The geographic boundary of the panhandle has been debated by this blog’s authors since the three of us were in college.   To be honest, these conversations have been one part intellectual curiosity and one part simple bulls*$%ing.  Still, for a blog supposedly written by three people from the panhandle, it deserves asking: where is this place?

For those who’ve never heard of the Florida panhandle, the simple answer is that it’s the part of Florida that looks like the “handle of a pan.”  In colloquial use, the “Florida panhandle” refers to that strip of land in North Florida, running roughly East-West, which borders Alabama and Georgia.  The region is generally contrasted with the “peninsula” of Florida, running roughly North-South, which juts into the Atlantic Ocean.  This definition seems simple enough – but as you will soon learn, no answer is too simple for me, Lawrence, and Brian to make it complicated.

Why isn’t this definition enough?  Well, in 1983 a man named Benedict Anderson wrote a book called “Imagined Communities.”  In this book he argued that any community is “imagined” by those who see themselves as part of this community.  What Anderson meant by this “imagination” stuff, is that communities (or regions like the panhandle) are not simply geographic places defined by rivers or national borders.  Instead, Anderson argued, a place is always first and foremost defined by those who live in an area and believe they share something in common.

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Welcome to what must be the first blog created by intellectuals from the Florida panhandle (it’s a small demographic). Along with fellow “southern intellectuals” Brian and Lawrence, I hope we can show you what it really means to live in the panhandle, and the American South (and also to convince you that “southern intellectual” is not an oxymoron). Neither pulling punches, nor waxing lyrical about a nostalgic past, hopefully you will find this blog a frank and practical guide to issues that affect our most southern “southern” state.

In the way of introductions, let me start by being honest and say that, in a certain light, you might have trouble labeling me as “from the panhandle.” In all honesty, I only physically lived there for just 5 of my 26 years (8^th to 12^th grade). Furthermore, like Brian and Lawrence, I’m not exactly what you would call the prototypical “panhandle resident.” For a region colloquially referred to as “Lower Alabama,” my characteristics are probably not the first things that come to mind: extremely liberal, PhD-bound, and relatively free of a southern accent.

In another light, though, my heritage strangely makes me very much from the panhandle. It’s from this experience that I am inspired to contribute to this blog, and from which I think I have some purchase on the region. Because this background is important, let me share with you what connects me to the Florida panhandle.

Both my father and my grandparents were born in Okaloosa County (two generations of Florida natives are an oddity for the state) — and my family is certainly representative of the region. My grandparents are farmers (although they don’t do much farming in their old age), who several times a week attend a Congregationalist church up the hill from their house. Most telling of my grandparent’s panhandle heritage is that my grandfather built their house, by hand, out of knotty pine — a house that I have consistently returned to each year for Christmas.

In a similar way, my father is a panhandle man. He grew up helping my grandfather on the farm. Like many people who grew up working on a farm, he doesn’t speak highly of this experience (not surprisingly — from what I hear, “free slave labor” best describes how farmers “utilize” their sons). My father was also captain of the football team at Baker School (notice the missing modifier here, as in “high” or “middle” or “elementary” – Baker has a K-12 program to this day). Afterward, my dad went on to attend such venerable panhandle institutions as Okaloosa Walton Junior College (often referred to as “OW,” “O-dub,” or “slow Dub”), and the University of West Florida in Pensacola. To my knowledge, with the exception of a short stint in his 20’s, he has always lived within comfortable driving distance of his stomping grounds in Okaloosa County.

So my family is from the panhandle. Ultimately though, what about me?

Let’s just say that the strongest testament to my panhandle heritage is the permanency of my inherited southern traits. Despite my best efforts to remove the more stigmatizing aspects of my southern heritage (my questionable grammatical constructions, my predilection for collard greens, my enjoyment of shooting a rifle or reading the bible or listening to Johnny Cash), it’s just plainly evident that I cannot escape my indelible connection to this place.

As we go on in future posts, I’m sure there are many other qualities I will reveal to venerate myself as qualified to look deeper into this region (and ultimately beyond the panhandle to the entire Gulf Coast region, and the Southeastern US). However, beyond just the perspective I’ve gained from my time in the panhandle, I also should let you know that I plan to apply the tools of sociology (to what extent you give that credit) to pierce into issues relative to this region.

That’s enough for a first post. Let me end by saying that Brian and Lawrence are smart folks, and if you read on, you’re guaranteed to get a clear view on what it means to be from the panhandle, the South, and (if you’re interested in such a thing) what it means to be a panhandle intellectual.

When I meet new people here in Chicago where I live, I often feel like I’m in an AA meeting: “Hi. My name is Brian, and I’m a Panhandler. I’ve been southern for 25 years now.” As the supporting yet slightly pitying looks dart back and forth and the polite applause dies down, I have to ask myself, “Will I ever NOT be a southerner?”

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t want to be southern. I ask this question as a start to understanding what it means to be southern, what other people seem to know about me when they divine that I’m from the Panhandle of Florida and NOT from Miami, and to discover what it is that is perceived to be so different about the South compared to the rest of the country. 

Thus The Panhandler’s Guide. Through this blog my two partners in intellectual me-search and I will try to expose what it means to be from, and to be in, the Panhandle and the South. We want to tackle this challenge through a mixture of empirical data and good old fashioned unsubstantiated anecdotes from our own lives to help get that “rich description” anthropologists are always going on about. 

You may at this point be wondering about my credentials. Am I the quintessential image of a grits eating, pick-up truck driving, overalls wearing, church going, tobacco picking, banjo playing good old boy? Well, no. But I’m not the opposite, either. In the South I’m not quite Southern enough, but in the rest of the country I’m enough Southern to be typecast as such.

I was born in the Florida Panhandle. My parents moved out of Miami in the late 1970s as refugees from the race riots (like the Arthur McDuffie Riots) towards a more picturesque and simple life, in the fashion of “The Waltons” or “Little House on the Prairie.” They stopped in Tallahassee for a few years before purchasing land in the small town of Live Oak in Suwannee County. In 1980, Suwannee county had 22,287 residents (we’re in the data section now, by the way) and ranked as 46 out of 67 counties by population – meaning 21 counties had even fewer residents. This, dear reader, is a rural area: 33 people per square mile, which is 36 times less dense than Miami and 386 times less dense than the city of Chicago.

My mother was a nurse, and my father began as a school teacher and then ventured into running a series of his own businesses beginning with weaning calves and selling them as mature cows, and then operated a mobile sawmill (jobs which, by the way, were wildly unpleasant for me at the time but great icebreaking stories now). Both enterprises failed to gain fiscal traction, and so we relied almost exclusively on a nurse’s salary until I was finishing high-school, remaining in the mobile home that was originally meant to be temporary. I mention this to allow the reader to place me in class terms: I, unlike seemingly every undecided voter in America, could only aspire to be middle class, and this economic identity colors my view of the world as I work on my Ph.D. at the upper-class private University of Chicago.

And, for any readers who were misled by the title of this blog, the focus of this site is the Florida Panhandle and is about neither the culinary instrument nor destitute beggars.

Not yet, anyway.