In between she became the best-known fixture at one of Jacksonville's best hotels. The people who ran Jacksonville's big downtown hotels in their glory years. They were a cumulative encyclopedia of local color. Their tales, sadly, have gone with the hotels.
Dead hotels tell no tales.
The people who worked in them did, of course. Darling was the soul of the Seminole Hotel for a half-century. She started as a hat-check girl in the Indian Room and walked away as desk clerk when they closed the place in 1967. The Seminole was a 10-story hotel at Forsyth and Hogan streets. It was built by J.B. Pound, designed by Henry Klutho, run by Robert Meyer and host at times to practically everybody of any significance whatsoever, as well as a host of nobodies and the great mass in between.