The Advance

Stranded "Shoe-Stringers"
in
Florida Sell Autos for Food
and Return Ticket

Palm Beach. Fla.--The backwash from the Florida real estate boom is receding through the neighboring southern states and leaving in its wake thousands of stranded tradesmen and their families.

Charitable agencies in nearly every large city in Georgia and the Carolinas report scores of daily appeals for financial assistance from those who are returning north without funds.

Many of these appeals, they say, come from itinerant workmen and hobos, but the majority are made by small tradesmen of the north or west who sold out their businesses at home and came to Florida to make their fortunes. Here the high cost of living soon depleted their small "stakes" and started them north again, "busted and disgusted."

In most cases the fortune hunters have come here in their automobiles. A few have left the same way, and by begging gasoline for the car and food for themselves from charitable agencies along the road, they managed to get home again.

But the increasing number of such appeals has forced the charitable organizations to discontinue that practise, and now when appeals are made to them they advise the owner of the car to sell it and use the money to return home by rail.

There are many, however, who forced to sell their cars before leaving Florida. Sometimes the owners fail to get sufficient money to defray the expenses of his family home, and is forced to go as far as his finances will permit and then appeal to the Travelers Aid society.

At the offices of the city charities in Macon it was said that they had several such cases.

One man returning north with his family asked for transportation for his wife and children, saying that he could ride home on freight trains if they were cared for.

It is estimated that 1000 persons entering Florida daily. "Of this number a large percentage is made up of persons who have neither money nor employment in view. They head for the larger cities, principally Miami, with the result that these centers are jammed with unemployed.

Wheeling Daily News.