“People that write the history of the Everglades, Miami or Fort Lauderdale don’t do their homework. They write about the great and the mighty that everyone knows, but say nothing of … the common man and woman that really worked hard. They were there when the going was the worst.”

— John Fritchey

John Edward Fritchey was there when the going was the worst, a small boy riding on a truck beside his grandfather as they hauled tomatoes to early settlers in the Everglades.

Fritchey, 61, was also there for the best: days when persimmon trees were abundant and a little boy could dig a hole in the mud and spend hours watching snails and other creatures now gone.

“My grandfather told me to write all that stuff down because someday it would all be changed,” Fritchey said. “I wanted to leave the journal to my grandchildren.

“I didn’t know the Everglades would be wiped out so quick,” he said. “I didn’t even know it was going to be messed up.”

In the 1930s, Fritchey began a journal he would keep for 50 years, an abundant stream of stories now being shared with a wider audience than his eight grandchildren.

A fledgling nonprofit publisher, Florida Heritage Press, has turned Fritchey’s handwritten, loose-leaf diary into a book.

Appropriately, it is titled Everglades Journal.

“It talks about the beauty and abundance of the Glades as it existed, and the tragedy of its loss,” said Beth R. Read, book editor and executive director of the Archeological and Historical Conservancy, sponsor of the press.

Florida Heritage Press published its first book in 1987, The Battle of Okeechobee, and has used proceeds from that book to help finance Fritchey’s journal. It will use any profits from this $16.95 book to finance the next one.

Everglades Journal went on sale this week and has more than 50 advance orders, Read said. But it is a long way to go to earn the more than $15,000 needed to publish again.

So far, most of the people interested are naturalists. Fritchey’s prose is more colloquial than literary. Some stories are passed down from his father or grandfather.

“The editing (task) was horrendous. Punctuation? Spelling? Forget it,” Read said. “But he is a natural-born storyteller.”

It is not all pretty plants and flowers.

Fritchey writes of alligator hunts that left carcasses clogging canals and the 1928 hurricane that killed nearly 2,000 people, many of their bodies burned by survivors for health reasons.

He writes of a renegade moonshiner named Frank Wilkerson and a man who watched smoke chugging from trains and predicted that “evil air” would kill the Glades.

Fritchey tells readers about the days when survival meant digging sweet potatoes or picking wild grapes. And he documents the painful disappearance of that bounty because of increasing pollution.

The paperback book is illustrated by Garth Fripp, a Florida native. The press can be contacted at P.O. Box 450283, Miami 33145, or at 1-305-374-5699.