{"id":196983,"date":"2026-03-18T22:05:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T22:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/196983\/"},"modified":"2026-03-18T22:05:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T22:05:07","slug":"john-lodwick-was-st-petersburgs-1920s-publicity-genius","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/196983\/","title":{"rendered":"John Lodwick was St. Petersburg\u2019s 1920s publicity genius"},"content":{"rendered":"

Welcome to the Catalyst\u2019s Community Voices platform. We\u2019ve curated community leaders and thinkers from all parts of our great city to speak on issues that affect us all.\u00a0Visit our\u00a0Community Voices page<\/a>\u00a0for more details.<\/p>\n

Babe Ruth is rightly credited with putting St. Pete on the national map, beginning with the New York Yankees\u2019 arrival here for spring training in 1925. As early St. Pete Mayor and baseball booster Al Lang reflected, \u201cThe Yankees with Babe Ruth and their stars meant millions to this town.\u201d While St. Petersburg is greatly indebted to Babe Ruth for floods of tourists, there was another tourist promoter diligently working to do the same. His name was John Lodwick.<\/p>\n

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John Lodwick<\/p>\n

\u201cLodwick,\u201d wrote Ray Arsenault in St. Petersburg and the Florida Dream, \u201cemerged as the master of masters when it came to public relations. In an age addicted to ballyhoo and buffoonery, the press welcomed these stunts and begged for more.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lodwick was born in Ohio in 1890. He began his career as a messenger boy at age 13 for the Associated Press in Cleveland. Later he became a member of the Cleveland Press and then went on to become sports director for the City of Cleveland, after which he relocated to Akron where he became sports editor for the Akron Press.<\/p>\n

In December, 1918, Lodwick relocated to St. Petersburg, like so many of our early city leaders for reasons of health. He began by volunteering his time to the St. Petersburg Times writing local stories for which he was unpaid. It was through Walter Fuller, a staff writer for the newspaper at the time, that Lodwick connected with L.A. Whitney, secretary of the Chamber of Commerce.<\/p>\n

The three had lunch together at which time Lodwick proposed that a good way to market St. Pete to tourists was to turn St. Pete into a \u201csporting capital,\u201d hosting a multitude of \u201cworld championships\u201d throughout the year. The publicity, he insisted, would reach national audiences free of charge to the city. He proposed to create headlines and datelines displaying St. Petersburg, Florida in publications across the nation, featuring Tampa Bay\u2019s natural beauty and ideal climate as a backdrop.<\/p>\n

As Fuller later recalled, Whitney was intrigued with Lodwick\u2019s ideas and asked him what pay he required to direct such a project. Lodwick then astounded Whitney by offering to work for the Chamber without pay, leaving it up to Whitney to pay him what Whitney thought his services were worth at the end of the tourist season (ultimately Lodwick was paid $500, about $10,000 calculated for inflation). Thus, Lodwick \u00a0became the first city publicity director, not only in St. Pete, but in Florida.<\/p>\n

And so, all sorts of \u201cWorld Championship\u201d events (\u201cWorld Champion Horseshoe Contest,\u201d \u201cWorld Champion Shuffleboard Contest,\u201d \u201cWorld Champion Geriatric Boxing Match\u201d and many more) were born. So well-known was Lodwick\u2019s influence as \u201cthe man who organized National Horseshoe Championships,\u201d that his rules and regulations of the \u201cgame every boy in America can get into\u201d appeared in publications nationally. In 1923 Lodwick reported that he was in correspondence with over 300 newspapers during the horseshoe tournament. These world champion events provided alternatives for tourists to spending the day at the beach, fishing and golfing, but more importantly captured the imagination of the nation\u2019s press and received invaluable media coverage.<\/p>\n

Lodwick had a real flare for public relations stunts designed to bring the national limelight to St. Pete at very little cost. Another of his earliest ideas was the simple but brilliant one of just taking photos of tourists, often with a mock catch of large fish, and sending the photos and a brief article to the tourists\u2019 hometown newspapers for publication. The idea was another huge success, giving the city lots of free publicity and significantly increasing the stream of tourists coming to St. Pete.<\/p>\n

Lodwick subscribed to a newspaper clipping service so that he could measure the impact of his work. Based on the clippings received he calculated that during the 1924 winter season St. Pete received $241,784.10 in free advertising. He further noted that typically the clippings accounted for only about 12% of the total publicity received. The clippings came from every state in the nation. On one occasion St. Petersburg Mayor Pulver tongue-in- cheek charged Lodwick with grand larceny, for stealing newspaper space.<\/p>\n

Mayor Frank Fortune Pulver was Lodwick\u2019s kindred spirit, promoted by Lodwick as \u201cThe Millionaire Bachelor Mayor.\u201d Pulver was elected mayor in 1921. The two worked together hand in glove to promote St. Petersburg as a major tourist destination.<\/p>\n

Pulver moved to St. Pete in 1917, the year before Lodwick, and soon became a successful businessman. He bought and operated the Detroit Hotel, at the time the city\u2019s foremost. Pulver favored white suits and straw hats and together with Lodwick created \u201cWhite Suit Day,\u201d to celebrate the arrival of spring. White suits were symbolic of\u00a0 St. Pete\u2019s sun-drenched climate. One of their stunts was for Mayor Pulver to go to New York City and march down Broadway with a group of Florida bathing beauties, creating a major traffic jam.<\/p>\n

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St. Petersburg Times, 1922<\/p>\n

Another was the creation of the mythical \u201cPurity League.\u201d With the support of the Purity League and a supposed city ordinance prohibiting women\u2019s bathing suits from covering less than half their bodies, he went about town with a tape measure and photographer measuring revealing swimsuits. Police escorted the guilty \u201cSea Vamps\u201d away.<\/p>\n

All of this was photographed and sent off to the nation\u2019s press. Pulver himself paid for full-page ads in northern papers to advertise St. Pete and its many attractions.<\/p>\n

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St. Petersburg Times, 1923<\/p>\n

The bedrock of marketing in that era was print media. While Lodwick cleverly obtained hundreds of thousands in advertising free through his tourist photo program, he also redirected the popular practice of sending penny postcards. In 1924 he noted that the penny postcard in many ways \u201cthoroughly outweighs any other variety of publicity\u201d in attracting tourists. Lodwick kept a collection of scenic city photos, and sent the best ones to postcard publishers. In one case a publisher printed 300,0o0 color copies of the cityscape taken from the bay featuring the Soreno Hotel (now the site of the Florencia Condominiums).<\/p>\n

This was soon followed by another half million cards, and then another three publishers each produced an additional half million. Lodwick opined, \u201cthe day of one-color pictures as well as the old type bathing beauty, alligator, and comic pictures of Florida are a thing of the past \u2026 the alligator postcard has done much to prejudice the minds of tourists against this state \u2026 these have been instrumental in broadcasting the idea that Florida is the habitat of the world\u2019s fiercest alligators and snakes. They should be absolutely banished from every postcard stand in the state.\u201d The Chamber provided tourists postcards with scenic city views for free, to send to the folks back home.<\/p>\n

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On another occasion Lodwick arranged for erotic fan dancer Sally Rand to pose half nude on Spa Beach near the Downtown Pier. In league with Nicholas Dennis, owner of the Dennis Hotel on Williams Park (now the Williams Park Hotel), he created \u201cRoom 310.\u201d The room was filled with all kinds of gimmicks from whoopee cushions and electric shock devices to a skeleton in the bathtub. Babe Ruth was one of the many tourists visiting the attraction.<\/p>\n

Later, in the 1930s, Lodwick came up with the idea of the \u201cSunshine Babies\u201d to celebrate 18 months of continuous days of sunshine in St. Pete. Photos of the babies, all born within the eighteen-month period, boasted they \u201cnever have known a cloudy day.\u201d \u201cAll Sunshine, No Clouds in their Young Lives,\u201d reported national newspapers.<\/p>\n

Cooing and smiling, one set of twin girls and six other tots\u2019 photos radiated above captions claiming, \u201cHappy and Healthy, These Babies Haven\u2019t Seen a Sunless Day,\u201d and \u201cAll eight of them have been taught to walk and talk without a sunless day.\u201d For months, publications reprinted the articles gaining the Sunshine City, as St. Petersburg was called, endless free publicity.<\/p>\n

One of Lodwick\u2019s less successful projects was bringing the Goodyear Blimp to St. Petersburg in 1929 as yet another attraction. The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company was located in Akron, known as the \u201cRubber City,\u201d where Lodwick previously worked. Likely using his Akron connections, Lodwick arranged for the company to locate a blimp at the new Albert Whitted Airport and got the city to pay for construction of a necessarily large hangar. On December 11, 1929, the blimp Vigilant of St. Petersburg was christened and gave rides to VIPs over the city.<\/p>\n

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Unfortunately, his timing for this was off as the nation soon plunged into the Great Depression, and tourism sharply declined. But the blimps remained a part of the downtown cityscape for 10 years. They provided tourists with magnificent aerial views of St. Petersburg and Tampa Bay. The blimp Reliance paid a visit in 1932, and in 1933 the dirigible Akron paid a visit. There was also a fourth blimp, the Mayflower, which made a brief appearance in 1935. However, after receiving rife shots while in the vicinity of Plant City, the deflated blimp was shipped back to Akron by rail.<\/p>\n

Mayor Al Lang brought Major League spring training to our city beginning with the then-St. Louis Browns in 1914, later followed by other teams including the New York Yankees and Babe Ruth in 1925. Particularly the Yankees and Ruth had a huge impact on attracting tourists and the economic benefit they brought to the city. Lang was mayor at the time Lodwick arrived in the city. Likely in addition to his many zany marketing ideas, another reason for Lodwick\u2019s hiring was his background as a sports journalist in Ohio. While the particulars of Lang\u2019s association with Ruth are unknown, no doubt they were well acquainted with one another, and Lang was well acquainted with Lodwick by 1925.<\/p>\n

It was through Lang that John Lodwick befriended Babe Ruth. St. Petersburg loved the \u201cSultan of Swat.\u201d Stories abound of the Babe\u2019s kindness towards children, and his love for all things excessive. Boosters like Lang and Lodwick even encouraged owners and players to sign Major League contracts during spring training, making St. Petersburg the dateline for countless sports pages. Lodwick also staged a surprise birthday bash for Ruth on at least one occasion.<\/p>\n

Lodwick\u2019s untimely death was reported by the Times on October 17, 1942. \u201cSlumping over in the seat of a Central Avenue street car which was carrying him from his home at \u2026 Jungle avenue north to his office at the chamber of commerce, John Harris Lodwick, 52 \u2013 director of St. Petersburg\u2019s city publicity since December, 1918 \u2013 died suddenly from a heart attack \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

His death at 52 as a shock. By one o\u2019clock that afternoon, mourning the loss of \u201cthe pioneer booster,\u201d the Chamber of Commerce closed its doors for the day. Tributes were paid by many.<\/p>\n

Immediately following his death, Nelson Poynter, president and editor of the Times, praised Lodwick noting he \u201ccontributed greatly to St. Petersburg\u2019s fame as a winter resort, and his vision and creative genius helped to make this the great winter capital of Florida\u2019s west coast.\u201d<\/p>\n

He then went on to observe \u201cHenceforth, Florida communities which expect to continue to grow and prosper, hardly will be able \u2014 as St. Petersburg has been in the past \u2014 to put all their eggs in one basket, in this case, the tourist trade.\u201d Poynter was writing at the beginning of World War II, when the bottom fell out of the city tourist trade.<\/p>\n

While St. Petersburg has rightly diversified its economy since the Lodwick era, tourism continues to be significant. Visit St. Pete Clearwater reports that despite two back-to-back hurricanes in 2024, tourism brought an $11.2 billion economic boost to Pinellas County, breaking a new record.<\/p>\n

(The writer is especially indebted to Nevin Sitler, Curator and Historian, St. Petersburg Museum of History, and author of Selling St. Petersburg: John Lodwick and the Promotion of a Florida Paradise and Warm Wishes From Florida for contributions to this article.)<\/p>\n

Will Michaels is former director and trustee of the St. Petersburg Museum of History, and the author of The Making of St. Petersburg and The Hidden History of St. Petersburg. This article was previously published in the Northeast Journal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Welcome to the Catalyst\u2019s Community Voices platform. We\u2019ve curated community leaders and thinkers from all parts of our…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":196984,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-196983","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196983","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196983"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196983\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196983"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196983"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196983"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}