Theodora Long

Partial Transcript: Hi I’m Theodora Long and I’m the executive director of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center here in Crandon Park on Key Biscayne Florida.

Partial Transcript: Well, the Everglades - there's only one in the world as Marjory Stoneman Douglas states in her book. And uh - it’s how freshwater gets from Lake Kissimmee down through Lake Okeechobee into Florida Bay. So basically, it helps purify the water - our drinking water.

Partial Transcript: I really don’t - I’m not really an expert on the Everglades so I would prefer not to - uh - talk about - I thought you wanted to talk about Marjory’s role in education and things like that. That I’m very good at speaking about but Everglades ecosystems and what makes it work and not work is not my forte.

Perhaps uh Connie Washburn can - is - is much more equipped and you would get those answers from her. Cause they’re an advocacy group so they understand what they’re fighting to protect where whereas I’m fighting to educate just the general public about nature in general so that they have an interest in saving the Everglades.

Partial Transcript: Well, nature tantalizes all your five senses and, you know, the human body wants to use all their five senses so whether you can smell it, touch it, feel it - uh - that - that’s - that’s what brings you to nature and that’s what encourages you to walk, ride your bike - uh - get your feet wet in the ocean or the stream and - uh - so - uh - that’s how nature promotes itself to the human being, I think.

Partial Transcript: Well, when she took the train from New York down to Florida, - um - she fell in love with Florida, she fell in love with the Everglades, the train, all the birds, - uh - the palm trees, the breeze, the humidity, all of that she just embraced wholeheartedly. And she hate - she came and she lived along the Miami River with her father, Frank Stoneman, and wrote for the newspaper and got to know the early settlers of Miami as the gossip columnist for the paper. And it was uh - I think, just like I had said here, you know, Florida - uh - tantalized all her senses. She - she loved the smell of things in bloom, the birds flying, the beauty of it all. Uh - she loved to swim so she would swim every day so it was - uh - she just embraced it wholeheartedly.

Partial Transcript: She got the call from the publisher that said “Marjory I’d like you to write about the Miami River” and she said the “Miami River is, you know, about a mile long and it’s not very interesting”. But she also didn’t want to lose the book - uh - contract so she said “Give me a day or so” and she talked to some of her constituents that she knew here in Miami and she said “What if we wrote about the everglades? Could - could we prove there’s a flow to the everglades.” And she got a few scientists together, friends of hers, and they were able to prove that - uh - the everglades flows four miles per hour. So it comes very slow pace but it does move and it goes from Lake Kissimmee down to Lake Okeechobee and into Florida Bay through the Everglades. And - uh - so she went back to the publisher and said “What about if I write about the Everglades and call it the river of grass?” So, um, that’s what her book is all about. She explains how that happens and also how the developers in the early teens and twenties tried to stop up the Everglades and build - um - dams and dikes and all kinds of stuff to stop the flow so they could build hundreds - to make little cities in the everglades. And she was - her book, in 1947, really championed that the Everglades needed to be preserved. It was an ecosystem like no other, in the whole country or the whole world, and - uh - she spent the rest of her time - uh - talking about that; first promoting the book and then later in life, in the sixties when they were trying to build a second Miami airport in the everglades, that’s what got her involved in fighting the jetport. So, twenty years had gone by since she had written the book, "River of Grass", - uh - only to get more involved and forming Friends of the Everglades and becoming a true advocate for the - uh - the Everglades.

Partial Transcript: I really wasn’t aware that there was other women that tried to save the Everglades before Marjory, that’s - uh - a new - a new one on me. I know that she worked very closely with Ernest Coe - um - to form Everglades National Park, which would help the general public know more about the Everglades. And that was - uh - I - she was a big supporter of his and they kind of worked hand and hand in getting, you know, the general government to form Everglades National Park. So, um, I’m not familiar with other women. I know Marjory worked with other women on women’s suffrage and other issues but not about the Everglades.

Partial Transcript: Well, Marjory, since her father ran the Miami Herald and her being a well-known writer and poet, - uh, you know - she supported herself with her short stories and her books. Um - and she wrote, you know, um – “Florida the Long Frontier-(regions of America)” nine Florida stories; most of them were - were fiction but they definitely spoke about the natural environment and the true Florida. So - um - in that sense, in her fiction writing, she brought that to everyone’s attention. She wrote, I want to say, seventy, eighty short stories in the Saturday Evening Post, which went nationwide for people. So, she wrote stories that people read throughout the United States. And they were all mostly about Florida whether it was about the swamps or the beauty of the birds. One thing or another. So - um - I think in her own way, that was her way in bringing the Everglades to the nation.

Partial Transcript: Everyone thinks Marjory Stoneman Douglas was a wealthy woman and she really wasn’t, she didn’t have but two nickels to rub together. She built her little cottage in Coconut Grove in 1924. She lived on the royalties, of which weren’t very much, of the "River of Grass" and all of her other books. And she wrote for the short stories - uh - like I said, for the Saturday Evening Post. So ladies of Coral Gables and Mrs. Merrick and all the famous wealthy women of Miami kind of took care of Marjory and, you know, shared their clothes, their jewelry, and Marjory - uh - she liked getting all dressed up and being prim and proper coming from Massachusetts, being a graduate of Wellesley. That was kind of - she was a very social person; loved to have people come visit her at her house - um. I got to know Marjory late in her life. She was trying to save a - a piece of property in Coconut Grove next to the Barnacle State Park.

Anyway, Marjory was a very social person. Uh - you’ll learn from Toby Muir that Helen Muir, one of her good friends, lived on Stewart Avenue with her. And Stewart Avenue has a very slight hill and Marjory and Helen would get together every day and, as two writers, they would talk about what books they were planning to write. What publishes were calling them, what was - what was going on. And Marjory would walk up the hill to Helen’s house and they would have a cocktail and then Helen would walk Marjory back down to her house and they’d have another cocktail and they - um - Yeah, anyway they - uh - loved having - uh - company. And - um - both women were very social but Marjory would always invite you over to her house and as soon as you walked in she would say, “Tell me everything you've been doing.” And to the average person, that was going to the market, doing laundry, driving to work, doing whatever everyday chores are and that’s not what she meant. She wanted to know had you called the governor about saving the Florida panther, had I called the governor about whatever, had I written to my state senator, state representative. Uh - she was constantly pushing people to follow your passions, fight for your passions, and through sitting and having drinks or a cup tea with her, - uh - that’s how she encouraged you to do - to do things. And - uh - so.

Partial Transcript: Well, Marjory had a saying, “When you know you’re right, there’s no need to compromise.” So she’d never let down on the people. She continued to - uh - tell them “This is how it needs to be.” And she never veered left or right. People used to go up to her at the age of a hundred and say, “Marjory, thank you for saving the Everglades” and she would say, “It’s not saved yet” and “What have you done lately about that.”

Partial Transcript: Well, when I met Marjory, she came to my son’s school, little - uh - private school in Coconut Grove, and said, “Mothers, I need your help. We’re going down city hall next Tuesday and we’re going to fight this developer that wants to cut down this hardwood hammock, you know, along Biscayne bay, and I need you to step up to the microphone. I will speak first, and speak from the heart, and if you wanna preserve this hammock, you would just speak your mind and hopefully they'll listen.”

Partial Transcript: At the program here at - in Crandon Park started in 1969 by another friend of Marjory’s, Mable Fentress Miller. And she was a fifth-grade school teacher, Miami Dade County, and, being a friend of Marjory’s, she went over to Marjory’s house and said, “You know, it’s really difficult to teach children about nature in the class out of a textbook.” And she said, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could take them out and they could just see it, touch it, smell it, feel that breeze on their face, smell the ocean, smell low tide - uh - see the birds, the shore birds, it would just sell itself.” And Marjory said, “Well, we should do that.” And Marjory - um - again, having influences cause her father owned the newspaper, and - uh - she was well known for her writing, they went to the school system and the program started as a camp. And - uh - started on the side - the backside of a hotdog stand here in the park. They were flipping burgers and hotdogs on one side, and Mabel and her fellow - um - uh - teachers were - uh - teaching about nature. They had some fish in the fish tank, they had caught right in the seagrass beds. They had little mangroves growing in another tank. And they were, you know, exploring nature, walking the trails. -- Yeah key Biscayne is in the flight pattern.

So from 1969 to 1985, - uh - well, two years after the summer camp, 1971, it became a year-round program. The school system saw that it was a great program, children really enjoyed it, and they found funding to bus the children, you know, sixty, a hundred children a day, out and let them walk the beach. And the purpose they - they picked Crandon Park is, we have all the ecosystems here. We have the seagrass beds, we have the hardwood hammock, we have the dunes system, we have mangroves. And basically, you know, those are - uh - besides the pine Rockland, uh - every ecosystem is right here in Crandon. So you didn’t have to get back in the bus and travel to another location. You could tour and learn about all the ecosystem in Florida in one stop. So, the program from 1971 - uh - up to eighty-five, was still running out of the back of the concession stand. And then Marjory went before the school system - um - and she had gone before the school system several times, because, again, they always wanted to cut the budget and cut the program. And finally, she said to Mabel, “I am ninety-five years old, I am not going to live forever, and we need to get the community behind this school program. So that the next time I have to go and ask them not to cut the funding, there’s whole line of people behind me - citizens that think this is just as important as I am.” She went home, and with the help of Toby Muir, they - uh - her lawyer, she got eight of her best friends and they formed a non-for-profit group called “the Biscayne nature center.” And their whole mission is to build a nature center by the sea to educate the general public and to encourage better citizen participation in its conservation and preservation. So, had a very small mission, I mean, basically a very big mission, but short and to the point. Uh - didn’t have a lot of details but they would be a permanent nature center where people could come, get information, take guided tours, take self-guided tours, and just explore nature - um - and enjoy it.

Partial Transcript: I met her, like I said earlier, from - uh - I met Marjory in 1984. My oldest son was four years old in junior kindergarten. And that’s when Marjory came to the school and said - uh - “Ladies, I need your help.” And as mothers, we all - there were only twenty children in the class or - um - less than two hundred children in the whole school but all of us went and stood behind Marjory. She was that - uh - that encouraging or she - she didn’t take no for an answer so that was - uh. So we all went and we fought that developer for quite a few years. The property got put on the coral-list, which is the endangered land list. And - um - unfortunately, probably ten years ago, and we’re talking, that’s thirty-five years ago when she was fighting it, but ten years ago, developers finally did win - um - the battle because the state of Florida never did buy the land, and - uh. But it didn’t turn into a shopping mall like the original plan, it’s a nice residential community where they didn’t chop down all the trees, only a few, and they nestled - uh - uh - the development is now called “The Cloisters.” Um - so that was my first introduction to Marjory Stoneman Douglas. Uh - fundraising, trying to raise money to hire lawyers, fight the developers. And then in 19 - I want to say - 1987-88, she came to the junior league of Miami and I was a member, I still am a member of the junior league of Miami, and at ninety-five years old, she shuffled down the aisle with two-hundred - uh - women of Miami in the audience and said, “Ladies I need your help. I just formed a non-for-profit group called the Biscayne Nature Center and I Want to build a nature center by the sea.” And each junior league member has to select a project each year to work on for the community, and I was a little tired of helping raise money and do - uh - black tie parties and things like that, I wanted a more hands-on project so I signed up as a volunteer for the Biscayne nature center. And I volunteered - that project stayed with the junior league for three years. Uh - we helped - uh - put together a fundraising - uh - plan so to speak and - uh - through that Marjory was getting older and she wasn’t leaving the house so much so I also volunteered a couple of days a week while my sons were in school to go read to Marjory; So I got to know her pretty well by going by the house three times a week. Her housekeeper Medina would get to go to the bank and the market while I was there - uh - talking with Marjory, and it turned out to be very enlightening cuz she then -uh- I learned better how what her plan was, why she wanted to, why she thought it was so important and why she thought the children are the next generation and if we don’t teach them to protect the environment, no one will, and it will be here for generations to come.

Partial Transcript: I guess my fondest memory was we were planning her hundred and fourth, hundred and fifth birthday party, and I’m over at her house reading to her, and she, some days she would get a little feisty; she’d say, “I don’t find what you’re telling me very interesting.” I would be reading from Scientific America or Audubon magazine. I always thought, “Oh, I need to find something interesting to read to her,” and we got talking about her birthday and she was like, “Oh, go in the kitchen and…” - you know - “...see what we have to serve the guests” and - uh - ”What dress will I wear?” and “Who will we invite?” and - uh - it was a fun afternoon planning her birthday party and getting her excited about that, and you know, she was like, “Call up George Rosner, see if we have enough money to go to the hairdresser.” And, you know, so she wanted to get all gussied up for, you know, her hundredth and -uh- fifth or sixth birthday. I can’t remember which one it was. And - uh - my sons always teased me because after Marjory had quite a few one hundredth birthday celebrations here in town, and the next year they decided to have it at her house, and I helped, and we brought all the silver tea service and we brought all the food for the guests, and - uh - I made my two sons who were probably at that time, um, you know, eight and twelve years old, and actually put the jacket and tie, this is Marjory’s hundred and first birthday, she may not live to next, we have to make this special. And they - they - they - you know - succumbed to the encouragement and helped me load the car and we go and we celebrate Marjory’s birthday. And, you know, god willing, she lived to be a hundred and two, and the same routine: lugging all the stuff to her house. And, finally, when she was a hundred and five, my son said, “We’re not putting on the jacket and tie. We - Marjory, is going to outlive you, mother --” And, um, you know *laughs* “stop telling us she may not live for another year.” So - uh - it got to be a bit of a - of a family giggle. But - uh - we were lucky that we had her for a hundred and eight years, yeah. And Joe Browder, who was Marjory’s best friend, he would come every year on her birthday and visit at the house. And on that hundred-and-eighth birthday, Joe was here, and - uh - she recognized his voice. You know, her eyesight was not very good. She used to wear glasses that were like thick as - you know - and - uh - she heard Joe’s voice and said, “Joe! Joe, tell me - tell me everything that’s going on. What’s going on with - you know - big sugar? And where did we get on Canal whatever.” And - um - uh - Joe just, you know, they sat and held hands, it was just like, what a moment. So at a hundred and eight years old, she was still eager to hear what was - what success were happening, where were they still struggling, and Joe Browder, at that time - uh - was a lobbyist and had a big firm in Washington DC and was tapping into all the senators and house of representatives and other lobbyist, so - uh - he was up to date on all that stuff. But they had a very - a very keen bond and unfortunately Joe Browder passed away last year. And - uh - we no longer have him to tell wonderful stories about how the Everglades - but he was a big force in making - uh - big changes in the Everglades. And, again, Connie could probably talk better about that.

Partial Transcript: Well, certainly this nature center. We have over thirty thousand people come through the nature center a year. Two hundred children a day come on a field trip and they walk the trails, which is behind me with a hundred and sixty-five acres of pristine hammock. Uh - it’s left in its natural state; whether the hurricanes come, the hurricanes go, it’s left like nature - um - and very ironic, in 1976, Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Mabel Miller, who started the school program, had the one hundred and sixty-five acres behind the nature center between here and bear cut, declared - um - uh - an environmental study area. Which, you know, probably then, they just gave the two ladies a piece of paper to appease them. Mabel didn’t give up either. She was always pushing to educate the public and - um - but today, you know, their foresight is unbelievable because from 1976 to now, Miami - there’s hardly an inch of green space left. Everyone’s fighting for the last little acre and we had a hundred and sixty-five acres behind the building here. We’re less than six miles from downtown Miami, which is turning into, like, a cement jungle, with, you know, forty stories, sixty stories buildings, seventy stories hotels. And - um - so when you - uh - reflect back on that, they were really pioneers in their time and thinking ahead about - about the future.

Partial Transcript: Well, what we - we try to instill in the two hundred children that come every day is fight for your passion. You know, not everyone is - is enthralled with the everglades, who doesn’t like mosquitos, who doesn’t like, you know - uh - the outdoors isn’t for everyone but if you’re interested in something or about something, take it as far as you can. One person can make a difference. I think that's what we - and I think that’s her legacy - uh - for everyone. And it’s been unfortunate that the Parkland Florida incident happened, and - but it was also a very ironic that the school was named the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. And, as I watched, and other people who knew Marjory Stoneman Douglas, we all called each other and said, “Isn’t it wonderful that these students have stepped up to the microphone and just speak so eloquently, so well spoken, well-educated to the point, they’re not going in every which direction. They decided what their issue was and they’re not letting up on it.” And we have to commend them and - um - it’s just - I - you know, as much as we hated hearing the Marjory Stoneman Douglas massacre, like every time I heard that on the television, I was like, “stop calling it that!” But - um - but it made Marjory’s name being out - being reintroduced nationwide, perhaps it was in 1947 when she was writing for the Saturday Evening Post. But a lot of people have been born and, you know, died since then. And - uh - so it definitely made people look up who is Marjory Stoneman Douglas, what did she stand for, and - uh - it’s very ironic that the students are just, more or less, following in her footsteps. So, and more ironic is the school never really told the students who Marjory Stoneman Douglas was, it wasn’t something that they preached at the school, it kind of just evolved and happened.

Partial Transcript: Well, there’s not many people following after Marjory. You know - uh - I wish - uh - everyone’s life has gotten so busy, everyone’s trying to - um - pay their bills, working, you know, way long hours. And no one has - is really sitting being focused on who’s going to save the environment. Um - we - uh - yeah. All those old-timers are slowly fading away and - um - yeah. It’s - it’s kind of - kind of sad. But I think people are just too busy and, yeah. We need to - uh - I think it - it - there’s going to be a change because, you know, everyone’s connected to their computer, not being outdoors, everyone finds themselves sitting inside with their computers, with their telephones, and people are wishing - they’re now having, like, “ok, Friday afternoon, I’m shutting my phone off. I’m actually having peace and quiet so that I can have a thought, have an idea, and do something that’s passionate.” We have so many people come to the nature center and say, “How can I help? I want to get off this spinning wheel and I wanna - and I’m passionate about the environment and, you know, how can I come and do more or be inspired by what you’re doing here?”