Tag Archives: Cumberland Campus

Making an Old Church — with Its Many Past Lives — Home

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Having renovated this old church and made her home here, Jennifer Raines says she’ll never live anywhere else. When Mike Bennett lived here in 1970, it was a “Jesus Freak” hippy commune. A young Vietnam vet named Larry Colton, missing for more than 40 years now, lived here too. A Haitian church destroyed by arson was the last congregation to call this old church home. What lives this building has lived!

A Poet’s Circle: Francis Poole’s 55 Years & Thousands of Miles

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In 1968, Francis Poole had been chasing Soviet submarines up and down the East Coast when he started college on a campus made of former military barracks and published his first poems in a new student-led magazine named The Experience. When he returns in early February, his circle will have come through Morocco and Portugal and 55 years of writing and publishing poetry.

Remembering O.Z. Tyler, Epic Poet on Willow Branch Canal

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A quarter century ago, the ancient epic poet, “the Colonel,” opened his Tudor style home on Willow Branch Canal to a poet in his 20s. Orville Zelotes Tyler, Jr. wanted to be to America, to the South, to Jacksonville what Homer was to Ancient Greece, and his subject was Osceola, the Seminole leader who’d resisted the U.S. Army and was only captured under truce. 

Prissy’s Forgotten Arborteum

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I’d ask Prissy Bowers, were she still here. Jessie Lynn-Kerr wrote her obituary. On January 12, 2002, The Florida Times-Union headlined it, “Cheerful Clown Bowers Dies at 76.” She’d fought cancer for 16 years, one year fewer than she’d worked on her book. Dozens of clowns attended her funeral at Avondale United Methodist Church in full costume. The sign that once identified Wildling Arboretum has vanished, but these trees rise still. And a few of their broken markers.

Florida Junior College, What the Beginning Looks Like, the Chance to Create a New World

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“It was not a frivolous time. We felt like we were doing something really important. You couldn’t help but feel that way.”

In idealistic camaraderie, they built a new curriculum and course outlines from scratch, socialized until late in the night, and discussed what books their students should read.

Erstwhile underground bomb shelters opened up. In one building “down toward Park Street,” FJC headquartered its Experimental College.