FEBRUARY/MARCH 2000

PEARL TYNER

DONORS

By Jan Pudlow
Special to the Florida State Times

At 91, Pearl Tyner looks back fondly over her dietitian's career, which took her to faraway lands, from Portugal to Alaska. But she came home to live a half mile from where she grew up in Florida's Panhandle.

Childhood memories are still fresh of when she was a girl sweeping a sand yard with a gallberry bush branch and helping tame her family homestead by hanging on tight to a plow pulled by a mule.

"We all worked and did the chores," Tyner recalls of her girlhood days. "We didn't have anything, but my folks weren't poor. We weren't poor people, but we had an incentive to do better."

That drive to do better sent Tyner to Florida State University, when it was called Florida State College for Women. She graduated in 1930 from the College of Human Sciences, then the College of Home Economics. That was when there were no men on campus and the big thing to do on Saturday night was walk down College Avenue to Tallahassee's bustling downtown. There was a strict curfew to be back in her room at Reynolds Hall by 10:15 p.m.

What would happen if you were late?
"Well, I don't know," she says with a chuckle. "I never was late, so I never found out."

A lot has changed in campus life at FSU, but Tyner's love for her school remains the same. She has given more than $3 million to her alma mater, including her recent $1-million gift to help renovatate the former FSU president's home into a new alumni welcome center, which will bear her name.

"Dandy" is her favorite word to describe her college days and FSU.

 "I have no children, and I didn't know what to do with the money I was fortunate enough to make, so it's pleasure to give to my school," she says. "They needed money to build an alumni welcome center. I had some money. And I figured that would be a place to put my money and do some good."

Being a nonagenarian doesn't keep Tyner from cheering on the Seminoles.
"Oh yes, I'm a big Seminole," she says heartily, still pumped up from FSU's 30-23 defeat of the University of Florida Gators.

"Spur and sputter, that's what he's like," she joshes about UF Gators Football Coach Steve Spurrier. "And our boy just stays and keeps on going."

Tyner keeps on going, too, proud to share her key to longevity: "Hard work, saving money and being frugal. You don't need everything in the world. That's my secret to a long, good life. Now, my mother was 102 and a half, so I think we get some of her genes. But I don't think it hurts you a bit to work.

"Don't be ash-amed of it. There's dignity in labor, honey. I don't care what it is."
She still works her land, 160 acres that she kept after selling the rest of her 640-acre spread to her brother, Mack Tyner Jr..

"Oh, yes, I have a nice garden," she says. "I grow sweet potatoes, marigolds, zinnias, tomatoes, pumpkins. And I mow the lawn. You've got to keep working that muscle if you want to keep it."
When she tells the story of her life, she reels back to Grandfather Tyner, who came from Alabama in 1888 to settle a mile from where she was born.

"Grandpa was a womanizer," Pearl says matter-of-factly. " He ran a turpentine mill and a saw mill."
Then her mother's father, a surveyor, moved within a mile of Grandpa Tyner's place. Her mother and father married in 1905 and homesteaded 120 acres.

Her father helped his father at the turpentine mill, and her mother was the butcher in the family.
"You put that turpentine you get out of the pine trees, put fire under it, run steam and get spirits of turpentine," she explains of what was a big business in the Panhandle.

"We all got schooling," Tyner recalls with pride of her brother and sisters. "Everybody needs an education. Education is the road to riches, and don't you forget it."
Tyner's higher education was available through what she calls "a dining-room scholarship" at FSCW. "That meant we were one of the dining-room girls who served others," she explains.
After getting her bachelor's in home economics with a major in dietetics, she got an internship at the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago. Just experiencing big-city life was an eye-opener for this farm girl.

"It was dandy; I can't believe it," Tyner remembers.
"It was a learning experience for me. But when I came home, I couldn't get a job as a dietitian. There were no positions for you. Nothing for you."

She jumped at a chance to work with a staff of dietitians and kitchen workers for the Veteran's Administration. Her work with the V.A. took her to New York City, eventually to Wichita, Kansas, as a chief dietitian and then to a stint with the Army's 58th General Hospital.
"We went overseas and set up a hospital in France during World War II. About four days after D-Day, we went (back) over the channel over to France, and they were still bombing. We found a bed for us. We heard the planes, but none ever hit us. And then, of course, Harry dropped the bomb and stopped the war. And I came home in June of '46."

It was back to the V.A.

I always enjoyed where I went. I was never homesick. I loved it. It was dandy."
There was a brief marriage she'd rather not talk about, when she was 45.
An independent woman who became a millionaire on her own, Tyner learned how to invest her money in the stock market and real estate and watch it grow.

"I decided when I was a young kid, that I'd rather 'root hog than die poor.' That was a saying we had.

"So I saved my money, invested it to grow, and put it in places to make more money to make more money. Why not? Anyone can be a millionaire. I tell you, save money and live frugally. You don't have to have everything in the store. I haven't splurged much on me. Once in a while I buy me a real splurgy suit, so I will look really good."

And she lets out a hearty laugh.

She's been named Citizen of the Year in her hometown of Laurel Hill, when she gave $300,000 to get the school a media center. She paid off the debts of several local churches. She helped rebuild a railroad depot in Alabama. And, of course, she's been most generous to FSU.

"Well, I was a poor kid coming up having nothing and I can feel how poor people feel," she explains about her giving side.

She earned her own fortune.

"My Grandfather Campbell on my mother's side had a saying: "I dare say, I weave my own road." That was me: I weaved my own road."

That road has taken her back home to the land she loves, and to the school she'll always remember as "just dandy."

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