Regarding “Missing piece of history — Jim Morrison in Clearwater”

In 2005, I penned a blog post that was inspired by the then-St. Petersburg Times had written an epic feature regarding the days of Jim Morrison,  lead singer of The Doors, had spent living in the Tampa Bay area of Florida. Being a Morrison fan and living only a handful of miles away from locations mentioned in the piece, I was blown away. I had known about Morrison having been born in south Florida but I didn’t know about this.

Part of what inspired the blog post was the fact social media wasn’t then what it is today. Not that writing a blog post was going to necessarily draw eyeballs. Yet to this day, Missing piece of history – Jim Morrison in Clearwater still draws web traffic because of Morrison’s romantic interest (and song inspiration) Mary Werbelow.

At any rate, to get to the point, the now- Tampa Bay Times has basically failed with how they treat their archives online, which now hides the articles on a for-profit site (…unless the Times plans to fix their “Page Not Found” issues on archival articles). Between this and my old blog post failure in being more direct and obvious on the link to the feature section from September 25, 2005, finding the feature reading is next to impossible.

Well, was.

Using the Wayback Machine let me give a direct link list from the reads within “Mary and Jim to the End”:

• Master List
• Mary and Jim to the End (main article)
• Mary and the Lyrics
• Timeline: Mary Werbelow, Jim Morrison, and the Doors
• Jim’s college days in Florida
• The Doors burned bright — and were done
• 35 years ago, but just found
• Your own place of music history

Note: Because this utilizes the Wayback Machine, load time for each article will not be optimal. At the same time, without the Wayback Machine — reading these articles would not be possible…unless you pay. And even then, I don’t know if the site provides all articles from the feature.

Also of note is the simple fact that the Times report being 13 years old, most of this stuff is probably out there already or cited in other sources (books, articles, blogs) so I don’t know if it’s truly a feature set of reads any more. I can’t say it’s the highest quality band history either, but the feature’s primary focus was on Morrison’s connection to the Tampa Bay area way back when.