John Lodwick: St. Pete’s City Publicity Genius

Featured image: Lodwick created publicity stunts like the “Purity League,” which had Mayor Frank Pulver measuring the length of ladies bathing attire to assure it complied with a (fictitious) city ordinance, image c 1922. Courtesy of St. Petersburg Museum of History

Babe Ruth is rightly credited with putting St. Pete on the national map, as early St. Pete Mayor and baseball booster Al Lang reflected, “The Yankees with Babe Ruth and their stars meant millions to this town.” But there was another promoter diligently working to do the same. His name was John Lodwick.

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

In December 1918, Lodwick relocated to St. Petersburg for health reasons. He began volunteering his time writing local, unpaid stories for the St. Petersburg Times. Through Times staff writer Walter Fuller, Lodwick connected with L.A. Whitney, secretary of the Chamber of Commerce. 

The three had lunch and Lodwick proposed that a good way to market St. Pete was to turn the city into a “sporting capital,” hosting “world championships” throughout the year. The publicity, he insisted, would reach national audiences free of charge. He proposed headlines and datelines displaying St. Petersburg, Florida in publications across the nation, featuring Tampa Bay’s natural beauty and ideal climate as a backdrop. 

As Fuller later recalled, Whitney was intrigued with Lodwick’s ideas and asked him what pay he required to direct such a project. Lodwick then astounded Whitney by offering to work for the chamber for free, leaving it up to Whitney to pay him what he thought the services were worth. (Ultimately Lodwick was paid $500, about $10,000 calculated for inflation.) Thus, Lodwick became the first city publicity director, not only in St. Pete, but in Florida. 

And so, all sorts of “World Championship” events – “World Champion Horseshoe Contest,” “World Champion Shuffleboard Contest,” “World Champion Geriatric Boxing Match,” and many more – were born. So well-known was Lodwick’s influence as “the man who organized National Horseshoe Championships,” that his rules and regulations of the game “every boy in America can get into” 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 golf, but more importantly captured the imagination of the nation’s press and received invaluable media coverage.  

Lodwick had a real flare for publicity stunts designed to bring the national limelight to St. Pete at very little cost. Another of his earliest ideas was simply taking photos of tourists, often with a mock catch of large fish, and sending them with a brief article to the tourists’ home town newspapers. The idea was huge success, giving the city lots of free publicity and significantly increasing the stream of tourists. 

Lodwick subscribed to a newspaper clipping service so he could measure the impact of his work. Based on clippings returned from the service 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 made up a tongue-in-cheek “charge” of grand larceny for Lodwick – for stealing newspaper space!

John Lodwick’s kindred spirit was Mayor Frank Fortune Pulver, promoted by Lodwick as “The Millionaire Bachelor Mayor.” Pulver was elected in 1921 and the two worked together hand-in-glove to promote the city, and Pulver himself paid for full page ads in northern papers to advertise St. Pete and its many attractions.

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’s foremost. Pulver favored white suits and straw hats and together with Lodwick created “White Suit Day” to celebrate the arrival of spring. 

One of their stunts had Mayor Pulver go to New York City and march down Broadway with a group of Florida bathing beauties, creating a major traffic jam. Another was the creation of the mythical “Purity League” and a supposed city ordinance prohibiting women’s bathing suits from covering less than half their bodies. Pulver went about town with a tape measure and photographer measuring revealing swimsuits. Police escorted the guilty “Sea Vamps” away. All of this was photographed and sent off to the nation’s press. 

Lodwick cleverly redirected the popular practice of sending penny postcards. In 1924 he noted that the penny postcard “thoroughly outweighs any other variety of publicity” in attracting tourists. He kept a collection of scenic city photos, and sent the best ones to postcard publishers. In one case a publisher printed 300,000 color copies of the cityscape, soon followed by another half million cards, then another three publishers each produced an additional half million. 

Lodwick opined, “The 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…. The alligator postcard has done much to prejudice the minds of tourists against this state…These have been instrumental in broadcasting the idea that Florida is the habitat of the world’s fiercest alligators and snakes.  They should be absolutely banished from every postcard stand in the state.” The chamber provided tourists postcards with scenic city views for free to send to the folks back home.

On another occasion Lodwick arranged for erotic fan dancer Sally Rand to pose half nude on Spa Beach near the pier. In league with Nicholas Dennis, owner of the Dennis Hotel on Williams Park (now the Williams Park Hotel), he created “Room 310.” 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.  

In the 1930s, Lodwick came up with the idea of the “Sunshine Babies” to celebrate eighteen months of continuous days of sunshine in St. Pete. Photos of the babies, all born within the eighteen-month period, boasted they “never have known a cloudy day.” “All Sunshine, No Clouds in their Young Lives,” reported national newspapers, soaking up Lodwick’s story. For months, publications reprinted the articles gaining the Sunshine City, as St. Petersburg was called, endless free publicity. (St. Pete was later in the Guinness Book of World Records for 768 days of sunshine that began in 1967.)  

One of Lodwick’s less successful projects was to bring the Goodyear Blimp to St. Pete in 1929. 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. Unfortunately, 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. Pete and Tampa Bay.

Early mayor Al Lang brought Major League spring training to our city beginning with the then St. Louis Browns in 1914, and later followed by other teams including the New York Yankees and Babe Ruth in 1925. Particularly the Yankees and Ruth had a super-huge impact on attracting tourists and the economic benefit they brought to the city. Lang was mayor at the time Lodwick arrived and began his work at publicity director. Likely in addition to his many zany marketing ideas, another reason for Lodwick’s hiring was his background as a sports journalist. 

It was through Lang that John Lodwick befriended Babe Ruth. St. Petersburg loved the “Sultan of Swat.” Stories abound of the Babe’s 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.

 Ruth was deeply involved in the city’s social life, speaking at civic associations, and visiting charities, hospitals, and schools. In 1934 Ruth brought 50 boys from across the nation to watch spring training in St. Pete. It is documented that Lodwick arranged for the care of the boys while they visited the city. All of this was extensively covered by the media, local and national. It is highly likely that much of Ruth’s public involvement in the city was facilitated, if not somewhat orchestrated, by John Lodwick. 

Lodwick’s untimely death was reported by the Times on October 17, 1942. “Slumping over in the seat of a Central Avenue street car which was carrying him from his home at… Jungle Avenue North to his office at the chamber of commerce, John Harris Lodwick, 52 – director of St. Petersburg’s city publicity since December, 1918 – died suddenly from a heart attack…”

His death at 52 came as a shock to citizens and civic leaders. By one o’clock that afternoon, mourning the loss of “the pioneer booster,” the chamber of commerce closed its doors for the day. Many paid tribute. City Manager Glenn V. Leland noted, “John Lodwick had been continuously employed by the city for the past 23 years as director of publicity. He gave his full time to this work and was instrumental in publicizing the city to the extent that it has become known as one of the nation’s leading resort centers. Former mayor Al Lang, the city’s “Mr. Baseball,” declared, “No man ever did greater work in publicizing the city. Mr. Lodwick’s passing leaves a big gap in the ranks; his place can never be completely filled.”

Immediately following Lodwick’s death, Nelson Poynter, president and editor of the Times, wrote a glowing editorial of Lodwick’s contributions entitled “John Lodwick – End of an Era.” He praised Lodwick, noting he “contributed greatly to St. Petersburg’s fame as a winter resort, and his vision and creative genius helped to make this the great winter capital of Florida’s west coast.” He went on to observe, “Henceforth, Florida communities which expect to continue to grow and prosper, hardly will be able – as St. Petersburg has been in the past – to put all their eggs in one basket, in this case, the tourist trade.” Poynter was writing at the beginning of World War II when the bottom fell out of the city tourist trade.

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.

The writer is especially indebted to Nevin Sitler, curator and historian at the St. Petersburg Museum of History, and author of Selling St. Petersburg: John Lodwick and the Promotion of a Florida Paradise (2006) and Warm Wishes From Florida (2014), for contributions to this article.

Will Michaels is the 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. Reach him at wmichaels2222@gmail.com