Pop pop writing 5 19 with ispa current

SELECTED AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL DATA FROM THE LIFE OF EDWARD ARTHUR FERNALD

I am writing this paper at Jean Kathryn’s request and as I write these words I am in the middle (literally) of the Atlantic Ocean looking at nothing but water to the horizon. (We are on a Holland America cruise from Ft. Lauderdale to the Madeira Islands, Portugal, Spain, Monte Carlo, Florence, and Rome, Italy). Years ago on the USS Yorktown it was the Pacific Ocean that stretched for as far as the eye could see. Take it from me it looks the same. One difference, although a cruise ship and an aircraft carrier are both huge (1000 ft. long, approximately 3000 people), the cruise ship is preferable even if the Yorktown “cruise” was “free.” The Oosterdam Cruise ship audio background is playing the 1940s song “Time After Time.” That was the tune Jean and I claimed as “our song.” “Time after time I tell myself that I’m so lucky to be loving you.” (absolutely true, the situation and the song).

Before I get into historical background I will describe my life today, as a retired Professor Emeritus of Geography and Associate Vice-President for Research from Florida State University.

It is nice to enjoy the Florida State Retirement System to which I contributed as a worker for 45 years. I have enjoyed good health and am proud of my family. The Lord has blessed us beyond measure. We need to strive to be good stewards of what we have received. Jean has been a great wife and partner for 60 years (2013) and the family is one to be very thankful for. Tom has the Certified Public Accountant designation plus certification as a Financial Analyst and an Information Systems Analyst. At least he is well certified. Gary is a successful lawyer in Clearwater and Joy is a very knowledgeable physical trainer and school teacher. They each have families with which I am happy. Tom’s wife Cindy is a very able, retired CPA and Sarah and Rebecca are their Seminole girls. Gary’s wife, Kim, has her own private investigation business and Seminole Scott and Emma are their children. Joy Portero has two graduate Seminole 1

daughters, Ashlyn and Amberly.

I spend a lot of time reading (mostly theology, politics and geography related material) and I enjoy studying maps. I am not critical of people who cannot read very much due to one problem or another, but I am critical of those who like to think of themselves as good citizens, who can read, but are too lazy to dig out the information they need to be informed. To not understand, for example, why the Iranians are suspicious of us when we say they should have a democratic government is ludicrous. We need to remember our history with Iran and former Premier Mossadegh, for example. We ought to be informed. After all, I was, and am, a social studies teacher.

I have read an average of 30 to 35 books a year for fifteen or so years. I keep a record.

There is a lot to know and at least two sides to every problem. Therefore, I need to get as much information as possible. After 2013, I will have read the Bible through 60 times. I have cut magazine reading back to THE ECONOMIST and CHRISTIANITY TODAY, both trustworthy, basically conservative sources. I try not to have strong opinions regarding topics I know little about, even though that is popular these days. I acknowledge the truth of Proverbs 19:2,”It is not good to have zeal without knowledge”.

I deliver Meals on Wheels and enjoy teaching a men’s Bible class, as I have done for over fifty years. I do spend considerable time on the lessons and I encourage discussion and questions.

I am not reluctant to say “I don’t know, I will get back to you next week”. As with most teaching situations, the teacher learns more than the students do. As I have stated, I have been blessed with good health and since my Mother lived to 90 and my Grandmother made it to 106, I am afraid to speculate as to the future.

I work with the Florida Geographic Alliance writing teaching/learning materials and 2

going out to counties or to conferences to hold workshops. Since retirement in 1998 I have volunteered as a teacher in the Florida State geography department at least one term every year. I explain what geography is; how it is different from other subjects; how students learn geography; and how to direct a class to develop a teaching/learning model that helps them to understand any place. Finally, I work with some of the teaching/learning units I have written in workshops, to show teachers how to utilize them in the classroom. For examples, see the Appendix box, a container to hold both references and “things” that will help one better understand this paper.

(For example, some supporting papers will be in a folder and artifacts such as my Eagle Scout badge, family genealogies and pamphlets are in the box to be referenced when someone wants to dig deeper.) However, the box will not be available for each copy of the paper.

What follows is a simplification of my life and activities over the past 80+ years. Some of it will be just reporting, some humor, some explanation and a few philosophical and theological thoughts thrown in. Most of it is true but some is the result of my best recollection. I do think that it helps explain who I am, what I did, and to some degree why I did what I ended up doing.

I do hope the ego part is not too hard to take.

Edward Arthur Fernald was born to Francis Gordon and Rebecca Jane Murray Fernald on January 31, 1932, in Manatee River Hospital in Manatee, now Bradenton, Florida. My first home was an upstairs apartment in my Grandmother’s home at 1714 14th Ave. W. Bradenton.

During my first year, we moved to 1514 7th Ave. W. where there was a two story house and a garage apartment. We had a family group there that included my Dad’s brother Eugene Fernald, his wife Helen, and their sister Evelyn and her husband, James “Bum” Amlong. Among the various cousins was Gene Amlong, who was one year older than I, but with whom I was close until we graduated from high school. Also in our family group was my Grandfather, Ralph Curtis Fernald, who died when I was in the second grade. Ralph was born in New Jersey and 3

worked for the Seaboard Coastline Railroad. He came with the railroad to Florida in the early 1900s. His family lived in Arcadia (where my Father was born in 1907), Enterprise Junction, in Volusia County, and then in Bradenton, in 1922, where he served as station master. He married a lady from Melrose, Putnam County, about 1900. This is mentioned only to footnote the fact that my grandchildren are at least fifth generation Floridians. It may be more, but I never could find out where her parents were born. Her name was Ellen Alexandra Fletcher and she is buried in a cemetery in Arcadia, Florida.

While in Enterprise Junction, Dad and his brother Gene rode to grammar school in Sanford on a “side or pump” car. They pumped to school on the railroad tracks and when they got to school they put the little car on a side track and then pumped back home after school. My Mother, Rebecca Jane Murray was born in 1911, in Indianapolis, Indiana. She and her family moved to Bradenton in 1924. Her father was a college educated draftsman who worked for the Bradenton Abstract Office where, among other things, he drew the first official plat map of Bradenton. I still have a copy of that map. When the Murrays first got to Bradenton, they lived in a large tent for a year or so until they built their house on the property they homesteaded. For Rebecca Jane’s first Christmas in Indianapolis, her parents bought a Christmas tree imported from Germany. It was about three feet tall and had wire limbs. On their way to Bradenton from Indianapolis, they stopped at a Georgia cotton field and let Jane pick one boll of cotton to put on the tree. One hundred and one years later we still put up that tree including that same ball of cotton every Christmas.

Information on Fernald genealogy can easily be overdone. Therefore, I am placing, in the Appendix, an additional couple of pages on the Fernald family tree, which includes the information that Dr. Renald (Reginald) Fernald, a surgeon, surveyor, judge and city clerk, came to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1635, from England. Jean Kathryn has become very 4

proficient at being a genealogy detective and recorder.

An interesting story develops out of my Mother’s side of the family based on a merchant Quaker, Thomas Chalkley, who first came to the colonies from England in the late 1600s.

(Chalkley’s story is also found in the appendix in material written by the Historical Society of Frankford, Pa. Some factual data from various sources differ, but offer no major conflicts). He eventually settled in Philadelphia with his wife Martha, whom he married in 1699 on a trip back to England. He worked out of that city from where he conducted missionary work and his trading business with England and the English colonies in the Caribbean. He was persecuted in New England for preaching a Christian faith that differed from that of the Puritans. Chalkley wrote a book entitled, “Collection of the Works of that Ancient, Faithful Servant of Jesus Christ, Thomas Chalkley”, (prefixed as “A Journal of His Life, Travels and Christian Experiences, Written by Himself”). It describes his six trips to England and his twenty trips to the Caribbean.

He died on the island of Tortola in 1741. A copy of that book (Journal) is in the Appendix. It was first printed by Benjamin Franklin in 1746 and later reprinted by the Quaker church in London in 1766. The church used it in their education efforts. My copy is the later reprint. Jean Kathryn did some research on the journal when we taught in London (1992) for a semester and she later purchased a copy for me through the local Quaker church.

In time, Chalkley began to build a large mansion, Chalkley Hall, outside Philadelphia, where he and his wife raised their daughter, Rebecca. Having married two wives named Martha, Chalkley had twelve children, all of whom, except Rebecca, died in infancy. Rebecca married a very successful merchant, Able James, who finished building Chalkley Hall. James knew many of the revolutionary leaders, including Washington, to whom it is rumored he gave a large sum of money for the revolution. In another source indicates James is described as a supporter of the king due to his business interests and his Quaker faith. Did he try to work both sides of the 5

street? Daniel Boorstin, the noted historian, names James as “an influential friend of Benjamin Franklin.” Again, in the Appendix, see the copy of a letter Franklin wrote James from London in 1773. Rebecca James had a daughter, also Rebecca, who married Samuel Griscom. Their daughter Elizabeth married a Ross and is better remembered as Betsy Ross, of flag sewing fame. (see brochure in the Appendix).

After James’ death and several changes in ownership, Chalkley Hall fell into disrepair as the city of Philadelphia spread out around it and the neighboring land became industrialized. An effort was made to save and refurbish Chalkley Hall but the efforts were not successful. Some of the effects of the house are found today in the Frankfort Museum in Philadelphia and the portal (front entrance) of the home is found in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts. Jean and Ed, Joy and her girls and the Tom Fernald family have been to New York and seen the portal display, and the Ed Fernalds have viewed Chalkley related articles in the Frankfort museum. (see appendix for photographs and other information).

This Chalkley/James story is not complete without mentioning the fact that, as Chalkley Hall was being furnished a large Chippendale dining room set was built for the home. The table had twelve chairs. As the home was being disassembled in the mid to late 1800s, the table and chairs were claimed by a member of the family. This gentleman, around 1900, assigned the various pieces of furniture to family members, including my Grandmother. As she moved to Florida a cousin in Indianapolis kept her chair for her. It was later identified as Ed’s chair, and in the early 1990s I brought it to Tallahassee. The chair was in very poor condition and I found a furniture repairman in Havana, Fl., who meticulously recreated the chair using the same methods used when it was originally built. (see photographs in the appendix). Today, that chair in which I think it is logical to believe, several of our country’s founding Fathers sat, is a prized object in our living room. You, dear reader, are invited to visit the Ed and Jean Fernald home and to sit in 6

it.

Early life on 7th Ave. Bradenton included climbing mango trees and having “mango” fights with cousin Gene and friends. I have always said that, at 2000 prices, we threw at least a million dollars worth of mangos at each other. Because 7th Ave. was a dead-end road, there was very little traffic so we skated, rode our bicycles and played ball in the street. We also spent a good bit of time several blocks to the west, at Wares Creek, on Warner’s Bayou. Many fun hours were enjoyed playing in the water and swinging on a large bag swing. It was fastened to a big oak and we jumped on it from a platform about six feet high. I went to the Palace Theatre on Saturdays where nine cents bought a ticket to the cowboy and cartoon movie and the extra penny bought a tootsie roll.

On Sundays we attended the Westminster Presbyterian Church. My father was my Sunday School teacher. He was a nonacademic Bible scholar. He read the Bible through every year and was what we would call today, a fundamentalist. Most of my early reading was from the Scofield King James version of the Bible and conservative sources such as Moody Monthly. I fit the humorous saying, “My faith was built on nothing less than Scofield’s notes and Moody Press.” Both Dad and I changed our theological positions as we learned more. I changed more than he did, but I very sincerely honor his Bible teaching and his Christian life. More on this topic later.

In 1939, Mom and Dad built a house at 1706 14th Avenue, Bradenton, across the street from my maternal grandmother, Nancy Essie Dora Friesner Murray. Her husband, Thomas Edward Murray, had died in 1927 so as a widow lady she enjoyed having her grandsons alternate spending the night with her. My brother Harry was born in 1936 and we enjoyed her company, her stories and listening to her read Bible stories.

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Schooling began at Ballard Elementary where I attended through the sixth grade, after which I attended Walker Junior High. Many of the kids who started Kindergarten with me were in my 12th grade class at Manatee High School. I have a picture of many of them taken at our 50th high school reunion in 1999. Elementary school was normal with half of my teachers being good friends of the family.

All I remember about kindergarten is that at the graduation play I had a broken left arm from falling out of a tree. The third grade was notable due to acquisition of reading glasses and a musical instrument, a cornet. I changed to contact lenses in1958. As a student I was average to slightly above average. It was during the third grade that the Fernalds moved into a newly built, three bedroom house at the corner of 14th Avenue and 17th Street, across the street from my Grandmother. Our family, by then, included Harry Curtis Fernald, my brother. Curtis was our paternal Grandfather’s name. As brothers we had virtually no conflict, largely due to the four year difference in our ages, different interests and the fact that I and my friends were always accepting of Harry when he wished to join us.

All through our youth I was more of an extrovert, Harry more introverted. He loved books and individual activities rather than being a joiner. This difference did cause Harry some pain later in high school as our mother constantly badgered him to join, participate, etc. (like Ed did) when he did not care to. Harry was, and still is, very bright and artistically talented. He has two sons and lives in Hawaii.

A positive aspect of my gregariousness was the degree to which our mother encouraged it and took part in it. She was quick to be a den mother when I was in the Cub Scouts. She was a huge success and all the other scouts and their parents appreciated her efforts. I quickly became a Webelo in Cub Scouts (Cub Scout’s highest rank) and later an Eagle in the Boy Scouts. An encouraging benefit to me was the fact that I was a member of a very active, achieving group of 8

friends who encouraged each other to attain the next or highest rank of whatever ladder we were climbing. These friends were all in my grade in school. We were, in general, more into scouts, band, orchestra, etc. than into sports. As you read these pages you will see that the motivation to get to the top stayed with me though scouts, the Key Club, Boy’s Club, education degrees, professional organizations, clubs, and the university administration as well as other activities. It was never a parent or wife pushing me, although they were very supportive, it was just natural.

That was just what I was supposed to do.

On the other hand, I benefited from being accepted by the boys who were in the grade ahead of me. They were playmates and friends of my cousin, Gene Amlong. They were very oriented toward ball—baseball, football, basketball, tennis, etc. While not as athletically talented as most of them, I was always included.

With the first group I went to camp Flying Eagle, five or so miles east of Bradenton, on the Manatee River, several times a year for about four years. Mostly we went with just our Troop 12, sponsored by the First Baptist Church of Bradenton. We also camped out with boys from neighboring towns and several of these boys attended FSU in the late 1940s, when I did. In fact, one of the boys from Fort Myers became a fellow faculty member at FSU. Most of the boys in the group had been in school together since kindergarten and we spent the night at each others homes on a regular basis. This group had a much more involved group of parents than the sports crowd. Their parents were also a bit more affluent. However, it must be noted that, in those days (1940s), everyone had just come out of the depression and the concept of class was not an important consideration. Undoubtedly, the impact of World War II also had a leveling and “togetherness” effect on us all. Only one boy had an older brother in the service. He was an army air force pilot and a bit of a hero to us all.

Bradenton, Florida on the eve of World War II was a small tourist town of about 10,000 9

people. Primarily, its citizens made their living providing services in a tourist economy, with one of the major economic activities the “world’s largest” trailer park located on 14th Street. Even the trailer park had an influence on me. It was owned by the Bradenton Kiwanis Club and the profits from the park were invested in youth activities such as the Boy’s Club and Key Club.

Manatee’s small agricultural economy was basically tomato growing with a little cattle farming, and growing cut flowers, primarily gladiolas which were shipped by air daily, in season, to the northern urban areas.

As a nine year old in 1941 I was only vaguely aware of the fact that we had a middle class level of living. My father was a mail carrier and we had moved into a new, but rather modest, home mentioned above. We had the necessities of life and Dad had a car allowance from the post office that let him buy a new Oldsmobile every three or four years. This was our one claim to luxury. Our home was about 1600 sq. ft. and cost about $6,000 dollars in 1930. I was in the third grade and my life was very much the same as that of most of my classmates.

Our school (Ballard) was a pleasant place with need of new class materials, books, etc., but at the time I was not aware of any critical needs. We, on occasion, traveled as far as Sarasota, Tampa or Saint Petersburg. We also visited cousins in Lake Placid, but we never made out of state trips.

The man who lived across the street from us on 14th Avenue, near Ballard school, worked for a paving contractor who had the contract to pave the runways for the new signal corps (later US Air Force) airbase (Now known as the Sarasota/Bradenton airport). He had promised our family that he would take us out to the airbase on the afternoon of Dec. 7, 1941. Since we had attended church, none of us had had the radio on that day and when we got into the car my Father turned the radio on and we heard about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. As a nine year old I listened without too much understanding, but the concern of the adults made a big impression on me. I

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thought about the islands being bombed and I confused the location of the Hawaiian Islands with Cuba. Maybe that is why I became a geographer.

Geography is the study of places and their important cultural and physical features. The next few paragraphs will identify selected aspects of the geography of Bradenton and Manatee County in the early 1940s. The county is low and flat, with Anna Maria and Snead’s Islands, and the Manatee River as the main physical features. The primary vegetation was pine flat woods with some upland pine and oak. For us kids, sandspurs were an ever present negative part of the environment. Each year, or so, we would experience a hurricane but none seemed to be too destructive, as I remember. What I do remember is that we high school kids looked forward to the storms so we could go to the beach for a hurricane party. It was fun, but later we learned it was not too smart. A distinctive characteristic of Bradenton and the Tampa Bay area was its proximity (closeness) to the Gulf of Mexico.

Much of each summer was taken up with spear fishing around Anna Maria Island. Snook and large mullet were our favorite targets. A good friend, Don Work, and I constructed our own spear guns (of various types) and we never used any artificial breathing gear. Get a big breath of air and go get ‘em. Our problems began when we were under water, just out of air as we saw a big fish. Sometimes we got them, sometimes we didn’t. Our spears were attached to the guns by a fine metal line.

Early in the 1940s several German submarines were sighted, or were said to have been sighted, off the entrance to Tampa Bay. Port Tampa quickly became an important shipbuilding site. Many people from Bradenton drove to Port Tampa every day, on roads that were not nearly as good as today, to work in those critical, and high paying jobs building ships.

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As a student (in grades 5- 9) I remember many war bond drives, getting Christmas and birthday presents of war bonds and we had community wide metal drives, but I was most involved as a boy scout in paper drives and collecting aluminum foil. I have vivid memories of ration books for various items, such as food, gas, tires, etc. Many items such as sugar, chocolate, leather, gasoline, and many more were rationed, or just not available. (see ration books in the accompanying folder) No one hopped in the car to just “ride around”. Another memory is of having blackouts, painting car headlights (top half) with black paint and hanging dark drapes over windows facing the gulf. Passage, a small key north of Anna Maria was used as a practice bombing target because it resembled a ship. My Father was an airplane spotter and Mother was involved in the Red Cross and Servicemen Center activities. My folks invited servicemen who came to church to weekly ice cream socials at our house. We became friends and helpers to several of the base chaplains. Many servicemen wrote my folks for years after the war.

I was unaware of the buildup of military bases before WWII. However, I do remember the previously mentioned airbase being built and the change in a local baseball park and dirt airfield, near downtown, to Camp Weatherford. It was located where the Boy’s Club and Pirate’s Field are today. The base main gate was where the present baseball main gate is at 9th Street and 16th Avenue. The area was low and when it rained it flooded and was called Camp Waterford.

Camp Weatherford was a small temporary base made up of tents, no wooden or stone buildings.

An important opportunity came about as my friends and I learned to take advantage of the soldier’s needs at Camp Weatherford. I sold newspapers on the base on many mornings after I finished delivering my route (Tampa Tribune). The soldiers were pretty generous with tips after payday and we would let some, whom we knew, run a tab before payday. I don’t remember getting stiffed (being cheated).

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During this period, young boys rode bicycles everywhere. We even rode our bikes to Anna Maria Island, a trek of about six miles. In those days it was safe to do that. However, the largest enterprise was for boys to gather at the base gate, with our bicycles, at quitting time and having the soldiers give us money to let them tow us into town (a mile or so). The soldiers would pay us 25 cents to a dollar. We would hurry back to the base and make five to eight trips in an afternoon (more on Saturdays). Right after paydays we made a lot of money, at least a lot for young businessmen. We developed “regulars” who tipped us well but, on occasion, they were not too kind to those boys who would only come out right after payday. In town, the soldiers went to the movie, the two pool halls, the bowling alley, and ice cream parlors as well as to the USO Servicemen’s Center. Movies always had newsreels between shows (we often had double features) and those newsreels were the way we kept up with the war.

As you can tell from this article, almost everything we did (1941-45) was, in some way, impacted by World War II. It was a war that people understood because our country had been attacked by a foreign nation (Japan) and our international friends (Britain, France and others) had been attacked by Germany.

Overall, I guess it showed how resilient and capable our democracy is during severe crises. Personally, I do remember my Dad talking about how troubles will come (depression and WW II) but, with faith in God, you don’t give up, work hard and get to your goals. As an adult, I wish we would appreciate the good sense our leaders had after World War II to instigate a program like the Marshall Plan, to realize that it was not just a giveaway program, but one of the smartest (as well as generous) international relations moves in all of world history. It made the United States a lot of money due to the way it was structured. Most of the aid money had to be spent in the United States for the purchase of goods and services. As we have learned, some of it was siphoned off by the CIA, a new agency, for covert activities (see BOMB POWER. Wills.

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2010). Both Japan and Germany are friendly today.

Of course, the G I Bill, and veteran’s home loans were important. Some people have complained that those programs were examples of the government “just throwing money at a problem”. Guess what! Many of the big achievements made by our society came from that funding method. For example: the interstate highway program; the space program; war efforts, sensible (World Wars I and II) and stupid (democratic Vietnam and republican Iraq); as well as the two programs mentioned earlier. Usually, people criticize programs when they don’t see how they personally benefit.

Now I will go back to my narrative. In junior High (Bradenton Jr. High), the band director we called “Pop” Grant moved me from the cornet to the tuba in the orchestra and sousaphone in the band. I enjoyed both and played both instruments through high school. Many kids and parents laughed at the fact that one of the smaller boys had the biggest instrument, especially on long parades like the Gasparilla in Tampa.

During this period, several activities influenced my growing up. Socially, our group had a number of what we called “prom parties”. These were closely supervised boy/girl parties which had the girls fill out cards, like dance cards. Couples would pair off and walk around the block, sit on the porch, or in some other way spend 15 minutes together. It was a way for kids to learn about the other sex without the temptations a more private date would offer. It also made some kids spend semi-private time with people they might not even want to be with. It also broke up kids who were beginning to “go steady” and I don’t remember anyone getting jealous. As I look back, it was a valuable, if innocent, social learning situation. Some attended just for the refreshments. During our high school years Bradenton had a youth center downtown where we would go most Friday nights. The record player (juke-box) played music all evening. Most kids would “slow dance” but several of them were really good at the jitterbug. Parents would take 14

turns as chaperones.

Several other activities were of the work variety. My first jobs were as a grocery store sweeper, and as a stock boy, another job I was given was window washer in the store that became the huge Beall’s Department Store chain which began in Bradenton. I worked for Papa Beall, the grandfather and taught Robert Beall, company president today, 2000, when he was in high school. In addition, I delivered news magazines such as Liberty, Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal and Life. Since my Dad had bad ulcers and needed goats milk, I was recruited to get up at five in the AM and go with Dad to milk 15 goats. We sold some of the milk and by the time I was 15, I was allowed to drive around town to deliver milk. As my brother Harry got older, I was able to get a paper route delivering the morning paper, the Tampa Tribune. A benefit of this activity was that we kids, after we delivered our papers, would go to a local bakery where the owner let us buy Danish rolls and load them up with as much icing as we wanted. We had the routine paper fights within our ranks and with the paperboys at the Bradenton Herald but we never got into any trouble.

During Jr. High I became, with my older friends, very active in the Boys Club of Manatee County. We were fortunate to have the positive guidance of Mac “Snooks” McGinnis, the Director of the Boy’s Club. During this period I developed my long lasting “modus operandi” of “don’t let books or teachers interfere with your education.” Looking back, I can’t say that it was an attitude to be proud of, but I also don’t think I would change a thing. I enjoyed being in various clubs, in the band and orchestra, journalism, sports and church. I am satisfied that these various activities helped me a great deal in my later life. I followed this path largely because it worked then. I could enter Florida State with a diploma from Manatee High. Times change and today I would have to be much more interested in grades. In those days, kids activities were not nearly so adult directed, we benefitted from organizing and policing our own activities. As we 15

matriculated into high school our activities became more organized and we kids became more a part of the organization. For example, I began to work behind the check-out desk at the Boy’s Club and eventually became the youth President of the club. The Boy’s Club was supported by the Bradenton Kiwanis Club.

During that period, 1940-1950, the Boston Braves major league baseball team held its spring training in Bradenton on a field shared with the Boy’s Club. A small group of the Boy’s Club youth leaders were used by the Braves as bat boys, etc. so we became familiar (friends?) with many famous ball players. We boys found this relationship to be very enjoyable. One day when the team had traveled to Orlando several of the best pitchers stayed in Bradenton to run and just get exercise. Warren Spahn, one of the best left-handed pitchers ever, called several of us kids over to the right field line and told us to race to the left field fence and back. He said he would give the winner a glove. I won the race and Spahn gave me a glove. I proudly put on “Warren Spahn’s” glove then quickly realized it was a glove for a right handed player. About that time, Johnny Sain, another outstanding right handed pitcher, came up and asked “Where the hell is my glove?” Spahn snickered and trotted off and everyone laughed because Spahn had given me Sain’s glove. When Sain realized what had happened, he let me keep the glove. Nice guy.

All through high school I played on the Boy’s Club team in the summer softball league, Boy’s Club basketball, American Legion baseball, and although I went out for football at Bradenton (became Manatee in1947) High as a sophomore, I was not talented (big) enough to participate.

High school years (1945-49) were very active years. By activity, I participated in: band, orchestra, sports editor of the school newspaper, the Macohi (Manatee County High), Key Club (president), Boy’s State, etc. The main happening during high school was the development of a very innocent, but then serious, high school affection for a Miss Jean Kathryn Martin, a 16

scholastically bright, very attractive, clarinet player from a wonderful family. I liked school but I was interested in Jean Kathryn and not too devoted to homework. I made mostly C’s and B’s with an occasional A and D (the D’s were in Chemistry and English as I recall).

A unique aspect of high school was the availability of a mint condition model T Ford belonging to my grandmother Mrs. Essie Dora Murray Conn. In about 1944 she remarried a Mr. Conn who became a close member of the whole family. This related to high school because he owned a 1924 Buick touring car that I could drive to school. It had a top but open windows, wooden spoke wheels, etc. It was an item, I assure you.

In high school, I learned more than anyone guessed. I learned to write, not in English class, but in three years of journalism and I really did like the social studies. Unknown by anyone, I must have had an inborn logic that helped me in math. I had virtually no math in high school but when I went to FSU I took the test all freshmen took and exempted all college math requirements. Interestingly, I did not take a single geography course because they were not offered.

During high school summers I worked at various jobs during my free time. In the summers of 1947-48 I was chosen to participate in a work program developed by the school and the shade tobacco farmers of the Connecticut Valley. Fortunately, Jean was chosen also. It allowed 15 boys and 15 girls from various Florida counties, to go by train (the Silver Meteor) to Connecticut to very nice camps where the boys picked large shade tobacco leaves. The girls sewed them on sticks which were placed in barns to be smoked and cured. The plants were grown under frames which had light cheese cloth over them to protect the plants from the blazing sun. The large leaves were used as the outside wrapping for fine cigars and they were quite valuable. On the way back to Bradenton, we stopped in New York City to see several shows including Brigadoon, the Rockettes and the famous dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. It was on 17

that 1947 trip that Jean Kathryn and I started to share a more serious interest in one another. One of the highlights of my life. The next summer, 1948, my best friend, Tom Hastings and I did not go north with the group but stayed in Bradenton to play American Legion baseball. Then, we hitch hiked all the way to Connecticut to work in the fields and to see our girl friends. Before we left Bradenton, Tom, I, and our parents went to the local police station and got a certified letter to ”to whom it may concern” stating that we had permission to hitch-hike to Connecticut.

My visit to Boy’s State, an honorary program of the American Legion, took me to Tallahassee for the first time (summer of 1948). It was about 300 miles away over rather narrow two lane roads that occasionally were occupied by cows and horses. The Florida fence law was enacted in 1949 but was not adequately enforced until the mid 1950’s. Rather serious accidents involving animals and cars were common. It was a long trip from Bradenton to Tallahassee.

This visit to Tallahassee and FSU changed my mind about where to attend college. It had been assumed that I would go to Gainesville, but I was impressed with the beauty of FSU. The fact that, at that time, there were 6 girls to every boy was lost on me since Jean K also decided to go to FSU rather than Stetson. Good move for all involved. The girls went with their parents by car and one of the girls did fly. Bus was a popular way of travel but many of us boys hitch-hiked, a mode of transportation which was relatively safe in those days.

In those years, I, like most of the average and above average students (by grades and extra curricular activities), planned to go to college even though no one in their immediate family had gone before. As stated earlier, my Mother’s Father, who died before I was born, had a college degree and my Father was very bright, but did not go to college. He made a 3.79 average in high school. He later started a statewide newspaper for the letter carriers of the postal service, which he edited for sixteen years and which became a 20 plus page publication 4 times a year. It received several awards. He was also elected to the state Presidency of Christian Endeavor, a 18

religious organization.

In high school I was recognized as a student leader although out of a class of 210 I was ranked in the middle academically. I must note that a girl named Jean Kathryn Martin was scholastically ranked number 4. This was helpful for the eventual intelligence of our kids and grandkids.

Selected aspects of high school included—being recognized by the Bradenton Kiwanis club as a leader (they supported 2 youth organizations, Boy’s Club and Key Club and I became president of both), active in the Presbyterian church, achieved Eagle as a boy scout, and was designated “Personality Plus” in the yearbook.

Sometime during junior high years I was “saved” and was “sprinkled” (baptized) in the Westminster Presbyterian church only to be “straightened” out in college by Jeannie as I joined the First Baptist Church in Tallahassee (1953). Today I do not place much emphasis on denominations. An understanding and acceptance of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is the key to salvation. I am particularly unhappy with the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention and the takeover of the denomination by self interested leaders. Leaders who were very critical of anyone who disagreed with their interpretation of the scripture, and who fired or at least got rid of everyone of the seminary presidents and who made missionaries sign a statement of beliefs forced on them. These men were forceful in restructuring the yearly conventions in ways that allowed them to pack committees, replace long time committee members, and dictate changes in the Baptist Faith and Message to suit their “take control” philosophy and identified with one political party.

As stated earlier, my religious background was formed under the guidance of my Sunday School teacher, my Father, who was a strict Christian as he interpreted the New Testament. In the 19

1930s-40s he would have been identified as a fundamentalist who would become much more moderate in later years. This is not to say “more liberal.” He rejected the “Holier than thou”, judgmental, self-righteousness that has become characteristic of the 1980-2000 “religious Right.”

He brought me up to practice a strong “Sermon on the Mount” theology while also accepting a 10 Commandments ethic and a Romans 10:9 salvation. (“If you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart God hath raised Him from the dead you will be saved”.) He believed that everyone was equal before God and it impacted the way he lived.

At the post office, no other letter carrier wanted to deliver mail in the “colored quarters”, the Afro-American part of Bradenton, so Dad volunteered to take that route, which he had for many years. He developed many friends there and made a strong witness to me and to others by serving that route. He believed we should be humble, more focused on our own sins and not so much on other people’s sin as so many “religious” people are today.

This theological background has influenced both my religious and political philosophies.

I have trouble with those who oversimplify our complex society by stating that they are “liberal” or “conservative” and act as if that solves all questions. First, they should define the terms before they use them. Actually, I agree with P.C. Cothern, who wrote in POLITICS, AMERICANISM AND CHRISTIANITY, p.120, that “Ideally, the Christian is both a conservative who tries to conserve all that is true, honest, just, pure, lovely and gracious (Phil.

4:8) in society and a liberal who tries to liberate mankind by changing the conditions of society that violate those criteria of excellence”. One should recognize that even in the above statement there can be areas of disagreement as to definition and implementation. If a person is arrogant and insists that only his ideas are right, if he only reads or listens to books and programs that support his views, he/she is intellectually suspect. Worse, is the person who does not consider any other views than his own and critically judges anyone who disagrees with those ideas. This 20

person is unkind, if not unChristian.

I have little patience with those who say “Get government off our backs”, or, “Big government is bad”. First, government is a gift from God. It is like a hammer. If used to build a house it is good. If used to hit me in the head, it is bad, at least in my opinion. Everyone agrees that government should first, keep us safe. In the words of the Preamble to the Constitution “….

Establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and to our Posterity...”. But, government shares a problem with individual citizens. It has a problem with how to handle things like power, technology, too large a police or military force, and, I believe political units should own up to their faults. Humility in politics these days is hard to find. In Micah we are told to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with your God. We still need guidance from the Holy Spirit to guide us in achieving those goals. There is too much “I” and “People like me” in our thinking today.

We should be proud of the United States of America for the good it has provided in so many ways. But, we should also be humbled by our treatment of our aborigines, our past institution of slavery, the treatment of Chinese in the late 1800s; the Democratic war in Viet Nam, the Bush war in Iraq, the use of the term “Manifest Destiny” to run roughshod over the West, the treatment of US citizens of Japanese descent after Pearl Harbor, etc.

We let pundits use simplistic phrases like “tree hugger” and “do gooder” without bringing to their attention the complexity of, or the ethical aspects of the situations. After all, the Bible states that we are “God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works” (Ephesians 2:10). We also have a problem with the misuse of financial and political power to harm or hold down people who do not have that power. Enough of that, except I feel that the government and the powerful (by way of money or political influence) should be held to the ideals of the Sermon 21

on the Mount (not as public policy, but as individual morality) just as individual citizens are.

After all, our courts have given corporations the right to be dealt with as individuals and they have used it to benefit themselves. Therefore, they should be held to the same responsibilities.

Does the verse of 2 Chronicles 7: 14 relate to nations? “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves, pray, seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, I will hear from heaven, I will forgive their sins and I will heal their land”. Too often, we act as if we think military might gives us the right to police the world. On the other hand, if a person strongly believes in the separation of church and state, as I do, it is not correct for the government to make and dictate, laws and policies to make citizens be or do good. Christians, individuals, corporations and governments should act on their own to adhere to biblical admonitions. In the final accounting, I believe we will be held responsible for not only our “religious” thoughts and actions, but for supporting leaders and political parties that have, or don’t have, Christian goals.

Of course, the problem is that each party will have both good and bad objectives. As Christians, we are to help the poor, the young, the old, the infirmed, the alien, and we are to be good stewards of God’s creation. To the extent possible, we should support politicians and political parties that follow these admonitions.

I am a registered politically as an independent. I think both parties have both good and bad ideas and members and I feel that anyone who cannot see that is not paying attention. Paul told Timothy to study to be a person who does not need to be ashamed of his understanding of truth. Paul also cautions Timothy to judge others, not by their words, but by their deeds. ‘Study to be informed’ applies to other areas of thought as well as to theology. I believe it is important to accept Paul’s position that we re saved by grace, through faith, (Ephesians 2) but I also believe that “faith without deeds (works) is dead”. (James 2) These are not contadictory positions. I fall short, but I attempt to live up to those ideals. To the extent that I don’t, I ask forgivness. Now, 22

back to what I did rather than what I think although trying to explain some of my political and theological philosophy was a good exercise for me. I recommend it for everyone.

I attended FSU for one year and a half before I was to be drafted into the army for the Korean conflict. During that time my interests all focused on Jean and gymnastics. At first, I had an interest in trying out for the FSU diving team. The swimming pool was in the basement of the Montgomery gym (now the School of Dance). As I went into the front of the gym to go down to the swimming pool, which was in the basement, I had to pass the main gym floor where I saw guys doing things on gymnastics apparatus that was totally new to me. I had never seen a pommel horse, horizontal bar, parallel bars, flying rings or a tumbling mat before. As I watched in amazement, Coach Hartley Price asked me if I was interested in trying out for the gymnastics team. I answered “No sir, I am going down to try out for the diving team.” He said, “If you can dive I can make a tumbler out of you and I need tumblers.” I never made it to the swimming pool. By the year’s end I was on the gym team as a tumbler and as a participant on the trampoline.

Although I was not nearly as accomplished as the other FSU gymnasts, I was in the first athletic event between FSU and UF, the Southeastern AAU Championships in Atlanta. The score: FSU 87, UF 3.5. I personally scored 10 points and won the SE AAU Trampoline title. ( of course, a newspaper article on the meet is in the Appendix) During the next year and a half I scored points in both events. FSU was the only southern school that was competitive with the northern schools. That group of accomplished gymnasts who came to FSU from the North with Coach Price won five national titles in the next few years, both NCAA and AAU. It was my good fortune that they needed a tumbler/trampolinist. I made the team and participated in meets in Atlanta, West Point, Annapolis, U. of Maryland, Chicago, 1950 (where I saw my first snow). By the way, I did win the FSU intramural diving championship one year (1950).

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An enduring memory about gymnastics is the fact that we practiced year around. We tumbled up the slope of Landis Green so that when we got on a flat mat we could really go.

Another memory has to do with post practice. Many days I would get through with practice and go to the University Grill, across from the old Psychology Building on Copeland St. where Bill’s Bookstore is now, and order a big piece of pecan pie and a large chocolate milkshake. ( Just the thought of that now almost makes me sick.) Then I would go to dinner. Oh, the joys of youth, but I don’t want to go back.

There was also a negative result from the gymnastics. On January 31, 1950, we had a meet with the University of Indiana at our gym. The trampoline we used was an old one with metal springs. It did not give the spring, or height, that the newer elastic ones did. The Indiana boys were used to the higher bounce of the elastic springs, so we took some of the metal springs out to give the trampoline more bounce. I was not use to it so I was off on all of my routine. So, I decided to try a double back flip for my ending move. I should not have made that decision, because I over spun and when I fell on the trampoline bed, I bent in half about my chest rather than my neck or waist. I pulled muscles and ligaments in my back and neck and spent the next week in the hospital. As anyone who knows me is aware, it bothers me to this day. All God’s children have problems and that is one of mine. I sometimes define such a problem as “crabgrass in the lawn of life”.

Later in life, I returned to some of my gymnastics for an exercise routine. When I was 45, I wanted to get a physical workout without going to a gym and lifting weights. I decided to go to the track on campus most days to jog a couple of miles, do some situps, etc. and do five to ten back handsprings (flip flops). I enjoyed that, and it led to my decision to do as many back handsprings on each birthday as I was old. For example, when I was fifty, I did at least fifty back handsprings until I was 62, when I did 75 flip flops. That is when a chiropractor friend said 24

that I should quit, because if I landed wrong on my wrist, it would be a problem for the rest of my life. As I tell the story, I didn’t hear him say that, I heard him say, “You land wrong on your wrist and you won’t play any more golf”. So, I left his office and never did another back handspring. I guess it was a good decision, but I still feel, of course wrongly, that I could do one now.

As an aside, during my freshman year, I had a job as a “car hop” at a local drive-in restaurant on Tennessee Street at a place called “The Quaker House”. People would drive in, park and stay in their car as I came up to the window, took an order and delivered the food back to the car. Normally, this was a girl’s job, but the owner found that boys were not hassled as much as were girls and we made good tip money.

In January, 1951, I joined the US Navy rather than be drafted into the army. I traveled by train from Jacksonville to San Diego, CA. for 12 weeks of boot camp. From there I boarded a ship to go through the Panama Canal (a week at each end) to Norfolk, VA, and back to Jacksonville for aviation electrician’s school. I had requested submarine service. For what was good for me, the United States Navy was smarter than I was.

After about six months and two aviation electrician schools I was transferred to Saufley Field, Pensacola. I had good enough grades to choose my station. Saufley was deemed, by me, to be better than the Aleutian Islands or Morocco, my other choices. The reason was that, just like Jacksonville, I could spend almost every weekend in Tallahassee with Jean Kathryn. In those days wearing a navy uniform I could hitch-hike anywhere about as fast as I could have driven.

Before I joined the US Navy I had joined Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity, so I had a place to stay at FSU. In a brief two years, I made some long lasting friends in Lambda Chi. We still (2013) have a yearly meeting of the first 100 brothers. Jean had joined Phi Mu sorority. She was 25

to be President but she graduated early in order to get an early teaching job in Bradenton so we could get married. When I would get on campus from my navy station I would go to the Phi Mu house where my civilian clothes were. Jean and her sisters kept my clothes in good shape. Many old friends at FSU never realized that I was in the USN service because they saw me every weekend. During this navy/FSU period (1952) I “pinned” Jean, meaning that we were planning to get engaged. I was thrown into the pool in front of Westcott building as was custom, and all was well with the world.

While Jean K. was teaching in Bradenton I still saw her virtually every weekend by hitchhiking from Pensacola, 500 miles, and back. I must have been in love. The Lord watched over me as I covered so many miles and had some wild rides. In late 1952 I proposed and surprise, she said yes. I gave her a very nice engagement ring we had driven to Tampa to buy with her money, and, on June 26, 1953 we were married, went to Key West and Miami Beach for a week honeymoon and moved to Pensacola to begin a life of marital bliss.

While in Pensacola, but before marriage, I earned twelve hours of college credit from the Tulane-Pensacola University Center. At the T-P Univ. center my classmates were all officers.

We got along well and often, at Saufley they would call the electric shop and ask for me to fly in the back seat of the SNJ, a plane used for flight instruction. We would go out before the students took off and I would get flight training. I really enjoyed that, and I always wanted to get a pilot’s license but never felt I had the money. It is probably just as well, flying for fun would cost too much for my lifestyle.

After six months in Pensacola we moved to Redwood City, California, about 30 miles south of San Francisco. I was stationed at Moffitt Field just north of San Jose, at the southern shore of San Francisco Bay. While driving west, I made the statement to Jean Kathryn, “Stick with me and we will go places.” Little did I know as will be proven in the next 25 pages or so. Jean 26

recalls that statement quite often.

Our California stay was almost totally happy. Jean taught school in San Mateo and made over twice the salary she made in Florida. We traveled on weekends from northern California, redwoods and wine country through the valley, Yosemite, Carmel, El Centro, Monterey Bay, Los Angeles, San Diego, and south to Ensenada, Mexico. Many trips to San Francisco, fish houses, museums, telegraph hill (Jean always called it television hill, a new word for us), University of California and Stanford, etc. The best part was that it was just us.

Our one sad experience was the day Jean received the phone call that her dad, W.A. “Bill” Martin had died of a heart attack. Her first airplane ride from San Francisco to Tampa was a long, sad one.

At Moffitt field, I drew flight pay so I flew all over California. On several occasions I would leave for a couple of weeks to go to some technical school in San Diego or El Centro for rocket and gunnery practice. Absence did make the heart grow fonder. However, when I got on the Yorktown to go overseas, Jean said she thought she would never see me again. Fortunately, for Tom, Gary, Joy and others, she was wrong.

At that time, China was threatening to invade Taiwan and the Yorktown’s job was to stop them. We flew “live” missions, with loaded guns, bombs and rockets. On one occasion, when landing, a plane hit the landing arrest cable which made the plane stop. However, a rocket broke loose from the wing mount and skipped down the flight deck toward where I was working. I saw it when several people screamed, but it went by about 15 feet from me and fell off the bow of the ship. No harm, no foul. On several occasions we rode out typhoons in the Pacific Ocean and the South China Sea. On numerous occasions we took waves over the flight deck, 70 feet above the water. Carrier operations are very complex and dangerous under the best of circumstances but 27

add bad weather, bombs and rockets, it was an interesting six months with periods of significant fright. I must say that I got a thrill out of participating in carrier operations. I got a kick out of carrier landings. It is a fact that when I landed on a carrier for the last time, I was flying with a pilot who, on his last landing crashed. Was I nervous? Yep. The landing was perfect.

My belief in education carried through my navy career. It paid off as I achieved Aviation Electrician First Class petty officer in three years and eight months. Only Chief Petty officers were above me as noncommissioned officers and it allowed me numerous privileges and responsibilities during the last several months of my enlistment and discharge. One responsibility was to be in charge of a shore patrol group in Manila, Philippines, We were assigned to keep order in Manila’s largest bar and house of ill-repute about ten miles from the city. I was issued a 45 sidearm (pistol) which I was sure I would never to take out of the holster.

I told my group to be visible, speak with authority, and don’t get hurt. Nothing too violent happened and there are no stories to tell, at least none that I could relate in this paper.

With the credit and hours Florida State gave me for my navy schools, I eventually earned one year of college credit during my navy time. I had been selected to get schooling in special aircraft technology, including G-2 compass installation and maintenance, the love and care of aircraft automatic pilot systems and LABS (low altitude bombing systems) installation and maintenance. We, VF-152 squadron, had large two-engine fighter-bomber jets (McDonald Douglas F2H-3). They were called Banshees and when we were sent over to patrol the China coast and the Taiwan Straits I had the responsibility of installing the system for releasing the atomic bombs that our plane carried. Needless to say I am pleased to report that the system was never used. This was the summer of 1954. I have lived with a hearing problem ever since, because when I worked on the planes, often with the engines revved up to near full throttle, the noise, without earplugs, was damaging. Carrier air group 15 was part of the 7th Fleet which was 28

one of, if not the largest naval fleet ever put together. On one occasion I stood on the deck of the USS Yorktown CVA-10, and counted 87 ships that stretched to the horizon.

Not many words need to be expended on the seven month cruise. It was an interesting experience to be done with. Three weeks in Hawaii at Barber’s Point, gave me an opportunity to tour the island of Oahu and Honolulu. We then sailed to the Philippines. During this part of the journey we conducted a lot of flight operations (practice). Some of it was during bad weather which is what the bosses wanted. The Philippine cities of Manila and Cavite, and the country side gave me a look at the “underdeveloped world”. On one occasion, I needed some flight time to meet my requirements for flight pay, so I signed on to join a patrol flight. I did not know it was a 14 hour flight north along the coast of China to the area of Taiwan from the Philippines when I only needed 4 hours.

We spent a month in Atsugi, Japan, a marine air field about twenty miles out of Tokyo at the base of Mt. Fujiyama. Flying around the Tokyo Bay area and Mt. Fuji, and trips to the old Japanese capital of Kamakura, as well as visiting Tokyo, Yokohama, etc., were all interesting since I had to be there. We saw Taiwan and Korea from the ship but not from a land visit. It was a bummer to be a half a world away on our first wedding anniversary. In 1954, I spent an interesting Christmas in Hong Kong. It really gives a person an idea of high density living.

In January, 1955, I was able to leave the Yorktown in Manila Bay, a couple of weeks early to fly back into FSU. I was too late so I got a construction job in Bradenton until June and back to being a Seminole. At Florida State, as a married vet I received about $168 a month and I had taken a test for, and received, a Florida Legislative Teaching Scholarship which was appreciated. We had the good fortune to buy a small house in Seminole Manor (1514 Caldwell Dr.) by just taking over the payments. Loan, insurance and taxes totaled $42.42 a month. Talk about a deal, even for those days. We were lucky since there were almost NO apartments in 29

Tallahassee in 1955. Can you believe that?

As a married student I decided books and teachers were more important to my education.

No more gymnastics, only A’s and B’s, mostly A’s, and a goal to get a master’s degree as soon as possible. I got a summer job as a lifeguard at Levy Pool (1955-57). Life was good, friends, grad school program following a bachelor’s in social studies education then a master’s degree in geography. I wrote my thesis on “Fresh Water Problems, Sources and Use in Manatee County, FL.” While a graduate student in geography, I was asked, by Henry Becker, the geography chair, to work in the Florida Resources Analysis Center. We developed a modest Atlas of Florida.

Nearly 30 years later I developed three of them. I mention this because about 15 years later I accepted the responsibility to resurrect this same center.

Jean and I came to Tallahassee a family of two and left as a family of three. Tom was born as planned in April of 1956 while I was interning at Leon High School. When I received my master’s degree we moved back to Bradenton, where Gary was born in March of 1958. I had taken a job teaching social studies and coaching at Manatee High school, the school I had graduated from 8 years earlier. It was interesting being a colleague of many of my former teachers.

Getting started in Bradenton again was exciting. I was a new teacher at Manatee County High School. I taught geography, world history, economics and one class of tenth grade English.

Any educator knows that this is a perfect assignment for failure. I wasn’t a failure, but neither was I a successful teacher largely due to the necessity of four preparations every day. Teachers with 10-20 years experience had two different classes to teach and I had four. In addition, I helped coach football and I coached tennis. I learned to cope and then, to teach. No thanks go to the school’s administrators.

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Over all, I feel I did an adequate to good job by the end of my second year. I must have been successful because Dr. Dick Skretting, who had been my social studies education teacher at FSU assigned an intern to me. After he came to see the intern several times, he offered me the position of Chairman of the Social Studies Department at Florida High, the demonstration school at FSU, which I accepted in 1960.

This was an interesting turn of events in that during my first year Jean and I had built a very nice house in Country Club Heights in Bradenton. We often said that we would live and die in that house, at 4100 14th Avenue. In addition, I had gotten involved in a political campaign to elect a new property appraiser. I did this because, after considerable research, I found that teachers were paid very little in Manatee County mainly because the Property Appraiser set a very low tax base. All, (most?), of the county officials thought that it was okay to pay a beginning teacher, a veteran, with a master’s degree $3,490 for a ten-month teaching position. I did pick up another $500 supplement for coaching. The superintendent was adamant that we teachers should not be involved in political activity. In fact, we persevered, and won. For a couple of years, I ran a youth center on Friday nights in Myakka City, 35 miles from Bradenton, and I worked summers in the Clerk of Circuit Court’s office and Christmas season in the Post Office.

As a result of the success of the political efforts of the teachers and many others, the Superintendent, to my surprise was not mad. In fact, he offered me a position in his administration which I accepted just before I told him I was leaving Manatee County for Tallahassee. The Superintendent’s name was J. Hartley Blackburn and he was a friend of my family. We teachers referred to him as J. Blackly Heartburn. Most teachers were the spouse of wealthy businessmen and neither they, nor the school administrators, were interested in adequate teacher salaries. Here it is 2009 and not much has changed. Truth be told, the county 31

administration was less happy to lose Jean, who had started back teaching in 1959, than to lose me.

I was in tall cotton at Florida High, getting $4850, no coaching and fewer preparations.

By the second semester I was teaching a social studies methods course in the College of Education. I would describe and discuss a teaching method and several days later the students would go to Florida High to see me, or another teacher, using it. The teachers at Florida High would share with me how the class went, and back in the college class, we would share and discuss how it went. Next, the students would prepare a short lesson, teach it, and then critique it.

I thought it went well.

A successful project that took me out of my normal activities was the building of a real log cabin with the boys. Several lots in our neighborhood (Parkside) were being cleared to build new homes and a good number of 8-10 inch pine trees were being cut down. We carried them to our backyard, cleaned them of branches and bark and built an 8 by10 foot notched log cabin. It had two windows and a door. It was sturdy enough to be used as a platform from which to launch a bag swing I put in a nearby oak tree. It was also a popular meeting place for Tom’s Cub Scout den.

Being on the college faculty presented me with a challenge. I knew, to be successful, I had to get a Ph.D. (the union card). In the summer of 1963 a family of five took off for a year and a half to live in East Lansing, Michigan, the location of Michigan State University, and a highly respected Big Ten geography department. Jean Kathryn and I had been blessed in 1961 with a sweet, beautiful daughter, Joy Kathryn. We arrived in Michigan on June 7th and when we all got out of the car in front of our very small student apartment, we wanted to jump back in and return to Tallahassee. It was 19 degrees.

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We stayed, and for the next six weeks we moved to the Kellogg estate at Gull Lake, between Kalamazoo and Battle Creek. The specific place was Hickory Corners where MSU held a field camp for graduate students. It was a delightful few weeks. I did well with the younger graduate students. I was 31 and they were generally 23 or 24. While in Gull Lake I received word that an article I had written on geography had been accepted by the Peabody Journal of Education. This helped me with both fellow students and faculty.

My educational experiences, as well as the family activities, went very well at Michigan State University. I asked for no financial help and I took as many hours as they would approve, I made good grades and I passed my statistics and first language (Spanish) requirements. Of course the snow was a chilly but positive experience for all of us. Tom and Gary had good elementary school years and Joy gave up her bottle. We called it our “camping out” year. No rugs on the floor, no pictures on the wall. Joy took her sand bucket and little shovel out to the sandbox and “played in the snow” like she was at the beach. Instead of making fun of her the Yankee kids all got out their sand buckets and played with her. We traveled Michigan and, during break, we went north to Mackinaw Island, then into Canada, east to Sudbury, south to Toronto, Niagara Falls and back to East Lansing. I had received a $6000 student loan from the Manatee River National Bank at virtually no interest so money was not a major problem. Of course, paying it back was a necessary inconvenience.

Actually, I became closer to two faculty members at MSU than I did to my fellow students. One was the Department Chair, Larry Sommers and John Lounsbury, who ran the field camp. Over the years John, Larry and I received numerous teaching grants together and John invited me to teach in the 1968 summer school at Eastern Michigan University, where he was chair. While at Eastern, John, Tom, Gary and I went to several Detroit Tigers games and Gary got to play in the local recreation park baseball league. He received the “Most Valuable Player” 33

award which upset several of the local fathers.

In the fall of 1964 I returned to FSU but I still had to finish my written exams, second foreign language (Russian) and a “pressure problem”, and of course a dissertation. Those were done while teaching full load. As with so much of my life, my success came at the cost of time with the kids. It also placed too much of a load on Jean. However, in retrospect, at whatever cost, getting the Ph.D.degree (in 1968) was most important to all of us.

For my dissertation I chose a field topic “A Land Use Model for Land Contiguous to the Cross Florida Barge Canal.” Using aerial photography and on the ground field work, I completed a successful paper both for my degree and for the Corps of Engineers who had provided modest financial help. In several situations I had a significant impact on what the Corps ended up doing.

Of course, the barge canal project was halted several years after I finished my study. I can argue both sides of the question about whether that was a good decision.

I finished the degree in 1967 and, as the administration of Florida High changed, I transferred to the Geography Department full time. During the middle 1960’s I had volunteered to teach several courses for them. My first year with the department, we moved into the new Bellamy Building. My academic interests were Latin America, the Soviet Union, Land Use and Resource Management, and Geographic Education. Very soon I became, not only interested in the Geography of Florida, but ten years later I became The State Geographer, an honorary position I held until I retired.

Dr. Bill Brueckheimer, Department Chairman, asked if I would be interested in restarting the Florida Resources Analysis Center (1969). When I asked how much help I would receive from the department he replied that I would have one less class to teach but that there would be “no lines (people) and no money”. I replied that if he would also promise no direction, I would 34

accept. What a big, wonderful step that turned out to be. I had begun to realize that, as much as the university said they valued teaching, promotion and financial advancement was more dependent on writing and receiving research grants, publishing books and articles and professional advancement. I had early good fortune at writing and getting grants and, from the work we did, I managed to get a reasonable number of publications accepted and published.

I maintained my teaching and for the department, I developed an “audio-visual� tutorial course on the Geography of Florida. I had taught it as a normal course and it became popular and, instead of reaching 30-35 students most quarters, I could reach 90-100 students every term.

I recorded on cassette tapes the 45 lectures around 500 or so 35 millimeter slides. I had taken them as a private project to produce 12 filmstrips on the geography of Florida. I also had the students do a good bit of map work. It was a success and was taken over by another professor when I left and was phased out after 10-12 years. The family enjoyed the one week picture taking trip as a happy educational vacation.

The filmstrips I had produced were profitable beyond my fondest expectations. This gave Tom and Gary a job as they boxed the filmstrips for mailing. The success of the filmstrips encouraged me to write several textbooks and produce a set of picture prints that sold pretty well.

The profit I made from these materials allowed us to build the house on Lakeshore and encouraged me to help county school districts develop Florida geography courses.

A unique and interesting situation, associated with the new house, came about in January or February of 1973. I was working in the yard, which was beginning to look real good, when a fancy car stopped on the lane. Two gentlemen got out of the car and stated that they represented a large advertising agency in New York. They had heard about this new, nice house just off Lakeshore Drive and they would like to use it as a backdrop for an advertisement touting the benefits of a Homelite riding mower. They said that the house was just what they had been 35

looking for a “Georgian house that looked like ‘anyplace’ USA.” They wanted to pay me for the use of it for a photo shoot. Of course, I said yes. They walked all around, looking at the yard, its slope and the grass, trees, etc. They then said that I would be a perfect model and that they would pay me to pose on the mower. Again, I agreed. They told me what to wear, and the next day they raked my yard to perfection, and we had a big time photo shoot. It was very cold and I only had on a summer outfit, so between taking several shots, moving the mower and reposing me, they had a helper wrap a blanket around me to keep me warm. They said they took 142 shots. It must have worked, because the April 16, 1973, issue of U S News and World Report had in it on page 50, the two page color ad with me on the mower with our house in the background. A copy of that magazine is in the appendix. The ad also appeared in six other national magazines.

Back to the department and Dr. Brueckeimer’s offer. I was excited about the prospects of recreating the Center and, to get it started, I “hustled” state government for projects, including maps, papers, and field work, library research, etc. Some fellow professors thought I was prostituting myself to government agencies by doing their “step and fetch it” work, and to a degree I was, but it had a purpose. (For a bit more detail on the history of the Institute for Science and Public Affairs, see the paper,” ISPA History” in the Appendix).

After a year or so it became common knowledge in the agencies that “if you have a certain kind of problem, Ed Fernald can solve it for you.” My approach was: A) We can do high quality work, on time, and within a very detailed budget; B) I will use graduate students to do the work. They will get good instruction, good work habits and pick up some helpful money all at the same time”.

Over time, agency heads began not only to trust me but to depend on the Center. We began to purchase equipment and developed 8-10 students who were bright and hard working.

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This got attention. I was quick to inform higher administrators about what I was doing and I got agency people to give FSU and the Board of Regents positive credit for doing good work and saving the state money. Not only save the state money, but the money we received was used to educate students, many of whom began to work in those same agencies. Years later I worked with, or heard from, dozens of former students who had jobs in counties or agencies, doing what they had worked on at the Analysis Center. Several years later Dominic Calabro, the Head of Tax Watch, an organization created to audit how the state money was spent, featured our Institute of Science and Public Affairs in their newsletter. It stated that our efforts “were outstanding and the state should be more involved in resources working like that with the universities’. (a copy of that newsletter is in the Appendix) All of this got the attention of Joe Cresse, the Head of the Governor’s Planning and Budget Committee. Joe was a very able and tight-fisted budget man. He introduced me into the Legislative Budget process and finally, at Cresse’s insistence, I was given over $100,000 per year to make the Center a stable, functioning organization connecting state agency needs with University resources. On numerous occasions I would be asked “How much will it, a project, cost?” Often our price would be just a fraction of what they had budgeted for the work. On occasion I would say “I’m not sure about part of the project so I will up my budget request, but if I have any money left over I will give it back.” On a good number of cases I did return money or did extra work. In most cases they said “Keep the money and purchase some equipment we will need when we do more work with the Institute.” Since this was about the time computers were coming into use, extra money was often used to develop our computer capability in mapping, geographic information systems and other programs.

As our expertise with, and for, various agencies developed, separate centers were developed to meet specific needs (see brochure). New centers were developed for Hazardous 37

Waste Management, Conflict Resolution, Beaches and Shores (established to set dune lines and coastal set back lines, etc.). In 1971, Vice-President Bob Lawton moved me from the Geography Department to the office of the Vice-President for Research. This move proved to be successful because VP of research Robert Johnson knew that Lawton said that I was to be left alone. Before long, the Vice President (Lawton) began to move various centers and institutes under my direction as I was made assistant, then Associate VP for Research, then Academic Affairs, and back to Research. With more centers I started an Institute, then another, and then another. When I retired in 1998, five institutes and seventeen research and service Centers reported to me and our yearly budget was $16.6 million dollars. As I retired, I was able to establish a two million dollar endowment for geography education with donations from the National Geographic Society ($500,000), the FSU Foundation ($500,000), the State of Florida Matching Program ($750,000), and several miscellaneous gifts plus some interest.

An interesting example of service to the community came about when I was asked to be a member of the Tallahassee/Leon County Planning Commission (1977). I was a member for eight years and served as chairman for three years. I always felt that my service was a benefit to me professionally because I taught a course titled “Spatial Analysis of Land Use”. On many occasions I used Commission work as content for the class. I was pleased when, six months after I left the Commission, I was asked to have lunch with a local leader of realtors who stated that the realtors and developers would like me to go back on the Commission because, “even though we sometimes disagree, we always know why and we appreciate how you have helped us in the past.” I appreciated the request but I respectfully declined. I helped write the first Comprehensive Plan for Leon/Tallahassee and on several occasions was heavily lobbied by good friends to either pass or disallow a request. One would be for it, while the other would be against. Some fun. On occasion I would receive a telephone call, from someone I did not know, only to hear them berate me for being for, or against, a request before I had made up my mind 38

how I would vote. Some of the language reminded me of my navy days.

While a member of the Planning Commission, I was given an award by the Council for Neighborhood Associations for outstanding service to neighborhoods; the City and County Commissions gave me a joint commendation for my efforts toward development of the first comprehensive plan.

In the University, I was a founding member and President of the Florida State University Varsity Club, and I was appointed to the FSU Athletic Hall of Fame Committee when it was created and am still a member about forty years later. Outside the University, I was on the Southern Bank of Tallahassee Business Advisory Board and the Board of Directors of the Bay Area Insurance Company of Bradenton. In a pile in my office I have 24 plaques of one kind or another for public service, offices held, or books or other products developed.

On the national level, I was appointed by the U.S. Geological Survey to be Chairman of the Florida Board of Geographic Names. The task of this Board was to investigate the requests for the addition, or change, of the name of a place in Florida. Most requests were simple, but several created much consternation and some nasty letters to me and to the USGS. We also changed several names that were racially, or in some other way offensive. Geographers can live interesting and even combative lives. I filled this position from 1984 until I retired in 1998.

An important fact needs to be made at this point. In the early 1970s Dr. Gus Turnbull was a young professor in Public Administration. I helped him get some projects during several summers and gave him some technical help. As the years went by Gus climbed the administrative ladder and became Academic Vice-President. His help to me was invaluable. He supported me to the hilt and without his encouragement little of the success of the Institute of Science and Public Affairs would have been possible.

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On one occasion, two Vice Presidents (Hodge and Johnson) asked Bernie Sliger to shut down the Institute of Science and Public Affairs because we were going to get the University in serious money problems. They were not sure just what I (the Institute) did and they knew I/we received a lot of good attention and they didn’t like it, but they didn’t tell me. Bernie wrote the memo. Gus talked to me and when I told him that the two Vice Presidents had not even discussed it with me, he told Bernie “No way, they don’t know what they are talking about”. It turned out Gus was right and the Institute was on solid fiscal footing. We were, and after that episode, we brought in millions of dollars to FSU. When I retired, Mac Hall, ISPA business manager, told me that “we”, all of ISPA, had brought in to FSU, over $100,000,000.

In fact, in1998, when I retired, then Governor Lawton Chiles, asked me to come before the Florida Cabinet, where he gave me a “Thank You Proclamation” signed by all the Cabinet members acknowledging the work that I had been involved with for the state over the last 25 years. It was a special event and Jean, Tom and Cindy, and others had been invited to the presentation. I have Dr. Bob Bradley to thank for that event. He had been the Head of the Governor’s Planning and Budget Office under three or four Governors. Because of Bradley’s interest in, and appreciation for, the Institute for Science and Public Affairs, he replaced me as Associate Vice President when I retired. He has been a valuable resource for the university and is now a full Vice-President and an indispensible member of the FSU administration.

At the center level, several professors must be mentioned. When I had the idea that Florida would need to manage its hazardous waste problem I knew nothing about the technical and scientific aspects of the situation. Dr. Roy Herndon, a nuclear physicist, took a chance on me and developed the program into a world renowned effort with offices in Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, and other European capitals to help them solve this important problem. Roy and his staff have worked for nearly 20 years with NATO. He cannot be praised enough. In the conflict 40

resolution field Bob Jones supplied the same level of effort. Nothing that has been accomplished has been done without the great people in the various Centers and Institutes. Just a few names are Jim Anderson, who helped us get started in the field of cartography, Dr. Betsy Purdum, excellent editor and an accomplished anthropologist, Steve Hodge, one of the more accomplished researchers in Geographic Information Systems in the country, Dr. Laurie Molina, very able Director of the Florida Geographic Alliance, Mac Hall, Business Manager, and Shelia Williams, office manager, both of them have kept us all straight for many years.

My management approach was: Get a good project, get a good person to work on it, grease the slides, and get out of their way. For nearly 30 years when I retired, it worked. I thank them all. During this period of time, over 100 million dollars of contracts were signed with the state and federal governments. I might add, for my accountant son and daughter-in-law, I never had a contract problem. On one occasion, my vice president (Johnson) boss said I had too much money in my auxiliary account and he swept it ($600,000) into his accounts. I had been challenged to create excess funding in the auxiliary account by Provost Turnbull.

Some of the notable publications and projects that were developed during the late 1970s through 1998 in the Florida Resources and Environmental Analysis Center were: but not limited to, two major Florida Atlases and their revisions, two smaller atlases on county highways and health, the Florida Geographic Alliance and the Florida GIS Program. Our first comprehensive Atlas of Florida was published in 1982, to be followed in1984, by The Water Resources Atlas of Florida. Both of these books were very well received, and were the result of hard work by a great number of people, including Dr. Betsy Purdum, Jim Anderson, Dr. Mort Winsburg and Dr. Don Patton. The Comprehensive Atlas won the �Outstanding Book on Florida Award� from the Florida Historical Society, and a complete revision came out in 1996. The revision of the Water Atlas came out in 1998. My resume includes over 40 articles and book chapters, and several 41

dozen reports.

Overall, I served as principal investigator, or co-principal investigator, on over 80 contracts or grants valued at over 14 million dollars, from private, local, regional, state and national funding agencies. I worked with 11 of Florida’s Regional Planning Councils and all five of the Water Management Districts.

I take special pride (not the sinful kind) in one award. The Newsletter for the Applied Geography Specialty Group, of the Association of American Geographers, stated the following: “Ed Fernald, professor at Florida State University is the winner of the 1992 Anderson Medal of Honor. The Anderson Medal is the highest award given by the Association of American Geographers in recognition for career accomplishments in applied geography.” (Full resume and the Newsletter is in the Appendix) On the subject of professional development, in the late 1980s I became involved again with the National Council for Geographic Education. I say again, because in the late 1960s, I was elected to the Board of Directors largely because I had been President of the Florida Society of Geographers and very active in the Florida Council for the Social Studies. I realized that this involvement was too early in my career and after my board appointment expired, I spent my time working on the activities of the Center. When I rejoined NCGE I became quite active. After several years on the NCGE board I was elected president of the National Council for Geographic Education. Due to active involvement in NCGE, I had my fill of giving talks and participating at the national, and because of MAB, at the international level. After chairing, and bringing the NCGE national convention to Orlando in 1996, I decided to let others get the experience of doing all those fun things. NCGE gave me a Distinguished Mentor Award about 1994. During those early 1990s years Jean and I were able to travel much of the United States for professional meetings. For those readers who are real gluttons for punishment, a copy of my 1998 academic 42

resume is in the Appendix.

The Geographic Alliance program was started by the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. During the middle 1980s Gilbert Grosvenor, who was NGS President at the time, recognized the poor state of geography education in public schools. He wanted to change this condition by identifying geography education leaders in every state in the union and have the NGS Education Foundation give each state $50,000 every year to do three things. Florida State received at least this amount until we received our endowment. One goal was to put geography, as a separate course back into the school curriculum; two, develop top quality teaching materials which would be made available free to teachers; and, three, to hold workshops on how to teach geography. I was asked to write the Florida proposal, which was funded, and I started the Florida Geographic Alliance.

Each year I visited Grosvenor in his office to report what we had accomplished in Florida. I always took a book, some maps or other interesting material we had produced that I knew he would like, and I never asked him for more Alliance money. He actually said, “I like to have you come to see me because you never ask for money and you always bring me something interesting.” He also knew that I always put the stipend that NGS offered each Alliance Coordinator in the budget. I never took any Alliance money. On one occasion I took the 1996 edition of the Florida Atlas to him. He looked at it and asked me how much it took us to create it. I told him, 300-350 thousand dollars. He told me to see him the next day, which I did. He said he spent the evening going over the atlas, and the next morning he took it to the chief cartographer at the Geographic and asked him to estimate the budget for NGS to produce an atlas just like the one I gave him. The answer was “three million dollars”. Then he said, “Ed, given the quality of this atlas, I would be proud to take your name off of that book and put mine on it”.

Now, coming from NGS, this was a compliment for everyone who worked on the atlas.

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Early on, Laurie Molina, a teacher from Hillsborough County joined the Alliance, first as a teacher in residence, then as a Ph.D. faculty member who now runs the program. She has been a bright, hard working co-coordinator. I have often said, in jest, that I was smart to bring Laurie into the Alliance because she does the work and I get the credit. She now should get the credit.

The Alliance got many counties to add geography to their curriculum, but by 1995 budget cuts eliminated most of the gains.

In the year 2000, Gov. Jeb Bush instituted the FCAT assessment program (Florida Comprehensive Assessment Program). The assessment program was not comprehensive in that it left out geography, history and the social science subjects and it rewarded schools on the outcome of the test scores. Schools in wealthy neighborhoods had higher scores because they served more advanced students and had received more money over the years. They were rewarded with more money. Schools in poor areas lost money because they did not do as well.

You figure the logic of that approach. In addition, since schools were given money on the basis of their FCAT scores, school leaders (?) spent more of their curriculum time on FCAT subjects, math and reading and cut out, or at least, cut way back, history, geography, art, industrial arts, music, etc. as less important subjects. By 2013, I am pleased to report, the FCAT has been significantly changed.

Never-the-less, I continued to work with Mr. Grosvenor and as I retired in 1998, we received 500 thousand dollars from the NGS, 500 thousand from the FSU Foundation, and a State match of 750 thousand, to establish an endowment for the Florida Geographic Alliance.

This quickly became a 2 million dollar endowment and the Alliance made good progress for a couple of years. I received a consulting fee and put in a lot of time. However, due to the W. Bush recession, we began to lose the endowment nest egg and now I help on a volunteer basis.

By the middle of 2009 we have had to scale back our involvement in the National 44

Geographic Society program. They are facing their own financial difficulties and they can’t help us yet they want us to jump through their hoops at our expense. I know it is a bit over the top to speculate that they think they know more about geography, education and Florida than we do, but that is the way it comes across. I will say the folks I have gotten to know at NGS are really nice people, but the institutional self satisfaction has been oppressive. I hope the cooperative aspect of the program will again be established and Laurie can get the Alliance rolling again. I will help as requested. One of the great benefits of the Alliance has been the opportunity to meet, and become friends with, some very talented and gracious geography teachers from all over Florida and the rest of the country.

Earlier, I mentioned the consulting and teacher training I had done in many counties over the state. Many times teachers would request that I write a book for the junior high school curriculum. I had developed filmstrips, picture prints and many units but they wanted a textbook. So, in 1974, I wrote FLORIDA: ITS PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS. It was written according to the teaching/learning model I created and the teachers received it well. The book was published by Trend Publications in Tampa, the company that produces the FLORIDA TREND magazine. Harris Mullen, the publisher was a great help during that time as I wrote Florida materials. A year or so later I asked Helen Deans and Anne Black, faculty members at the Florida State University School, to co-write with me an elementary textbook FLORIDA: ITS HERITAGE AND HORIZONS. It was well received by fourth grade teachers all over the state.

Copies of several of the books and the filmstrips are in the Appendix box.

An interesting story involves a gentleman named, Dr. Homer Hoyt. Dr. Hoyt was a very inquisitive soul who had a law degree and a Ph.D. in economics. To geographers interested in land use he was well known for developing the Hoyt Sector theory. I was asked to answer a question on my doctoral exams about his ideas in1964. In 1974 my desk telephone rang and 45

when I identified myself, this interesting voice stated, “This is Dr. Homer Hoyt”. I was flabbergasted. My unstated reaction was, “I thought you died 50 years ago.” After gaining my composure, I was very business like and he stated his problem. He had been in a meeting in Washington and told a Florida planner that he had a problem with a piece of land he owned in Florida. The Floridian thought , “Here is a fellow who has bought some swampland and wants out”, but before he could make a statement, Dr. Hoyt said, “I own a linear mile of coast on Hutchinson Island, in St. Lucie County and I need some help dealing with state land use regulations”. The fellow said, “You need to talk to Dr. Ed Fernald at FSU. So, the phone call.

We talked and he asked me to be his private consultant on the problem. I said that I was the director of a center that dealt with such problems. Therefore, I did not feel that I should be a paid consultant, but that I would be happy to work with him but that I would want him to pay my travel and per diem. I did add, that if I helped him, he could give some money to the University for a program he could support. He jumped at that and I worked with him for about four years.

His main idea was, “That land is mine. I paid for it, and I will do what ever I want with it.” It took me a long time to convince him that there were many rules governing coastal land, especially land on islands: dune lines, coastal setback lines, vegetation easements, etc.

Dr. Hoyt had established the Homer Hoyt Institute and he had a Board of Directors made up of real estate professors mostly from American University in Washington, D.C. They would not accept any regulations over private property. Especially this property, since they were to be the beneficiaries of the sale as the board of the Hoyt Institute. I eventually set up a meeting in Ft. Pierce of representatives of city, county, state, regional planning council, and two federal agencies, all of whom would have to sign off on any development. It blew their (the Hoyt Board) minds. They told Hoyt I was out to keep him from developing his land. I didn’t hear from him for over a year until he called to say that the Board had spent over $350,000 of his money trying to sell the land to every Arab Sheik they could find. The problem was, he realized, 46

the sheiks all had a consultant like me who explained the regulatory situation. Hoyt said we have to sell without spending any more money. He had paid 5 million for the land, but the Board wanted 12 million. In fact, I got lucky and found a developer in Ft. Lauderdale who would give them 10 million dollars and the Board convinced him (Dr. Hoyt) to turn it down. Dr. Hoyt was really perplexed, even panicky. Shortly thereafter, I told him I had talked to Ney Landrum, who was director of the Florida Recreation Lands Trust Fund, or some such name, and the state would give him 8 million dollars. He took it and he was unhappy with the Board members and very happy with me. To make a too long story short, he gave FSU (ISPA) 500,000 dollars to set up a Homer Hoyt Land Use and Real Estate Center and made me a Fellow in the Homer Hoyt Institute. As a Fellow, Jean and I have gone to Singer Island, in Palm Beach County, for five days every year since 1985. They stuff us in a room at the Hilton and pay all of the bills. Of course I had to listen to papers (I gave a few) for five hours a day, but Jean got to shop and run all over that part of Florida. Tough, huh? I resigned the Fellows appointment in 2010 since I felt I was not contributing any more, but I did appreciate the association with the Hoyt program and people.

Since I have mentioned several foreign locations, I must spend a bit of time commenting on some of the trips I have had the good fortune to make. In 1974, I worked with a Vice President at Michigan State University, John Nellor, to outline the effort it would take to do an Atlas of Michigan. I developed a “dummy� (mock up) for the atlas and it was published in a couple of years. Nellor had seen a small atlas I had made of Florida several years earlier. I helped Michigan State develop a very nice atlas in 1978.

Nellor had been working with the Man and the Biosphere Program in the United States Department of State. It was a UNESCO program working with natural resources. After a discussion I had with Nellor about the fact that geographers had a lot to contribute to such a 47

program, he acknowledged that no geographers had been included. After he reviewed a paper I had written he suggested to FSU Vice President R.M. Johnson that I should give the paper to a UNESCO-OECD meeting in Denmark. I was given permission to go to Rungstedgard, Denmark as a member of the US delegation (1974). Jean and I flew to London where we took the doubledecker sight-seeing bus to see all of the sights. The only problem was that Jean slept through the entire trip. Fortunately, she got to retake that same trip several times as we took tour groups of teachers to London.

After several days in London we took the boat across the Channel to Belgium and on to Copenhagen, Denmark. There we rented a small Ford with a total of 5 kilometers on the odometer. We had a dinner at the Queen’s castle, but she sent the Prince Consort to welcome us.

It was fine, but actually, the nicest dinner we had was at the Turborg Brewery. We drove back south through Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. We saw many of the tourist sights in those countries but the thing that still sticks in my mind was our visit to the very large American cemetery in Luxembourg. It was humbling. Since I am inquisitive, I asked if there was a German cemetery near by. In fact there was, and we saw it too.

War is not nice to people from any country. This was the first of many trips we took overseas together and it was great. It seems that all stories have a down side. We went on this wonderful trip but, in so doing, we missed son Tom’s high school graduation. To his credit, he did seem to understand and we appreciated his attitude.

As I prepared material from which to gather data to write this paper, I went to the drawer into which I have deposited my daily calendar books. I have kept them since 1964 and they were all there. They are brown, green, and red, but I have called them my little black books. Almost all of my trips, domestic and foreign, are noted in them. As I went through them I remembered a lot of things, and people I had forgotten, or nearly forgotten. From the list I made, since 1964, I 48

count 740 trips out of Tallahassee. By 2013, I have made at least 47 trips out of the United States. That includes business and vacation trips of one kind or another. Jean and I have made eight cruises on Holland America Cruise lines to the eastern and western Caribbean, Alaska, the Med cruise I was on when I started writing this epistle, and one when we flew to Santiago, Chile, got on the cruise ship at Valparaiso and saw the Chilean glaciers, Strait of Magellan, Tierra del Fuego, the Falkland Islands, Buenos Aires, Montevideo and Rio de Janeiro, from which we flew back to Miami.

We have also been on bus tours to Atlanta, Ashville and the Outer Banks of North Caroina, Cape Cody, Greenbrier, in West Virginia, and Nova Scotia. One of our favorite trips was by rail from Vancouver, Canada, east over the Rockies to Calgary, Alberta. My list of cruises does not include the free one Uncle Sam gave me to the Far East. As a geographer, I note that we went far west to get to the Far East.

I went on an interesting trip with an Alliance school group from Pensacola to Helena, Montana, in February, 1992. Thirty Pensacola students flew to Montana to see the cold, cold sights around Helena, including a historic cowboy ranch, swimming at a hot springs in a blizzard, and Yellowstone National Park. Bears, elk, bison, eagles and Ole Faithful, we saw it all and no one got a cold. In May, the Helena group came to Pensacola to enjoy the Gulf beaches.

My list of excursions included 52 resort trips (as of early 2012) with the Fairfield/Wyndham resort program. We have enjoyed that resort plan a great deal, especially when we have been able to take family or friends.

A few short comments about several of my professional overseas trips follows: In 1978, Man and the Biosphere (MAB) held a meeting in Warsaw, Poland. I had been made chairman of the Fresh Water Directorate for the United States. I was chair for 25 years and on the US 49

national committee for 15 years. Our responsibility was not to conduct research, but to evaluate and communicate research being done on water resources in the U S and around the world. We reviewed a great number of research labs, projects, papers and proposals. We testified before a few congressional committees and when we met in Lake Tahoe, Boulder, Colorado, and Duluth, Minn. or other cold places in the winter months, several of us took an extra few days to go skiing. A major benefit of overseas travel with MAB was that you represented the United States State Department. People everywhere were not only nice, but protective and helpful.

Back to the Warsaw meeting. I was able to start the trip off by going by London to see Gary who was enjoying his stay in the London Program. Tom had been in the London program a couple of years earlier. I then flew to Warsaw. It was during a rather strict oversight time for the Soviet Union and, while nice, they watched us like hawks but they, the Soviets, watched the Polish professors closer than they did us. We met at the University of Warsaw where the Polish professors bragged about their labs, equipment, and level of technology, when, in fact, it was all shabby and very out of date. The Poles were not hesitant to let us know of their dislike of the Soviets. We did enjoy a trip to the Masurian lake district of Northern Poland.

The best part of the trip was on the return to Tallahassee. I made a visit to Dr. Herndon’s hazardous waste mitigation office in Lausanne, Switzerland. On the weekend, he took me around Lake Geneva where we got on a narrow gage railroad for a climb up the French Alps to Chamonix, the French Vail, for winter sports. It was the most picture postcard trip I have ever made. Absolutely beautiful and we then took a ski lift ride over to the Italian side of the border at Mt. Blanc. Fortunately, several years later, I was able to take Jean Kathryn on that same trip in the spring. The flowers, hanging valleys and waterfalls were just as beautiful as it was in winter.

My next trip, in 1979, was unique. I was to give a paper to the Pacific Science Congress, in the Soviet Union, at Khabarovsk, on the Amur River in Far Eastern Siberia. While in 50

Khabarovsk, a city of 500,000 people, we got to go on a good number of field trips out into the forests and farms (collectives) and on the Amur, one of the main rivers of East Asia. On one field trip on the Amur, I struck up a conversation with an interesting gentleman. After a while, I asked him where he was from and he answered, Tallahassee, Fl. He was with the Game and Fish Commission and he was there to listen to talks about the use of a particular type of fish in the Amur, shad, to decide whether it might be used in Florida’s rivers to eat river grasses.

On one field trip to a Soviet collective pig farm, we went into the manager’s office where I noticed a red telephone on his desk. During a question and answer session, I told him that I felt better for world safety when I noticed the red telephone on his desk, because I had feared the White House used their red telephone to call an office in Moscow rather than a pig farmer in Siberia. Most our group thought it was funny, but the director didn’t catch on. While there, we had to listen to many speeches about how the brave Russian army saved Asia by defeating Japan in World War Two. Of course, they did nothing of the kind. They joined the allies after the atomic bombs had been dropped in order to take as much land as they could from the Japanese, such as the Island of Sakhalin, which had earlier been Russian.

Just before the time of the Khabarovsk meeting, a friend, Dr. Rashid Malik asked me to visit his university, the U. of Punjab, in Lahore, Pakistan, to help them set up a research and service center like FREAC at the University of Punjab. His problem was a lack of travel money for me. I mentioned that I would be in Tokyo for the Khabarovsk trip and the extra cost to go around the world would not be but several hundreds of dollars. His university agreed, so after a pleasant two weeks in Khabarovsk, I flew from Tokyo through Bejing to Rawalpindi/Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. In the capital, I talked to the national Secretary of Education. I explained our philosophy of tightly written contracts, low costs, training future agency workers, using money to purchase new equipment and providing high quality work on time. I suggested that 51

Pakistan would benefit by developing its own capabilities rather than spending so much money hiring foreign engineering and environmental firms. The Secretary thought that was a great idea and committed $250,000 per year to the university to establish such a center at the University of Punjab.

My official host was the brother-in-law of Dr. Malik. He was a military colonel and a devout Muslim. Every several hours he would pull the car over to the side of the road and he would disappear for about 15 minutes so he could say his prayers. No criticism, just an observation about a devout man. When he was with us everyone gave us a wide berth. We later flew to Lahore, set up the center and everyone was happy. Just recently, I talked to Rashid, who now lives in Tallahassee, and he said the center is still going strong.

After we set the center up, I enjoyed a tour of Lahore given by Dr. Malik. I was touched by the hundreds of poor, mostly children, begging everywhere we went. Rashid knew it bothered me and he said, “Ed, I could give them everything I have and it would only mean that there would be one more of them”. An interesting part of the trip was the flight from Lahore to Karachi where I was to get on a Lufthansa flight for a great leg to Frankfort, Germany, through Athens, Greece. When I got on the Air Pakistan flight, it was packed, not only with people, but with live chickens, bags of potatoes, raw meat in paper wrapping, and no one paid attention to assigned seats. The odor was strong and I was glad to get off that flight.

Another story Dr. Malik told me later also got my attention. Rashid told me that the week after I left the take over of the US embassy in Tehran, Iran, occurred. It was invaded and hostages were taken. At the University of Punjab, some students ran into a large lecture hall and shouted “The Americans have invaded Mecca”. Wrong, but Rashid said the students went wild and if I had been there I would have been killed. Students in Islamabad stormed the American embassy. The Pakistani army tried to explain to the students that Iranian students had kidnapped 52

American diplomats and that no one had invaded Mecca. The Pakistani students didn’t listen and kept throwing rocks and fire bombs at the embassy so the army sprayed the crowd with machine gun fire, killing about 25 rioters. Needless to say the crowd broke up in a hurry. I was thankful to be home safe.

The next trip I will comment on came out of a meeting in the State Department when the MAB program director said there was a less than desirable meeting that would need our representation and he needed a volunteer to cover it. Since he didn’t say where it was and I had an idea that it would be worth the gamble to volunteer. I did, and he said it would be a tough two weeks in Paris. I went with the State Department people and we stayed in a little hotel just two blocks from the Eiffel Tower, three or four blocks from the Invalides, a hospital which is now a museum and the location of Napoleon’s tomb. The UNESCO building is on the south bank and in an ideal location from which to get around Paris. We attended a lot of meetings, but we also visited many spots in urban Paris such as Versailles and the Bastille. We also took a trip southeast to Chartrs, the location of a famous church with one of the finest rose windows in Europe.

During the ten years from 1981 to ’91, I mixed MAB meetings, hazardous waste and education conferences. These events took Jean and me to Budapest and Sopron, Hungary, Vienna, Innsbruck, Paris, Switzerland, Toulouse, Fr., Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Moscow.

On several occasions, I would take a couple days vacation on the front, or back, of a professional trip to visit a new place or to spend time in a preferred location such as Vienna. We did this with the trip to Toulouse, France. We started in Paris, for a couple of days that started a bit frightening. While we were flying to Paris, President Reagan bombed Tripoli, Libya. When we landed, the airport was crawling with soldiers with machine guns and we were warned that Americans were in possible danger. We were mildly worried, but we did not go near the 53

American Embassy or MacDonalds.

From Paris we took the TGV, high speed rail, to

Switzerland and the ride up the French Alps I mentioned earlier. Then we went south through the Rhone valley, spending the night in Avignon, the famous location where the Pope moved the Roman church for nearly a hundred years in the 1300s. During the weeklong meetings Jean did not wander out, to be safe. After the meeting was over we went to Cannes, Nice and Monaco.

During a trip to the Soviet Union in 1991, a country in transition at the time, our group was fortunate to have several Russian ladies (Ph.Ds) as our interpreters. They introduced us to their families and their homes, which were bleak apartments in buildings 12 stories high. One of the ladies’ sons, about ten years later, graduated number one from FSU law school, largely due to a discussion I had with him about the future of Russia, and their probable need for lawyers. He has done very well, and his mother has a position at sea camp in the Florida Keys. She has received her American citizenship. We were in the Soviet Union shortly after the Chernobyl disaster. We visited with children from Chernobyl who had all kinds of physical problems. We were told that none of the children would live past thirty. Very emotional. Due to the spread of radiation, we were told by an official in Minsk, Belarus, that his country was a nice place to live in as long as you did not drink the water or breathe the air. I must add that when I “retired” from my association with the State Department, they gave me a nice letter and the proverbial wristwatch (with the appendix material).

In 1991 I was invited to Costa Rica to help them create an agricultural atlas. I spent a week with geographers and cartographers there and produced a dummy atlas that they followed to produce a final book. In 1995, I went back to celebrate the publication of the Agricultural Atlas of Costa Rica.

Also in 1991, I fulfilled a desire I had to teach overseas. I arranged to teach in the London program for the Fall of that year. Jean and I rented a flat from an English professor, 54

Janet Burroway, to live on a street named Cambridge Gardens. It was just four or five blocks North of Kensington Palace and Hyde Park and about two miles from the center of the city. The well known area for outdoor shopping, Portobello Road, was just three or four blocks. I enjoyed teaching two geography courses about Europe and the European Union. The Program was in less than desirable quarters that Fall, but it was during those months that FSU bought several buildings, fee simple, on Great Russell Street, just east of the British Museum. FSU first bought four buildings then acquired three more to very adequately house the London Center. The temporary site and the new site are very close in the historic Bloomsbury section, just off Oxford Street, a perfect location from which to get around London.

Jean and I did a very good job of investigating as much of London as was possible. We made practical use of the tube, noisy and crowded as it was, but we also learned to get around on those classic double-decker buses. To top it off, we walked all around London and never got hit by those interesting people who drive on the wrong side of the road. A good number of family and friends came to Londontown to visit and I should have gotten a medal for renting cars, driving on the wrong side of the road and not experiencing an accident. We covered most of southern England, drove to Scotland and enjoyed (?) the round-a-bouts. The much appreciated visits came from Tom and Cindy Fernald, my Mother, who was 80 then, and Leon and Miriam Sims. We became familiar with Oxford, Regent, Piccadilly, Whitehall and other famous streets, as well as Harrods, Buckingham Palace, Parliament, Westminster Abby, Soho, Covent Gardens, and on and on.

We took advantage of the great tours and events that are normal for the London Program: York, Bath, Stonehenge, Canterbury, Greenwich, many stage plays, the Tower of London, St. Paul’s and Paris, just to name a few. An additional joy came from the opportunity to visit with Dr. John Stott, an internationally respected Anglican religious figure, in his office. I have eight or 55

ten of his books in my library. Dr. Jim Chavis, our pastor at First Baptist at that time, introduced us. It was an outstanding fall experience.

Out of our London experience, came the idea for me to organize a three week tour in the United Kingdom. I put it together with the help of the FSU International Programs office. It ran for four years. I knew teachers in our Alliance and friends who would like to participate. Jean and I went to London a week early and stayed a couple of days after for planning and debriefing.

It was a great success. Many old friends went with us, several twice, and we made a lot of new friends.

The tour group stayed at the London campus on Great Russell Street and the staff at the Center really made my life easy by organizing tours, getting busses, blue badge guides and getting special prices on almost everything. The Center is part of the attraction since it is in the center of activity in London: Oxford and Regent Streets, Leicester and Trafalger Squares, Whitehall and government offices, Covent Gardens, Soho, theaters and great connections for buses and tubes. For our trips, we enjoyed introducing the tour group to those sites we had enjoyed such as the following: Tour of London, the London Museum, a tour through Parliament, walking tour of the south bank, Greenwich and the Prime Meridian, Bath, Salisbury, Stonehenge, Hastings, Cliffs of Dover, Canterbury, York (2 days), Stratford on Avon, Stoke on Trent (Wedgewood, Spode and other China shops), and one of my favorite places, Chattsworth ( beautiful castle in a perfect setting), Oxford and Cambridge Universities and more. After a while, I didn’t need a guide as I got to know our trip pretty well. I really like London, both as a large urban area, and as a historical site.

When we visited Oxford, we also visited Woodstock, a quaint little town close by and toured Bleinham Palace, where Winston Churchill was born. I got to tell some of my favorite stories about Sir Winston. For example, one evening at a party, Lady Astor scowled, “Sir Winston, you 56

are disgustingly drunk”, to which, Churchill retorted, “Yes, Lady Astor, and you are disgustingly ugly. But, in the morning I will be sober.”

I also visited Chartwell, his estate south east of London. I don’t think I would have enjoyed knowing Churchill as a man because of his acerbic personality, but he certainly was a great leader of the Western world during World War II. At Cambridge, we visited the large, World War II American Cemetery.

A very unique trip in 1992 was the result of a professor in Uzbekistan seeing a copy of our Water Atlas. It had been given to him by a mutual friend. He worked with the Central Asian Irrigation Institute in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. They had diverted water from the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya Rivers, which fed the great inland Lake called the Aral Sea, to grow cotton to sell on the world market to gain capital for the Soviet Union. This project had been started in the 1930s, but the steps they had taken to correct the destruction of the Aral Sea and the salting up of the cotton soils, had been a disaster. It was internationally known by resource professionals as one of the biggest environmental mistakes ever made by the Soviet Union, or any other nation, in resource management.

I was asked to visit the Institute and talk to them about a resource decision-making model I had created and written about. I will skip over most of the technical stuff and comment that while there, my host was very kind. He took me to Samarkand, an extremely ancient Silkroad city where Tamerlane ruled and is buried. I also flew to Nukus, a city of 500,000 people, south of the Aral Sea, which is being stressed by the disappearance of the water from the rivers and the sea. It is a desert of sand and salt. While there we went south to Turkmenistan and the ancient Silkroad city of Kiva. Several observations: they are Muslim but they like alcohol, they also eat pork and many of the consulting firms working there are from Israel. Their expression was, “We are Muslim, but we are not that good Muslim”. I do feel a bit guilty since I don’t think I helped 57

them much, but they seemed happy about the visit.

The National Geographic Education Foundation was the sponsor of the trip in 1993 to Rome and the Mediterranean. The coordinators from Florida, Georgia, Virginia and Maryland, were asked to pick Alliance teachers, who would, in turn chose two outstanding students to make the trip. We flew to Rome by way of Frankfurt. In Rome we took a city tour and then we bussed to Naples where we visited Mt.Vesuvius, the remains of Pompeii, and then boarded a small US Navy ship (about 300 feet long). The next day we were taken to Capri for a day. Very interesting little island fit for tourist and wealthy people. Next we sailed west a few hundred miles into the Tyrrhenian Sea where the students took part in collecting samples of the bottom of the Sea, air samples and knot tying. Early on the second morning we were awakened to be told that the volcano on the island of Stromboli was erupting. What a sight. We watched for several hours as the volcano belched out lava and gasses. It was a very colorful event. Nature’s fireworks displays put men’s efforts to shame.

We then sailed south through the Strait of Messina to the port of Catania.. We stayed there three days. Our trips from there took us over the southern part of Sicily, and then across the Strait by bus and ferry to visit the region of Calabria. Ancient farming villages and remnants of Roman ages past were everywhere we went. From Catania, we went into the Ionian Sea for more shipboard work and then west for three days of sightseeing in Malta. After Malta, we visited the African nation of Tunisia.

We docked in Tunis, visited Carthage and motored a hundred or so miles south into the Northern Sahara Desert to see more ancient ruins and an oasis or two. On the way back we stopped for dinner and a swim at Sousse, a port and a resort heavily visited by Europeans. A very proper junior high teacher from Kissimmee, Fl., said she would take the kids swimming.

The rest of us went out from the restaurant to sit on the terrace overlooking the pool. We sat 58

down about the time the kids and the teacher bounce down from the dressing rooms to go to the pool. Needless to say, the kids (boys) were leading the pack. Then, we all noticed that most all of the ladies in the pool were topless. Too late. We all (read adults) laughed and said that we promised them new experiences. They acclimated, and on the bus on the way back to Tunis, a very shy junior high boy from Thomasville, Ga., very seriously announced that “After a few minutes, it really doesn’t make any difference.” On the way back to Naples from Tripoli we suffered a very bad storm and everyone but Truman Hartshorne, Bob Myers and I got sick.

Another unique experience.

Nineteen ninety four was another Paris year. I had been asked to join a team of geographers to help develop a television series titled Power of Place. It was funded by The Annenberg Foundation and developed for National Public Television. We had had several meetings in Washington, and then we had this one meeting in Paris. I had been chosen by a good friend, Dr. Harm deBlij to be on this developmental group. Harm, an outstanding scholar, is the single most published geographer in the country and had served as an academic commentator for ABC and NBC networks. Harm is the person most responsible for me being appointed State Geographer of Florida. Several people over the country called me to say they had been impressed to see my name on the television program’s credit list for Power of Place and called to catch up on past years.

From 1994 to 2000 I made five more trips to Europe and Jean accompanied me on all of them. Just meetings, but several had interesting before or after excursions. For example, in 1994 we went to Budapest and Dr. Herndon asked me to go to Berlin to check with a number of hotels and meeting halls to check on the possibility of having a hazardous waste conference there. The most interesting part of that trip was the 400 mile trip in a new, rented BMW to Munich. Our problem was that the weekend I wanted to make the trip was both Octoberfest and the 59

anniversary of the unification of East and West Germany. I had ordered a Ford Fiesta compact but they were out of Fiestas and only had one new BMW which would cost me $16 dollars more.

A deal was struck. The traffic on the autobahn was going either 85 mph or more or standing still.

In 1996 we extended our trip to Warsaw by flying to Stockholm for two days, getting a Baltic cruise to Helsinki and then to St. Petersburg, Russia. Some of the old churches, museums and other famous buildings were superb, but the city itself was a disaster. Finally, when we were going on another trip to Warsaw, I asked Jean where she would like to go and she said the area around Salzburg, Australia. She felt the Sound of Music tour would be fine. We started that trip in Zurich, then to Salzburg, Vienna and Warsaw. In every one of the cities mentioned we took the tours and saw the historical sites and sights. We especially enjoyed the “old town” sections and squares.

In addition, on a trip from Warsaw to Krakow, we toured Auschwitz death camp. It was an experience never to be forgotten. We also visited Prague a couple of times, and Nurnberg, where the Danube and the Rhine Rivers are joined by canals on the Main River. Heidelberg was given special attention, because an ancestor, a root in the Fernald family tree was born in the castle there, way, way, way, back. We have it documented.

Well, there you have it. A simplified review of the life and times of yours truly. Most would agree that the statement “Stick with me and we will go places” was more meaningful over our lifetimes than when I said it. It also is proof that geography as a discipline has been good to me and, I think, I to it. I really can’t think of anything that I could have wished for, within reason, I have not been able to do. True, I missed going to Australia, New Zealand, Namibia, North and South Dakota and Nebraska. I still will probably make it to those states, but I am getting to the point where I want to be places but I don’t want to have to go. A one day car ride is OK, such as Panama City, Edisto Island and Sapphire Valley. Meanwhile, trips to the First 60

Baptist Church and The Golf Club at Summerbrooke a couple of times a week keep me happy.

More detail, I am afraid, would have bored readers to death. I will be happy to answer any questions these pages might elicit. Cheers.

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