We’re in the midst of Spring Break season, that time of year when seemingly every college kid, high school kid, and family in Michigan heads to Florida.
Michigan isn’t alone—every northern state sends its share. In 2024, Florida welcomed more than 140 million visitors during Spring Break, a record number. This year’s total could be even higher.
And to think it all started with an English professor from Michigan State University.
It’s not entirely accurate to say that Glendon Swarthout “invented” Spring Break in Florida, but it’s a fact that he’s largely responsible for making it what it is today.
In 1960, when he was teaching English at MSU, he wrote a book called “Where the Boys Are,” a semi-fictional account of three Michigan State co-eds who travel to Ft. Lauderdale over Easter break for a week of boy-chasing, sex, drinking, and fun. The book was a best-seller, and MGM bought the movie rights almost immediately.
The film version of “Where the Boys Are” came out in late 1960 and was an enormous success. Not only did it make MGM and Swarthout a bunch of money, it created a craze in Florida.
Before Swarthout wrote his book, Spring Break in Florida wasn’t really a thing. College kids mostly just went home over the Easter vacation. A few thousand people came to Ft. Lauderdale every year, but most were college swimmers looking to get in some warm-weather workouts.
Swarthout was born in 1918 in Pinckney, delivered at home by the small town’s only doctor. The Swarthout family has deep roots in the area, and there’s even a road named for them.
Young Glendon had a flair for words from the beginning, and he often read recitations at the Howell Methodist Church.
His dad was a banker and spent some years running the bank in Lowell near Grand Rapids, and that’s where Glendon attended high school. After graduation, he earned his bachelor’s degree at the University of Michigan. He joined the Army during World War II and saw combat in France.
When the war ended, he turned his attention to his main passion in life, writing. He went back to school, earning a master’s degree from U-M and then his Ph.D. from Michigan State in 1955. He then took a job at MSU as an assistant professor, teaching English literature.
He started writing novels, and his second book, “They Came to Cordura,” about the 1916 Mexican War, was a huge success. Hollywood paid him a whopping $250,000 for the film rights (about $2.7 million in today’s dollars) and turned it into a movie starring Gary Cooper and Rita Hayworth.
Despite the financial windfall, though, Swarthout didn’t want to give up his teaching job at MSU. He and his wife Kathryn still lived with their son Miles in their modest home at 901 Rosewood Ave. in East Lansing.
Then came his second big smash: “Where the Boys Are.”
It all started when he was teaching an Honors English class at MSU and he heard one of his students, a young man from Jackson, talking about going to Florida over Spring Break in his red convertible. “That’s how it started,” his wife Kathryn said in 2011. “He’s the one responsible for the novel.”
After that, Glendon heard some women in his class talking about going to Ft. Lauderdale, too. In 1985, he told CNN’s Larry King the story of what happened from there.
“I was at Michigan State University teaching in the English department,” he said. “I was teaching some honor sections of youngsters. They were brilliant, they were fun, and they kept talking about spring vacation in Ft. Lauderdale. And sometime during that winter it occurred to me I’d like to see what they did during spring vacation. So I asked them where I should put up in Ft. Lauderdale and if I came down would they show me around.”
So in the spring of 1959, the 40-year-old English professor flew down to Ft. Lauderdale and spent the week observing his students.
“It occurred to me as the week progressed that this would make a fine novel, a very funny novel,” he said. “And yet I could at the same time write a kind of profile of that particular generation. Their aspirations, their hopes, their fears, and so on. And that’s what I tried to do.”
He turned it all into “Where the Boys Are,” a novel about three MSU students—Merritt (the narrator) and her two best friends, Tuggle and Melanie. They meet up with all sorts of boys in Ft. Lauderdale and end up having several relationships in the course of a week.
The book was well-reviewed and became a New York Times bestseller, and in almost no time, MGM snapped up the movie rights and turned it into a film— all in less than 12 months. The book came out on Jan. 1, 1960, and the film debuted on Dec. 28 of that year.
The film version was fairly true to Swarthout’s book and starred Dolores Hart as Merritt, Paula Prentiss as Tuggle, and Yvette Mimeux as Melanie, and included a whole bunch of other actors who would become big stars, most notably George Hamilton as Merritt’s love interest, Ryder Smith.
The book version had the three co-eds as Michigan State students, but in the film version, they never say where they’re going to school. MSU does make an appearance in the film, though, in the person of a character named TV Thompson (played by Jim Hutton), who proudly introduces himself as “TV Thompson, junior class, Michigan State.”
Included in the film was the title song, “Where the Boys Are,” which became a No. 1 hit for Connie Francis, who also starred in the movie.
The film was a box-office smash, and more than that, it made college kids across the country realize that they, too, needed to start going to Ft. Lauderdale in the spring.
More than six decades later, his legend lives on.
A reporter from the BBC came to Florida in 2024 to report on the spring break phenomenon, and once again, gave full credit to the professor from Michigan State. “It wasn’t until Glendon Swarthout’s novel ‘Unholy Spring’ (later changed to ‘Where the Boys Are’) that things really took off… The book inspired a film, effectively cementing Fort Lauderdale as a spring break magnet, with the Elbo Room (featured in the movie) as its unofficial headquarters.”
Right before the book came out, Swarthout and his family moved from Michigan to Scottsdale, Ariz., where he took a job teaching at Arizona State University. He lived there for the rest of his life, passing away in 1992 at age 74.
He wrote a whole bunch of other books that were turned into movies, including “The Shootist,” which was John Wayne’s final movie in 1976. In 2014, a full 22 years after Swarthout died, his Western novel, “The Homesman,” was made into a film starring Tommy Lee Jones.
And, of course, his legacy lives on this spring and every spring as carloads and planeloads of college kids from Michigan and every other cold place descend on Florida. Whether they realize it or not, they owe it all to Glendon Swarthout.
Buddy Moorehouse teaches documentary filmmaking at Hillsdale College.
