POST WAR
By the 1960s, Vero Beach exported the message of its success, including its boast as the home of Piper Aircraft, to places such as a parade in Atlanta.
52
GROWING PAINS Transportation, technology advances spur
population surge after the war
Better bridges and roads, mosquito
control and eventually, the widespread
use of air-conditioning,
even in public schools, made Vero
Beach attractive to new residents during
the postwar Baby Boom.
Vero Beach’s only bridge across the
Indian River lagoon was a narrow, handcranked
structure built in 1920. Local
banker Merrill P. Barber was serving on the
State Road Board and in the state Senate
in 1949 when he helped secure funding for
a new bridge.
Barber’s daughter, Helen Stabile, remembers
what it was like to cross the old
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wooden bridge in her parents’ car.
“It went clickety-clackety, clickety-clackety
all the way over,” she said in a 2006
interview for the WQCS radio oral history
project. “People were always fishing on
it. It was probably one of the few bridges
in the world that had a curve in it. The
drawbridge part of it was literally cranked
by one hand. It would swing outward, not
go up.”
The bridge tender, Ben Wood, and his
family lived in a house on the bridge.
While the newer bridge, a concrete
structure with an electric draw span, was
being built, Barber took a keen interest in >>
BY JANIE GOULD
Land transportation
also became better
in the late 1950s with
the opening of the
first leg of Florida’s
Turnpike, then known
as the Sunshine State
Parkway.
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