📅 Tuesday, November 18, 2024 | ⏰ 6:00 p.m.
📍 Casa Feliz Historic Home Museum
Attendance limited: RSVP to casafelizrsvp@gmail.com

EVENT DESCRIPTION

In the midst of the Great Depression, young architect James Gamble Rogers II brought his visionary and practical skills to create a home for the Barbour family – a home like no other, now known as Casa Feliz. Venture back to Winter Park in 1933 with our speakers, Rick Kilby, Bonnie Hansen, and Joy Wallace Dickinson, to a time that was anything but depressed – when Zora Neale Hurston produced a musical revue, Rollins College was embroiled in controversy, and novelist Irving Bacheller shone in the social scene. From fabulous fashions to fabled characters, there’s a lot to discover. 

ABOUT OUR PRESENTERS:

Rick Kilby
Orlando-based writer and graphic designer Rick Kilby is the author of Florida’s Healing Waters: Gilded Age Mineral Springs, Seaside Resorts, and Health Spas (University Press of Florida, 2020), which received the silver medal for Florida nonfiction from the Florida Book Awards and the Florida Historical Society’s Stetson Kennedy Award. His first book, Finding the Fountain of Youth: Ponce de León and Florida's Magical Waters (University Press of Florida, 2013), won a Florida Book Award in the Visual Arts category. A former board member at Casa Feliz, Rick is currently Vice President of the board of the Winter Park Historical Museum.

Joy Wallace Dickinson
For more than two decades, Joy Wallace Dickinson wrote the Orlando Sentinel’s weekly “Florida Flashback” feature about aspects of Central Florida’s history. She’s the author of three nonfiction books, including Orlando: City of Dreams, and the novel Secrets of the Flamingo Café, set in Orlando in the late 1940s, which received the Florida Historical Society’s Patrick D. Smith Award for 2025. 

Bonnie Hansen
A fashion historian, Bonnie has worked as a Hollywood costumer, museum consultant, and lecturer on women's history and fashion history with notable organizations such as Titanic: The Exhibition, the New Mexico History Museum, and California State Historic Parks. She will share some authentic 1930s-era clothing and accessories from her extensive collection. Through her offerings we'll get to see how women dressed during the era in which Casa Feliz was constructed and get a peek at some cool Art Deco trains.

👉 Reserve your spot today — space is limited!