Joe Marzo

By Joe Marzo When Americans picture the First Thanksgiving, they usually think of Pilgrims and Wampanoag gathered around a long wooden table in the cool New England autumn of 1621. The image has become a national myth—an origin story built around gratitude, peace, and the birth of an American tradition. But that story leaves something important out. The real first Thanksgiving happened fifty-six years earlier, not in Massachusetts but on the sandy shores of Florida. A Different Beginning In...

By Joe Marzo Credit : Florida Memory Rum, Rebellion, and the Wettest Spot in the South When the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect in 1920, Florida’s west coast should have gone dry. Instead, it only got wetter. Across the Tampa Bay area, from the smoky cigar lounges of Ybor City to the Greek sponge docks of Tarpon Springs, prohibition was more suggestion than law. Geography, culture, and commerce conspired to make Tampa Bay one of the most notorious rum-running hubs in the South. It was a...

By Joe Marzo A Quiet Florida Town Becomes the Center of the UFO World In late nineteen eighty-seven, the peaceful coastal community of Gulf Breeze, Florida, found itself at the center of one of the most controversial UFO cases in American history. The story began when a local building contractor, Ed Walters , claimed to have encountered a mysterious craft hovering near his home. What followed was a media frenzy, a flood of reported sightings, and decades of debate over whether Walters...