Professor wins election
Charles Billings, a Florida State political science professor, has won a seat on the Tallahassee City Commission. Billings, 59, received almost 70 percent of the votes in the runoff election Feb. 24.
He grew up in Michigan and earned a doctorate from the University of Michigan. He taught in Detroit public schools, the University of Kentucky and New York University and came to Tallahassee in the mid-1970s to study how teachers discipline black and white students differently.
He ran for mayor of Tallahassee in 1996, and lost by only 551 votes.
His opponent in the latest runoff was Amanda Host, 24, a 1995 Florida State graduate. Host, executive director of the Retirement Housing Council, a statewide association, won an Outstanding Young Professional Award for 1997 from FSU.
Look for more on Billings in a future issue.
Two ways to get a degree
If you missed graduating by just one little course - maybe a language requirement or something else you didn't care much for - the easiest way to get the degree is to just come back and take the course and pass it.
But there's another way, practiced and endorsed by Arts and Sciences Dean Don Foss.
You can be a cartoonist, one of the very best, and win a Pulitzer Prize.
Then apply for the degree in your major. You might get it.
Doug Marlette did. He wanted to be a grad made good, and now he is. In February, Foss and Leo Sandon, a professor in Marlette's major, gave him a B.S. in American studies - not a B.A., Sandon explained. For that, you really have to pass your language course.
Marlette started his political cartooning on the Florida Flambeau and worked his way up to New York Newsday, where he does five political cartoons a week. And he does the syndicated Kudzu seven times a week.
Magazine publisher
Florida's leading business magazine, Florida Trend, has an FSU grad at the helm. Lynda Keever, a 1969 graduate of FSU's College of Social Sciences, is the magazine's publisher and CEO. Her college named her distinguished alumna of the year in 1997.
Tax advice
If you think your taxes aren't fair, maybe your legislature, commission or Congress (the main tax imposers) need some advice from the experts. Send them to Lance deHaven-Smith, director of FSU's Askew School of Public Affairs.
DeHaven-Smith, who studies local taxes, will share his expertise when he's asked for it.
Recently, for example, he helped TaxWatch, a business-supported study group, give some advice to Hillsborough County.
They told the county commission that the unincorporated parts of the county (outside Tampa, Plant City and Temple Terrace) aren't paying their share of the cost of services.
Furthermore, deHaven-Smith said, the county's constitutional officers (sheriff, clerk, tax collector, supervisor of elections and property appraiser) could save money by consolidating some chores with the county commission.
But that one may not sell.
"Constitutional officers have developed enduring political loyalties among their employees, contractors and favored constituencies," he told a newspaper in the area.
A new Urich program
Love Boat's back on the mini-network UPN. It's expected to have a more '90s style, with a little more realism and some topical issues.
More important, it'll have a new captain - Robert Urich.
Urich graduated from Florida State in 1968 with a degree in radio and television. He was soon a success in television acting, and he's well known for several roles, including Spenser: For Hire.
He scared his friends a couple of years ago with a battle against a rare cancer, synovial sarcoma, but it didn't slow him down for long. The chemotherapy left him well prepared for a program about true medical dramas, Vital Signs.
Now he starts a series - six episodes are planned - with more fun and less drama than the life-and-death subjects of his earlier work. The first segment of Love Boat: The Next Wave is scheduled for 8p.m. April 13.
Weather winners
Mark Bove 24, a December graduate of FSU, has won an international meteorology award for a research paper he wrote on the effects of El Nino. He is the first-place winner of the Father MacElwane Award from the American Meteorological Society an award given to only one undergraduate student each year.
Working with FSU Professor James O'Brien, who heads the FSU Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies, Bove researched 35,000 recorded tornadoes from 1950 to 1992 in the United States, and compared them with El Nino, the warm-water system off the coast of Peru, and with El Viejo, the opposite cold-water system in the same area. They found a strong link between El Nino and El Viejo activity and tornadoes and were the first to document that relationship scientifically. Bove is continuing his education at FSU as a graduate research assistant in the department of meteorology.
Other honors for weather prediction and research have come to Florida State alumni from the Florida Department of Commerce. Masao Kanamitsu (Ph.D. '75) won a gold medal from the DOC for his weather prediction research. And Naomi Surgi (Ph.D. '87) received a silver medal from the DOC for her research on hurricanes at the National Hurricane Center.
Update on Dunn
Warrick Dunn, one of Florida State's best-ever football players, has hardly disappeared since he graduated in 1997 and had to give up college football.
He moved on to professional sports - playing for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers - and used his new wealth to quietly spread the advantages around. Where he used to just take care of his own brothers and sisters (he has five), now he sets up charities to help large numbers of poor children he's never met.
He's still not a librarian, in spite of an information-studies degree.
But he has moved into business. Checkers Drive-In Restaurants announced last fall that Dunn would promote them with television, print and in-person appearances. And Checkers has promised to support Dunn's charities and youth camps.
Unions grow in California
Research done by David Macpherson, an FSU economist, has shown that 21,000 more people have joined unions in California in 1997 than in 1996.
He attributes the increase to aggressive recruiting by unions and an increase in migrant workers in the state. But nationally, union membership dropped by 98,000 that year, to 16.17 million, because of job losses at unionized companies, Macpherson said.
Florida High is wired
On Jan. 20, FSU dedicated a technological library worth $1.5 million to Florida High, the university's K-12 developmental research school.
The Sara Krentzman Srygley Knowledge Center is equipped with a television studio, computers and Internet tools so students can produce their own shows and cruise the World Wide Web. Students used to reading without books will now find the Encyclopedia Britannica on the screen as well as on the shelves.
The center is dedicated to Srygley, who graduated from FlSCW in 1936 and became the librarian in 1941 at the university school. Later, she worked at the Florida Department of Education and was a professor at FSU.