ONE

COON DOG CONNOR AND AVIS SNIVELY

GRAM PARSONS SPRANG FROM RICH WHITE TRASH AND RURAL GENTILITY. THE antecedents of Ingram Cecil Parsons, né Ingram Cecil Connor III, were pure Faulkner, his upbringing a catalog of Southern dysfunction. The critical pathway of his ancestry brings together the moralistic complacency of small-town wealth and the hunger of the small-town hustler: two key routes to the American dream, played out in their most lurid Southern form. Out of generations of wanting sprang a man who never pursued anything because he was too busy fleeing from himself.

Gram came from money, vast amounts of it, and alcohol, in equally vast amounts. He had three parents—his father, Ingram Cecil “Coon Dog” Connor; his mother, Avis Snively; and his stepfather, Robert Parsons—and amid all their differences and conflicts, pedigree, money, alcohol, and self-destruction ran through their lives like the helix of their doomed Southern DNA.

COON DOG CONNOR came out of his sky. He tilted the shark-painted mouth of his black Grumman P-40 Warhawk into a blinding shaft of glare and dropped straight down from the sun. When he thumbed the red button centered on his joystick, the wing-mounted .50-caliber machine guns made the whole plane shudder. The balsa-wood Zero in his crosshairs exploded into flinders. Dead Jap aviators floated like eiderdown through the soft warm air over the far southwestern Pacific. Turning his fighter back to the sun in search of new prey, Coon Dog Connor never saw them splash.

When he touched down on the clanking metal airstrip, his canopy was already shoved back. Coon Dog’s mechanic ran alongside the plane in the crushing jungle heat, leaped onto the still-moving wing, and passed Coon Dog his celebratory bottle of Jack Daniel’s…or maybe it was Rebel Yell or Maker’s Mark or homemade jungle hooch; who knows?

Coon Dog Connor shot down numerous Japanese pilots over the Pacific Ocean in World War II, bombed and strafed even more of them when they were on the ground, and consumed vast quantities of whiskey, in the process becoming an Army Air Corps flying ace, a genuine war hero, and a certifiable alcoholic. After two years of aerial combat, Coon Dog sailed from New Guinea for Australia on a hospital ship. There he was treated for the malaria that eventually sent him stateside for good in 1944.

His specific flights, number of kills, and the date and route of his rotation back to the States vanished on July 12, 1973, when the Defense Department’s World War II archives in East St. Louis, Illinois, went up in flames as all-consuming as those that broiled Coon Dog’s airborne enemies. What we do know is where his unit served and in what battles they fought, and there’s no question of Coon Dog’s prowess, courage, or fightin’ want-to.

Ingram Cecil Connor was bred to the military. He and his brother, Tom, attended their father’s high school, Columbia Military Academy, in Columbia, Tennessee. Cecil’s folks were native Tennesseans. His father was born in Mount Pleasant in 1887, his mother in Columbia in 1889, and both would outlive their son by more than a generation.

Cecil’s dad came from a well-to-do farming family. His mom’s father was a lawyer. Amid the rolling hills and small lakes of eastern Tennessee, that placed both families solidly in the haute bourgeoisie. Though the two families had been in the South—and well off—for more than a hundred years, and though they had illustrious ancestors who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War, surviving family members insist that none of the Connors ever owned slaves. On this they are adamant.

After graduating from Draughn’s Business College in Nashville, Cecil’s father settled in Columbia. He worked as a sales rep for two Nashville hardware companies, Gray & Dudley and Keith-Simmons. He traveled for work and was seldom home during the week. He made an excellent living and provided a good life for his family.

Cecil, his younger sister, Pauline, and his brother, Tom, grew up on a dead-end street in a big formal house with an entrance hall, four bedrooms, and front and back porches. The front room held a piano and all three kids took lessons. Cecil’s mother’s side of the family supplied the musical genes. Cecil’s maternal grandmother, Ella Dotson Kelly, played the organ at Columbia’s First Methodist Church for thirty years. Grandma Kelly was always at the piano in the Connor parlor, playing but never singing. Cecil Connor never sang, either.

Pauline Wilkes, Cecil’s sister, recalls three kinds of music in the household: hymns, classical, and big band. She remembers Tommy Dorsey, Jimmy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, and especially “Moonlight Serenade.” The children took classical lessons three times a week, but their relationship to music was lighthearted. In high school and college Cecil clowned around with an old ukulele. When brother Tom attended Vanderbilt University, he followed in his grandmother’s footsteps and played organ in church. “We never listened to country music,” Pauline Wilkes says.

Cecil, Pauline, and Tom were raised in the old-school, small-town Southern manner, a manner that lingered well into the sixties. “We answered a question with ‘sir’ and ‘ma’am,’” says Pauline Wilkes. “We stood up when an adult entered the room; that was good manners. We never questioned anything our parents told us to do. If they told us to do something or not do something, that was all that was necessary. That was the way children were brought up in the South. My children were raised the same. Gram was raised that way too, until his father died.”

Columbia prospered as a mill town. When Maury County, of which Columbia is the county seat, was found to be full of phosphate, Monsanto and other big chemical companies built plants. The county’s economy was rock solid and thriving. Cecil’s father was on the road five days a week, but his family enjoyed their leisure.

Cecil’s dad had grown up on a gentleman’s farm; he was bred to the woods and loved hunting and fishing. As soon as his sons were old enough, they were given .410 shotguns. The .410 is a small gauge with a light kick, light enough for a young boy to shoot. Cecil Connor loved guns; he was an avid hunter and an excellent shot. In Columbia he hunted dove and quail, wandering through the fields with the family dogs; when he was stationed in New Guinea he wrote home of wild boar hunts in the jungle.

Their father bought the boys an Indian canoe in which they plied the local Duck River, paddling and swimming. Cecil had a best friend, Van Shapard, whom he met at the age of five; they stayed best friends for life. Together they took the canoe to the local landmark, Big Rock, for overnight campouts. Big Rock was known as the place where only boys swam. No girls were allowed.

Pauline Wilkes recalls lazy summer evenings with the neighborhood adults gathered on the deep shaded porch after dinner, watching their children play Kick the Can and Capture the Flag. Kids and parents always gathered at the Connor house.

All of Cecil’s people concur: For all the good it did him later, Cecil Connor, a beloved son in a loving family, lived a sheltered, privileged, stressless childhood and adolescence. Life came easily to Cecil, as it would to his son.

Cecil was a Boy Scout. And when he left the Scouts in his teenage years his passion turned to cars and airplanes. Cecil’s folks drove regular old vehicles, but Cecil dreamed of a red convertible. His other dreams centered on flight. He and his pal Van Shapard were always talking about planes and how they would learn to fly. When Cecil (and Shapard) entered Columbia Military, his ambitions were all about the Air Corps. The school closed after World War II, but for the time it had a demanding curriculum.

As a young man Cecil’s eyes seemed to slant a bit, so the first nickname he acquired at Columbia Military was “Chink.” That was the name everyone in town, children and adults, called him. “Chink” was in the old Southern manner, too.

Pauline Wilkes remembers her brother as “an extremely popular boy. He was a good-looking boy all his life. My friends would come over just to be with him.” Although Cecil dated often, he had no great love in high school. Already Cecil manifested the same quality of relaxed separateness that would mark his son.

Cecil grew to be manly, affable, charming, and socially at ease. At Columbia he became a student leader and the alpha of his social pack, pulling out his ever-present ukulele at parties and taking it on dates. In school he devoted himself to the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) to ensure that he would join the service as an officer, because it was officers who became pilots.

When Cecil graduated, he and Van Shapard set off for Alabama Polytechnic Institute in Auburn. Established in 1856 and made coed in 1892, the Polytechnic is today better known by the name it took in 1961: Auburn University. Van Shapard and Cecil studied aeronautical engineering and both were officers in the ROTC. Cecil’s family says he graduated in 1939. Auburn University disagrees; he attended Alabama Polytechnic, but no record exists that he left with a degree.

In any event, when Cecil was done with college, his and Van Shapard’s paths diverged. After joining the Army Air Corps together, Cecil stayed in the Army while Van Shapard opted for the Flying Tigers. Cecil would end up in the Pacific Theater; Van Shapard would fly “over the hump” from India to China over the Himalayas.

Cecil took his aviation training at Kelly Field in Texas. During training he drove around Kelly Field in the red convertible he’d always wanted. On May 11, 1940, he graduated flight school and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army Air Corps. His proud mother pinned his flight wings to his chest.

Cecil remained at Kelly Field until March 1941, when he transferred to Wheeler Field near Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. There Cecil Connor did not live like an ordinary officer. His life aligned more closely with the languidly structured peacetime pleasure dome depicted in From Here to Eternity. Cecil rented a house on Diamond Head and acquired another red convertible. In addition to being tall, handsome, socially adept, and well-to-do, Cecil was also a pilot, which at the time was among the coolest, most badass identities a man could earn. He lived in the most beautiful place in the world and he tore around that paradise in a new red convertible. Cecil Connor did not live like an Army Air Corps second lieutenant—he lived like a rock star.

The rock-star life came to a halt when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. Asleep on Diamond Head, Cecil was awakened by explosions—he could see Japanese planes over Pearl from his house. He leapt into his red convertible and raced to Wheeler Field. When Cecil got there, the base was a shambles. Bomb craters littered the runway, planes were burning on the ground, and the few hangars still standing were in ruins. There was nothing Cecil Connor could do. After the war, he told a coworker, “I didn’t even get up to my plane to get it cranked up…but I made up for that later on.” If in civilian life Cecil was sometimes regarded as a hard-drinking laggard with an overdeveloped gift for indolence, during the war there was no questioning his sense of duty or adventure.

With Wheeler Field destroyed, Cecil’s 6th Pursuit Squadron of the 18th Fighter Group shifted to Kahuku on Hawaii and later to Kipapa Field until they were sent overseas late in 1942. The 6th Pursuit had trained as interceptors, meaning they flew close support for bombers. In May 1942 their name was changed to the 6th Fighter Squadron, and later to the 6th Night Fighter Squadron. Their mission changed with their name. They would still escort bombers, but they were also turned loose to pursue aerial combat and to execute bombing and attack runs on their own. The 6th Night Fighters were sent to the Pacific to be aggressors.

In honor of their new name, their emblem became a gray skull outlined in black, the outline forming the hub of a spinning propeller blade in black on an orange background. Painted on the side of each plane below that emblem was the squadron’s nickname: the Flying Vampires.

Here history gets a little murky; surviving records address the Flying Vampires as a unit and not Cecil specifically. At some point in late 1942, the 6th Night Fighters headed out of Pearl Harbor to war. In January 1943 they spearheaded an extended attack on Japanese forces centered around Munda Airfield, on the island of New Georgia, in the Solomons. Cecil’s group attacked a Japanese transport at sea; they bombed an airfield on Bougainville Island; they assaulted Munda field repeatedly. All this was in support of the U.S. Marines’ invasion of and attempt to secure Guadalcanal Island.

At some point while fighting the war, stationed somewhere in the Pacific—most likely New Guinea—and bombing jungle airfields at night, Chink Connor became Coon Dog. And Coon Dog he remained for the rest of his life.

While coon was the South’s vilest, most hateful racial epithet during Cecil Connor’s time, there’s no evidence that his nickname derived from that slur. Cecil was a well-bred, civilized Southerner, and no one remembers him ever using or condoning that kind of language. But raccoon hunting was, and remains, a popular slice of backwoods Southern culture. And if you’re going to hunt raccoons, you got to have coon dogs. There are two ways of hunting raccoons, and neither could exist without the dogs. In one variant, the dogs track the scent of a raccoon, find the beast, harry it through the woods, and, if the raccoon outruns them—if it doesn’t turn and fight—chase it up a tree. When the hunters catch up to the dogs, which can take a while, they shoot the raccoon down so the dogs can rip it to shreds. Another method is more amiable: The hunters send their dogs out to find a raccoon somewhere in the summer night and sit around a fire drinking and listening as the dogs’ voices cut through the humid darkness. An experienced dog handler can tell when his hound is on the scent, when it’s on the chase, when it’s treed a raccoon, and when it lies down to sleep at the bottom of the tree. Dawn finds the dogs loping back into the camp from however far off they might have treed their prey.

It’s probably from those hounds that Coon Dog got his name. He became Coon Dog in New Guinea and never told anyone why. Raccoons, however, can be mean sumbitches when brought to bay. So coon dogs necessarily must be tough themselves. And fearless. And besotted with the hunt. Coon dogs are also Southern to the core; blessed with loping strides, gentle natures, and big, soft, brown eyes. As was Cecil Connor.

The Flying Vampires bombed enemy installations at Rekata Bay. They strafed Japanese bunkers while providing air support for ground troops on Guadalcanal. They ran a night raid—well out over the ocean—on Munda once more. On January 15, 1943, they attacked a flotilla of enemy destroyers at sea and shot down twelve Japanese floatplanes that rose to intercept them. The Flying Vampires, roaming over tiny island fortresses and vast waters, were ass kickers.

With Coon Dog in their midst, the Vampires kicked so much ass that the Japanese took personal notice. Throughout the war, the Japanese war ministry operated a propaganda radio show that broadcast war news (accurate when it reflected their gains, distorted when it did not) with a signal strength that could be received all over the Pacific. Marines at their bases, pilots at their fields, sailors on their ships: Everybody tuned in. The main draw was the voice of the broadcaster, a woman’s voice, almost completely free of Japanese intonation or accent, Americanized, feminine, sultry, and full of promising insinuation—what today we might regard as the perfect phone-sex operator’s instrument. This was Tokyo Rose, who every night went on the air to mock the American war effort. And every night the Americans listened.

Tokyo Rose allowed the Japanese to demonstrate, for a while anyway, their remarkable intelligence work and sometimes astonishing knowledge of the personal lives and habits of their enemies, whom they named on the air. More than once Tokyo Rose mentioned Coon Dog by his nickname and cited his fight wing, the Renegades. She named the targets Coon Dog hit and added, “But now you had better watch yourself. We know who you are and where you are and we’re going to get you.”

But the Japanese did not get Coon Dog. In July 1943, after being promoted to major, Coon Dog received the Air Medal. His commanding officer, General George G. Kenny, wrote to Coon Dog’s mom back home in Tennessee: “I would like to tell you how genuinely proud I am to have such men as your son in my command and how gratified I am to know that young Americans with such courage and resourcefulness are fighting our country’s battles against the aggressor nations. You, Mrs. Connor, have every reason to share that pride and gratification.”

Mosquitoes accomplished what the Japanese could not: Coon Dog’s flying days were ended by malaria. In August 1943, Coon Dog, wracked by blinding headaches, bone-shaking fevers, drenching night sweats, delirium, loss of weight, and the psychological punishment of being physically unable to fly (or get out of bed), was hospitalized in New Guinea. He left New Guinea by hospital ship en route to a long recovery in Australia.

He returned stateside in ’44, assigned as an air inspector to Bartow Field in central Florida. Upon arrival at his new station Coon Dog got another red convertible, a Buick. He did not discuss the war with his family. “I heard that most soldiers were changed emotionally,” his sister says, “but he didn’t talk to me about that. I don’t think he would talk to any of the family about anything sad.”

She adds, “Malaria certainly zaps your strings, and he had a hard time. It took him a long while to get his strength back, and he was as sweet as ever. If there was anything wrong, we certainly didn’t know it.”

While Coon Dog was down in Florida, he sent his family a letter telling them he had met a girl. That girl was Avis Snively. She and her family lived in Winter Haven, the town adjacent to Bartow Field. Avis was “a nice girl,” Coon Dog told his sister. But she was more than that. The Snivelys were one of the wealthiest families in the South. In Winter Haven, a center of Florida orange growing, they were outright royalty.

COON DOG came from people who stayed put, who had taken root in the rolling hills of middle Tennessee before the Civil War and had never strayed. Avis Snively’s ancestors arrived in America even before Coon Dog’s—by the time Avis was born to the Snively empire, her bloodlines had been American since before America existed—but the Snivelys showed more restless spirit, more entrepreneurial hustle.

The first Snively on these shores was Johan Jacob Schnebele, who fled Switzerland for Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1714. Genealogical records in Polk County, Florida—home to the Snively family seat of Winter Haven—record that Johan Jacob “came to this country to escape religious persecution and availed himself of the religious freedom guaranteed in the province of William Penn.” He became a Philadelphia citizen in 1729 and had one son, to whom he gave the English version of his own name, John. John begat two boys and christened the older one John as well. At some point Schnebele became Anglicized to Snively, and naming the firstborn son John became a Snively tradition.

Johan’s progeny were ambitious and headed west straightaway, establishing themselves in Ohio in the late 1700s. The Polk County records describe one of Avis’ eighteenth-century Snively forebears as “a woman of strong character, as family tradition tells us, who combined the habitual thrift of the German Swiss with the energy of the American pioneer.” Habitual thrift had leached out of the Snively gene pool by the time Avis came along, but not the strong character.

Johan’s great-great-grandson John A. came from the Ohio Snivelys. Or maybe the Pennsylvania branch; the documents are contradictory. His family lived on one side or another of the Pennsylvania-Ohio line. John A., born in 1889, worked for the railroad, and his regular run took him to Akron. There he met Dorothy De Haven, a member of a storied mid-American family. Dorothy’s ancestors, four brothers, loaned George Washington $450,000 in 1777 to help the government defray the expense of fighting the British. After the Revolution, the De Havens were offered restitution in (useless) Continental dollars and, prudently, refused. De Haven descendants are still dunning the U.S. government for a debt they claim has reached—with two-hundred-plus years of interest—something like $105 billion.

John A.’s family lived a few rungs lower on the social ladder. He courted Dorothy for five years before she agreed to their marriage, which took place in Akron on September 13, 1911. For their honeymoon they drove to Winter Haven, Florida, in the middle of the state, to visit Dorothy’s Aunt Florence, who had moved south for her health. Aunt Flo had so many visitors that her house gradually expanded to become a hotel, the Florence Villa. The De Havens dictated that the newlyweds should move to Winter Haven to look after Flo, so they did. Soon after their arrival, John A. purchased a twelve-acre orange grove.

Citrus had loomed large in Florida ever since the early 1500s, when the Spanish, or rather their Indian slaves, planted citrus groves around St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest city on the continent. A severe freeze in 1835 drove farmers to the warmer central part of the state, but even there the vagaries of the weather made citrus a boom-and-bust business that required perseverance and deep pockets. And it bred leisure, at least for those who owned the groves: Growers routinely took off the months of May to September.

Snively’s entry into the citrus business coincided with state efforts to stabilize the industry. In that same year, 1911, Florida introduced regulations that made it illegal to sell immature trees. Other rules that followed created standards for a properly ripened orange. (At the time, grapefruit were considered a backyard decorative fruit, something that looked nice hanging on a tree rather than destined for a table.) The new regulations meant statewide inspections and thus more standardization—a boon for large operators but not for small family farms.

John A. had only a fifth-grade education but no lack of the Snively pioneer spirit. Family members, business partners, and employees describe him as charming, shrewd, ambitious, domineering, and hard-assed. By the age of twenty-three he had become the family patriarch. His younger brothers, Thomas Vinton and Harvey Bowden Snively, moved to Winter Haven to work for their brother. Thomas came south in 1917 and Harvey in 1919. John ruled his brothers and two generations of subsequent Snivelys with an iron fist. He didn’t bother with the velvet glove. He was famous for his method of choosing business associates. A former partner describes John A.’s technique: “When a salesman, a fruit buyer, or whatever would come into his office, John A. would tell him: ‘Don’t say a word. Sit down on the couch.’ And he’d study him for a while, do a little business on the phone, keep looking at him a bit. Then John A. would say: ‘I don’t like you. Get out of my office.’ Or, ‘I like you. We’re gonna do some business.’”

John A. and Dorothy’s first child, a son, was born in 1915. Baptized John, the boy was known as John Junior and his dad became John Senior or Papa John. (The Snivelys and their cousins go by a confusing blizzard of nicknames. “Coon Dog” wouldn’t have fazed them for a second.) Dorothy De Haven Snively was called Haney all her life. Their older daughter, Evalyn, known as Dede, was born in 1919. Avis followed on June 8, 1923.

At first John Senior sold fertilizer and worked as a grove caretaker. Like a Horatio Alger hero, he learned the orange business from the ground up and worked hard. Unlike a Horatio Alger hero, he had backing. The money came from “Yankee investors” and his De Haven in-laws. As early as 1924 John Senior created Haven Villas Corporation, a land-development business. Haven Villas developed a pair of successful two-thousand-lot subdivisions. One, Florence Villa, was built right across the street from Haney’s aunt’s hotel and named in its honor. In 1925, brother Harvey cofounded the Snively-Giddings Construction Company, which built homes for subdivisions. Meanwhile Thomas Snively began as a field foreman and graduated to running the trucking department in the grove he supervised. He hired out planting groves and started a fruit-hauling business.

Freezes in 1917 and 1927 and the appearance of the dreaded Mediterranean fruit fly hit citrus growers hard. The apocalyptic freeze of 1927 drove orange prices up but the price of groveland down; small growers went bust all over central Florida. In 1928, exploiting the bust, John A. Snively bought a half interest in an eight-hundred-acre tract of orange groves. A few years later, with the Great Depression in full force and prices at their lowest, John Senior “bought everything in sight,” recalls Evalyn “Dede” Snively’s son, Rob Hoskins. “He was sitting in the driver’s seat. And when the country started coming out of the Depression he had property, he had income, he had a way of building a fortune faster.”

Where others failed, John A. Snively and his brothers prospered, buying out competitors as the Great Depression wiped them out one by one. They didn’t just buy groves. In 1934 John Senior and Thomas opened a packing house and incorporated as the Polk Packing Association. Twenty years later John Senior recalled that move in Snively Groves, a self-published book detailing his history in citrus. “Up until 1934 I spent my time selling fertilizer, taking care of groves for other people, and making groves for myself,” he wrote. “At that time business was so bad that I came to the conclusion that the only way to exist was to have a packing house of my own. Thus in 1934 I built a small unit on the present location and a great many of the people who are working here now helped to build that packing plant. Most of the lumber came from trees around the edges of our own groves. Many times that lumber was a green pine tree in the morning and part of the packing house that night.”

Another Snively acquisition was an undeveloped swamp that would become the lakes and gardens of the quintessential fifties tourist resort, Cypress Gardens.

Cypress Gardens made its money from Yankee snowbirds who came to experience elaborate tropical gardens festooned with beautiful Southern girls in antebellum dress. The main draw later became waterskiing stunt shows, with tanned, blond Floridians leaping off ramps and doing airborne tricks. The famous finale of the Cypress Gardens show was the appearance of their equivalent of the Rockettes: four handsome men and six young women waterskiing in a pyramid. The classic Cypress Gardens pyramid pose—head turned to show a gleaming smile, one arm straight out holding the towrope and the other straight overhead (sometimes grasping a flag)—became an icon for 1950s and early ’60s Florida tourism. A Cypress Gardens beauty in that pose would one day adorn the label on every can of Snively Groves orange juice and concentrate. But instead of a flag, the beauty on the label held aloft a can of Snively OJ.

Legend has it that in 1932 John Senior and waterskiing pioneer Dick Pope spent a drunken night betting on what they were seeing in the moonlight across a swampy lake. Was that a duck? Was it a manatee? After betting, the men jumped into John Senior’s boat, sped across the lake, and found out who was right. After Pope whupped John Senior in a few wagers, he said: “Lease me this damn swamp for ninety-nine years for a buck, and I’ll show you what I can do with it!” John Senior was game. He leased the lake and its surrounding lands—thirty-seven acres all told—to Dick Pope for ninety-nine years for the sum total of one dollar.

John Senior also loaned Dick Pope his start-up money and was repaid through a secret arrangement that granted John Senior 20 percent of Cypress Gardens’ stock. The Popes’ and Snivelys’ respective empires, Cypress Gardens and Snively Groves, would be intertwined for the next forty years, and in the end both dynasties would come to ruin in the hands of the founders’ firstborn sons. But Pope’s enterprise, absurd as it seemed at the outset, outlasted John Senior’s by twenty-some years: Cypress Gardens opened June 7, 1936, and drew tourists under its various owners until it finally closed on April 12, 2003.

On opening day, admission was twenty-five cents. Pope took a lot of grief from local papers for opening a tourist garden in an undeveloped swamp. They called him “the Swami of the Swamp” and “the Maharaja of Muck.” As Pope proved the skeptics wrong, those names faded and Pope became—possibly at his publicist’s behest—Mr. Florida. “Cypress Gardens,” says a spokesperson from the Central Florida Visitors and Convention Bureau, “put Polk County on the map in the 1930s.” And it’s arguable that Dick Pope is single-handedly responsible for the popularity of two mainstream American pastimes: waterskiing and going to Florida to visit a themed tourist park.

Florida’s image as a paradise playground was key to John A. Snively’s business, too. A former Cypress Gardens pyramid lovely, Cornelia Snively Wallace, married John Snively III, John A.’s grandson. (She later became the second wife of former Alabama governor and controversial presidential candidate George Wallace.) Cornelia remembers how John Senior attracted investors: “He played golf with all the Yankees. He told them if they wanted to invest in orange groves, they should pay for the land and he would grow the trees, tend the groves, and pick. The Yankees all wanted groves in Florida. They never seemed to care if they made money, and I don’t know if John Senior ever sent them any or not. Later John Senior would golf with richer Yankees, and he talked them into making loans to him. Because of the loans, his books never showed any profit, and he never paid any taxes.”

In 1938 John Senior built a house as a gift to his wife, Haney. Fashioned in a New Orleans mode, it was a two-story redbrick mansion with elaborate ironwork balconies and railings and faced with large white Tara-style columns. “Five bedrooms, five baths, a fireplace in the living room, dining room, master bedroom, and den, a sun porch downstairs, and a Florida room,” recalls grandson Rob Hoskins. “Fourteen-foot ceilings. The entry foyer had a spiral staircase, and every year a giant Christmas tree was in that entry. In the center of the house was a huge atrium with windows looking out at the lake.” (The Snivelys’ private lake, of course.) “Eat-in kitchen as big as a small house, and the master bath upstairs encompassed two-thirds of the kitchen. It had the first shower I ever saw with five shower heads.”

The family fortune was secured in 1945 with the development of the technology to make orange juice concentrate. Concentrated OJ became an American staple. Processing concentrate required a lot of oranges, and demand went through the roof. With that demand came the planting of ever-increasing acreage, the development of hardier, juicier oranges, and the building of more processing plants. More oranges also meant more boxes. John Senior merged Polk Packing with Snively Groves in 1956, creating one of the largest citrus operations in Florida.

In 1950 the entire complex was destroyed by fire. John Senior’s family and his business associates expected him to take the insurance money and move on to other investments. Instead he rebuilt everything, declaring both his determination that his empire continue and his concern for his workers. “He was a hard-ass, but he had a heart of gold when it came to his employees,” recalls his grandson Jack Snively. “He was a shrewd businessman but believed in taking care of his people.” In 1949 John Senior donated land down the street from the Snively Groves offices for an elementary school in the farming town of Eloise (now incorporated into greater Winter Haven). In 1959, after his death, the school was named the Snively Elementary School of Choice. A wing of the Winter Haven hospital also bears John Senior’s name. So does Snively Avenue.

As John Senior’s business grew, so did his local prestige. He invested in real estate and became a director of the Exchange National Bank of Winter Haven and a director of the railroad. There was no such thing as a Southern businessman of that era who wasn’t active in the Rotary Club, and John Senior became the Rotary’s local leader. He was a city commissioner, a Master Mason, a director of the Florida Citrus Exchange, and cofounded a powerful trade association, the Florida Citrus Mutual. It’s credited with “stabilizing the industry,” which presumably means setting prices, discouraging newcomers, and keeping the workers in line.

The Snivelys became the financial engine of Winter Haven. From late September to May, the Snively Groves employed upward of two thousand people, with fifty in accounting alone. Most of what comprises Winter Haven today beyond the downtown core was once all Snively Groves. Naturally, the family dominated the town’s social life, too. “The Snivelys were perceived as the crème de la crème,” says Dode Whitaker, one of Avis’ younger Winter Haven cousins. Although the admiration “centered on Haney and Papa John, the rest of the family was included. They lived like it, too. I remember when Haney got the first air-conditioned Cadillac. It was the only one in town and you had to go all the way to Tampa to get it…. If you saw that Caddy, you knew who it was.”

John Senior exerted his power at home as well, meddling in every aspect of his children’s lives. “He considered himself strictly a railroad man,” Cornelia Snively Wallace recalls. “He forbade any of his children to ever ride in an airplane. My father-in-law, John Junior, never set foot in one. He even rode the train to New York City to show his horses.”

Rob Hoskins tells the story that after his birth, his parents and grandparents were sitting in the den with the newborn when John Senior asked daughter Evalyn what her new son would call her. “Mom, I guess,” answered Evalyn. “He’ll call you Dede like everyone else!” thundered John Senior.

“And I did,” Hoskins adds. “I was sixteen or seventeen before I ever called Dede ‘Mother.’”

John Senior routinely intervened between his children and grandchildren. “When my mother divorced my father, John Senior gave him a handful of cash and an ultimatum,” Rob says. “He disappeared and I never heard from him until I was twenty-one years old.”

Younger generations of Snivelys describe Rob’s mother, Dede, as the brains of the family. Later, everyone knew how frustrated she was when the Snively kingdom passed to her much less capable brother, John Junior. “John Senior was smart enough to know that Dede should have been the one to run the company,” cousin Dode Whitaker says. “She had a fantastic business brain. But he couldn’t leave it to her. She was a female and he wasn’t going to leave Snively Groves to a female.”

The universe Dede and her younger sister, Avis, grew up in regarded men as leaders and women as ornaments. All of Avis’ life, her money would be under the control of men, starting with her father. She was groomed to spend it in the style befitting her station as not just a Southern belle but a Snively princess.

She was sent to the Gibson School, a private girls’ school in Winter Haven. The curriculum centered on horseback riding. The Snively driver took her to and from school each day. Later Avis boarded at a finishing school, the Southern Seminary, in Buena Vista, Virginia.

During her high school years, Avis grew into a Southern beauty. “She didn’t walk, she floated,” Dode Whitaker remembers. “She had a bit of an accent, was caring, gracious. She was almost like Princess Grace. She didn’t demand attention but you wanted to give it to her.”

Avis attended Fairmont College in Fairmont, West Virginia, then transferred to the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, where she spent most of World War II. She joined the Phi Mu sorority, becoming president of the house her senior year. “Our house wasn’t the most frivolous,” her roommate and friend, Rosina Rainero, recalls. “We weren’t thought of as the best social house. Girls actually cared about getting good grades. Avis was the only girl that was loaded.” Haney, Avis’ mother, came up to Tuscaloosa to visit. She donated, in Avis’ name, an ornate silver coffee service to the sorority. The other girls were stunned by the lavish gift.

Avis finished school in 1944 with a bachelor of arts degree in home economics. Rosina Rainero says, “She could have been anything at all, but she had no interest in a career.”

AVIS CAME HOME AFTER GRADUATION and met Coon Dog. While stationed at Bartow Field, near Winter Haven, he and seven other pilots, including his hell-raising buddy Whiskey Jack, rented a Mediterranean-style mansion from an heiress to the Packard automobile fortune. They called the mansion the Purity Palace. Avis and her girlfriends visited the Palace because they’d heard it was full of crazy pilots. Avis and Coon Dog soon became as inseparable as the service and Coon Dog’s antics allowed.

“She told me about him right away,” Rosina Rainero recalls. “She was crazy about him. I said, ‘Well, when do you think you’re getting married?’ She said, ‘Oh, he hasn’t asked me yet.’”

In 1945 Coon Dog was transferred to an airfield in Perry, south of Tallahassee, where he served as an intelligence officer instructor. There he made do with less luxurious accommodations. One drunken night he and Whiskey Jack played “chicken”: They both wanted the same parking place and each thought the other would back off. Neither did. Coon Dog drove his red Buick convertible right through the wall of his barracks. Whiskey Jack smashed his dark blue Oldsmobile convertible through the wall next to Coon Dog. Both ended up restricted to base.

During the week Coon Dog went to the movies alone every night. On weekends Avis made the two-hundred-mile drive from Winter Haven up to Perry. She never missed a single weekend while Coon Dog was confined to base. They went to on-base movies; there was nothing else to do. But it’s not unimaginable that Coon Dog snuck off the base on some weekend nights. Avis stayed in town at a hotel. That she even drove up from central Florida alone in her own car, never mind got her own hotel room and perhaps met her boyfriend there, suggests the kind of free, wild spirit Avis possessed.

“And then,” Coon Dog’s sister, Pauline Wilkes, remembers, “he called us one night to say he was asking her to marry him.”

The wedding was set for March 22, 1945. Pauline Wilkes rode the train from Columbia, Tennessee. She stayed with the Snivelys for a week of luncheons with the girls and family dinner parties, some at the homes of Snively friends, others at restaurants. There were cocktail parties every night and dinners after the parties. Coon Dog’s parents and brother came down right before the wedding. When they met the Snivelys, the Connors were amazed. Coon Dog had not told them about the Snively mansion or the endless acres of Snively orange groves or the phalanx of liveried Snively servants or the millions and millions and millions of Snively dollars. The Connors, typical of the Southern small-town genteel elite, put great store in quiet, insular confidence. They avoided displays of ostentation as they would scandal. The Snivelys were one of the wealthiest families in the South; they made no secret of their love of display.

Aside from the opulence of the Snively lifestyle, Pauline Wilkes was struck by their fondness for alcohol in a time and place where many among the genteel regarded drinking as sinful and uncouth. “I didn’t have alcohol in my home, and when I went down there it was the first time I was exposed to it being in the home,” Wilkes says. “I was surprised by how much there was and how freely it flowed. Avis and I were the same age. She was drinking cocktails before dinner and that sort of thing. I was unaccustomed to cocktails every night. The Snivelys were big into alcohol.”

Coon Dog had grown into something of a patrician in bearing: He conveyed confidence, worldliness, and expectation. He did not seem awed or seduced by the Snively millions. But as it turned out, Coon Dog was outgunned. The Snivelys did not regard themselves as patricians. They regarded themselves as deities. No one in their solar system had their money, prestige, or power.

Coon Dog was marrying into the family as it was rising to what turned out to be the peak of its wealth and prominence. The Snively view of the marriage was not that the two families were blending, but that Coon Dog was coming under the auspices of the Snivelys. “My family were always suspicious of anyone who married into the family and what their intentions were,” says Jack Snively, the son of Avis’ brother, John Snively Junior. “My family viewed most outsiders as gold diggers. [A marriage] wasn’t because they were in love with someone but because they wanted the money. Especially if they didn’t come from a wealthy background.”

Given that attitude, “under the Snively auspices” could be an oppressive place.

Coon Dog and Avis were married at the Snively mansion. “Avis was absolutely gorgeous at her wedding,” Snively cousin Dode Whitaker says. “Porcelain skin, dark hair. She was on the grand staircase with her gown trailing down…swirling around her.” The Winter Haven Sentinel society columnist’s write-up of the “exquisitely simple” ceremony was suitably breathless, describing the banks of calla lilies, the bridal gown of heavy ivory slipper satin, and the reception, in which “the dining table of antique inlaid mahogany was covered with Belgian linen and filet lace and centered with the three-tiered wedding cake. Rolls filled with creamed chicken, mints in the shape of wedding rings and orange blossoms, salted nuts, wedding cake and champagne were served the guests.”

After the wedding the newlyweds moved to Perry for a few months until Coon Dog served out his time. He was honorably discharged from the Army Air Corps on August 20 with the rank of major. He had spoken of a career in civil engineering, but the Snivelys had other plans.