More Tellable Cracker Tales by Annette J. Bruce

Author:Annette J. Bruce
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pineapple Press
Published: 2015-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

Fingy Conners

Well, now, if you are a young sprout—that is, if you haven’t celebrated at least sixty birthdays—chances are good you have never read the comic strip “Bringing Up Father.” Between the 1920s and 1950s, George McManus created this comic strip, which appeared in more than 750 papers worldwide in 27 different languages. It spawned seven stage shows that toured the United States for eleven years, was dramatized on radio, and was made into a movie five times. There is no way of knowing how many tellers and writers were inspired by this popular real-life story.

It seems that when McManus was a young artist, he fell in love with the blond, beautiful daughter of the millionaire W. J. “Fingy” Conners. While Fingy had no objection to the proposed marriage, his society-minded spouse found that McManus was not on the social register and squelched the romance. But McManus got his revenge. In his comic strip, he gave Conners and his wife the names Jiggs and Maggie and was able to capture the essence of real people, which made the humor believable and endeared his comic characters to millions of readers. Okeechobee historians A. J. and Kathryn Hanna, after some research, concluded that the likeness between Fingy and Jiggs is startling. Fingy was a ringer for Jiggs, right down to his corned-beef-and-cabbage diet.

W. J. Conners started out life the hard way. At only thirteen, he was a cabin boy on a Great Lakes freighter. When he was big enough, he was a stevedore on the docks at Buffalo and got into a fistfight ’most every day. It was in one of these scuffles that he got the broken fingers that gave him the nickname Fingy. In time, by dint of honest toil and a little political finagling, Conners became boss of all the stevedores and soon made a fortune. It was then that “Maggie” dragged him to Florida to shine in the high society of Palm Beach.

In February 1917, Conners attended a swanky dinner celebrating the opening of the Palm Beach Canal and first heard about the Everglades. He couldn’t stand still until he got a boat to take him to Lake Okeechobee. No sooner did he get there than he spent $40,000 for four thousand acres of sawgrass muck. And since Conners still had some money left, he bought the town site of Okeechobee and a few thousand acres of swamps and prairies thereabouts. Then, to round out his holdings, he bought all the lakeshore land still lying loose between Okeechobee and Canal Point. This twelve thousand acres cost him another $700,000.

Conners stood on the shore at Canal Point and exclaimed, “I own all the property from here slam to Okeechobee City, and yet I can’t even get to the cussed land. Why, dagnabbit, I can’t even set foot on the property to see what I’ve bought!” So he decided he’d build a road. He hightailed it up to Tallahassee, where the legislature was in session. It took the lawmakers two hours and twenty minutes to pass his highway bill.

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