Some Beach History

Four years after Arlos Ogg employed his first unwieldy camera, a large box Brownie, his parents moved to a farm in Brooksville, Florida. Ogg was only 11 at the time, but he had already learned to drive four-horse teams hitched to gang plows, and to build a house from the foundation up.

He graduated in 1922 with 28 others from Clearwater, Dunedin and Safety Harbor. Most students arrived for classes by car, as there were no buses then. They met in the courtroom of the Pinellas County Courthouse in Clearwater for the graduation ceremony.

Ogg went on to the University of Florida in Gainesville where in 1926 he earned a degree in chemistry. He then accepted a position as professor of chemistry at the State College in Raleigh, North Carolina. One year shy of his doctorate, the Depression caught up with the college and Ogg’s salary was reduced so drastically that he was unable to afford his job. He returned home to Clearwater.

“I sent applications to several outfits and received replies like, ’We were very pleased to receive your application. You are number 175 on our list,’” he explained. “Luckily, I had continued to photograph in my years at the university, taking pictures of the experiments we were performing on tung oil, used as a medium for paint in those days. I had even co- written a paper on darkroom procedure. When I returned home in 1936, I set about learning the trade from a photographer.”

“Only the Palm Trees Stuck Out Above the Water”

“Things have changed so much,” Ogg told Freedom, carefully turning over one after another of his old photographs. “75 years ago, there was only one building on Clearwater Beach, a bathhouse. At that time, you could stand at any point on the beach and throw one stone into the Gulf and another into Clearwater Bay [the intracoastal waterway]. Mandalay Road used to be the shoreline of Clearwater Bay. They filled in the beach to make it wider.

“There was no causeway to Tampa at that time. We would have to go over to Safety Harbor, up by Philippe Park, through Oldsmar and back down to Tampa. You could make it in an hour if you didn’t have a flat.”

Flats were minor inconveniences compared to the hurricanes Ogg lived through. “I’ve been in or near nine hurricanes,” he said. “We would take all the signs down around town and board up the windows. The hurricane in 1921 completely inundated Clearwater Beach. Only the palm trees stuck out above the water. It tore down all the private docks that extended from Clearwater to the channel. It also widened Hurricane Pass, sending the sand onto the south end of the beach.”

The landscape isn’t the only thing that has changed. “We were on Garden Avenue when I was in high school. We would always leave our house wide open. We never locked it. If the rain came up, the neighbors would run over and close the windows and the door. Although my neighbor looks after me now, it isn’t quite the same, generally speaking.”

As he moved slowly through his piles of pictures of Clearwater, he paused to describe each. “This is the Five Point Sundry, a store selling sodas and cigars,” he commented. “It was on the very edge of town: on Cleveland and Greenwood.”

Looking at a photograph of a large brick building standing where today’s main library is, he noted, “The original public library was donated by Andrew Carnegie.”

“And you see that pharmacy, between the old McCrorys and the Coachman Building?” he asked. “Jack Eckerd took it over. That was the original Eckerd store.”