My first memory of Cocoa Beach is from a warm spring night in the early seventies. My family had driven to Florida along with their close friends, the Wiatrowskis. We had been promised a trip to Disney World, but, for my father and me, the highlight of the vacation was to be our visit to the Kennedy Space Center.
With nine kids between the two families, the adults must have had an enormous amount of patience. I-95 was not yet completed, so a good portion of the trip had been driven on secondary roads cluttered with cheerful billboards advertising South of the Border. We’d survived a brief visit to that well-known tourist trap, figured out the difference between the thrilling “E” and the not so exciting “A” tickets at Disney, and we kids had managed not to kill or maim each other too badly on the endless journey south from Massachusetts.
While we’d been dazzled by Frontierland and Tomorrowland at the Magic Kingdom, Cocoa Beach seemed grown up and otherworldly. In addition to the warm weather and the unfamiliar flora, the town had something of the Wild West about it. It seemed like a place that catered to young and unencumbered men. Back home in staid Springfield, bars had much earlier closing hours and the one “exotic dancer” license had to be shared among three rather seedy establishments. My father made it sound like Cocoa Beach had an endless supply of strippers and mermaids and topless clubs. Liquor could be consumed on the beach, restaurants and taverns stayed open until the wee hours, and their signage bragged of “the best breakfast on the beach,” because people weren’t expected to go home after an all-night bender to cook their own. You didn’t even have to partake of the bubbly to start seeing things. Besides the famous mermaids swimming in the walls of Lee Caron’s Carnival, the well-known nightclub also sported a two-story pink elephant out front.
For our two families, however, the main attractions were the beautiful beaches and the Kennedy Space Center. The Visitors Center had not yet been privatized, but the tour was mesmerizing—as long as you brought your imagination along with you. Although nearly everything seemed to be “restricted,” we were taken on a brief tour of the Vehicle Assembly Building—at the time, the world’s largest building by volume. In the vast, apparently empty space, we were told that the building had its own weather system and that it had been known to rain inside it. Outside, we got to see some old missiles and then we were led to a building with a small room filled with portraits of famous rocket scientists. Each portrait was accompanied by a short biographical paragraph. My own obsessive fascination with science fiction seemed vindicated by the discovery that nearly all of these men attributed their inspirations and interest in their fields to reading the works of Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and other early SF writers. Surely the modern authors would help the next wave of scientists and engineers get us off planet and into deep space.
Unfortunately, Cocoa Beach, Cape Canaveral, and the surrounding area were entering an economic downturn. President Nixon had recently proposed that a half a billion dollars be cut from the space program’s budget. Four planned Apollo Moon landings had been dropped and thousands of scientists and engineers were about to be thrown out of work. Money had been set aside for a new space shuttle program that would ferry astronauts to a large space station in Earth’s orbit. This station would be the departure point for a manned mission to Mars, but since the shuttles and the station were being delayed, the New York Times speculated that the new timetable would “push the Mars mission into the nineteen-eighties or later.”
The rules and mores of civilization seemed to arrive in Cocoa Beach during the waning days of the 1970’s space program. Topless sunbathing was outlawed on the beaches in 1974 and in 1978 the pink elephant was sold to a used car dealer in Maine. My father, who had begun to develop condominium conversions in Cocoa Beach and other nearby towns, would report on the closing of one familiar bar or restaurant after another.
These thoughts resurfaced as I returned to Cocoa Beach this past May for the Nebula Awards. Although I had visited the town several times in my teens, I had stopped coming after my father’s business ventures moved further south to the even more alien environment of the Florida Keys. My only intervening visit to the area had been a side trip to the Kennedy Space Center just before the 1992 WorldCon in Orlando, Florida.
This time I noticed that there had certainly been some changes. While I could scarcely catch a glimpse of the beach from the road for all the hotels and condominiums that had sprung up, the Kennedy Space Center’s Visitors Center is now a spectacular tourist attraction filled with places to eat and shop and fascinating exhibits. The beach, when you walk out on to it, is as beautiful as ever and the town seems just as lively. I didn’t hear of any mermaids, but I was delighted to see a smaller version of the pink elephant on a nearby miniature golf course.
I don’t have room to unlock all my memories of Cocoa Beach, so I’ll have to explore these and other thoughts about the Space Coast in a future editorial.

Copyright © 2010 Sheila Williams