Marjory Stoneman Douglas was an American journalist, author, women's suffrage advocate, and conservationist known for her staunch defense of the Everglades against efforts to drain it and reclaim land for development.
77 Facts About Marjory Stoneman Douglas
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and was inducted into several halls of fame.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas lived to 108, working until nearly the end of her life for Everglades restoration.
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Marjory Stoneman was born on April 7,1890, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the only child of concert violinist Florence Lillian Trefethen and Frank Bryant Stoneman.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas visited Florida when she was four, and her most vivid memory of the trip was picking an orange from a tree at the Tampa Bay Hotel.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas's father endured a series of failed entrepreneurial ventures and the instability caused her mother to move them abruptly to the Trefethen family house in Taunton, Massachusetts.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas credited her tenuous upbringing with making her "a skeptic and a dissenter" for the rest of her life.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas left for college in 1908, despite grave misgivings about her mother's mental state.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas was a straight-A student at Wellesley College, graduating with a BA in English in 1912.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas found particular success in a class on elocution, and joined the first suffrage club with six of her classmates.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas was elected Class Orator but was unable to fulfill the office since she was already involved in other activities.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas was so impressed with his manners and surprised at the attention he showed her that she married him within three months.
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The true extent of his duplicity Marjory Stoneman Douglas did not entirely reveal, despite her honesty in all other matters.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas's uncle persuaded her to move to Miami and end the marriage.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas passionately opposed the governor of Florida, Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, and his attempts to drain the Everglades.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas infuriated Broward so much that when Stoneman won an election for circuit judge, Broward refused to validate the election, so Stoneman was referred to as "Judge" for the rest of his life without performing the duties of one.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas developed a rivalry with an editor at The Miami Metropolis whose greater familiarity with Miami history gave her cause to make fun of Douglas in writing.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas's father scolded her to check her facts better.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas was given an assignment in 1916 to write a story on the first woman from Miami to join the US Naval Reserve.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas gained some renown for her daily column, "The Galley", becoming something of a local celebrity.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas amassed a devoted readership and attempted to begin each column with a poem.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote supporting women's suffrage, civil rights, and better sanitation while opposing Prohibition and foreign trade tariffs.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas's story "Peculiar Treasure of a King" was a second-place finalist in the O Henry Award competition in 1928.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas called the garden "one of the greatest achievements for the entire area".
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas became involved with the Miami Theater, and wrote some one-act plays that were fashionable in the 1930s.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas got the idea from her father, who had witnessed hangings when he lived in the West and was unnerved by the creaking sound of the rope bearing the weight of the hanging body.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote the foreword to the Work Projects Administration's guide to Miami and environs, published in 1941 as part of the Federal Writers' Project's American Guide Series.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas served as the book review editor of The Miami Herald from 1942 to 1949, and as editor for the University of Miami Press from 1960 to 1963.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas released her first novel, Road to the Sun, in 1952.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote four novels, and several nonfiction books on regional topics including Florida birdwatching and David Fairchild, a biologist who imagined a botanical park in Miami.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas had been working on a book about W H Hudson for years, traveling to Argentina and England several times.
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Early in the 1940s, Marjory Stoneman Douglas was approached by a publisher to contribute to the Rivers of America Series by writing about the Miami River.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas spent five years researching what little was known about the ecology and history of the Everglades and South Florida.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas spent time with geologist Garald Parker, who discovered that South Florida's sole freshwater source was the Biscayne Aquifer, and it was filled by the Everglades.
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Parker confirmed the name of the book that has since become the nickname for the Everglades when Marjory Stoneman Douglas, trying to capture the Everglades' essence, asked if she could safely call the fresh water flowing from Lake Okeechobee a river of grass.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas characterized the Everglades as an ecosystem surrounding a river worthy of protection, inescapably connected to South Florida's people and cultures.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas outlined its imminent disappearance in the last chapter, "The Eleventh Hour":.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas was not impressed with the reception the group got from the Florida Legislature.
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In 1948 Marjory Stoneman Douglas served on the Coconut Grove Slum Clearance Committee, with a friend of hers named Elizabeth Virrick, who was horrified to learn that no running water or sewers were connected to the racially segregated part of Coconut Grove.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas noted that all of the money loaned was repaid.
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Stoneman Douglas became involved in the Everglades in the 1920s, when she joined the board of the Everglades Tropical National Park Committee, a group led by Ernest F Coe and dedicated to the idea of making a national park in the Everglades.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas toured the state giving "hundreds of ringing denunciations" of the airport project, and increased membership of Friends of the Everglades to 3,000 within three years.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas ran the public information operation full-time from her home and encountered hostility from the jetport's developers and backers, who called her a "damn butterfly chaser".
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas compared Florida sugarcane agriculture to sugarcane grown in the West Indies, which, she claimed, was more environmentally sound, had a longer harvest cycle less harmful to soil nutrients, and was less expensive for consumers due to the higher sugar content.
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Besides Big Sugar, Marjory Stoneman Douglas spoke about the damage the Army Corps of Engineers was doing to the Everglades by diverting the natural flow of water.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas was giving a speech addressing the harmful practices of the Army Corps of Engineers when the colonel in attendance dropped his pen on the floor.
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In 1973, Marjory Stoneman Douglas attended a meeting addressing conservation of the Everglades in Everglades City, and was observed by John Rothchild:.
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Mrs Marjory Stoneman Douglas was half the size of her fellow speakers and she wore huge dark glasses, which along with the huge floppy hat made her look like Scarlett O'Hara as played by Igor Stravinsky.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas reminded us all of our responsibility to nature and I don't remember what else.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas's voice had the sobering effect of a one-room schoolmarm's.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas opposed the drainage of a suburb in Dade County named East Everglades.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas was not just a pioneer of the environmental movement, she was a prophet, calling out to us to save the environment for our children and our grandchildren.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas served as a charter member of the first American Civil Liberties Union chapter organized in the South in the 1950s.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas lent her support to the Equal Rights Amendment, speaking to the legislature in Tallahassee urging them to ratify it.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote to Governor Bob Graham in 1985 to encourage him to assess the conditions the migrant workers endured.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas co-founded the Friends of the Miami-Dade Public Libraries with her longtime friend Helen Muir, and served as its first president.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas tied her agnosticism to her unanswered prayers when her mother was dying.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote that his wife was a friend of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and had provided Stowe with the story of Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin fleeing slavery because Douglas's great-great-aunt took care of Eliza and her infant after their escape.
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Frank Stoneman grew up in a Quaker colony, and Douglas maintained he kept touches of his upbringing throughout his life, even after converting to Episcopalianism.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas witnessed her mother's emotional unraveling that caused her to be institutionalized, and even long after her mother returned to live with her, she exhibited bizarre, childlike behaviors.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas suggested she had what she referred to as "blank periods" before and during her marriage, but they were brief.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas connected these lapses to her mother's insanity.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas eventually quit the newspaper, but after her father's death in 1941 she suffered a third and final breakdown, when her neighbors found her roaming the neighborhood one night screaming.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas realized she had a "father complex", explaining it by saying, "Having been brought up without him all those years, and then coming back and finding him so sympathetic had a powerful effect".
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Regardless of her dedication to the preservation of the Everglades, Marjory Stoneman Douglas admitted the time she spent actually there was sporadic, driving there for occasional picnics.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas was known for speaking in perfect, precise paragraphs, and was respected for her dedication and knowledge of her subjects; even her critics admitted her authority on the Everglades.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas never learned to drive and never owned a car.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas's house had no air conditioning, electric stove, or dishwasher.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas was attached to several men after her divorce, counting one of them as the reason she enlisted in the Red Cross, as he had already gone to France as a soldier.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas began accruing honors in her early days writing for The Miami Herald.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas told a friend she would have rather seen the Everglades restored than her name on a building.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas was posthumously inducted into the National Wildlife Federation Hall of Fame in 1999, and the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2000.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas appears as a major supporting character in the 2014 point-and-click adventure A Golden Wake.
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Some of Marjory Stoneman Douglas's stories were collected by University of Florida professor Kevin McCarthy in two edited collections: Nine Florida Stories in 1990 and A River In Flood in 1998.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas died at the age of 108 on May 14,1998.
76.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas would give these wonderful, curmudgeonly speeches to which there was no response.
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Marjory Stoneman Douglas wrote all of her major books and stories there, and the City of Miami designated it an historic site in 1995, not only for its famous owner but for its unique Masonry Vernacular architecture.