We went to Hollywood to stay at a house owned by my father's partner. We went to Hollywood Beach and enjoyed the white sand. Almost every year after that we went to Florida, visiting Ft. Lauderdale, Miami, Ft. Myers and Ft. Myers Beach. In those long ago day, Ft. Myers Beach was almost empty, with just a few shacky cottages on stilts, and we took a small car ferry to Sanibel for shelling, many years before the first bridge was built and Sanibel was developed.
Sanibel above and below
It's quite built up now with lots of condos and fancy houses, stores and restaurants. But they have preserved some areas and the beach is supposedly sancroant. The wildlife refuge is called, of all things, Ding Darling, after an environmentalist. "The refuge is part of the largest undeveloped mangrove ecosystem in the United States. It is world famous for its spectacular migratory bird populations."
"Ding" won two Pulitzer Prizes for his editorial cartoons. He often advocated protection of wildlife and was a pioneer in conservation of natural habitates. In 1934, President Roosevelt appointed "Ding" Darling as the Director of the U.S. Biological Survey, the forerunner of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Eventually, my parents settled on a double lot in the Florida Keys. I have tons of pictures which I will eventually copy into digital files. For now here are some internet pictures of Key Colony Beach. As I recall, KCB and its neighbor just north, Cocoa Plum Beach, were created in the early 50's by dredging shallows and piling up the coral/mud called marl. Eventually the two idlands were formed with canals, a marina, oceanfront property, and a sewer system with a water treatment facility, something rather rare for the Keys. 
Our place was almost at the point at the lower right where the canal meets the ocean. I think we were the fourth or fifth lot from the corner. We had our own boat landing and little beach where we often found great shells. Behind our place was an open area where we flew kites with the kids but which is now tennis courts and gardens.
We actually had a place called a botel for the first few years we spent there. It was on a canal and had a dock for our boat. Then my parents bought the house near the point which was very pretty and had a lovely yard Daddy doted on. He loved growing various tropical flowers as well as petunias and other things we would have had in the midwest.
Because the angle at which the island sat made the Atlantic beach face south instead of east, as one would expect, Mother often used to say in Florida, the sun comes up in the north. In the winter we would watch the sunrise and it really did seem like it rose from the north. And when we watch the rollers coming into the beach on a windy day, it seemed like we were looking east instead of south.
Many times the dolphins would come up the canal from the ocean, for the fish were plentiful in the quiet flats behind the island and they had breakfast lunch and dinner at the ready. For several years, there was one dolphin with a baby that came back until finally, the baby had taken off on its own, now full grown.
Actually this picture is much more like the views we had of free dolphins in the wild. The above pair was probably in one of the many dolphin shows.
Hungry Pelicans were frequent visitors to our pier.
Beautiful Key Colony Beach
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