Merlin Classics, 3400 Equestrian Club Drive, Wellington, FL (2026)

09/02/2026

It is illegal to wear high heels in Carmel-by-the-Sea. It has been since 1963, and City Hall will happily give you a permit.
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Part II of III — link in bio 👆
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The poets got organized. In 1929 city attorney Argyll Campbell drafted Ordinance No. 96 and Carmel adopted it as something close to a constitution: the village was “primarily, essentially and predominantly a residential city,” and business would be “subordinated to its residential character.” Locals call it Carmel’s Magna Carta. It is still the law, and it hangs on the wall behind the council.
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Everything else follows from that sentence.
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The trees came first. Carmel calls itself a city within a forest: the pines and cypresses are planted irregularly on purpose, so streets read as woods rather than grid. The city keeps a forester and more than 13,000 public trees. Removing a tree on your own lot takes a permit. Cutting a four-inch limb takes a permit.
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Then the consequences. Trees mean roots, and roots buckle pavement. So the pavement stays informal: no sidewalks outside the small downtown, no parking meters, no streetlights. Bring a flashlight.
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Which brings us to the shoes. In 1963 the city attorney looked at the root-heaved brick and saw a lawsuit. His fix was Ordinance No. 87, now Chapter 8.44 of the code: heels over two inches with less than a square inch of bearing surface are prohibited on public streets and sidewalks — without a permit. The ordinance explains itself with a straight face: the “urban forest character” requires “some informality” in lighting and surfacing, which poses “greater risk to those wearing high heeled shoes more adaptable to formal city life.”
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The permit is free. You sign it at City Hall and release the city from liability if you fall. Police have never cited anyone. Visitors collect the certificate as a souvenir. Asked last year whether repeal had come up, the city clerk said it never had.
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Carmel did not ban heels. It decided the trees mattered more than your ankles — and filed the paperwork.
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08/31/2026

What do you do when your city falls down? If you were a San Francisco poet in 1906, you followed the King of Bohemia to a beach with no streets. 👀
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Part I of III — link in bio 👆
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Carmel-by-the-Sea began as a real-estate gamble. In 1902 a development company carved the pines above Carmel Bay into lots and aimed its brochures at an odd market: professors, painters, writers — “bohemian types.” Ten dollars down, little or no interest, pay what you can. Nobody else sold land that way, because nobody else wanted the customers.
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The first big fish arrived in 1905. George Sterling, the poet San Francisco called the “uncrowned King of Bohemia,” got a house in the Carmel pines from his aunt and wrote to Ambrose Bierce that he planned to raise vegetables, raid the mussel reefs and cultivate a taste for rice. A Walden with better weather.
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Then, at 5:12 on the morning of April 18, 1906, the ground shook for close to a minute and San Francisco stopped existing as anyone had known it. Two hundred thousand people were homeless. The bohemian cafés were rubble. For a remarkable number of writers and painters the answer was simple: follow Sterling. By June his diary records a beach barbecue for forty, a keg, martinis, enchiladas. “A great day.”
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They kept coming. Mary Austin. Jack London, in and out. The photographer Arnold Genthe. By 1910 the San Francisco Call reported that sixty percent of Carmel’s houses had been built by people devoting their lives to the aesthetic arts. That year Herbert Heron carved a stage out of the woods and called it the Forest Theater; he would later be mayor, as would Perry Newberry, another writer and actor. The early councils were run by artists.
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When Carmel incorporated on October 31, 1916, it was a village of poets who had chosen unpaved streets and rough cottages over everything a real city offered. Nobody had written that choice down yet.
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They were about to. In ink. With permits.
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08/29/2026

Eleven majors. Zero prize money. The best player in the world walked away — toward a barrier nobody had ever broken.
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Part III of III.
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After the 1958 season she retired at the very top, and the reason is the part nobody believes today: there was nothing left to win. No professional tour for women. No prize money. No endorsements waiting. Eleven major titles, fifty-six championships worldwide — and none of it paid a living. She taught physical education. She recorded a jazz album. She played exhibition tennis for packed arenas. Everyone assumed the story was over.
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But the final chapter had been seeded in Tallahassee years earlier. At Florida A&M, coach Hansel Tookes had put a golf club in her hands and taught her the swing. In 1964, at age 37 — when athletes retire, not begin — she used it to become the first Black woman on the LPGA Tour, breaking the color barrier in a second sport a decade after breaking it in her first. She competed through 1971: a two-sport trailblazer before the phrase existed.
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Tallahassee never forgot whose swing that was. FAMU’s Sports Hall of Fame, inaugural class of 1976 — the only woman in it. The Althea Gibson Tennis Complex, named in 2019, a historic marker already standing on its lawn. Her portrait in the Florida Women’s Hall of Fame at the Capitol downtown. And in April 2024, the street running through the heart of FAMU’s campus became Althea Gibson Way. Every game day, thousands walk it.
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Champions get trophies. Trailblazers get street signs.
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08/26/2026

Eleven major titles in three years. The hardest point she ever won was walking through the gate.
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Part II of III — link in bio 👆
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August 1950, Forest Hills, Queens. A physical-education major from Florida A&M in Tallahassee steps onto the grass as the first Black player ever to compete at the U.S. National Championships. She turned 23 that same week. The door had opened only after reigning champion Alice Marble published an open letter shaming her own sport for keeping the country’s best young player out — if tennis was a game for ladies and gentlemen, she wrote, it was time to act like it.
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What followed was one of the steepest climbs in the history of American sports. Paris, 1956: she became the first African American — man or woman — to win a Grand Slam title. Wimbledon, July 6, 1957: champion, handed the trophy by Queen Elizabeth II herself. Two months later she won the U.S. National title on the same Forest Hills grass that had once needed a letter to let her in. Then, in 1958, she did all of it again — both titles, back to back. The Associated Press voted her Female Athlete of the Year both years. When the run was over she held eleven major titles across singles, doubles, and mixed — and fifty-six championships worldwide.
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On July 11, 1957, New York City sent her up Broadway under a storm of ticker tape — only the second Black American ever honored with a parade there, after Jesse Owens. And in 2025, the United States Mint struck her portrait onto a quarter: the final coin of the American Women Quarters program. Four years, twenty extraordinary women — and the series closed with a graduate who learned her craft on Tallahassee courts.
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Twenty women on America’s quarters. She got the last word.
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08/24/2026

How does a kid from a Harlem play street end up with a scholarship to Tallahassee? 👀
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Part I of III — link in bio 👆
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143rd Street, Harlem, late 1930s. In summer the Police Athletic League closed the block to traffic and turned it into a play street, and one girl owned it. Her game was paddle tennis — wooden paddle, sponge ball, chalk lines on asphalt — and by twelve she was the New York paddle tennis champion. Her neighbors saw exactly what they were watching. In 1940 they passed the hat and took up a collection to buy her a junior membership and real lessons at the Cosmopolitan Tennis Club up in Sugar Hill — the first proper court she ever stood on.
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The asphalt game translated. In 1942 she won her first tournament, the New York State girls’ singles run by the American Tennis Association — the national circuit Black players had built for themselves when the country’s lawn clubs wouldn’t have them. National junior champion in 1944, then again in 1945. Two physicians who scouted talent for the ATA, Dr. Hubert Eaton and Dr. Walter Johnson — the same mentor who would later guide a young Arthur Ashe — took her under their wing, and she moved south to train and finish high school.
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Then, in 1949, came the letter that changed the map: a full athletic scholarship to Florida A&M in Tallahassee, recruited by the legendary Jake Gaither. She played tennis AND basketball for the Rattlers, majored in physical education, and pledged Alpha Kappa Alpha’s Beta Alpha chapter on the hill. The play-street champion was now a college athlete in Florida’s capital — one year away from a door no one had ever walked through. And one more thing: tomorrow, August 25, marks 99 years since she was born.
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It started with neighbors passing a hat. Tallahassee did the rest.
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08/22/2026

Fifty schooners. Three thousand pounds of live fish swimming inside each hull. On purpose.
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Part III of III — link in bio 👆
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The second lost fleet on the bottom of Pensacola Bay wasn’t sunk by a hurricane. It was simply left behind by time — and it’s the fleet that made this city the red snapper capital of America.
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They were called smacks, and they worked on an idea that sounds like a mistake: bore holes through the hull below the waterline and let the Gulf flood in. Amidships, sealed off by watertight bulkheads, sat the live well — a wooden compartment of circulating seawater where thousands of pounds of red snapper swam all the way back to the dock, alive and market-fresh in an age before refrigeration. Fishermen stood at the rail with handlines — a weighted line, baited hooks, bare hands — the same method New England crews had used for generations. Because that’s who built this fishery: Yankee fishermen and Yankee money, sailing south after the Civil War to a bay full of snapper nobody was catching at scale.
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From the 1870s to 1930, this fleet owned the Pensacola waterfront. Nearly fifty schooners at the peak. When ice and the railroad arrived, Pensacola snapper started landing on dinner plates in Chicago and New York, and a Gulf fish became a national dish — every fillet of it caught by hand, under sail.
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And here’s the stubborn part: when engines arrived around 1900, this fleet largely said no. The crews judged sail and handline the better way to catch snapper, and they kept at it for decades — one of the last great commercial sailing fleets in America, working canvas into a century of steel and steam.
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Then the snapper banks thinned, the economics broke, and by 1930 the fleet was gone. Some of it ended where working boats end: on the bottom of the bay — where UWF divers study a smack today, resting in the same water as Luna’s ships, three centuries apart and neighbors at last.
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One bay. Two fleets. Every story still coming up.

08/19/2026

It took 456 years, three shipwrecks, and one man who never stopped checking vacant lots.
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Part II of III — link in bio 👆
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Pensacola Bay holds two lost fleets from two different centuries — and the same divers found them both.
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The first break came in 1992, when archaeologists located a wooden wreck off Emanuel Point: ballast stones, hull frames, broken Spanish olive jars. It was one of Luna’s ships, down since the hurricane of 1559 — the oldest shipwreck ever found in Florida. In 2006 a second Luna ship turned up nearby. Divers from the University of West Florida spent years on them, bringing up cookware, trade beads, fishing weights. Everyone assumed the settlement itself would be found the same way: underwater, by professionals.
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It was found on a Friday afternoon, on land, by a man driving past a cleared lot.
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Tom Garner had taken a UWF archaeology field school back in 1983, and for thirty years afterward he kept a habit: whenever a house came down in the old part of town, he walked the bare dirt to see what the ground gave up. On October 2, 2015, it gave up the neck of a sixteenth-century Spanish olive jar — lying on the surface, in a neighborhood within sight of the wrecks. He gathered what he found and brought it to the UWF lab. Shovel tests confirmed it within weeks: this was Luna’s colony. America’s earliest multi-year European settlement had spent 456 years underneath a Pensacola subdivision.
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The next year, divers found a third Luna ship — the fleet accounted for at last.
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And here’s the part almost nobody outside the dive teams knows: the same program has been mapping a second lost fleet in this bay. Not Spanish. Not colonial. A fleet of American sailing ships that once fed the entire country — and drilled holes in their own hulls to do it.
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That story surfaces Saturday.
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08/17/2026

What did Pensacola Bay swallow in 1559 — and then hide for 456 years? 👀
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Part I of III — link in bio 👆
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Two days ago marked the 467th anniversary of the day eleven Spanish ships sailed into this bay. Almost none of what they carried ever left.
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On August 15, 1559, Don Tristán de Luna y Arellano led roughly 1,500 people into Pensacola Bay — soldiers, colonists, enslaved people, and Aztec Indians, sailed up from Veracruz to plant Spain’s first colony on the northern Gulf coast. They called the place Santa María de Ochuse. It was six years before St. Augustine. Forty-eight years before Jamestown. The first multi-year European settlement in what is now the continental United States began right here, on this water.
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It lasted one month before the sky turned.
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A hurricane came into the bay in September and did what hurricanes do to wooden fleets at anchor. Ships went to the bottom with most of the food still in their holds. The survivors hung on — through hunger, through detachments sent inland looking for supplies that weren’t there, through two years of a colony shrinking by the month. By 1561 only a few hundred remained, and Spanish ships carried the remnant back to Mexico. Spain would not return to this bay for good until 1698.
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And then the strangest part: the settlement vanished. Not from memory — Pensacola never stopped telling the story. Luna’s name is on the streets here. There’s a cross on Santa Rosa Island marking the first mass. But the actual ground where 1,500 people lived, starved, and held on — nobody could say where it was. For four and a half centuries, America’s first settlement was a story without an address, and the ships that carried it here sat somewhere under the bay, waiting.
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The bay kept the receipt.
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08/15/2026

In 2020, starting a women’s pro soccer team cost about $2 million. The latest franchise sold for $205 million.
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Part III of III — link in bio 👆
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Nobody saw this coming — because twice, it failed. America launched a women’s professional soccer league in 2001. It folded in three seasons. Another launched in 2009. Gone by 2012. Empty seats, thin sponsorships, the same obituary written twice: the women’s game can’t sell.
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But the players kept coming. Thirty-seven words passed in 1972 had filled the high school fields — hundreds of thousands of girls where there had once been seven hundred — and all of them kept growing up. So in 2013, a third league launched. It survived. Then it caught fire.
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A record season cleared two million fans through the gates. Average crowds passed ten thousand a game. Television networks that once paid a few million dollars a year for rights now pay a reported sixty million — annually. And the price of a seat at the table went vertical. In 2023, two new franchises paid $53 million each to join. In 2025, a Denver group paid $110 million — at the time, the most ever for a women’s professional sports team in America — then sold ten thousand season-ticket deposits in two months, before playing a single game. An Atlanta group paid $165 million. This spring, a Columbus group paid $205 million — more than nearly every men’s Major League Soccer team in history paid to enter their own league. The most valuable women’s club in the country is now worth over a third of a billion dollars.
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And the pipeline behind it has never been fuller: more than fourteen million American kids play soccer today, and nearly four hundred thousand girls play on high school teams — every one of them walking through a door that opened in 1972, held by a woman from a sugar town on Maui.
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Two leagues died trying. The third is outselling the men. The girls just kept coming.
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08/12/2026

In 1971, just 700 girls played high school soccer in America. Today, nearly 400,000 do.
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Part II of III — link in bio 👆
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That climb didn’t start on a soccer field. It started with a stack of rejection letters mailed to a girl from Paʻia, a sugar-plantation town on Maui’s north shore.
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In 1948, Patsy Takemoto graduated from the University of Hawaiʻi with degrees in zoology and chemistry and one plan: medical school. Every school she applied to said no. Not her grades. Not her record. She was a woman, and in 1948 that was the whole answer. So she pivoted to law. The University of Chicago admitted her under its “foreign student quota” — someone in admissions apparently hadn’t learned that Hawaiʻi had been American since 1898. She earned her law degree in 1951, one of only two women in her class. Then no law firm would hire her. So she opened her own practice, ran for office, and in 1964 became the first woman of color ever elected to the United States Congress.
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In Washington, she finally answered those rejection letters. Working with Representative Edith Green of Oregon and Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, Mink co-authored thirty-seven words: “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of s*x, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” President Nixon signed them into law on June 23, 1972. Title IX.
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Here’s what most people miss: the law never mentions sports. It was written about classrooms, admissions, scholarships — every door in American education, including the ones slammed shut on a girl from Maui. But watch what one open door did. In 1971, about 294,000 girls played high school sports in this country. Today, 3.4 million do — and the fastest-growing game of them all was soccer, from seven hundred players to four hundred thousand.
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The schools said no to one student. So she wrote thirty-seven words that say yes to all of them.
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