Tag Archives: Florida Junior College

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.

Florida State College at Jacksonville’s Original Shero: Professor Mildred Barnert

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At first, Professor Barnert’s protest was tame. Florida Junior College had fired her, but wouldn’t say why. Faculty had no tenure, no union. After Barnert’s “sleep-in” made the front page of The Jacksonville Journal, male administrators rated her looks and belittled her. Though she loved her students, she didn’t need the job. She protested “on principle” and won rights for those who followed.

 

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. 

New Story: Three Oaks Plaza, FBI Headquarters, Offshore Power Systems

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New Story: Polio in Florida, Ann Adams, the Artist Who Painted with her Teeth

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The caption said, “This card was drawn by mouth by Ann Adams, a polio patient in Jacksonville, Florida.” Ann was paralyzed from the neck down. She slept in an iron lung. For most of her life, she never drew a breath on her own. “Through perseverance, she trained herself to draw by holding a pencil between her teeth. Each original drawing takes up to two months to complete.”

Wesconnett: Pucketts and Gunnings

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No dogs inhabited the doghouse, just 10,000 fleas. The gazebo welcomed the alligator. Rodney’s memories of his mother and his father are radically different. His mother connected callers at the hospital. His father chased his mother through the Wesconnett house with a machete. He recalls the Gunnings, the hardware store, the bulldogs, the 15 year old girl, his baby, his first truck. 

 

Stories of Pine Forest: Incinerators, Klan Crosses, Family Love and Mulberry Trees

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The Ku Klux Klan burnt a cross in front of her family’s little woodframe house.

The Clydo Road incinerator burnt as much as 120 tons of trash every day. Donna recalls the black smoke pouring through the trees.

Another Lebanese family, the Johns, lived in the three-story rambling house at 5724.

Hansontown Lies Beneath FSCJ’s Downtown Campus

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Hansontown lies beneath Florida State College at Jacksonville’s Downtown Campus, figuratively and, in part, literally.

When Florida Junior College consolidated its downtown locations into the new Downtown Campus in the late 1970s, it eliminated the last of Hansontown, a century-old neighborhood built for freed slaves and former U.S. Colored Troops.

Some FSCJ leaders now espouse views on urbanism much like those the college abandoned by building Downtown Campus.