For Naples (Florida), ‘tis the season to be jolly : The booming Gulf of Mexico resort town puts on its happy face as America’s top CEOs flee the winter cold and go south to play.

Along Gulf Shore Boulevard, the shutters are coming down from the windows of waterfront mansions. Private jets line the tarmac at Naples Airport, wing to wing. And last month soprano June Anderson kicked off the Philharmonic Center’s winter season with selections from Puccini and Bizet.

“It was marvelous,” said local arts maven Myra Janco Daniels, president of the Naples Philharmonic. “We do have a wonderful world here.”

For the fortunate few who can afford to live in this elegant city nestled along Florida’s southwest coast, these are the days. As the daytime temperature drops into the comfort zone and the moneyed snowbirds return from the North to open their winter residences, about the only concern of some here is whether Naples really did lose the unofficial title of America’s golf course capital.

The National Golf Foundation recently reported that with the addition of a couple of new courses, Myrtle Beach, S.C., now counted only 147 people per golf hole--compared to Naples’ 194. But no one here is panicking. There are 48 golf courses now ready for play, and more are being built.

“By a lot of people’s definition, this is the best place in Florida--safe, clean and well-mannered,” says John Ayres, a hotelier who heads the Naples Visitors Bureau. “Weather, golf, shopping, the arts--we’ve sort of got it all, in a very first-class little package.”

A stroll through the downtown area provides an insight into what Naples is about. Art galleries, pricey boutiques, banks and stock brokerages predominate. There are no pawn shops or discount outlets.

Behind the well-manicured, tightly zoned facade are some impressive numbers. According to Kiplinger’s Florida Business Letter, only two cities in the United States have a higher percentage of households with incomes over $200,000.

The city ranks first in Florida in the cost of housing, with the average home selling for almost $300,000.

With no budget motels, Naples also has the highest average hotel room rate in Florida, about $200-a-night in season. And as everyone here knows, more active and retired CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have winter homes in Naples than in any other resort city in America.

“These are people who come from big product companies--General Motors, Ford, General Electric, Pillsbury,” says Daniels, who relies on these residents to help underwrite the Philharmonic Center’s annual $11.6-million budget. “I think maybe only Aspen gives us a run.”

Thirty-five years ago, Naples was home to no more than 15,000 people, an out-of-the-way resort noted for a turn-of-the-century fishing pier that reached 1,000 feet into the Gulf of Mexico. The pier is still there.

But Naples has boomed under the crush of wealthy industrialists and corporate executives, especially those from the Midwest hunting for a balmy winter climate.

The year-round population of Naples is only 20,000, swelling to almost double that in the winter months. But surrounding Collier County has boomed, from 80,000 residents in 1980 to more than double that today.

While growth in the Naples area has slowed, from 7% a year in the 1980s to 4.5% last year, the boom has caused management problems, with particular concern about water quality and preservation of the fragile Everglades ecosystem that extends over most of the county.

“That’s the main issue: How do we keep our quality of life as we grow? How do we keep Naples’ charm and cleanliness?” asks Bill Neron of the county’s Economic Development Council.

The answers, Neron suggests, are tough zoning laws and a citizenry protective of the good life they enjoy. “Private citizens donate money for public landscaping,” he says, “so the ambience of Naples is such that when you drive through the community, you say, ‘Wow! The whole area is beautiful.’ ”

Of course, most of the thousands of service industry workers here cannot afford to live in town and must commute from other areas in Collier County. “With the growth of hotels and tourism, we have created a lot of service-related job,” Neron says. “And we’re trying to diversify by attracting some clean, high-tech industry. But it’s tough to compete with Ft. Myers” and other cities to the north.

Tourism has always been the major industry in the Naples area, and the outlook for this year is for “the best season we’ve ever had,” Ayres says.

In the summer, when temperatures climb back into the 90s and nary a breeze ripples the Gulf of Mexico, the population of Naples drops by about 35%, nearly 15% of the local businesses close and the hotel rates plummet into the range of merely expensive.

It is quiet in Naples in the summer, and that’s just how Paul Thomas likes it. “The main thing is, I feel secure here,” says Thomas, who comes home on the weekends from a tourist directory business he owns in Hollywood, Fla. “A year ago in Miami Beach, I was held up at gunpoint, robbed of my credit cards and watch, hit on the head and thrown in Biscayne Bay.

“If you want excitement, Miami Beach is the place. But if you want to retire, or peace of mind--Naples.”