Gulfarium Fans and Longtime Locals Will Flip for Krista Stouffer and Russel Chiodo’s Historical Book

The Gulfarium Adventure Marine Park has been a part of Fort Walton Beach since it opened in 1955 under the name The Living Sea, but few people know much about the origins of Northwest Florida’s first major attraction. Even Krista Stouffer, the park’s marketing and communications coordinator, was a little foggy on some of the details when she started.

“I got bits and pieces from photos, but I wanted to learn more,” she said.

A perfect educational opportunity came when Chiodo, a marine mammal trainer-turned-writer, called Stouffer and asked for assistance in researching and writing a photo essay-style book about the history of the Gulfarium, “Images of America: Gulfarium Marine Adventure Park” (Arcadia Publishing).

“When he called me,” Stouffer said, “I thought it was such a good excuse to talk to former employees. I learned so much, and a lot of the staff reading the book now say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that!’”

For example, many people who have been to shows at the Gulfarium have no idea that it was once the location of a famous “Porpoise College,” where marine scientists trained dolphins who would go on to perform at aquariums across the nation, or that it was the first institution to successfully raise a rescued baby dolphin with formula it developed itself.

Much of what Chiodo needed help with was research: matching photos and artifacts with names and dates. The result is a 128-page softcover book featuring more than 200 vintage images.

“We had a lot of material that wasn’t really explained,” Chiodo said of the early stages of assembling the material for the book. “We took photos out in the field with us and matched them up to newspaper articles and archives and memories from people we talked to. As opposed to going out looking for stories, we were trying to attach artifacts to stories.”

Former employees of the Gulfarium were invaluable in putting the pieces together.

“Training wasn’t a job Ron Bradford had planned on his whole life,” Chiodo shared. “What was most inspiring about him was he left the Gulfarium for military service, then went back to the Gulfarium and worked again because he loved working with the animals so much.” 

Stouffer and Chiodo were just as fascinated by the human stories involved in the history of the Gulfarium as they were by the animal ones. For example, park visionary John Siebenaler’s wife, Marjorie, was terrified of water and fish, having almost drowned as a young girl. However, when one of the divers became unable to participate in the Living Sea Exhibit, Marjorie put on the suit herself and went on with the show. She eventually became one of the world’s premier marine-mammal trainers and experts.

“I just wish I had had the opportunity to meet her,” Stouffer says of Marjorie Siebenaler, one of the first female trainers. “The male employees who worked with her were so in awe of her training abilities — in that time, I think it was a little humbling for them to learn from a woman. She’s incredibly inspiring as the first female pioneer in the field, and now the field is so dominated by women that it’s hard to imagine when it wasn’t.”

While the book is definitely meant to be entertaining, Stouffer and Chiodo hope that readers get a little more out of it than just a good time.

“I hope that people can appreciate the role that the Gulfarium has played within the community of Fort Walton Beach and the Emerald Coast in general, but in the international marine-mammal training industry as well,” Stouffer says. “There were a lot of firsts that happened there.”

Of what drove him to create the book, Chiodo simply says, “Definitely part of it was wanting to honor the folks we talked to for the book … all the work they’d put into the Gulfarium and into the whole animal-care profession. Today’s animal field is very sophisticated; years and years of research contributed to the level of care we can give to animals, especially the ones who need rehab work. It’s really cool to honor that sort of infant age of the whole industry.”