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For most of its early career, the SS Florida carried passengers from various Florida locations to Havana, Cuba. Apparently, in the early 1930s, the P&O Steamship Company (Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co.), which owned the SS Florida, briefly tried to compete with the Eastern Steamship Co. on its northeast Atlantic routes. This image of the SS Florida steaming past Maine’s picturesque Portland Head Lighthouse was taken in July, 1934 by noted photographer Ralph F. Blood (1905-1972). Passengers on board the ship during this trip might likely have been reading in their newspapers about Public Enemy Number 1, John Dillinger, having been shot dead by FBI agents as he left the Biograph Theatre in Chicago, or of the assassination of Chancellor Englebert Dollfuss of Austria in an attempted overthrow of that government by the Nazis. After unrest in Cuba, which led to the eventual takeover by Fidel Castro, the SS Florida stopped going to Havana, Cuba and made permanent runs from Florida to the Bahamas until the vessel was retired in 1966.
(Photo from the Rob Michael collection. The photographer, Ralph Blood, is Rob Michael’s maternal grandmother’s brother and his maternal grandmother was married to noted photographer W.W. Ballard of Southwest Harbor, Maine.)
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