"Welcome to Florida" by Craig Pittman

Craig Pittman is one writer who doesn’t have to spend a lot of time digging up story ideas. As a 30-year veteran of the Tampa Bay Times and now a reporter for the Florida Phoenix, Pittman gets tips online or by phone as well as having dozens of reliable sources who will alert him to the latest goings-on in his home state of Florida.

Florida has been Pittman’s beat for decades. “Nine hundred people move to this state every day. I look at it as my job to tell them what they’re in for. A lot of people think Florida’s history started with Disney World, but there’s a lot more going on,” said Pittman, named a Florida Literary Legend by the Florida Heritage Book Festival in 2020. “That’s a living legend,” said Pittman. “That’s the important part.”

Florida has gone through plenty of changes over the years, he said. “In the 1940s, we were the getaway state. In the 1950s, we found that cities like Tampa and others were Mafia-dominated. In the 1960s, you had the Kennedy Space Center. In the 1970s, of course, you had Disney World. By 2000, we became known for the (presidential) election we botched,” said Pittman.

His newest book, Welcome to Florida—True Tales from America’s Most Interesting State (University Press of Florida), is a collection of Pittman's recent columns and articles, all about Florida, that most interesting of states. 

Whether writing about developers and a place once known as Jackass Junction or Jimmy Buffett who founded the Save the Manatee Club in 1981 and supported the effort right up until he died in 2023, Pittman captures your interest with his stories. 

“To me, the manatee represents what we all like about Florida—kind of cruising in warm, clear water and not bothering anybody,” said Buffett in Pittman’s book.

Pittman wrote about manatees just last week in the Florida Phoenix in a story  citing the 2,000 manatees that starved to death because the seagrass they depend on for food was wiped out by the consequences of human pollution.

“When you only have about 6,000 manatees to start with, that’s a problem,” said Pittman, who acknowledges that Florida faces severe environmental challenges in the era of climate change.

“Florida is the flattest state in the union, and we’re surrounded on three sides by water. So that water comes surging in. We’re also the hottest state, with temperatures even rising at night. They call it the Sunshine State but most of Florida’s cities get more rain than Seattle. That leads to more mosquitoes and mosquito-related disease,” he said.

More intense hurricanes are doing more damage than ever, but the mantra remains “we will rebuild” instead of “retreat from the beach,” said Pittman. While the governor and a developer-friendly legislature don’t offer much in the way of leadership on climate-change issues, Pittman sees another group weighing in. “The property insurance companies see the pace of disaster,” he said, noting that higher rates or an exodus of insurance firms from the state will likely set the agenda for action.

While he never tires of writing about his home state (Welcome to Florida is his seventh book), Pittman said he may try his hand at fiction next. “I wrote about Tim Dorsey (the Florida novelist who died in 2023) in the book. Usually, Tim would slip in some scenes that directly reference real ‘Florida Man’ headlines. There was the one about the guy who tossed an alligator through a Wendy’s drive-through window. Maybe there’s room for another wacky Florida crime novel. We’ll see,”  he said.