By Deborah Sharp
FLORIDA TODAY

AUBURNDALE - If it doesn't slink, swim, soar or slither in Florida, you won't find it on the menu at Carl Allen's Historical Cafe.

In a state crowded with concrete condos and fast-food stands, the Allen cafe and its 70-year-old proprietor provide an authentic taste of Florida's cracker past.

"If they don't want to go back into time, they better not come here," said Allen, gazing around his antique-filled establishment in the small Central Florida town where he was born. "Because coming to this place and talking to me will surely put you back in time."

Indeed, Allen, a self-described cracker, tells of another time in Florida when the lake-dotted plains around these parts resounded with the crack of whips that pioneers used to drive their cattle to market That's how the cracker nickname was born.

Allen tells of yesteryear when the land teemed with birds and game, when the crackers got everything they needed from each other and from the land.

Everybody was poor back then. But didn't nobody know it" Allen said. "I like to remember back when times were quieter, when people had more love for one another."

And the cafe helps Allen recall that bountiful past. The eatery sits on busy US. 92 just east of Lakeland. Allen and his wife, Jewell, opened the place 28 years ago.

When you step through its swinging screen door and walk past the sign that reads "Smokers and Chewers, Please Spit on Each Other, Not on me Stove and Floor," you step back about a century. The walls are covered with antiques and early Florida artifacts.

Allen lost count of his collection years ago.

"Oh, I don't know how many," he "said, looking helplessly at items stashed in every nook and cranny and covering literally every Inch of !bare wall and ceiling "Thousands 'and thousands."

He pauses to consider the cumulative effect of his lifelong hobby.

"This collecting is a sickness", he confided, with a smile.

And then there's the menu. Allen doesn't serve anything but Florida foods.

"You won't find anything on the menu that wasn't caught, netted, raised, grown or hatched in this state," he has said.

There are the predictable plates: mullet, grouper, flounder, catfish and oysters. For the adventuresome diner, Allen also offers the exotic: armadillo, alligator, turtle, rattlesnake and frog legs. The food at Allen's Cafe is a flashback to days when Florida pioneers survived on whatever they could hunt.

We'd eat rabbit, squirrel, alligator, snakes - anything that moved. We're talking about a time when there wasn't much to eat." Allen said.

Service at the cafe is friendly. You might find Allen's daughter, Billie, waiting on tables. Shell bring your dinner with a side order of grits, already properly buttered and steaming In a small pan.

Allen himself likely will be holdIng forth at a customer's table, serving up a heaping portion of local lore along with the home cooked food.

"I'm such an old, hard-core cracker I've never seen it snow," Allen said. He said he's never strayed far from the house where he was born, about a block away.

Sitting in the cafe, you can hear Allen's roosters crowing In his back yard.

"I'm an old cracker boy," he said. "I'd be miserable without my chickens"

The collection of antiques provides clues to the colorful past of Allen's Florida. He's got one laded picture of Auburndale, taken about 1911, showing a wild west-looking town with dirt roads and clapboard buildings. A few pigs stroll nonchalant:y down the main road, and Allen points out an architectural feature of the era.

"Those boards kept the pigs from running up under the houses," he said.

Some of the common appliances of the time seem gruesome now: a fowl killer, which looks like a mini-guillotine for chickens, and a "midwife" -a thickly woven wicker circle.

Allen said it was placed around the bodies of pregnant slaves and slowly inched downward as they grew nearer to delivery. The steady pressure exerted by the "midwife" pushed the baby farther into the birth canal, allowing for an easier labor, Allen said.

A museum, really, the cafe holds memories from the odd to the mundane, There are arrowheads and fossilized bones and eggs, a bat pin holder, an ancient washing machine and a walking cane made from a body part of a bun.

A turtle doorstop has a hidden use: Step on the head and the shell lifts up, turning the turtle into a spitoon.

Allen said proper ladies of the day didn't want anyone to know they were chewing tobacco, so they would only spit when no one was looking. And the turtle wouldn't tell.

He's had many offers, but Allen isn't interested in selling his collection . In addition to the stuff In his cafe, he has two warehouses and his, own house packed full of similar items.

He has raised seven children, so he feels certain there will be someone left to preserve the past after he is gone.

"When all this goes," Allen said, looking beyond his collection to a bygone Florida, "it ain't coming back"