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Vintage St. Pete: Paddy the Porpoise and the Marine Arena

Bill DeYoung

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Jack Hurlbut and Paddy. The fully-grown bottlenose dolphin lived in Hurlbut's 54x24x10 concrete tank for nine years. Photo: Collection of the author.

This story appears in the book Vintage St. Pete: Th Golden Age of Tourism – and More (St. Petersburg Press)

A photograph in the Oct. 2, 1953 edition of the St. Petersburg Times shows five men standing on a dock, a dead bottlenose dolphin stretched out in front of them. They are identified as being from a boat called Dixie Queen, out of Johns Pass:

The porpoise was lassoed but fought so hard he killed himself threshing (sic) against the boat. Other attempts will be made, using new methods planned by the crew.

The fearless fishermen had been in the Gulf that day in response to a bounty placed on “porpoises” by Jack Hurlbut, the proprietor of the Marine Arena, a new Madeira Beach tourist attraction. Two of the animals had recently died in Hurlbut’s care, and he was offering $100 apiece for new specimens for his 54 x 24 foot “show” tank.

Until Congress passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972, it was legal to harass, capture, kill or possess bottlenose dolphins, aka “porpoises.”

They’re completely different species, of course, but in those days most people didn’t know, or care.

Postcard image

Long before Congress acted, marine scientists did know that the animals were hyper-intelligent and sensitive, and thanks to TV’s Flipper and the proliferation of those places where they jumped through hoops and tooted horns for the amusement of tourists, bottlenose dolphins were the subject of fascination.

But they didn’t have any rights at all. And back in the ‘50s, when Jack Hurlbut built the Marina Arena, a porpoise was just another fish to be taken and exploited.

A mechanical engineer with a degree from Duke University, Hurlbut left his native Illinois in 1943 with his new, Florida-born bride. They settled in Madeira Beach, where Hurlbut could indulge his passion for fishing. He bought an old bait shop, right across from the docks, and launched a new career.

“He used to go up on the old Johns Pass Bridge, in the evening when work was over,” recalls Hurlbut’s son Wayne, now 80 and living in New York. “And he liked to snook fish. And one night he caught 23 snook. I have a hunch that’s something close to a world record.”

Jack Hurlbut served on the Madeira Beach town commission from 1951 to ’55.

Jack’s Bait Shop, as it was called, came to be known for the unusual local fish Hurlbut kept alive in his baitwells. They were caught from the bridge mostly, or from boats –  the waters around Johns Pass were teeming with fish then, and visitors would stop in to gawk at sea robins, flounder, redfish, snook, snapper, rays, sheepshead, small sharks and even the occasional tarpon. His buddies would bring them in alive and drop them at Jack’s Bait Shop.

All this attention gave Hurlbut an idea. Alongside the bait shop he constructed, from his own design, a 50,000-gallon concrete aquarium, with 17 small portholes of ¾ inch thick glass, and a viewing area (with bleacher seats) on top. Hurlbut, his wife and their young son lived in the adjacent apartment.

“My bedroom was upstairs, and it was only 15 feet from the tank,” recalls Wayne Hurlbut, whose parents called him “Punky” in those days. “Downstairs was the gift shop, where you would buy your ticket. So for a neighbor I had a porpoise, or a dolphin, or whatever you want to call him. Plus a lot of other fish; he had tanks all around the lower level, around the outside of the big tank.”

When the Marine Arena opened, on July 4, 1953, there were dozens of fish in that big tank, a 300-pound loggerhead sea turtle Hurlbut dubbed Stinky, a pair of 450-pound Goliath grouper (then known as Jewfish) and a juvenile bottlenose dolphin he named Frankie.

Frankie had been snared in a mullet net on Pass-a-Grille; left by his captors in the sun too long, he was blind in one eye.

Hurlbut’s first two sharks beat themselves to death against the sides of the tank. Only the docile nurse sharks, somehow, survived and thrived in the aquarium. 

Captive tarpon never ate, and always died.

According to the Times, the turtle was sometimes confined to a small steel cage at the side of the tank.

The closed-in roof allowed little sunlight to get in.

Nevertheless, as a curiosity the Marine Arena was an instant success, particularly when Hurlbut began to teach Frankie to do “tricks” for fish.

But there was always drama:

When Johnnie, a larger porpoise brought in to be Frankie’s playmate, went berserk and tried to kill Frankie by battering his mid-section with his snout, Hurlbut anxiously paced the rim of the tank until police could be summoned to bring a final halt to the brutal Johnny with several well-placed shots.

St. Petersburg Times/Nov. 17, 1953

Frankie stopped eating and died the next month.

Frankie and Johnnie were replaced in February. Hurlbut had snared one of the new creatures himself, 18 miles offshore, and the other he purchased from the Daytona Beach Sea Zoo, driving it across the state on a saltwater-soaked mattress in the bed of his truck.

What happened next is lost to history, but in December 1954 it was reported that Hurlbut had purchased two more porpoises from local charter boat operator Wilson Hubbard.

One of Hubbard’s businesses was an excursion boat to Shell Key, where he and his crew had constructed a pen, from chain link fencing and wood pilings driven into the sand, right there on the remote beach. 

Wilson Hubbard, Shell Key, 1954. Photo courtesy the Hubbard family

Here they kept porpoises they had netted, or snared with a special contraption they’d come up with, to “entertain” guests on their tour boats.

Several times a day, seven days a week, the Shell Island boat would arrive and Hubbard would toss fish to “Mike” and “Patty” (named for his young children) and “Frank” (named for the man who’d helped design the snare).

Hurlbut, meanwhile, went through numerous “porpoises” in 1955, including a pair delivered from Marathon Key by a bounty-hunting married couple. “Johnny II” was the star of his little show until September, when it was reported that the animal had taken “ill” and had been released back into the Gulf.

When a storm knocked down a section of Wilson Hubbard’s Shell Key porpoise pen, “Mike” and “Frank” escaped, leaving “Patty” as the last captive animal. Hubbard, weary of the work and the maintenance, decided to abandon the project. In 1956, he sold Patty to Jack Hurlbut.

Somebody, most likely Hurlbut himself, noticed right away that the newest captive at the Marina Arena was a male. And so Patty became Paddy.

Paddy the performing porpoise spent the next nine years of his life swimming back and forth in that tiny concrete cage, three shows a day, 75 cents for adults and 35 cents for children.

At maturity, the animal measured 7-foot-10 inches from nose to fluke. The homemade tank was 10 feet deep.

Paddy turned out to be easily trainable. Hurlbut, who had no previous experience in such things, worked with the dolphin daily, first on rudimentary “tricks” like leaping on command, shaking hands or returning a beachball. “He taught that porpoise, or that porpoise taught him, I’m not at all sure how it was,” remembers Hurlbut’s son. “Dad made this little organ. It had four pedals on it, four different notes. They were different colors. And he actually got that porpoise to play a tune. It took some time … but I thought it was amazing.

“I went diving in the tank one time. Dad wanted to get the sides scrubbed, so I put an aqualung on and I went in the tank. I was going along scrubbing the walls, and that silly porpoise come up and poked me with his nose. Scared me half to death.

“That’s one story that comes to mind. There was a million of them, but I think I’ve forgotten most of ‘em.”

Paddy, Jack Hurlbut told the Times, was “too smart for words. He actually understands you.”

Hurlbut was proud of the clear water at Marine Arena. He’d been fascinated by Marineland, the attraction near St. Augustine, and his original sketches for the Maderia Beach facility resemble the open-air Marineland in miniature. “That’s where Dad picked up some of his information on the filtering systems, and one thing and another,” Wayne Hurlbut recalls.

Hurlbut’s original sketch of his “West Coast Marineland.”

Marineland’s filtration secrets were protected by copyright; Hurlbut, his son says, deduced how the system worked and “built it himself” using $20,000 in spare machine parts.

Florida State University biologist Winthrop N. Kellogg, author of the book Porpoises and Sonar, came to the area in 1962 and performed a series of “intelligence tests” on Paddy, and pronounced the aquarium dolphin “the most sophisticated and best-trained porpoise in the world.”

(The tests) proved, among other things, that Paddy can outthink and outperform five chimpanzees undergoing duplicate tests – and still do three shows a day in the bargain.

St. Petersburg Times/Sept. 9, 1962

The arrival of the $3.5 million Aquatarium on St. Pete Beach spelled the end of the line for Jack Hurlbut’s facility, which he had re-christened the Johns Pass Aquarium. Knowing full well he couldn’t compete with the new kid in town and its 1.2 million-gallon, open-air stadium tank, he sold his entire stock – including Paddy, his recently acquired sea lion Sydney, 50 fish and the contents of the gift shop – to the Aquatarium.

RELATED READING: Vintage St. Pete: The Aquatarium

Jack Hurlbut continued to operate his bait shop, then went to work as a machine engineer for Brite Industries. He died in 1975, at age 61.

Within a month of his January, 1966 transfer, Paddy was back to three shows a day. Because of his “inability to get along with others” he was kept alone, in a smaller tank away from the attraction’s other “performers.”

Paddy was found dead in his Aquatarium tank in November of 1967. The newspaper headline read Paddy Joins His Buddies in Eternally Quiet Sea.

The house that Jack built: Wild Style Swimwear, 12801 Johns Way, is the old Marine Arena/Johns Pass Aquarium building. Photo by Bill DeYoung (Aug. 18, 2020).

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3 Comments

3 Comments

  1. Avatar

    Linda Jensen

    March 31, 2023at9:04 pm

    In the late 70’s I had a stained glass studio upstairs and lived in the apartment. I love Johns Pass!

  2. Avatar

    Janice Ririe Taylor

    September 1, 2020at1:58 pm

    I saw Paddy perform many times as a child. Of course, I had no idea what his living conditions were. I, too, am glad for the progress we’ve made in animal treatment since then.

  3. Avatar

    Shane Smith

    August 25, 2020at10:46 am

    Grateful that we have come a long way from the practices displayed here. However, I still believe in the importance of whale/dolphin captivity. It provides a level of education to the many that are never connected to what lies beneath the waves. “We protect what we love” ~ Jacques Cousteau. And we love what we know about.

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