Book Reviews
Venice Gondolier – Wednesday, April 2, 2025
There’s nothing trivial about Sarasota Trivia Game
Game tests your knowledge of Sarasota County history
KIM COOL
Our Town Editor Emeritus
Even if you own every Sarasota area history book ever published, there is always more to learn about the Sarasota County area of Florida.
The fun way to discover the little known facts is by playing the “Sarasota Trivia Game” by Kim Patton Manning and John D. Manning.
Newly published by New View Services in Sarasota, this book is filled with facts.
With help from such area experts as historian/writer Jeff LaHurd and John McCarthy (vice president of Selby Gardens and director of Historic Spanish Point), this book is filled with facts about the entire Sarasota County area.
There were the early settlers like Seminole’s chief Billy Bowlegs, or Williiam Whitaker, the first white settler (1842), and John and Eliza Webb, who arrived in 1867.
There were later arrivals with names like John, Charles and Alfred Ringling in the 1920s, Venice city planner John Nolen, developer Dwight James Baum, architects Ralph Twitchell, Paul Rudolph and Carl Abbott, and artists Jack Dowd, Ben Stahl and Syd Solomon.
The seeds of the Cultural Capital of Florida were planted.
Also included are composer of films and more, Dick Hyman, musicians Brian Johnson, Joe Perry and Rudy Bundy.
With the arrival of the Greatest Show on Earth to Sarasota in 1927 came famed clown Lou Jacobs and daughter Dolly, who would become “Queen of the Air,” the Wallenda family and later in Venice, the Flying Gaonas, Gunther Gebel-Williams and the birth of the famed Clown College.
Adding to the cultural climate were writers such as Walter Farley, John D. MacDonald, Clifford Irving, Stuart Kamnsky and Stephen King.
Elvis Presley performed in the old Edwards Theatre, now home to Sarasota Opera and known as the Sarasota Opera House.
But all this is 20th and 21st century history.
This history game goes farther back in time — roughly 530 million years back to early ice and global warming ages. The present west coast of Florida is located in the middle of the land mass that existed some 20,000 years ago.
That today’s land was under water during the age of the dinosaurs is why those giant creatures never occupied the land of today’s Florida.
Consider that even the Seminoles were not the first human settlers. Paleo Indians, known as Calusa, appeared some 12,500 years earlier. Their shell middens are nearly all gone along the coastal areas.
Creek and Seminole Indians rid the area of Calusas by the 1750s — yet another piece of trivia from the “Sarasota Trivia Game.”
The book includes a sample scorecard, rules on how to play the game and finally some 210 pages of facts. There are 340 questions (and answers) but hundreds of additional questions that can be created from all the facts within the book.
One could choose themes such as Major League Baseball, circus lore, colleges and universities, bodies of water, historic figures, street names, barrier islands, or famous women such as Bertha Palmer, Mable Ringling, Marie Selby, Gertrude Albee, Vernona Burns, Lillian Burns and Louella Albee.
People and places all played a role in today’s Sarasota, not just the city but the entire county.
So did inns, hotels and restaurants. This book is so packed with information about this special area of Florida that one could play a different Sarasota Trivia game daily for years. Photos, maps and diagrams add other dimensions to this work that resulted from a simple idea but years of research to bring it to fruition.
More details can be found at SarasotaTriviabyKim.com
“Sarasota Trivia Game,” a game and reference about the History of Sarasota County, by Kim Patton Manning and John D. Manning, 216 pages pub. by NewView Services Inc. ISBN 9798-9923471-0-4 $39.95.
