Some years ago, I was asked by Ruth Campbell, the head of the Town Hall Museum in Homestead, Florida, to give a presentation on how Tom and Mary Blakley had come to Homestead and established Mary Blakley Ceramics. A tall order, indeed! I declined at the time, knowing that such a presentation would involve a lot of time to research and document. But Ruth is nothing if not persistent and she finally convinced me to make the presentation.

The presentation, which I gave on March 20, 2014, was the hurdle that I needed to cross to be able to establish this website, which I did shortly thereafter. I have left out some of the details in the presentation in this post and have included others here which were not a part of the talk. The slideshow entitled “Tom and Mary Blakley” in the category Tom and Mary Blakley on the Galleries page has photographs that go along with this post.

History is always far more complex than an author can imagine and setting a starting point is hard. For the purposes of this post, I’ll begin on December 30, 1937, when Tom and Mary set out on a road trip to Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, in a Plymouth, with 16,772 miles on it, towing a small trailer that they had built with the help of a friend, Bill Kaiser. Travel in those days was not as easy as it is now, and they averaged around 225 miles per day, getting 14.5 miles per gallon. Gas was 20 cents per gallon. On January 6, 1938, they arrived in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, about 30 miles east of New Orleans. There, they explored the surroundings, fished, met interesting people, drew, painted, carved wood and made several trips to New Orleans, taking in the French Quarter and enjoying the art scene there. After almost a month in Bay St. Louis, they set out for Tampa, Florida, on January 29, 1938. My source for this information has no entries for the time they spent in Tampa, but Mary’s maternal grandmother lived there with her daughter Emma, Mary’s aunt. I suspect that Tom and Mary stayed with Mary’s grandmother for two weeks before setting out for Sarasota, Florida on February 14. I’m reasonably sure that the reason they went to Sarasota was so that Tom could work in the celery fields owned by a neighbor of Mary’s family in Fort Wayne, Indiana, George Sweeting. This was in the middle of the Great Depression and work was hard to find. No doubt, they needed more money to return to Indiana.

Having sampled the warm weather in Florida in the middle of winter, Tom and Mary returned reluctantly to Fort Wayne because there was no work to be had in Florida and both of their families were in Fort Wayne. Mary’s father died in July, 1938 and her mother moved to Miami shortly thereafter, possibly living with her son Paul, who had moved to Miami in 1937 to work for Pan American World Airways. In April of 1940, she sold the family home in Fort Wayne.

Mary made a trip to Miami to visit her mother at Christmas time in 1940 and it didn’t take much effort on her part to convince Tom, who could not tolerate the cold weather in Fort Wayne, to move to Florida. In March of 1941, they were living in apartment 4 at 1051 N.W. 2nd St.

In the meantime, on the west coast of Florida, in Tampa, Mary’s maternal grandmother had died in 1939 and her aunt (her mother’s sister) sold their family home and moved to Miami, where she bought a house with her sister (Mary’s mother) in what is now Little Havana, at 835 S.W. 12th Ct., in August of 1941. Soon thereafter, Tom and Mary moved into a garage apartment in back of the house.

Tom worked at his cartooning and Mary worked for Baronness Marianna von Allesch on Miami Beach, making glass Christmas ornaments, among other items. According to this web page, Marianna was born in Ingolstadt, Germany and was a ceramic muralist. “She was also a craftsperson, designer and teacher. She was the creator of Pulaski Modern Furniture and was a designer of glassware for Kensington Crystal Company. She studied in Europe with Bruno Paul and at the Royal Academy in Berlin.” I knew exactly none of this until I wrote this post. When I was a youngster, we had Christmas ornaments that were most likely made in von Allesch’s shop but of course they were broken or thrown away years ago. I wonder what they might have been worth? Sigh ….