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Growing Up Floridian
Growing Up Floridian is a personal memoir that relives moments as a boy grew up in the 1950's and 1960's learning life lessons in a rural Cracker-cowboy environment. He put those lessons to use as he adapted to Florida's west coast as a beach-loving teenager.
328 pages, Paperback
Published March 31, 2016
2 people are currently reading
7 people want to read
About the author
Michael Arthur Taylor
6 books57 followersAlthough I was born in Boston, and was considered a Yankee during most of my early years, I spent my formative childhood on a ranch in rural, central Florida. So, the cowboy image has significance in that I grew up in an environment that celebrated the rodeo-Florida Cracker Cowboy way of life about which many present-day Floridians know little. The cowboy persona blurred and merged with a Gulf coast sailing/fishing “salt-water cowboy” mentality when I moved to Pinellas County and spent my teen-age years and young adulthood surrounded by a marine environment.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 1, 2025
From Cracker cowboys to coastal dreams
Michael Taylor’s memoir of his boyhood growing up in Florida’s interior as the son of a “Cracker-cowboy” is an eye-opening chronicle of a bygone era wrought with delights, dangers, and unexpected sorrows. “Growing Up Floridian” is worth the read just to appreciate Taylor’s prose, which is slick, savvy, and highly polished. As the tale continues, the memoir takes a turn to the sea when the boy and his mother move to the west coast of Florida. When you read this book, be sure to pay special attention to its epilogue, which is both profound and inspiring.
Michael Taylor’s memoir of his boyhood growing up in Florida’s interior as the son of a “Cracker-cowboy” is an eye-opening chronicle of a bygone era wrought with delights, dangers, and unexpected sorrows. “Growing Up Floridian” is worth the read just to appreciate Taylor’s prose, which is slick, savvy, and highly polished. As the tale continues, the memoir takes a turn to the sea when the boy and his mother move to the west coast of Florida. When you read this book, be sure to pay special attention to its epilogue, which is both profound and inspiring.
February 20, 2022
The book is the memoir of the author as a boy growing up on a ranch on the west coast of Florida. For readers who love reading about the natural world written in exquisite language (think: Where the Crawdads Sing), this is your book. The memoir details the adventures of a young boy and his older brother while living on the ranch. In addition to alligators and snakes, they also have to contend with an abusive father, while their mother is the glue that holds the family together. Then a tragic accident forever changes the family dynamic. A beautiful story about everyday life on a ranch, loss, and finding solace in nature.
July 3, 2025
Thoroughly Enjoyable
This is a warm and entertaining memoir, filled with delights of nature. The author's childhood adventures remind me of My Family And Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. The change in POV for a highly emotional chapter is genius and the latter part of the book is coming of age gold.
This is a warm and entertaining memoir, filled with delights of nature. The author's childhood adventures remind me of My Family And Other Animals by Gerald Durrell. The change in POV for a highly emotional chapter is genius and the latter part of the book is coming of age gold.
December 9, 2021
When Peter Hargitai offered the following brief review,
Michael is the author of a fine memoir, Growing Up Floridian.. His lyrical descriptions read like prose poems. Here's an excerpt about a five-year-old Michael catching a Golden Topminnow. He had just moved from Massachusetts to Florida, trying to process displacement and the aftermath of a storm cell:
"A glint of gold disappeared into a small clump of weeds at the edge of an indentation in the bank of the ditch. I slid the Mason jar into the depression and lifted the glass to see what I felt bang against the sides. Red spots and irridescent gold flecks covered the side of a three-inch-long minnow that had an olive back and tawny sides."
(The power of the creative spirit transfigures whatever lurks in murky depression into a creature of scintillating beauty.)
…he encouraged me to recreate some of the passages poetically. An example can be found in GATEWAY: Gulfport Poets :
Cowboys and Indians
(from Growing up Floridian)
The cool recesses of the barn beckoned.
The odors of sweet feed and dry oats mingled
with the scents of leather, gun oil, and fertilizer.
The beams supporting the vast tin roof periodically groaned.
Bits of hay floated in and out of the shadows, and shafts of light
backed a horse’s gnawing at his stall gate; crunches echoed
into the barn’s empty southernmost corner.
The boys knew the terrain well and immediately disappeared
down stall lines in a game of cowboys and Indians.
Three artistic streaks of mud added to already grimy cheeks
identified the younger brother as a Sioux chief.
The older grabbed a pine splinter from a gnawed
stall plank to serve as his six–shooter.
The cowboy crawled under a stall gate and up against
the shoulder of Jughead, the oldest and slowest horse on the ranch.
A quick duck under his belly and a step up on the stall’s second
plank hid the cowboy from even the sharpest Indian scout’s eyes.
The Indian knew the enemy’s tricks.
He scampered into the hayloft and moved from bale to bale,
peering through the cracks in the floor into the stalls below.
The space between a support beam and the loft’s floor allowed enough room for a practiced hand clutching a warm, newly laid chicken egg.
The angle was slight, the flick quick. Warm yellow yolk running down the back of the cowboy’s neck signaled the Indian’s ambush was successful.
“Yuck!”
The cowboy tossed his six–shooter aside, stepped up a plank,
slid over Jughead’s broad brown back and plopped to the ground.
After brushing eggshell from his crew cut hair, he plunged
his head into the horse’s water bucket and washed egg slime
from his head and neck with a resigned chuckle.
“You win. One less egg I have to collect this evening.”
From “Minnows,”
The creatures that populated my miniature aquatic world
included two ghost shrimp,
A pair of tiny crawfish to wander the bottom, and two pygmy sunfish.
One with brownish-red mottling across a body flecked with bright blue and
another with dark bands over much of the greenish body
and fins that brightly speckled with a greenish-blue:
classic bottom dwellers.
I erroneously thought they were male and female of one species,
not two different species.
Middle level residents were a small male Sailfin
and an equally small female.
The Sailfin's blue fluorescent tail arrested my attention during my earliest explorations of the creek.
When larger males fought for control of a small school of females,
their dominant dorsal fins,
vertically striped in black and tipped with yellow,
would stand up so straight they would break the surface of the water.
A smaller male would always hang around the outside of the school.
That was the fish I targeted.
The capture of that fish took two days; a suitable female in two minutes.
The final pair, mosquito fish, the most numerous minnows in the creek.
A slender male with black spots and a suitable mate.
Such males, always much smaller than the females and non-spotted males, stood out in the swarm of mosquito fish.
Since they were typically surface fish, the areas of the artificial creek covered.
Michael is the author of a fine memoir, Growing Up Floridian.. His lyrical descriptions read like prose poems. Here's an excerpt about a five-year-old Michael catching a Golden Topminnow. He had just moved from Massachusetts to Florida, trying to process displacement and the aftermath of a storm cell:
"A glint of gold disappeared into a small clump of weeds at the edge of an indentation in the bank of the ditch. I slid the Mason jar into the depression and lifted the glass to see what I felt bang against the sides. Red spots and irridescent gold flecks covered the side of a three-inch-long minnow that had an olive back and tawny sides."
(The power of the creative spirit transfigures whatever lurks in murky depression into a creature of scintillating beauty.)
…he encouraged me to recreate some of the passages poetically. An example can be found in GATEWAY: Gulfport Poets :
Cowboys and Indians
(from Growing up Floridian)
The cool recesses of the barn beckoned.
The odors of sweet feed and dry oats mingled
with the scents of leather, gun oil, and fertilizer.
The beams supporting the vast tin roof periodically groaned.
Bits of hay floated in and out of the shadows, and shafts of light
backed a horse’s gnawing at his stall gate; crunches echoed
into the barn’s empty southernmost corner.
The boys knew the terrain well and immediately disappeared
down stall lines in a game of cowboys and Indians.
Three artistic streaks of mud added to already grimy cheeks
identified the younger brother as a Sioux chief.
The older grabbed a pine splinter from a gnawed
stall plank to serve as his six–shooter.
The cowboy crawled under a stall gate and up against
the shoulder of Jughead, the oldest and slowest horse on the ranch.
A quick duck under his belly and a step up on the stall’s second
plank hid the cowboy from even the sharpest Indian scout’s eyes.
The Indian knew the enemy’s tricks.
He scampered into the hayloft and moved from bale to bale,
peering through the cracks in the floor into the stalls below.
The space between a support beam and the loft’s floor allowed enough room for a practiced hand clutching a warm, newly laid chicken egg.
The angle was slight, the flick quick. Warm yellow yolk running down the back of the cowboy’s neck signaled the Indian’s ambush was successful.
“Yuck!”
The cowboy tossed his six–shooter aside, stepped up a plank,
slid over Jughead’s broad brown back and plopped to the ground.
After brushing eggshell from his crew cut hair, he plunged
his head into the horse’s water bucket and washed egg slime
from his head and neck with a resigned chuckle.
“You win. One less egg I have to collect this evening.”
From “Minnows,”
The creatures that populated my miniature aquatic world
included two ghost shrimp,
A pair of tiny crawfish to wander the bottom, and two pygmy sunfish.
One with brownish-red mottling across a body flecked with bright blue and
another with dark bands over much of the greenish body
and fins that brightly speckled with a greenish-blue:
classic bottom dwellers.
I erroneously thought they were male and female of one species,
not two different species.
Middle level residents were a small male Sailfin
and an equally small female.
The Sailfin's blue fluorescent tail arrested my attention during my earliest explorations of the creek.
When larger males fought for control of a small school of females,
their dominant dorsal fins,
vertically striped in black and tipped with yellow,
would stand up so straight they would break the surface of the water.
A smaller male would always hang around the outside of the school.
That was the fish I targeted.
The capture of that fish took two days; a suitable female in two minutes.
The final pair, mosquito fish, the most numerous minnows in the creek.
A slender male with black spots and a suitable mate.
Such males, always much smaller than the females and non-spotted males, stood out in the swarm of mosquito fish.
Since they were typically surface fish, the areas of the artificial creek covered.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews