened like people dueling with chain saws or trying to.

John D. MacDonald

One of the great ones was John D. MacDonald who published so many, a lot of books. I am getting ahead of myself a little. Some of you may have read his Travis McGee books about a guy who lives on a boat called the “Busted Flesh” off Fort Lauderdale. I think there are a lot of them…

The Book Department & The Library

But for me, I learned my love of mysteries down in the Book Department at Ivey’s Department Store down the street and the Library. I am sure I went through all, I would spend a lot of time in the Library. But also for my weekly allowance I could buy the new Nancy Drew when it came out at Ivey’s Department Store, and I loved reading them. And, you know, loved the myseries as a lot of women my age did. I grew up with Nancy Drew, the brainy girl detective. So I think that’s where my love of mysteries started… Ivey’s had a real Book Department… you could call up somebody who can be your personal shopper and help you in the Book Department. This is an ad for a Book Department at Belk’s advertises Nancy Drew for .88 cents…

Mysteries that include Orlando

So the love of mystery stayed with me and when I became a Florida history writer, I quickly learned something. You don’t have to necessarily create a mystery here, you just have to notice one, and that includes Orlando. So, when I began writing this book, The Secrets of the Flamingo Cafe, I thought about a story that would be sort of rooted in Orlando and a mystery that would happen in Florida.

The Flamingo Cafe

And at some point when I was writing Flashback, I discovered an article probably done in the fifties by a guy named Henry Balch who used to be an editor at the paper about this real place called the Flamingo Cafe; some say Flamingo Cafe, some say, Flamingo Club. It opened in 1929 on what we called then the Cheney Highway, Route 50. It was a nightclub with chicken and yellow rice, a torch singer named Billy Fargo, tuxedo gamblers and a back room decorated in red velvet. What do you need to know more? I mean, I was fascinated.

Gambling

Before we get into more about the Flamingo Cafe, I wanted to give you a little background about the folks who made money off of bolita. Bolita plays a role in the novel. I will say the Flamingo Cafe in my novel is, I think, more a glamorized version of it, somewhat. But all the things that are in the novel it had. It had big floor shows, entertainers, singers, dancers, all that kind of thing. And, in the background, gambling.

Organized Crime in Florida

So, let’s before we get there, talk about setting the stage a little bit. So a lot of times when people think about organized crime in Florida, they think about Miami or Tampa and the powerful Trafficanti family who was sort of the organized crime group. They had family in Florida. But, you know, organized crime did stretch into Central Florida… Tampa really was the headquarters for a lot of underground stuff. But Tampa Tribune published this series on Central Florida here with the crime octopus reaching out into the state… this was in the 1950s so they pointed their finger right at Orlando here it is called “Bible Belt Bolita”.

Bolita, a Numbers Game

Orlando the City Beautiful, I ran across and I don’t know who did it, but there was a tv show, long running documentary tv show that ran a thing about this and I remember a creepy voice with this guy saying, “Orlando the city of tall church spires where underneath is…” So most of you are probably familiar with the concept of what bolita was. It was a numbers game.

Bolita in Cuba

Supposedly it originated in Cuba and it was cheap to play and easy to run where people picked numbers every week and placed bets on them. [The forerunner of the Lotto.] Yeah, the forerunner of the Lotto. The numbers were written on little balls. You know they put the balls in a little bag and take out, you know the numbers were chosen by taking them out. [If I may as an aside, being from Cuba, the bolita in Cuba if a number was highly bet on, they would put a ball in there that was made out of chalk so as they tumbled that number disappeared. So the bolita runners always won. And the heavily bet number disappeared because the ball is made out of chalk and as it tumbled it disappeared.] That’s a great detail, George. They used to rig it all kinds of ways.

Placing Bets

So, in my book, everybody does bet on it. In my memory, I don’t think that’s an overstatement. I think it was seen as a victimless crime. And a whole lot of people bet on Bolita, you know. It wasn’t just something that you did, you know, in bars. You know you might place your bet with the boy down the street or something. So the Tribune in this series, described Orlando as one of those beautiful citrus cities where, “the very best people live but also a place with more than their share of gamblers and hoodlums.” Some of them operated in broad daylight.

King of the “Cracker Mafia”

Again, as I said, the man who was sort of increasingly at the center of it all was a man by the name of Harlan Blackburn. And he was the king of the so called “Cracker Mafia” and the rough numbers racket. He was a guy who was arrested at 13 for forging a $5.00 check, a story which he told himself. And, you know, went on to become the man who ran bolita in the region and had the blessing of Santo Trafficante Junior… I’m amazed when I look back about Blackburn… in the sixities he really was sort of given the star treatment by the reporter. He was eventually sent to prison for, as often happens with people in organized crime, for tax related stuff rather then for some crime like the hit that he put out on his lieutenant Clive Lee in 1971. But anyway, he served a lot of time in prison.

Harlan Blackburn’s Notoriety

But when he died, the Sentinel wrote about him and said that most people probably no longer know his name, that was in the nineties and I think that may have been incorrect. Because I remember in the nineties I went to a beauty shop in College Park that was frequented by a lot of ladies older than me, more my mother’s generation. And I brought up his name one time and everybody had a story. Everybody had, “Oh, you remember when his girlfriend would come in, so and so, carrying bags of cash and everything.” His house it was over on Rio Grande, his house had a wall around it. It’s not very far off the Trail. I talked to one gentleman who is no longer with us who said that cars from all over the state would congregate there [Harlan Blackburn’s house] at certain times and he was like about 13 and he would get paid to wash the cars while the big black cars were congregating at the house…

Fictional Characters

I have a story too, but I’m going to wait until the end to tell it. Because I don’t want to take up too much of our time. But, you know, this is sort of the core of it. In my novel there are figures that are sort of involved in, presented as being involved in organized crime. But I’m not trying to make anybody be Harlan Blackburn. The characters are just sort of inspired by this world. And my owner of the Flamingo Cafe I think is really a product of my own imagination. He wears a white suit and is like a Great Gatsby kind of figure that was far more glamourous I suspect than the real thing.

Ed Milam’s Murder and Bolita Operations

But serious business here, I mean, so it wasn’t this whole world, and I think a lot of people, probably my family included, if you bet on bolita you didn’t really think that much about where the money went or you know, what was happening. When people got killed generally in this whole world, a lot of it had to do with fighting over territory; fighting over who in the organization was running what area. So this is a murder mystery that never really has been solved. A man named Ed Milam this is the headline of the Sentinel in 1953 he was tied to bolita operations and was found in Reedy Creek Swamp shot four times. He had last been seen getting into a car on West Washington Street right down here, I mean not very far Central. It was called a ganglang killing, but nobody was ever arrested. So, like I said, it’s not, there was plenty here to be inspiration for sort of a crime mystery novel and that’s sort of inspired me a lot…

Location of the Flamingo Cafe

The real Flamingo Cafe… it was outside the city limits which at that time was on Colonial, called the Cheney Highway then, right about where the Olive Garden is now except on the other side of the street. I mean it wasn’t very far out. It was like where Fashion Square is on this side and Executive Airport is on that side. So that’s where it was. Opened in ’29 and it was a big splash when it opened here… it was called the Nightclub Deluxe… apparently the back room was lined with red velvet and dice tables with green felt, and tuxedoed dealers. Of course, that stuff was never advertised, you had to know about it… But there were two shows nightly and the last one was at 12:30 A.M…. with a bevy of Broadway beauties in the shows. So it sat outside the city limits so it was under the Sheriff’s purview, not the police. And the Sheriff’s Department did make occasional raids, but nothing seemed to have really stopped the action…

The Connection Between Havanna and Florida

One of the things that was always featured, it was the largest Spanish cafe and the cuisine which was very much Spanish cuisine was featured. So, another thread I want to touch on was, the connection and the closeness in those days between Havanna and Florida, particularly. It was very common for all kinds of folks to go to Havanna on vacation. It was affordable, there were a lot of ships that drove out of Miami. The flights from Orlando took two and a half hours and cost $46.00 roundtrip. There are items in the paper about Central Florida public school teachers going there for vacations. There were students from Cuba who came to Rollins College.

Gambling in Havanna

So, one of the attractions for some folks was that you could go gambling. You could go to nightclubs and gamble in Havanna. So pilgrimages for that reason existed a long time before people went to Las Vegas. And that gave the sort of Havanna style entertaining with the food and everything and a lot of glamour… So when characters said in the novel, talk about Havana or the Havana style; the cafe owner says to people, “You know we got entertainment just as good as Havana” that’s really a true thing. And occasionally folks like Mr. Trafficante went to Havana, too. So this is the world of the Flamingo Cafe…

The Canova Sisters

One of the interesting things I came across, some of you are old enough like me, maybe remember, when I was a kid I remember Judy Canova was a star in the forties, a comedian, she wore pigtails… One of the ads I found for the Flamingo Cafe advertised the Canova Sisters, who were just young, they were appearing at the Flamingo Cafe. They were, I think, from Stark. So again, I mean, it’s just real interesting people that came out of Florida that, you know, ended up going into entertainment. A lot more variety I think than some people might imagine…

History and Fiction

I am rapping up now, but that’s what I am sort of talking about is blending history and fiction. Somebody asked me last night, “Are you in it? Are you in this book?” And I said, “Well, no, there’s no character based on me or anybody that I know.” But then I thought, I’m in it because it’s a world I’m fascinated by and things I’m interested in and things I remember from childhood.

The Maitland Art Center

The other venue, the sort of real venue that appears in the novel disguised a little bit is and not as much, is the Maitland Art Center which is a real place, too. And, there are parties there and everything… But it was built in the late thirties by Jules Andre Smith. It is now a national landmark. It has this fantastic architecture. So I’ve sort of alluded to that…. It’s quite a special place.

Hudson Terraplane

If you love the Nancy Drew books you also remember that the car, the roadster is very important, the convertible. And in this case, my heroine drives a Hudson Terraplane which is a car that my dad owned at one point before I came along. But I used to hear my parents talk about memories of the Terroplane and look at pictures of it. So again I’m in it, but I’m not a character in it. So I particularly wanted to use a Terraplane too because Amelia Earhart was its spokesperson… Here’s Nancy and her car.

Book Dedicated to Mildred Wert Benson

The last thing I’ll say about that is the book is dedicated to Mildred Wert Benson who really was, you know if you grew up reading Nancy Drew books and loving those books, you know the name Carolyn Keene. But Carolyn Keene was actually a pen name. And different people played a role in those books. But a wonderful woman named Mildred Wert Benson, who was from Iowa, here she is in her 90s skywriting, you know was the person who was responsible for a lot of them.

Orlando Remembered Organization

This is in here because I am thinking it is about that time of year again and places matter. Our memories matter. Places hold stories after the buildings are gone. The Ivey’s building is still here that got nicknamed the Dickson and Ives building. The Flamingo’s gone, but the stories linger. And so, that’s what you all do at Orlando Remembered so beautifully is remember those stories. I hope that’s what my novel does in a small way, too. Thanks for being with us. I want to hear more stories from you all.

Oral History Presenter:  Joy Wallace Dickinson

Oral History Presentation Recorded by:  Jane Tracy

Date:  November 19, 2025

Place:  Orlando Public Library