Florida Halfbacks Come to North Carolina

This vintage linen postcard booklet from mid-century Miami Beach reminds me that it's nearly time for my annual trek into the swamps of Florida to visit my retired parents. They followed in the footsteps of my grandparents, who retired to Florida decades earlier.

Florida is the last place I'd go to retire, frankly, so I can clearly understand why some who have retired there have reversed course (at least half-way), and are now flocking to North Carolina, where they can enjoy a climate containing all Four Seasons. It would seem like the only sane thing to do. Floridians love North Carolina. Or so it would seem. The locals call them 'Half-Backs'. A term specifically referring to those Floridians, originally from one of the Northern industrial cities (e.g., Chicago) who retired to sunny Florida but decided to relocated to North Carolina--instead of returning all the way back home.

Recently, I saw a bumper sticker in Asheville that summed up the general feeling about Half-Backs: It read, "Yankee Go Back to Florida!"

Read my Postcard Collecting Resource Guide.

Comments

[MoultrieCreek]

We Florida natives have a love/hate relationship with our transplant and snowbird (who spend the winter here and go back north in April) population. On one hand, they help keep our taxes low. On the other hand, we're watching a lot of our lovely countryside get chewed up and turned into cookie-cutter developments.

Your "half-backs" may have gotten the North Carolina idea from us natives. Many Floridians have cabins in North Carolina. Back in the days before A/C, many Florida towns were ghost towns in August because everyone had headed for the mountains.

[John Ptak]

I used to love it when it got hot and miserable in DC--my home for 29 years--because it kept the tourists and the lesser mortals indoors, leaving the city more wide open (so long as you could stand abandoning your car). This meant that the best time to do things was the wrong time--so it goes, as old dead Kurt used to say. I'm only 5 years here in Asheville, but I know the best times now to do things around town...its a little inconvenient doing the leaf drive on a weekday morning, but people coming into town From the Outside help bring more interesting things to our area, so its an okay payoff. Anyway, there are more week days than those in the weekend...