During the summer of 1957, after completing my first semester of law school, I worked in Panama City, Florida, on a Dr. Pepper truck, selling soft drinks. The driver of the truck and I stopped at every grocery store, gas station, motel, hotel, restaurant, bar, and “juke joint” in that area, including a place called the Bay Harbor Poolroom. The poolroom was named for the small community in which it was located, just a few miles east of the center of Panama City.
The Panama City area was dominated by a huge paper mill located at Bay Harbor. The paper manufacturing process caused a smell that was pervasive for miles in every direction; no one in Panama City or in its environs could escape the caustic odor that stung and burned the eyes, the throat, and the face. Anthony Lewis, in Gideon’s Trumpet, described the paper mill and the adjacent area in the following words:
Just outside the city limits, twenty minutes from the motels and restaurants and Post Office that make “downtown,” is a gigantic International Paper Company plant, its tall chimneys spewing out sulphurous smoke. Huddled near the plant fence, within sight and smell of the chemical fumes, is the community of Bay Harbor. Community is too grandiose a word for it; Bay Harbor is a bitter, decayed parody of a movie set for a frontier town. It is just a few dilapidated buildings separated by dirt roads and alleys and weed-filled empty lots: a bar, a two-story “hotel,” a grocery and the Bay Harbor Poolroom. One who happened onto that dark street would be eager to drive back through the dank countryside to the highway and its neon. Gideon had no illusions about Bay Harbor; he called it “Tobacco Road.”