The Wacky World of Weeki Wachee

There’s something all-American about roadside attractions—palaces of corn, Stonehenges built from cars, mountains carved with Presidents’ faces. Americans have a knack for looking at a patch of nature and asking how we can turn it into a tourist destination.

My parents, both immigrants, have always been baffled by the American love of kitsch. They prefer their nature without a souvenir stand, and during my childhood vacations they generally resisted my pleas to turn off the highway to visit the giant maize maze or the build-your-own-sandscape-in-a-bottle stand. Unfortunately for me, now that I am grown and able to plan my own vacations, many of these American entrepreneurial wonders are floundering, and fewer and fewer remain. Lu Vickers and Sara Dionne’s new book, Weeki Wachee, City of Mermaids: A History of One of Florida’s Oldest Roadside Attractions (University Press of Florida, 294 pages, $34.95), is a lush album of photographs and a detailed story of the rise and fall of one of the wackiest American tourist spots.

Florida, home to wetlands and dramatic weather, has always been a perfect place for strange schemes. Some, like vast citrus groves, have been successes, and others, like selling swampland as prime real estate, dismal flops. The idea of creating an underwater theater with live mermaid shows ranks somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, and Weeki Wachee survived for many decades on a very simple premise: What if you could see a show about people living underwater?

For the past 60 years, Weeki Wachee has showcased underwater revues full of seemingly simple stunts. But acts that are ordinary on land—eating a banana, drinking a soda—suddenly look magical underwater, and more than a few tourists, lured by a giant billboard promising a mermaid show, have been willing to pull off the road and stop at a small roadside theater on Florida’s west coast to see what Weeki Wachee had to offer. Once out of the car, the tourists “pushed through a turnstile,” the authors write, “climbed down some steps, and entered what looked like a boxcar with windows. They took their seats on benches and peered out through the glass into the spring, where . . . local teenagers became mermaids and mermen. . . . They sucked breaths of air from hoses and dove fifteen or twenty feet down into the spring, where, in perfect silence and surrounded by schools of bluegill fish and turtles, they performed ballet . . . and fed pellets of bread they’d tucked into their swimsuits to the fish.”

The mermaids, lured by the promise of nothing more than free hot dogs and hamburgers for pay, were high school kids who wanted to have some fun. All that was required was to be a pretty girl with long hair and the ability to swim. Not surprisingly, the early owners of Weeki Wachee recruited from nearby high school swim teams and synchronized-swimming groups, thought the siren call of the place was so strong that even girls who didn’t know how to swim would jump in for an audition. One of the youngest mermaids, Penny Smith Vrooman, was just 14 when she started, and she recalls that “they wanted voluptuous mermaid-looking people . . . most of them wore falsies, but that was just part of the deal.” The authors make the attraction seem wholesome and fairly innocuous, though the appeal of young, attractive girls writhing underwater was sufficiently alluring that baseball players down in Florida for spring training were reluctant to pose with the mermaids, because, as Weeki Wachee’s photographer put it, “their wives would see the pictures in the paper and say, ‘Uh huh, you’re down there having fun, aren’t you?’” Like Miss Universe, who always made a publicity stop at Weeki Wachee during her reign, the mermaids were sexy but family-friendly.

Built around a natural spring, Weeki Wachee had water so clean and clear that many audiences didn’t believe the mermaids were in water at all; they were convinced the teens were held aloft with wires behind a pool of fish. Before long Hollywood came calling, and a number of movies were filmed at Weeki Wachee. Celebrities including Esther Williams and Elvis Presley came to pose with the mermaids. (More recently, Dick Cheney made a campaign stop in November 2000.) In Weeki Wachee’s heyday in the 1960s, the attraction was owned by ABC, and ABC invested substantially, building a fancy theater that seated 500 people, which opened in 1960.

Weeki Wachee’s downfall was the mighty mouse, Disney. Like so many boardwalks, midways, and crocodile farms, the smaller vacation stop couldn’t compete with the manicured sprawl of Walt Disney World. Weeki Wachee struggled on, even after ABC sold the attraction, and subsequent owners allowed it to get shabby. Local developments poured fertilizer into the spring that fed it, and the once-clear water began to fill with brown algae. But Weeki Wachee still lives, and it continues to offer mermaid exhibitions, including reunion shows starring former mermaids, some in their sixties and seventies.

Vickers and Dionne gained the cooperation of many former mermaids, and the book is filled with personal and publicity photos, capturing the vibe of weird fun that exists at a great roadside attraction. There is an ethereal beauty to old photographs of mermaids leaping underwater, and a sense of wonder in pictures of teenagers guzzling soda pop while sitting on the bottom of the sea. I had never heard of Weeki Wachee until I read this book, and it made me want to visit the mermaids while they still swim. Maybe not every dusty-shrunken-head attraction needs or deserves this kind of treatment, but the authors certainly make a strong case for the mermaids of Weeki Wachee.