Florida State is much older than 50

By Charlie Barnes
Executive director, Seminole Boosters

How would you feel if you and your friends had worked hard to make enduring contributions to our university, only to be enthusiastically ignored when it came time to celebrate?

For example, let's say you played football here under coach Tom Nugent in the 1950s. Your team shut out Tennessee 10-0 for the Tribe's first victory over an SEC opponent. Maybe you were on the first squad to play against Florida in '58. Perhaps you and Burt Reynolds were teammates, and you kept in touch, and shared in the joys of helping to build the program up over the decades.

Imagine how you would feel if the University leaders and boosters said: "Well, 1996 will be the tenth year in a row we've finished in the nation's Top Four, as well as the tenth year in a row we've won ten-or-more games. This will be our Tenth Anniversary Celebration of Football, because this last decade of success is all that really counts!"

The last decade of unprecedented national success rests solidly on the foundation of the first forty years. All the great coaches and players and supporters who brought us here, are just as much a part of the program as the young men who will line up against the Gators this Nov. 30.

No, our Seminole football world didn't begin in 1987.

Nor did our University begin in 1947.

We are happily caught up in a celebration of FSU's Golden Anniversary. But it the last fifty years we are celebrating, not the first.

We sometimes present ourselves as a "young" university, but we are not. The first of our campus buildings, College Hall, was built in 1854 on the serene, pine covered crest of land where Westcott now stands. It is the oldest continuous site of higher education in the state of Florida. If who we are is determined by our history, then Florida State University is a rich and complex broth. That brew nurtures us, and can ensure our future if we allow it. The academic credentials of a first-class, nationally prominent university were established long before 1947.

Among its more erudite alumni, FSU boasts Ken VanAssenderp, former student body president (1963) and later national chairman of the Alumni Association. VanAssenderp is an affable fellow of magnanimous spirit whose FSU family tree extends well back into the early history of the institution. One of the sprigs on that tree was Ken's uncle, the late J. Thomas Gurney of Orlando, who was chairman of the Board of Control (forerunner of today's Regents). In 1947, Gurney broke the two-to-two tie, thus allowing Florida State to renew intercollegiate football, much to the displeasure of the other school whose last memory of Florida State football involved being on the receiving end of a 23-0 thrashing in 1904.

Jim Melton calls VanAssenderp "the soul of the institution," a reference to Ken's panoramic perspective of the school and its heritage.

Ken points out that we are not celebrating 50 years of an institution known as Florida State, because long before we were Florida State University, we were variously, Florida State Classical & Literary College, Florida State College, and Florida State College for Women. That single thread of a name reaches back more than 100 of the school's 145 years (we all have our own way of counting years; I choose to begin with the 1851 legislation, the same as Florida does).

VanAssenderp says the University's "establishment era" stretched from 1857 to 1905, women having been first admitted in 1858 in separate quarters, and then re-admitted to regular classes in 1882 "in an effort to raise the academic standards."

"The refinement era," he says, "took place between 1905 and 1947 as FSCW grew into the third largest women's university in America, and was awarded the state's first chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in 1935." He calls the time from World War II until today our "coming of age era," and he notes that a "fourth era" is just beginning.

"As we begin our fourth era, we are just now a comprehensive full-component institution with mature, powerful and influential alumni of both sexes and all races, poised and ready to flex our muscles throughout the world, for the benefit of society itself," he writes.

Martee Wills' excellent Seminole History displays on its last page a photo of the 1903 Florida State College women's intercollegiate basketball team. Their faces are bright and strong. Confident. There is another photo too: one of the 1904 State Championship varsity football team, and their faces are also bright, flush with confidence of youth and eager to embrace the promise of a new century.

Those young men of 1904 gathered together for one final reunion, forty-three years later. They stood on the sidelines of Centennial Field, on October 18, 1947, the night of the first game played by the newly minted Florida State Seminoles. They stood shoulder to shoulder, and remembered the glory and wonder and triumph of those long past days.

For them, whatever happened after 1947 was merely the next chapter in the long history of their beloved school.

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