A Car Full of Dynamite Waited Outside This Beach House

December 11, 1960. A car full of dynamite is parked outside a house on the ocean in Palm Beach, Florida. The man inside is waiting for someone who, in a few weeks, will become the most powerful person in the world. The door opens. And then he sees something he did not expect. This is the hidden story of Palm Beach: a wild shore of shipwrecks that became the winter address of America's richest families. In this episode: the Jeaga people and the shipwreck coast, the Providencia and its 20,000 coconuts (1878), the Barefoot Mailman and the disappearance of James Hamilton at Hillsboro Inlet (1887), Henry Flagler's railroad, the Royal Poinciana and The Breakers, Whitehall, the Styx, Bradley's Beach Club, Addison Mizner, Paris Singer and the Everglades Club, Worth Avenue, the land bust and the 1928 hurricane, Marjorie Merriweather Post and Mar-a-Lago, German submarines and mounted beach patrols in 1942, the Kennedy house on North Ocean Boulevard, Richard Pavlick's plot of December 1960 and the postcard that stopped it, and the gift the government gave back. Chapters 0:00 Intro 1:01 The Coconut Wreck 2:50 The Barefoot Mailman 4:05 The Man Who Bought the Winter 7:03 The Architect Who Never Studied 9:28 Fire on the Horizon 10:11 The House on North Ocean 12:14 The Gift 13:22 What I think Visuals: archival photographs and postcards (Library of Congress, including the Detroit Publishing Company collection, State Archives of Florida and other public domain / Creative Commons sources via Wikimedia Commons), stock footage, and AI-generated reconstructions of scenes for which no photos exist. Reconstructions are illustrative. Sources Wikipedia: Palm Beach, Florida; Providencia (shipwreck); Barefoot Mailman; Henry Flagler; Royal Poinciana Hotel; The Breakers; Whitehall (Palm Beach, Florida); Addison Mizner; Everglades Club; Worth Avenue; 1928 Okeechobee hurricane; Mar-a-Lago; Marjorie Merriweather Post; Operation Drumbeat; Richard Paul Pavlick; Kennedy Compound (Palm Beach) Les Standiford, Last Train to Paradise (2002) Theodore Pratt, The Barefoot Mailman (1943) Donald W. Curl, Mizner's Florida: American Resort Architecture (1984) Laurence Leamer, Madness Under the Royal Palms (2009) Secret Service and FBI accounts of the Pavlick case, December 1960 #PalmBeach #Florida #HiddenHistory #BeforeThePostcard