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SAMUEL PROCTOR ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM at
the University of Florida.
Ybor City Tape Wells, typist
Interview w/
Shorty Wilson, ex-
principal of
Elementary school, Tampa
1/8/74
Part I
1
W: ...Funny thing because I had been up in ClUTemont I'd re-
signed there and I'd taken a job in Washington, D. C. with
Arlington Motor Company. I started up there as a mechanic
in June and was made the head of the used car division. And
so I had turned loose. They paid me much more money, you
know. And came the first cold, rainy season they turned into
ice. And I went in and told the boss I was leaving for Florida
the next day. So Ijust, I had a friend teaching here at
Franklin-a fraternity brother that I'd been in college with.
And I came to Tampa and just decided I'd see if I could get
"a job in the school business here. And they'd just run off
"a big red-headed phys. ed. teacher out at Ybor. He quit
during the first week and so I became phys. ed.; four of us,
phys. ed. teachers at Ybor--two men, two women. So I spent
two years there from 19--, September 1930 to June 1932. And
over
then I went to Largo High School/in Pinellas County as line
coach and teacher. I introduced the first commercial de-
partment at Largo High School. Back then it was a seven
through twelve and there were only ten teachers, including
the principal. And the only school I ever worked in in my
life that had a majority of men. There were six men and
Ybor City--Wilson interview
2
four women.
M: I noticed that. Usually you'll find women ...
W: Yeah, yeah. And then I came back to Tampa in 1932 and I
taught, oh, a couple of weeks in west Tampa, but the salary
wasn't anything then. My wife taught the year before seven
months at $70 a month, $490 a year. So I was selling
automobiles during the summer and I just
quit--went back down there selling automobiles. They would
have paid me $702 a year that we had to teach and I made $3860
besides selling automobiles, five hundred and some-
thing the next two months and took a month's vacation in
North Carolina. Then I came back down here and was selling
Dodges and Plymouths, Palmer, and they called me up
and asked me to go to Wilson Junior High School to substitute
for a couple of days. And then they wanted me to stay on.
So I got the school board to pass a resolution that I could
continue my outside activities so long as it didn't inter-
fere with my school business. So I made more money selling
automobiles in my spare time than I did teaching until I
went to open up Madison in 1952. And then I went to Ybor
again as principal. I went to _igea as principal in '39
to '41 and I went to Ybor again as principal in '41 to '50.
M: Now as I summarize it briefly: you were a physical ed. teacher
at Ybor between 19--, ...
W: Two years.
M: Two years. 1929 ...
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
3
W: 1930-'32.
M: 1930-'32. Then principal of 1939 to 1941?
W: Um huh.
M: And then principal of Ybor from 1941 to 1950?
W: 1950, right.
M: What was your educational background? Where did you get most
of your school experience?
W: Well, I graduated from high school up in Umatilla, Florida. I
went to the tenth grade in west Texas, northwest Texas and I
graduated from high school in Umatilla. Then I took a four-
year college degree and worked, my expenses, in three years.
I missed cum laude by three honor points. And got caught
big girl out of the dormitory one
night.
M: Well, that's a good reason.
One
W: / of the women was my math teacher. So then I went to work for
the U. S. Department of Agriculture in the Bureau of Entomology
until school started that fall. I became a coach and teacher
at High School. I was there one year, 1930. Then
I came to Tampa, to Ybor.
M: Why did you come down to Tampa? I know you were going to Florida
but why Tampa?
W: Well, this fraternity brother of mine was teaching out at Ben-
jamin Franklin. And I could stay with them. And I just wanted
to get into a bigger place.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
4
M: Now during the years that you were a physical ed. teacher what
was Ybor like as an elementary school?
W: It was a platoon school when I came in there.
M: You mentioned that before. What was that?
W: Well, a platoon school--you had so many homeroom teachers;
in other words if you needed sixty teachers you might have
thirty of them as homeroom teachers. Then you had special
music teachers, library, and shop, and home economics, and
an
physical education,/auditorium--that sort of thing. We had,
it was just like a departmentalized junior or senior high
the
school for the other half of / day.
M: Oh, I see. So it was only half a day?
W: Yeah. And the other half of the day they took their basic
subjects in the homeroom.
M: Why did they have a platoon system at Ybor?
W: God knows where it started from; it was there when I came there,
but I think it originally came from Gary, Indiana.
M: Um, huh.
W: Because the principal died. Then the principal from west Tampa
came .over there to finish out the year and then the next year
they hired a principal from Gary, Indiana who had worked with a
platoon school, and then retired up there or lived up there.
And he was just totally unable to handle it.
M: Unable to indle the situation.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
5
W: Yes. Well, handle people.
M: Just personality conflicts or something?
W: Well, yeah, he was ... he'd get up there in the auditorium,
(clap, clap) "now, children." And shit,\they didn't pay any attention
to him. And I walked from the back of the auditorium up to
front and everything got quiet. So he fired me at the end
of the first year. ... because I had been recommended for his
job before he got it by the retiring princ--, not a principal,
he went back to West Tampa.
M: What year was this that the Gary principal was there? Oh, he
was there ...
W: He came there in let's see, I came there in '30-'31, he came
there in '31-'32 that I was there, and he fired me at the end
of the first year. And because I was a threat to his job. I
mean, frankly.
M: Right.
W: And then I went to Largo High School for one year and came back
over here at west Tampa in the automobile business. Then
Wilson Junior High from '34 to '39. And then principal at
from '39 to '41, and back as principal at Ybor,
'41 to '50.
M: Well, this man from Gary, Indiana, is he identified with the
platoon system?
W: He was I think at that time, yeah. His name was McIntosh,
and he's dead now.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
6
M: And you did mention the platoon system was there even before
he came there.
W: Yes, it was there before I came.
M: Do you have any idea how it might have started?
W: No, sure don't.
M: Okay.
W: Somebody got, well, I think it started ... and I'm going to be
honest with you, I think it started with somebody who knew
something about a platoon system and because we had so many
kids there .r. at that time we had nearly 1400 in ten
square blocks. And I think it started because they didn't
have enough room ... double sessions and the thing they do to-
day. I think they, I think the platoon school so they could
take care of a lot more kids. For instance we had the
auditorium, which we called "auditorium," --we had three
teachers in there. And they'd teach them English words and
teach them to sing and teach them music, songs and things of
that kind in addition to what the regular music teacher had.
Then we had four phys. ed. teachers and I'd have, in my
group out there I might have three or four classes out there
at one time. Then the other man would have three or four classes.
Then the women on the other side would have the girls
for three or four classes.
M: So the platoon system was ideal for handling large numbers of
... ah.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
7
W: In a space, yeah. And then it gave these kids out there at that
S time, in 1930 when I came there, I'd say eighty to eighty-five,
maybe even ninety per cent of them didn't speak English.
M: No English or ...?
W: Well, they didn't know enough to read or anything else. So
we had what we called an opportunity class; which we had four
teachers teaching them the first year just enough English to
where they could go in the first grade actually. And they
taught them everything they could in one year but they had
to first teach them enough English to learn.
M: To learn. This was back in '31?
W: Yeah.
M: Okay.
W: This was '30, '31.
M: What were these opportunity classes like?
W: Well, they were just ...
M: Supposing I'm a kid, I don't speak English, I walk in, this
is my typical school day. What would a typical school ...?
W: Your first day?
M: First day.
W: Well, they'd come into this room, and we'd assign them to one
of those four rooms, and then they'd go on there and the
teach
teachers would/them whatever they could.
M: Were the teachers able to speak Spanish or English?
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
8
W: Some of them were, and some weren't. I remember Evelyn Garcia
was one of them, and she could speak Italian or English, or
Spanish, or English. And Grace only spoke English.
M: How would Grace handle the situation?
W: I don't know. With cards and other things, I guess; or the
other teachers would help her when she got into problems, I
don'e know.
M: Uh, huh.
W: And I don't remember who the other two were, you know, at that
time.
M: How did the kids respond to these opportunity classes? Did
they learn from them?
W: Very well. Our biggest problem came with kids who had come in
from Nicaragua or from Cuba or from Key West not speaking any
English and they were already in the third or fourth or
fifth grade.
M: But they'd start at the first?
W: Well, we did several things. We started them at the first and
as fast as they could go to the second we moved them in, and
the third and so fourth until they finally caught up in many
cases. Some cases they didn't. Now we had some kids
come in there that were in fourth and fifth grades that never
did get to be real good sixth f grade students by the time they
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
9
left.
M: Right.
W: i From the standpoint of their background. Now for example
I took a third grade I believe it was now and gave them a
-Andersnn Test in English. And say I used the
first semester and then I took the second semester which
is more difficult and gave the same kids the test in Spanish.
And the average IQ scores on that two was eighteen points
difference. They took the more difficult test and scored an
eighteeen points higher than they did on the first semester
test in English.
M: So what you're saying is that there was a language barrier
here that ...
W: Yeah, right on. Because the minute they got out of class and
the minute they went home or anywhere else, they'd speak
Spanish. If they got on the playground they'd speak it if
you'd let them.
M: Well, was there some attempt made to make them speak English?
W: Yeah. Yeah, we tried to make them speak English in class and
in school, but the minute they walked out of that classroom
why, they'd started jabbin' in Spanish. 'Course I'd had
five years of Spanish and I remember the first day I walked
up out there to this sixth grade phys. ed. class, I heard
them say in Spanish what they were going to do with ti*
little short, sawed-off S.O.B. And I answered them back
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
10
in Spanish about what was going to happen to the first bastard'
And I whipped, physically I whipped six kids in the first
week.
M: Your football skills came in h4ndy, I bet?
W: Yeah. I went out there, I had been wearing knickers and a
football sweater and I used that for my phys. ed. uniform at
first.
M: Well, what about sports? During your years as a phys. ed.
coach in those early years how did ...
W: Well, all we did out there, all we did out there was various
physical ed. things, you know--sittin' up exercises and games
and things of that kind, and we played some soccer. I had
had one year of professional soccer; and I had played it
in high school.
M: What were most of the ... most of the games played were American
or Cuban or ...?
W: Well, they were games tnt we, games that, American games; games
that we knew.
M: Because soccer is a Latin game, I think.
W: No soccer is originally an English game. I played against
the University of Florida soccer team when I was in high school.
M: I didn't know ...
W: The University of Florida had a soccer team them.
M: They still do, but it's mostly ...
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
11
W: Dr. and oh, we called him Frenchy, he was
boy from France that was one of the best :-college soccer
ball players I ever ran into. was good,
too. But I played, I never played a game of football until
I went to college. And I went to college on a semi-scholar-
ship I guess. I didn't tell them I never played football.
When I went in to dress the first time I watched how every-
body else put on their clothes.
M: Oh, no.
W: Then I put mine on the same way.
out
M. I don't think that would work once you got / on the field,
though.
W: No, but I was just as tough as a wall. I weighed 168
pounds and was twenty-nine inches in the waist.
M: Broad-shouldered then?
W: Oh, yeah. Big shoulders, and strong:arms *and legs. Fast
on foot.
on
M: Let me ask you again /this physical ed. deal I think there
are traditional sports and there are sports that Latin Americans
would prefer. How did this work in with your classes?
W: Well, if some of the kids wanted to play something different
if they were old enough to know what it was and explain it
to me how it was played, then I'd let them play it part of
the time.
M: What did they like to play all the time?
Ybor City Tapes
Wilson interview
12
W: Well now you see that's been a long time ago and I don't re-
member all of the things we did. We played a lot of soccer
and we played some basketball and we had at that time four
of those sheds out there at Ybor--two on the men's side and
two on the women's side--that we played basketball under and
we played games under; we played marbles under them and we
did just anything almost that the'kids liked to do, wanted
to do,, that we knew how to do or that we could get them to
teach them to teach them how to do. But we played more
soccer than anything else, I guess, because it was, well,
it was just a game we could play inside the fence. It was
sandy.
M: Oh, it was sandy.
W: There wasn't even any concrete in those courts at the time.
We played in the courts, supposed to be clay, but it wasn't,
it was just sandy. Then I later got those courts poured in
concrete.
M: When you became a principal, I guess?
W: I don't remember. I don't know whether I was principal or
not; I guess it was. But I got Nick Nucio the county
commissioner, to put sidewalks around the place some and
our additional courts.
M: Is Nick Nucio Cuban, Spanish, Italian?
W: He's Italian. Now he was county commissioner for a number of
Ybor City Tapes
Wilson interview
13
years, then he became mayor of Tampa, I don't remember four or eight
years, then he went back as county commissioner, I think, for
another four-year term, then he got beat.
M: What kind of cultural programs did they have back in the early
thirties? I'm saving the best part for the last and that's
the forties. But right now a comparison. Did they have
assemblies, plays, yearly carnivals, for example?
W: Well, we had assemblies, and we had the carnival thing, of
course, which was a Halloween thing to get them off the
streets and get them in some activity that was more or less
fun and that they could have a good time. We planned the
carnivals for the whole family.
M: Oh, the whole family would get involved?
W: Oh, yeah, the whole family.
M: How would the whole family get involved?
W: Well, we had certain things that the whole family could get
in on. Certain games--bingo and different things; they'd
run the booths and sell stuff, and they'd participate in what-
ever they could.
M: Theycould sell booze ?
W: If they wanted to.. They sold things at the booths.
M: Oh, oh, booths. I'm sorry, I thought you said "booze."
W: No, booths.
M: Okay.
W: B-o-o-t-h.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
14
M: So the carnival then the parents would get involved in that?
Phillip
W: Yeah, and we got / Shore and Ybor and Orange Grove, I think
were the three schools.
M: All three of those schools had something in common.
W: Had one common carnival.
M: But all three of those schools seemed to service the same
neighborhoods.
W: Yeah, same general area, yeah. Um, huh.
M: So like Orange ---, I think it was Orange Grove, ...
W: Orange Grove, yeah.
M: Orange Grove and Phillip Shore .
W: Orange Grove was north of Ybor and a little bit east and
Phillip Shore was south of Ybor and a little bit east.
M: Well, how did people in the rest of the city view these schools?
Did they see them as the schools where the Latins go or...?
W: Yeah, I guess, primarily.
M: Did they stereotype them is what I'm trying to find out?
W: No, back in those days the principal pretty well ran the
school.
M: Um, huh.
W: With the trustees. 'Course you had trustees that were political.
And the trustees hired the teachers and all this business.
We didn't have anything to do with it then.
M: So you had to be hired through a trustee too, I guess.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
15
W: Yeah, I was hired by the trustees.
M: I've looked a lot at the school board minutes back in those
days and they're so cut and dry I don't get any of this.
W: Well, there wasn't much school board. The school board, ...
the only thing the school board had at that time we had
thirty-five or thirty-seven, thirty-seven separate school
districts in this county. And originally it was sixty-five.
And over each of those school districts they had a set of
trustees of three people. And they collected and spent-the
district The county school board only had the
schools out in the county that were not in any incorporated
area you might say. But they still had the trustees in
every school or school district. Now if a school was, one
school was in a district, that was the only school, then you
had a set of trustees for that school.
M: Right, right.
W: But in district 4 which was Tampa, we had a set of trustees
for all of the Tampa schools.
M: What was the school board like in those days--the people them-
selves?
W: Oh, god, I don't remember too much about that.
M: What did people used to say? What were some of the issues -t
in those days the school board would be concerned with?
W: Well, of course, one of the the school board was concerned
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
1 16
with back then in those days was getting rid of the trustees
which we did in '47.
M: Why?
W: Well, because they couldn't ...
M: Oh, the whole system?
W: Yeah. In '47 when we passed the minimum foundation law.
We had one district whose boundaries were coexistent
with the county boundaries. See, the trustees were consti-
tutional officers back then. The school board wasn't.
M: That doesn't make sense to me.
W:, Well, it doesn't make sense but that was the way it was in
those days. See, when we started as a typical rural state
the trustees were set up in the 1848 constitution.
M: That's what you mean by co nstituitonal?
W: Yeah. They were set up to be elected in--.- the constitution.
And they were constitutional officers. You couldn't remove
them except by- election. So the only way we could do it in
'47 when we made the minimum foundation law was to change
the boundaries so that you had one district. you still had
one district set of trustees and you had a county school
board. But your district trustees gradually just didn't
do as much and the district trustees hired the supervising
principal of Tampa district and I guess later hired all the
principals of these other schools out there prior to '47.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
17
M: The school board itself, the county school board, wasn't a
constitutional ...?
W: No.
M: Oh, I see. It was just an administrative .....?
W: That's right. And I think, I think in the new constitution
the county board is the constitutional board and there are no
trustees. Later on we managed, we fixed it so that you could
abolish the trustees by referendum. If the county wanted
to get rid of their trustees then they could abolish them by
referendum. And then they set up advosry committees, advisory
groups, to advise the county board in these various districts
rather than trustees.
M: Which you could control.
W: Yeah, and the advisory board had nothing to do except advise.
and so after a while they just quit functioning.
M: Let's move ahead now to the main thing---When you were
principal of Ybor City Elementary School. Before that you were
principal of Did that sort of prepare you for
the principalship of ( Ybor City?
W: Well, it prepared me, see, I already knew Ybor City School be-
cause I'd worked there and I knew the platoon system and how
it operated, And when I went to it was in a kind
of a mess. The:principal there had been a real cultured
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
18
educator, but he, that was all. And he had lost contact pretty much
with the teachers and everything else.
M: Where was he from?
W: I don't know.
M: Like was he from the North or South?
W: I don't know. He was there when I came to Tappa. That's
all I know. Fowlkes, F-o-w-l-k-e-s.
M: F-o-w-l-k-e-s?
W: Uh, huh.. Principal of when I came, before I went
there.
M: Somebody mentioned a Fowlkes who / was principal of Ybor
back in the ,'twenties.
W: I don't know him, he might have been the same one. I don't know.
M: Might be the #e person.
W: But this Fowlkes was principal at when I went there
in 19--, well, he was principal the year before I went there
as principal.
M: What happened? Was he moved or transferred or fired?
W: He retired as I recall. I just don't know.
M: So in other words there was a vacancy and they assigned you to
it?
W: Yeah, yeah. And I put in, I put in two or three things over
in because I had the same type children, more or
less. But by '39 they were, seventy per cent of them were
speaking some English, enough to get :along. But I put in
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
19
an arts and crafts thing over there. I put in a homemaking
unit at
M: You say about 75% of the children were not Spanish?
W: No, were speaking enough English to get along.
M: Oh, it wasn't quite as bad as Ybor City.
W: No, in '41. Well, let's see, this, it was ten years dif-
ference there.
M: But how was Ybor City ten years later? Ybor Elementary School.
W: I think we had one or two chart classes, what we called op-
portunity classes. Instead of four.
M: So things had pretty much died down by then?
W: Yeah, well, they had become more English-speaking, let's put
it that way. The ones that we had that didn't speak English,
we'd put in those classes to start them off, the chart classes or
opportunity classes. We had chart classes for the first ones, then
we had some opportunity classes for fourth or fifth or sixth--
the kids who now would be classified as special education stu-
dents, mentally retarded or educationally retarded; it's hard
to tell which it was back in those days. In fact I claim
most mental retardation is educational retardation, rather
than mental. Although there are some that ...
M: By that you mean they don't have an education or.,.
W: They just didn't have any educational background. And they come
up to the level that you had up there.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
20
M: So what you're saying is you have had perfectly intelligent
kids who appear to be retarded because ...
W: Because they don't have any background. They9 i't have any
schooling And we had some who were
actually mentally retarded. I put in a sixth grade class
out there, I had a teacher who was exceptionally good
kids who were educationally retarded and I guess mentally
retarded, too, I guess. I gave her eighteen kids that were
as much in the sixth grade as 3.7 educationally.
And everyone of them, everyone of them including what we
called "Crazy Charlie" at least progressed a whole year. And
some of them made as much as three years' progress.in that
one year that she had them all day.
M: Now go over this again. In other words you more or less set
up a special classroom for these kids.
W: Um, huh.
M: During the ...
W: See, this was after we'd done the platoon; we'd done ary with the
platoon and put in the regular academic school year like every-
body else. We run the school like everybody else.
M: Did they do away with the platoon system while you were there?
W: Yeah.
M: When would that have been?
W: I don't know. It was around '49 or '50. 'Round '49 or '50.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
21
I had run for superintendent in '48 and been defeated and
the man that was elected : had studied all his life for the
Catholic priesthood. And when he
got ready to, I guess, to into that he came to Tampa and I
cam back home and I put the rest with it. I said he had
an opportunity to indulge in some of the finer things in
life and he got married. And Started teaching school with
me at started teaching, I think, then became principal,
then became superintendent for a one full-year term.
M: How'would you compare Ybor during the twenty years that you
knew it off and on? Looking at it over ....
W: Well, I'd say that we made more progress there, there was more
progress made, and I say "we," I was in it most of the time
after that ten-year span in there between '31-'32 and I
went back there in '41. My wife was still there some as a
home ec. teacher. That's where I met her.
M: Your wife taught at Ybor?
W: Yeah. She was a home ec. teacher. Came to Ybor her first
year of teaching and my second year of teaching; my third
year of teaching. Oh, hell, I was at Claremont, then I
came to ... yeah, it was my second year in the Tampa system.
And then I left the next year and went to Largo.
M: When did gshg start teaching in ...?
W: In 1930. Or '31, I dnn't remember which.
M: As a home ec. teacher?
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
22
W: Yeah. We had a home ec. out at Ybor and then they abolished
the platoon school of course we abolished the home ec. department,
and the shop, and the auditorium and so forth.
M:U Then more or less then the platoon system was stopped about 1942 .
W: No, well, it was some time, I think later than that. It
could have been, I think it was '48 or '49, I'm not sure, be-
cause I think it was under the superintendent that beat me
for county superintendent. But I'm not sure whether it was
stopped in there somewhere between '41 and '50.
M: There was just no more need for it.
e-
W: Well, it was then down to, well, when I cam back there as
principal in '41 it was down to seven or eight hundred kids.
You really didn't need it anymore for this, for the reason
that I thought it was put in there. Then when I lefthere,
when I left there in '50 I don't think there was over four
hundred, three or four hundred kids there.
M: Who was the principal during the thirties at Ybor or were
there several?
W: Well, McIntosh was there all those years after I left until I
cam back.
M: The man from Gary, Indiana.
W: Yeah.
ke ubS
M: So actually yD-'were there ...
W: Nine or ten years.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
23
M: Nine or ten years. Then he died?
W: Yeah. Well, no, he didn't die then, he retired, or they forced
him into retirement, I don't know which now. And when I left
there as principal, when he fired me, I said, "I'm going to
come back here as principal one- of these days." When I left
there as a teacher, I'm going to come back there, god damned
son of a bitch, I'm going to come back, excuse me, is that
being recorded?
M: oh, that's fine. These things
really make me, V'm still not used to them.
W: Yeah, so I came back there as principal when he left.
M: This is very interesting to me because a lot of the reform came
out of Gary, Indiana that filtered down to Florida and I'm
curious as to know what kind of influence he brought from
f Gary to Florida.
W: Well, he was a platoon school man when he came here.Ahat's
why they hired him.
M: To maintain their platoon system. And they probably got,the
idea from up North.
W: I don't know where it came from originally. It was there
when I came in 1930.
M: 'Cause they had that school study back in 1926 ...
W: and Englehart.
M: Right, and Englehart. That must have given them a lot of
new ideas.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
24
W: Yeah, I think they were the forerunners of the platoon school
in the Ybor system, Ybor school.
M: Do you know there as one man who was part of that study com-
mittee whose purpose was to look at the immigrants in the
education system and make suggestions. Do you remember anything
about that or ...?
W: No, I read of this during the Englehart Study but that's been
so long ago. I don't even remember what i was.
M: That study is still in existence, it's around, but it doesn't
deal with Ybor City very much.
W: It doesn't, as far as ... that was the only school they sur-
veyed.
M: Really?
W: Yeah, but I'm not sure, it may have been, may have been others.
M: Oh, my goodness. They did survey quite a few. Atr.. AT
least I looked at the records.
W: Well, they may have, but I just don't remember. They may
have looked at that whole area-and in west Tampa. See, they
had Elementary School, and McFarlane Park Elementary
School, then we had McFarlane Junior High School in west
Tampa at that time. And then the kids that finished junior
high school went to Jefferson, down there where Washington
is now, I believe, in the old building.
M: It was Jefferson Junior High, right?
W: Yeah, well, it was Jefferson Junior High School ...
Ybor City Tape
Wilosn interview
Side 2, tape 1.
25
W: The head coach went down, I think he went to the county office
as the head of physical education deDartment at that time.
retired as principal of Hillsborough High School and is
now principal of the Episcopal school over right close to
where I live.
M: Let me go into the forties again. 'Cause we got away from
that, but that's okay. What were the main subjects that
you wanted taught because I see you as the principal of the
school. What did you want the children to learn during
the forties? What kind of curriculum did you have?
W: Well, you see, I had a whole lot of what I found when I came
there. I didn't make a lot of changes until we changed the
platoon school system. I had classes assigned to the library,
I had them assigned to home ec., I had them assigned to shop,
and I had the boys in shop and the girls in home ec., and
I had them in phys. ed. Then they had their basic course.
M: What was the basic course?
W: The basic course was reading, writing, and arithmetic.
M. Oh, the whole basic stuff.
W: The basic stuff. That's right. English, and social studies,
and math primarily, spelling.
M: You still had the retarded persons, right?
W: I had them but they were in regular classes when I came there
as principal.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
26
M: They no longer set aside separate classes for them?
W: Well, they didn't set them aside. I organized that myself
while I was there.
M: The chart classes ...
W: The chart classes were there when I came and I kept those
up as long as there was a need for them.
Mt Those were for retarded children, weren't they?
W: No, those were for kids who didn't speak English.
M: Okay, glad I asked.
W: Yeah, so they were kids who didn't speak English who came to
school without an English background, an English-speaking
background.
M: Who would be considered a retarded child?
W: Well, ...
M: You mentioned there was a lot of question about that.
W: In some cases they were kids who just didn't score anything
They
on the IQ test to amount anything../ very little low. I had
one boy who'd just go crazy every once in a while. Finally,
the only kid I ever expelled from school that time, he hit
a kid with a baseball bat and missed his head and hit one of
those concrete water fountains and broke the baseball bat.
But he'd been in consistent trouble. And basically I think
it was due to the fact that he, well, le had no background.
a
He was a pimp when he was in elementary school;/pimp for
his mother and his sister, I think.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
27
M: How old was he?
W: He was twelve, fourteen, I don't know.
M: And still in elementary school?
W: Yeah. Well, I had kids eighteen years old that were still in
elementary school.
M: Is that common?
W: When I came there it was common.
M: In 1940 and 1931?
W: L930, '31, '32. I had a lot of sixth graders that were sixteen,
seventeen, eighteen years old.
M: Was that common in the Hillsborough system?
W: It was common in the Latin schools particularly because of the
background. West Tampa, I think, had some, had
some that were probably fifteen, sixteen years old.
M: So this would be a disruptive factor though in trying to teach
them?
W: Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.
M: How could you deal with that?
W: Best way I knew how at the time. If it got too bad I burned
their, burned them with a paddle or if they resisted too much
why, I physically handled them. I had the prizefighter, Six
Cylinders h.. e fought under ... and he got really
Ybor City Tapes
Wilson interview
28
upset out on the playground and went after me and I managed to
get his head in the crook of this arm and his face right in
here and I let him have it several times. I finally took
him into the principal's office and he called the police and
I don't remember now what the outcome of it was but they I
think put him on probation and sent him back.
M: Were there much instances of the police coming?
W: Not too many. We had some f during the communists' attempt
in here. The kids sometimes would take off, a whole class
Cetf+M^S
or two of them, and singing "El Communista." Red and
M: "El Communista"?
W: Yeah.
M: This was the tobacco thing or something?
W: No, "Communista" it was ... Communist.
M: Plot ...? I suppose it would wear off?
W: Yeah, this ...
M: What would elementary kids be doing singing about communists?
W: Je-nersais pas;. I don't know. They got it at home, I guess.
M: This was back in 1931 or 1941?
W: '31, '32 'round in there.
M:- But not in the forties?
W: I don't remember it in the forties. It might have been during the
sometime
time, it might have been/during World War II, I don't know.
M: But whenever it was ... tell me more about this.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
29
W: But I remember it happened. Yeah, and they'd put sand and
sugar in our gasoline tanks sometimes.
M: Why?
W: 'Cause that's the thing to do. Give the teachers hell, I
guess.
M: But that wasn't because of the communistta?
W: I didn't know what it was caused by.
M: Was there a communist movement or something like that with the ..?
W: It might have been together. I don't remember. You see, it's
been a year or two.
M: Uh, huh. That's something.
W: And I've gotten to the point in age where I don't remember
everything, or all the details. Some of them I wanted to
forget. But I had, oh, two or three, I guess, in the years
I was there that I had to call the police on
Some of them after they found out they couldn't do what they
to
were going to do,/that little short, sawed-off S.O.B, why,
they became great friends. And their nickname for me was
__," and ." And the other guy that was
with me there for quite awhile and then he left finally, I
don't know whether they ran him off or not, he was a tall,
slender guy and they called him ."
M: "?
W: Yeah.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
30
M: What was a ? Oh, .. .
W: A fried egg.
M: A fried egg. Right.
W: ." His name was Harrington. And he went to New Jer-
sey to teach English when he leftthere. I don't remember when
it was, but it was some time during that time.
M: How did your wife feel about teaching at Ybor?
M: She didn't mind it at all. She enjoyed it because she could,
she's the kind of a teacher who wants to help everybody. And
she spent her life whole life doing that. And she taught
those girls to cook and sew when they were in elemediyy school.
M: And she did this for maybe twenty years, I-think.
W: Well, no, she was onltut there from '31 to the time I came
out there in '41 as principal and she had to leave. And she
went to Wilson Junior High School from there. And then we
&<-' decided to have our first child and she got pregnant and
she was out about three or four months. In fact I think she-
stopped in April or something like that. The baby was born
in August and she went back the following January or some-
thing like that. They needed her for something. And then
she was at Wilson until I cam to Wilson in '34. And then
she left again and went to Hillsborough. And then when I became
vice-principal of Hillsborough in 1950 she left again and went
to Plant.
M: You kept coming up behind her sort of.
Ybor City
Wilson interview
31
W: Yeah, yeah. And then when I opened up I mean
Madison, I opened up both of those when I left Hillsborough
as a principal, first principal. And I was there one year
and they claimed I did such a good job that they wanted me
to open up Madison over on the other side of town as prin-
cipal. And I was there three years and I became principal at
Plant High School. And I was there five years, six years
then I went down to the county office as the assistant su-
perintendent.
M: Plant City must have been quite a change.
W: No, Plant, not Plant City. H. B. Plant out in the
section.
M: Okay. I'm not too familiar with Tampa.
W: Well, and Madison, Madison was south of it. It was one of the
junior highs ...
M: Oh, so you were way south?
W: Yeah. I was, Plant is just off of Bay about three or
four blocks at Hyams and something else. But I really built
it during the time I was there. When I came there the prin-
cipal had been indicted for embezzlement and he was totally
unable to handle it and the kids were going everywhere and
the teachers were every way and so they came over to Madison
to get me to take it. I told them "no." Why in the hUll
should I go over there and kill myself? And they came back
again. The salary was nothing. $200 more or something like
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
32
that. So I said, "Well, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll
go over there and straighten it out under one condition:
that I have unanimous approval by the school board, a you as
superintendent and your staff that I get to the backing.
The first time that I don't get it I'm going to walk out.
And so he took it back to the school board. And one of
the guys on the school board had never been very friendly to-
ward me, he says, "I don't like the short S.O.B .ut he runs
a good school." So he went along with it. So I went to
Plant in '55 and was there six years until '61, and then I
went to the county office. I became president of the Florida
Education Association in '61-'62.
M: Well, congratulations. You're the first k ex-president I've
met.
W: I've been involved with it, I've been on the board of trustees
retirement system since '45, fifteen consecutive years through
five governors. And I had helped design the original retirement
plan and I was, back years ago.
M: Did you know anybody ?
W: Before, oh, yeah, I knew all those people in there. I was on
the board for some time, then I was chairman of the retirement
committee for about twelve years and I wrote most of the
present retirement laws after Plan A and B. I wrote C, D
and E. 'Course I worked with two or three other people in
Ybor City Tapes
Wilson interview
33
drafting them and then we had an attorney _for
legislation. Alot of good legislature, I made as many as
eight trips up there in one session.
M: I A was doing a study of the FEA journal through about 1926.
Really found it exciting reading.
W: Well, the first retirement bill we proposed was 1935- Up until
that time, until '39 actually, but in '35 the only way a
teacher could get anything if they retired was to go down to
the welfare department and declare a pauper's oath. and get
the
$50 a month. So we passed / bill in '35. The governor
vetoed it. We passed another one in '37 not quite as good
and the governor vetoed it. We passed a third one in '39 in
the early part of the session that was not as good. The
governor vetoed it so we went in to see him, two of us, John
from Marianna and I, went in to see him.
And we said, "What will you sign, Governor?" He says, "I'll
sign a bill that will make retirement a responsibility of
the state of Florida if you'll prepare a bill for me I that
will a teacher after thirty-five years fifty dollars a
month without a pauper's oath." So we wrote over Plan A
just like that. And he approved it. Then every year there-
after every session, every two years then, we improve it.
The original bill provided fifty dollars a month, twelve
hundred was the maximum which you could deduct. If you
Ybor City
Wilson interview
33
made $1800 you still had for the $1200. After
thirty-five years you could make fifty dollars a month.
M: That still wasn't much.
W: Atsixty. And we did Plan B which let you make fifty dollars
a month if you were fifty-five. And C, we let you make, it
was a different formula, 1.67 instead of 1.43. You could
make more at fifty-five. Or you could do it with thirty years
of service instead of thirty-five. That's what it was. And
then D you could do it with twenty-five years of service
at fifty. But it was so good that it, of course, it cost
a lot of money. It cost the people a lot of money, the
teachers too if they elected to take it. Then in 1953 they
stopped Plan D for all new people and they let all of the
ones in there I mean you could stay on it, but after 1955
nobody could come in under Plan D. And we passed Plan E in
1955. A, B, C, and D were money-purchase pension plans.
We wrote Plan E as a guaranteed retirement plan. And we con-
vinced the legislature it was going to save them money when
actually it was going to cost them more. But that's the only
bill I ever really worked on and sold before the bill was
introduced. I got it introduced by all of the members of the
retirement system, the retirement committee signing it and
introducing it as a committee bill.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
34
M: Back in:those days what kind of interests were generally
opposed i to benefits for teachers, for public education?
W: Any inteasts that had to pay taxes. Just about.
M: Were there some that ?
W: We got a lot of parent-teacher support though.
M: There were parent-teachers organization in those days? Or
not?
W: Oh, yes.
M: The PTA.
W: Yeah.
M: How far back does the PTA go?
W: Beyond me.
M: Since year one.
W: Yeah, I guess. The county officers and employees didn't have
retirement assistance until '45.
M: It's hard for me to imagine.
W: We got ours started in '39 to become effective at the end of
'40.
M: I was wondering though about the kinds of opposition you
would get because ...
W: Well, I didn't pay too much attention to the- opposition to
be honest with you; We built something that was good for
the people and we sold it to the legislative committeesand
then we got it through the legislature.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
35
M: ,.
W: I remember when I did Plan E, when we got the House committee to
introduce it as a committee bill and I talked to Verle Pope
who'd been handling our legislation in the Senate. He said,
"Shorty, you haven't got as much chance paying this bill as
a snowball has surviving in hell." I said, "Verle, I'm going
to pass the bill and I'm going to pass it through the Senate
and you're going to lead it; you're going to pass it for
me." He said, "Well, I'll have to seer it." He said, "If
it
Turlington and his committee okay it and/passes the House,"
says, "hell, I'll go with it." So he passed it through
S bill
the Senate. It was the only/that I know of that was passed
unanimously in the House and had one opponent in the SdiOte.
M: Yeah, those were very rare occasions I bet.
W: Yeah, the Senate was whatever number they were then, I don't
remember now, to one.
M: Let me get back to the Ybor City School in the 1940s. I'm
trying to pinpoint a little more closely, I guess I'm fishing
for details, and really, I really don't know what it was
the
like to go to/Ybor City Elementary School if you were a teacher
or if you were a student there. What were you expected to de?
What was happening? What were they learning?
learn
W: Well, they were leaning the same things they '/ today
that when I came there in the platoon school they had these
extra opportunities which elementary school outside of the
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
36
Latin element didn't have, which so far as I know, Ybor School
is the only one who gave them.
M: What do you mean by extra opportunities?
W: Shop, homemaking, auditorium, library, music, phys. ed.
M: Now you mean the other t elementary schools didn't have
these kinds of things? No, they didn't have them. They had
phys. ed., but the teachers went out with them in some cases.
Then the teachers taught their elementary class phys. ed.
Then later they got phys. ed. teachers.
M: This is, wait a minutes. The elementary schools of Tampa
didn't have, well, they didn't have shop ...
W: No;
M: I mean, and most of them ...
W: Home ec.
M: None of this stuff.
W: The classes weren't assigned to the library; you put library
books in the room or theteacher brought them into the li-
brary on schedule.
M: Oh, you're saying the other elementary schools were still
organized with the one-teacher classroom.
W: Yeah, they were all organized as, what do you call it? Closed
class or self-contained.
M: Self-contained unit.
W: Yeah.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
37
M: So one teacher would have all the first grades students, and
another teacher would have all the second grade students?
W: Well, they might have four or five students, four or five
teachers for the first grade. Or two or three teachers.
M: But that teacher would have all the students all day?
W: Yeah, yeah.
M: And Ybor ...
W: The platoon school was different.
M: Now I begin to understand.
W: Later I think they abolished the platoon school at Ybor for two
reasons. One is because it was differi-ft, and the other is be-
cause we no longer needed it from the standpoint of the number
of people going there.
M: Well, what wouldyou have to be teaching young children shop
for at that age?
W: well, as I told you, see, many of them weren't very young.
M: Oh. So it was a very special school population.
W: Yeah. I think only the fourth, fifth, and sixth grade kids
took shop. I'm not sure. I don't remember.
M: How about home ec.?
W: Same thing, I think with home ec., I'm not sure.
M: Physical ed. would be the same way?
W: Physical ed. they all had. We had them all. We had first
grades, chart classes, everything on up.
M: Let me summarize that. There were chart classes, which, as
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
38
you described, were for the .....
W: Non-English speaking.
M: And their primary purpose was what?
W: To learn to speak English..
M: So was it mostly an English class?
W: Yes, well, yeah.
M: Why would they call it a chart class?
W: Well, because it was before the first grade.
M: Oh.
W: Then they went to first grade the next year.
M: Chart sort of meant ...
W: They worked from charts and things of that kind. So we called
them chart classes.
M: Worked from charts. What do you mean, what kind of charts?
W: Well, the teacher would ...
M: How would this differ from ...
W: The kids wouldn't read books.
M: Right, right.
W: So they'd put a word up there and teach them what the word
meant in English.
M: Ahhh. Now I see.
W: like you'd say, well, if you say, "a bird flew out of the win-
dow," or something like that, they'd talk about kids flying
out of the class. And it's just like, this teacher was
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
39
teaching them the song, "Paradise in Monterrey." And she got
to the word.. "paradise." And she said, "Do you know what
'paradise' means? Everybody was quiet and one boy stuck his
hand up like this. And she said, "All right, whatever his
name was. And he said, "Pair of dice, pair of dice."
M: Shaking his hand?
W: Yeah. Like you shake a pair of dice.
M. Oh, pair of dice! Right.
W: That was his understanding of the word "paradise." Was a
pair of dice.
M: Someone told me about the anecdote of the manger. People
wanted to know why the Hotel was called the
Hotel instead of the Manger Hotel.
W: Yeah, I remember that one.
M: But then you had the chart class, which was for people before
first grade and a lot of those kids would be older than a
first-grader.
W: Some of them could be, yeah. Some of them could have bean in
the fourth grade in Cuba or somewhere.
M: And then they'd all be stuck in the chart class.
W: Yeah, but they didn't have any English so you'd stick them in
there until they got enough English to move them up to the
first grade. And if they could get along there pretty well,
you'd move them on up to the second grade even the same
year. You might move them three grades in a year. You might
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
40
move them two.
M: You might not move them at all.
W: Might not move them at all.
M: What about the opportunity class?
W: The opportunity class was the older kids who couldn't do the
academic work of the fourth grade or fifth grade student.
M: They weren't retarded though?
W: Well, some of them were.
M: In other words the opportunity class would include English kids,
English-speaking kids, everybody.
W: Well, they went to the regular classes of all the rest. They
went to phys. ed., and they went to shop and they went to
home ec. and
M: But then they would stick them in the opportunity class in
addition?
W: What they would teach them in their basic studies was not
fifth
fourth or / or sixth grade, but what, more or less in
small groups on the level of that group.
M: Well, would they used tutors for this?
W: Oh, use special teachers, regular teachers or special teachers,
just teachers we had. The trustees hired them you put-them
wherever you could best put them.
M: Well, sounds like you were trying to give extra help to these
people above and beyond the call of duty.
W: That's what we were, that's what we were doing. That's what
Ybor City Tape
Wilso interview
41
we were trying to do.
M: In other ww1s, you take the opportunity, this really interests
me 'cause this thing is pretty important for kids today. You
take the children out of the regular classroom situation and
give them very special attention. That's what you did in the
opportunity classes.
W: Yeah.
M: And you would do it by reducing the number of children per
teacher, and you would help them with their personal in-
dividual needs.
W: As near as I could, yeah. Yeah.
M: Okay. And how do you think that worked? Did it help a lot?
W: Oh, hell, it worked wonderful. There was, even Crazy Charlie,
which we used to send down to the grocery store to buy, and
he could tell you how much money he took, and he could
tell you what he bought and he could tell you how much change
he brought back. And Crazy Charlie married later on and
had nine houses and still sold papers at the Columbia Res-
taurant Last time I saw him was
in front of Columbia Restaurant. Oh, back twenty years
after we had; he owned nine houses. I stopped and talked
to him. He owned nine houses.
M: He owns nine houses?
W: He owned at that time nine houses and was married. We had
that were not too bright. We had
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
42
one family that we called the father, ." He
married a Spanish gal and when she was, they had
twenty-two children and she was thirty-eight.. And they lived
like pigs.
M: Where did they live? In Ybor City?
W: Anywhere they could. They'd stay as long as they could one
place until they ran them off and then they'd find another
place. I think his idea of wealth was having a horse back
in those days. They did live on a. corner, right, on a house
right on a corner from the school there for a while. I
don't iink it ever had any windows in it or anything else.
They lived in an old cigar factory .once when I visited them
there and the stench would just almost just drive you out.
M: Did you have home visits-like that?
W: Oh, yeah. We had every teacher visit the homes of every child
that went to school in their class.
M: How would that work out?
W: Well, some of them didn't like to do but they did it. But
they'd treat you real nice when you came to home as a rule.
And the homes were usually pretty clean except for, you know,
somebody like And they'd serve you wine or
they'd serve you delicacies with coffee, Cuban coffee, or
M: What was accomplished by these home visits?
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
43
W: Well, you got to know the parents. You got to have a better
understanding of the children. Why they did what they did,
toe things.
they
M:' I think / need that today in some cases.
W: Yeah. Well, in one family there, the momma and two of the
daughters were prostitutes. They had one marriage license be-
tween them. I mean, you just ran into everything. I had
kids in school whose brothers and sisters went to the nigger
school.
M: Because they were black?
W: Well, this one looked a little more white than ...than dark
skin so he could get by in a white school.
M: In others words children from the same family might go to
different schools because they looked darker.
W: Yeah, one of the parents was white perhaps and every so often
you know, in a mutation situation you have a white child and
you have two or three blacks and so forth. And I've go into
homes where they've introduced their mother as the maid 'cause
she was black.
M: Why would they. do that?
W: Well, they were ashamed of the fact that she was, the kids were
ashamed of the fact that her mother was black and they were
afraid that if I found out that they had that much nigger blood
in them that I'd take them out of school and put them in
nigger school.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
44
M: How was this problem handled?
W: I just left them alone as long as I didn't have any real serious
complaints and I only had one during the whole time that
I was there.
M: You mean in terms of the child should have been in a black
school?
W: Yeah, well, I think they should. The kids all called them
"nigger," and so on and so forth.
M: So they didn't really belong there anyhow. See, what I'm
trying to see is did the kids come over to the Ybor City School
that aren't supposed to be there?
W: Well, you don't know. whether they belong there or not.
M: Oh, there was a problem.
W: 'Course you know that one of the parents was black. But I didn't
pay any attention to it. It didn't make any difference to me
what their background and what their parents was. Best I could
find out what it is we tried to do something about it. That was
our whole purpose.
M: This is one thing that I hadn't realized that even if a kid
came into the school, Ybor City School, the kids them-
selves at Ybor, if this kid was black, would probably harrass
enough so they wouldn't want to be their anyway.
W: They harassed this gal enough where it came to my attention
and then I investigated it and I don't remember now, but I
think they finally moved her to a black school. I'm not
Ybor City tpe
Wilson interview
45
sure. I just don't remember. I had a Nicarauguan girl there
that came there that was oh, I know all her features were
black. And she was staying I think at Wolf Settlement or some-
thing like that and she got pregnant when she was in the third
grade; fourteen or fifteen years old.
M: Settlement--that was a home for girls, or what was
that?
W: It was a place for people who didn't have any home, I guess.
M: Was that a religious institution?
Yeah,
W: /It was Methodist institution.
M: Oh.
W: 'Course she claimed the man hwo ran it was the one who got her
pregnant. She didn't know that was the way she got pregnant.
M: saying that, too.
W: Yeah.
M: Well, I'd like to know a little bit more about the home
visits. I'm really curious ...
W: Well, every teacher in my school visited, unless there was some
reason that they couldn't ever find a parent at home, they
visited every home of the children they taught. Except the
special teachers--they visited the homes of the other half
of the homeroom teachers. In other words if a homeroom
teacher had an A section in the morning and a B section in
the afternoon the homeroom teacher would visit the A section
home and the special teachers would visit the B section.
M: The special teachers were the platoon teachon-r
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
46
W: Yeah. They were the, well, they were the teachers who taught
home ec. and shop and phys. ed. and so on and so forth.
M: This didn't go t on in Orange Grove or Phillip Shore, only
Ybor?
W: I don't know about the visitation in those schools because I
think at that time it was a county-wide policy. But we did
it anyway. And wherever I had problems I went.
M: What were some of your impressions of home visits? What was
life like as you saw it in those days?
W: Well, you see, I came there first in the depression. And it
was rough. And then I came back in '41 as World War II had
just 'bout ready to start. It' got pretty rough there at
times. We put in rationing out there, we put in the regis-
tration for everybody for the draft; we handled all of that
at Ybor. The teachers were the ones who did the registering
and so many of the people who came there couldn't speak any
English so we'd have a Latin teacher And their
names, you know. were funny. If a Rodrigues married a
Ramiras or something like that, why, it would be So and So
Rodrigues y Ramiras.
M: Oh, they used both of the last names.
W: And you never knew which was their last name.
M: But ...
W: You'd try to find their father's name ...
M: You couldn't tell which was which.
Ybpr City Tape
Wilson interview
47
W: No, but you'd have to ask them.
M: Right.
W: And if they'd say, well, my father's name is Rodrigues and
my mother's name is Ramiras, I am Angelo Rodrigues Ramiras.
them
then you'd put "/- down as Angleo Rodrigues. Which is our
Anglo-Saxon way of a mother taking the father's name.
M: Right. Now on these home visits what were some of the special
concerns that the parents had? Not that you had, that they
had.
W: Well, see, I don't remember a lot of that 'cause ... I went
where the problems were, where the problems generally were.
M: What kind of problems?
W: Hoolky-playing. Non-attendance, which is hookey-playing.
Divorced family where you had a child very upset in a situation.
Anybody that was referred to me by some teacher I ought to
go visit. Or the kids at, some of them that I knew, con-
tinual hookey players. One boy, I went to their house, and
the momma was nursing the baby and she pulled out her breast
and nursed the baby while I was there and she was very nice
and asked about and she said, "I think he's under the house."
So I got him out and took him back to school.
M: This was a Latin family?
W: Yeah.
M: She spoke English?
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
48
W: Yeah, st, spoke English; she spoke enough English to where
I could understand her. Between that and Spanish, what Spanish
I could understand. When I first came to ybor I was rather
proficient in Spanish.
M: Back in '31.
W: I had five years of it and I taught it in in
'32-'33.
M: How did you pick up Spanish?
W: I had # five years of it. I originally had planned to ...
M: You mean at your senior high school?
W: ... WeNO, I took two years in high school, junior high school, and
and three years college Spanish. And one of my professors was
Dr. who'd spent fifteen years as the head of
the Romance Language division at the University of ARgentina.
M: He must have been an interesting person.
W: Oh, he was fascinating.
M: All the way from down there?
W: Yeah. and I was president of the spanish Club in which nothing
but Spanish was spoken.
M: You must have had a strong empathy or sympathy with the community.
W: Yeah, I did. I did. I had an empathy for anybody that was
the underdog. I said, "I'm going to make this god-damned
school the best ......
End of Tape 1, Side 2.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
Tape 2, side 1.
49
M: In the old days I'd sit here and writing away, now I can just
sit back and relax.
W: Yeah.
M: I really enjoy it.
W: Well, I think one of the things, when I started out to be a
principal, I started with the idea that I was going to be the
best principal. That I was going to do more for the kids than
anybody else had done and that I was going to have the faculty
and the kids with me in a very short period of time which
I've been very successful at doing. I can walk down Ybor
until the last few years at least I could walk down the
streets in Ybor and run into people I'd taught and they'd
still, "Hello, ." And some of the kids that
I'd had were waiters at the restaurants, aYand
Columbia. And Gilbert Rodrigues was one of them out of that
family of twenty-two. He was a busboy when I first saw him
in and then he became a waiter.
M: Tell me, do you know Joe Ignacias?
W: Oh, yeah, very well.
M: Is he any relation to the author Jose Ignacias?
W: I don't know. I don't know.
M: There's an author Jose ...
W: I've known Joe since our political campaigns way back in the
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
50
forties. Really in the fifties, I guess, '52, first time, I
believe.
M: He was principal of Ybor for four years or something.
W: I don't know how lnng he was there. The man that followed
me was Herbert Bissett and he committed suicide a little
later. And then Jimmy Minarty, I think, came in, and Joe
Ignacias, or maybe one came, Joe came before Jimmy, I don't
remember. See, after I left there and went to Hillsborough,
I went in there as vice-principal and I opened up,
as principal and then Madison as principal. Then I went to
Plant, then went to the county office. I didn't keep up too
much with ... at one time I knew every principal in this
county and half the teachers in the county. I don't even know
the principals any more. Most of them. I know some of them.
M: No. It's such a big system, such a big system. There's one
thing that puzzles me. Ybor had these special programs. Now
Orange Grove and Phillips Shore ...
W: Didn't have.
M: ... didn't have. And yet, didn't they have the same conditions?
W: I don't know. I came to Ybor; they had a platoon school. I
i carried it on until the time that we didn't apparently
need it anymore. We discussed it with the superintendent,
we decided the next year that we'd put it into a regular
school. That's how Got the trustees'
okay. And that's what was done. And then I don't remember
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
51
how many years we had it as a regular school before I left it;
I left there in 1950. And I went to Hillsborough as vice-
principal. They had a vice-principal then and an assistant
vice-principal. I was the principal, and the vice-principal,
and the assistant vice-principal.
M: You went down?
W: No, Well, I went down, but I went to vice-principal at
Hillsborough, which was still a bigger job than Ybor's princi-
palship was.
M: What was the difference?
W: Well, ...
M: I can see that it was bigger school.
W: Hillsborough was a high school and I went over there for one
year at least to see whether I liked it and whether the principal
liked me and before I opened up Grove the next year. I either
could have stayed at Hillsborough or I could have gone as
principal at Grove. And I made, I instigated and got
approved and made a lot of changes at Hillsborough. Actually,
my function at Hillsborough after reorganization, was like a
dean of boys. But I was over, actually over the assistant
principal, who handled the duties primarily of an assistant
principal or vice-principal at that time.
M: So you had a really big job there actually?
W: Yeah. So I reorganized it and got Wayne's office moved up
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
52
next to Gather's, up to the main office. And I went down to
the office that he had had and got a secretary for the two deans
or who would be today deans. And I handled that phase of
it---the discipline problems, and attendance problems, and
reports from the teachers, all this business at hillsborough.
Then the next year I became principal at Grove.
M: I guess what I mean is, how did,, it feel going from a place
with(?)
like Ybor where it was lucky ... the Latin community, you'd
had no special problems.
W: Well, you see, I had, I had, basically I had a lot of blacks
at Hillsborough.
M: By the 1950s?
W: Yeah.
M: 'Course they weren't iAthere, I mean, back in the 1930s there
weren't that many ...
W: I don't know.
M: Right.
W: I principal of Hillsborough High School .
M: Just because of your job.
W: Yeah, I was the phys. ed. teacher at Ybor and that was all I
was interested in at that time. I ran for superintendent
in 1948 and got beat. Then I set up a committee that selected
the run against McGlocklin and beat him
at the end of four years. I says, "If I'm the one selected,
I'll make the race, if I'm not the one selected I'll support the
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
53
one who is selected unless it's somebody I can't support."
M: Looking back over those years what would A you say were your
favbrigeyyearg?
W: My favorable years?
M: Your favorite years. Your best.
W: I don't know. I think the enjoyment I got out of being a prin-
cipal of an elementary school was more than A I ever had in
any other job I had. But I couldn't stay in an elementary
school because I couldn't live off the salary.for one thing.
And it wasn't enough challenge to me.
M: It wasn't enough challenge?
W: No, because I felt like I'd done about everything that I could
do there by the time I left.
M: So you actually set up a system in a sense?
W: Changed Ybor completely from the original to what it was when
I left.
M: Well, how would you describe that by the time you left. What
essential changes took place?
W: Well, basically the population in Ybor had dwindled down
to where, 'course they still kept us in that ten square
that
blocks, and when the superintendent that was electedjbeat me,
he wouldn't enlarge the territory because it would be more
money to me. In fact, he triedto to get me out of there and
we had a go around with the trustees and I was sustained.
M: He sounds a bit like an S.O.B., too.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interveiw
54
W: He wasn't exactly, I call him'John L. Lewis the second." He
looked a lot like him, had big, bushy eyebrows.
M: What was his name?
W: Randolph McGlocklin. He was the one who studied for the
Catholic priesthood, Jesuit priesthood. He went to Catholic
schools her, then he went to the University of St. Louis,
I believe, which is a Catholic school.
M: I was going to ask if he had any connections here with the
private Catholic schools he went through.
W: He had support from them, but he didn't have any connections
except that he'd gone through them.
M: Well, I guess that's about it then.
W: I think the greatest pleasure, the greatest satisfaction I got
of any principalship was the Ybor principalship. These kids
would come up and say they wished you were their daddy and
a lot of things like that. Made the difference.
they
M: Did 1. have problems like they do these days with families?
W: They had every.kind of problem you could think of back in those
days.
M: '' YOu mean, no father in the family ...
W: This or that or everything else. I remember very well that
with
an Italian woman cam up to school one day / a big old, long
butcher knife. And she was speaking Spanish to my secretary.
And she said, "Where is he? Where is he?" And she finally
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
55
got out of her and she was going to cut it
off with a butcher knife because for a nickel he'd enticed her
granddaughter or something into the alley. So she was going to
cut it off. And we finally got her calmed down and she went
on back home. Anything could happen. Anything could and did
happening those years from '32 ( to '50.
M: What kind of people would teach at Ybor? Did special people
come out there?
W: No.
M: Did you get certain types of personnel?
W: You got whoever the trustees hired and sent out there.
M: But I'm sure that these people knew what they were getting into.
W: No. Most of them some of them never had taught in Florida
before and they were just assigned to Ybor School when they
come out there.
M: Did Ybor get a lot of these kinds or people or?
W: Well, we had every type that I think you could think of out
there. We had people with degrees. I had one teacher with a
Masters who was the sorriest teacher I had and one I got
fired under the tenure law. And the best teacher I had had a
three-year degree, had started teaching with a two-year degree,
had a three-year degree at that time. She had her degree later
and I took p her with me when I opened 0. Grove. I brought
her over there. I brought two or three of the sixth-grade
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
56
teachers from over here that had worked with special kids
and so forth to take to 0. Grove to start my sixth-grade job
there. And in fact, when I went to Madison we set up, I've
forgotten what you call it, but we set up one basic teacher to
teach English and social studies and science, I think. And
then they went to the other departments. Similar to a platoon
type situation even in ... the sixth grades that came to us
see, they took the seventh out here. Well, the sixth grades
that came to us at Madison were seventh-graders. We took
that
that process, I figured/if we'd-take the process they had in
the self-contained classroom in the sixth grade, keep them in
a self-contained classroom for half the day and then let them
get into this other as seventh graders, and then in the eighth
grade they went into i regular departmentalization in the
ninth grade.
M: This was out in Pr____ Grove, though.
W: Well, no, this was at Madison.
M: So in a sense ...
W: I don't remember whether I started it at X+ Grove that
year or not. I don't think I did.
M: What's interesting is you took ideas from Ybor and took them
elsewhere.
W: Yeah. Instead of being a platoon, I called it, I've forgotten what
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
57
they called it now, but oh, well, there's a name for i it, but
I don't remember it.
M: Um, huh. What were some of the other ideas that you took
from Ybor? Let me rephrase the question. Was Ybor a testing
ground in a sense for some of your ideas?
W: Well, Ybor was an opportunity for some of my ideas. testa,
originally, you see, I did some of the things at =esta, first
year I was principal like putting in the home ec. and arts and
crafts, which was minimum type shop situation.
M: Into the elementary school system?
W: In the elementary school at El sesta.
M: What did people say about that?
W: People didn't say anything back there in those days very
much.
M: You mean, generally speaking people wouldn't ...
W: No.
M: They just minded their own business about the schools?
W: Yeah. The principal ran the school. The principal and teachers
ran the school.
M: You had much more jurisdiction ?
W: Oh, yeah.
M: But it seems strange that most schools in Hillsborough county
didn't have f kinds of activities at the elementary level.
W: Well, when I came to gesta, for instance, in '39, it still was
a very poor situation. I put in the first lunchroom over there
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
58
that they had except an old, broken down stove downstairs. And
I served, oh god, I don't know how many kids lunch for a nickel
and charged the teachers a nickel and item. And I got a stove
from an old Tampa electric.company, discarded stoves and things
an
of that kind;/old refrigerator. And I put in a lunchroom
down there And I started a dental
clinic.
M: Dental clinic?
W: Yeah, I got these kids who needed dental attention going to a
dental clinic, a city clinic for dental ... and with this
their
lunchroom situation and with feeding these kids, t./ average
achievement improved fourteen points in one year above the
normal achievementof those kids that I had under the special
and so forth and dental program
feeding program. I got a trailer and went out to the gar-
dens, out to WPA Gardens and got vegetables and pulled it
behind my car and brought it in there.
Qu
M: But this was still at resta?
W: Yeah.
Qu
M: You realize you did quite a bit of work at Gresta?
W: Yeah.
M: These are things that are ...
W: In fact the people in Ybor City, the ones that came over,
asked me to come from &esta to over there, they said, "You've
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
59
done such a good job at Questa, we want you to come over and
straighten out Ybor."
M: Who were these people, of the Latin community or ?
W: Oh, parents, Latin community, yeah.
M: So Latin parents were watching over ...?
W: and and, they were two of the trustees
at that time, and Peter who was a parent, and
severallothers. A committee of about five or six of them.came
over to Questa to see me to see if I'd come over there.
M: And you agreed?
W: Yeah, because I wanted to go back to Ybor as principal.
M: Why?
W: Because the guy'fired me that I took his place.
M: That's right.
W: And then the opportunity was there. You could either make it or
break it.
M: Do you see yourself sort of as a community organizer?
W: I don't know. I see myself .... I was into everything. All
my life I've been into it.
M: This is strange. It sounds like you really had the opportunity.
W: I made the opportunity. The school was there, it needed some changes
and I did them.
M: Well, was Questa still primarily a Latin school?
W: Yeah.
M: In '39.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
60
W: Um, huh.
M: This is something that I don't know about. But west Tampa
they say was a Spanish community.
W: Yeah.
41: Was it?
W: Oh, yeah.
M: And how would you compare it with Ybor City in terms of the
schools?
W: Well, you see, when I came there there was two different types
of principals. Fowlkes was an academician to a large degree,
but still, and he had some pretty good teachers as a whole. And
the taught a regular course of academic instruction and I put in
the home ec. and I put in the arts and crafts. And I took
problem kids and I took kids where hungry and fed them and
if they needed dental care, I got dental care for them.
M: This is at Questa though?
W: Yeah.
M: You mentioned Fowlkes ...
W: Did the same thing at Ybor.when I went there.
M: They already had that at Ybor, the platoon system.
W: Yeah.
M: They didn't have the dental care thing, though, did they?
W: No.
M: That was something you added extra.
W: We fed, when I was there in 1930-32 we put in a soup kitchen
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
61
for the kids at Ybor because :we; didn't have any lunchroom.
M: Um, huh. How'd you supply it?
W: Well, the home ec. department did the cooking and they put it
in great big pots and the kids would come.&and we'd dip
out a big bowl of vegetable soup for them.
M: Well, I guess I meant where did you get the food from?
W: I don't remember.
M: Just drum it up out of the ...
W: Yeah, I think we got it from WPA and got it from what the kids
had paid for lunches and the teachers had paid for lunches.
M: And so then you go to Questa and you're saying it was a bit like
Ybor. It was ...
W: There was an interim in there.
M: Right.
W: See, I was at Ybor from September of 1930 to June of '32.
M: Okay.
W: Then I didn't teach in '32, well, in '32-'33 I was in Largo
HIgh School. Then in '33-'34 I only taught two weeks at
West Tampa Junior High School. And then I went to Wilson
Junior High School in '34. And then I went to Questa as
principal in '39, and went to Ybor as principal in '41. And
I determined that these kids at Ybor were going to have the
same opportunities as the best kids in the county had.
M: Would you say that Questa was pretty much the same as Ybor?
W: Yeah, except I doubt ,. I knew as much about the conditions
A:
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
62
there although I did do a lot of things at Questa. I doubt
if I knew as much about the conditions as I did when I went-
to Ybor.
M: Did you have a platoon system at Questa though?
W: No.
M: Then it was not that crowded?
W: No, it wasn't that crowded.
M: Was it a smaller facility?
W: But the only thing I added to the curriculum at Questa was to
establish a lunch room and put in a home making class for the
an
older girls and / arts and crafts class for the older boys.
M: What about the needs of a Latin culture to attain their
identity? At home they wanted to be Spanish and then they
would come to school.
W: Well, what I tried to get them all to understand was to stay
with and to learn to speak Spanish correctly and English
correctly so they'd be bilingual and there would be oppor-
tunities for them for jobs that nobody else had. But I says,
unless you can learn to speak good English as well as you
learn to speak good Spanish you're not going to have the
opportunities that either Spanish or English have. I said,
the airlines or people who do business with South America
or opportunities to open up, to go into restaurants to
and-f(
places /- stores where they need somebody to speak Spanish
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
63
and speaks English well. So that if a Spanish parent comes
in and doesn't speak English you can talk to them in Spanish.
And if an Englishman comes in and doesn't speak Spanish you
can talk to them in English. But you've got to be good
in both languages. I never tried to get rid of Spanish
or Italian, but I said you've got to be proficient in both
if you want the greater opportunities
M: What about in terms of teaching them American traditions. I
mean they come here and hear about George Washington, say.
How would they react to these?. How could you I deal with this
in a class?
W: We tried to teach them the things the basic courses taught
in there, and then we tried to talk to them and explAin things
to them about anything that came up that they had a question
about or an answer we tried to answer.
M: Did they use, you had textbooks I'm sure, didn't you?
W: Oh, yeah. We had textbooks from the first grade on up.
M: When would you introduce subjects like history or social
studies for example?
W: I don't remember. It seem to me like the first year we did
nothing but read, you might say.
M: Reading.
W: Reading and music and phys. ed. And then in the year we
SYbor City Tape
Wilson intervewi
64
introduced a little simple mathematics. Third year we put in
real courses in mathematics and reading and auditorium and
things of that kind. And then the fourth year they had the
full basics. Now I did something else at Ybor that was the first
thing ever done and I guess was the start of a lot of this
electronics stuff. There were two UMf,______
that came into Tampa. You know what a Wilcox ?
M: No, what's that?
W: Well, you could cut records.
M: Oh.
W: And so I bought one for Ybor School. And I'd take these
kids and all this business, and in the first
grade right on up. They'd go in there and cut one of them
little small records and it was the same kind of record they
could take home and play on their victrolas. And then they
could sit down and hear themselves. They would read into the
microphone i or do whatever else they wanted to do in the
microphone. Then they'd listen to it. And then they'd take
it home. And several days later, or a week later, two weeks
later, a month later whatever schedule came around, I don't
remember, they'd go back and then they could see how much
Improvement they'd made.
M: Yeah, that's a good idea.
W: And then we got to cutting at that time each elementary school
Ybor City Tape
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65
was putting on a radio program occasionally on one of the radio
stations. SoI got the big discs and when Orange Grove, say, would
put on a radio program I would record it. And then give them
the big record so they could go back to their Orange Grove
School and play the record and hear themselves on radio.
M: This you'd be doing for Orange Grove.
W: Or somebody else. It didn't matter, anybody else. Soon as
they found out I'd do it nearly every school that went on
wanted it done. Then I got a wire recorder later. I put
the first intercom system in at Ybor School. And I put the
first teachers' lounge in at Grove, got it built in.
And got the first air conditioning, first venetian blinds,
the first television set at Madison.
M: You know, a lot of these things you take for granted.
W: First.
M: You know, like the teachers' lounge.
W: Oh, yeah.
M: It would never occur to me you wouldn't have one.
W: Didn't have one before. First one I know of, actually a teachers'
got
lounge and that we /air conditioned and got venetian blinds in
was the one I had built in at Grove. I know the first
television set I bought at Madison, an Emerson, I remember it
very well. And I had it in the library so that when particular
programs come on and so forth they could go in the library and
watch them.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
66
M: Let me ask you a sort of a monotonous question but it's got
to be asked. Trying to summarize the changes that you made
at Ybor City Elementary after 1941; it's pretty obvious
you made a lot of changes. How would you summarize those
changes? What are the ones that come to mind? I know that
you got rid of the platoon squad or platoon system. You
probably did away with the opportunity classes.
W: Ultimately, but I don't remember when it\uwas. I don't know
if I still had one or two classes when I left there.
M: You introduced the disc ...
W: Yeah, and the recordings and so forth.
M: The recordings. You introduced home ec. And shop.
W: Well, no, home ec. was there when I was there.
M: Okay. 'Cause Ybor would have been the ...
W: The platoon school had it when I came there.
M: Right. It would have been at Questa that you introduced
home ec. and shop as well as the school lunch and a dental
clinic.
W: Dental clinic, yeah.
M: As well as bringing in WPA produce.
W: Produce and so forth. And at Ybor I started the big lunchroom
out there. Built the same thing. We took!' the old home making
department and made a made a lunchroom out of it-when we abolished
the platoon school.
M: YOu brought in concrete courts at Ybor.
Ybor City Tape
Wulson interview
67
W: Y Concrete courts, yeah.
M: What else? The home visits. Were there any ...
W: Homes visits I think was a county situation. I'm not sure, but
I was sure my teachers observed it.
M: You introduced the intercom system.
system
W: Yeah, I put in the first intercom/there. It was put in anywhere
in the county.
M: What else would be some major changes you brought about?
W: Umm, I don't know. Let me think back on it.
M: The curriculum must have changed by then.
W: Well, we went more into the traditional elementary curriculum.
M: You got away from this platoon thing?
W: Yeah. Went into traditional elementary curriculum.
M: And yet at Questa you never had the platoon system?
W: No.
M: Did you have this problem?
W: Ybor School was the only school in the state of Florida that
had a platoon system.
M: And probably the only school in the state of Florida that had
such a large immigrant population.
W: Well, it might have been, but I think Questa had almost as
much as many, they might not have been immigrants, but they
were still Latin, Italian, Cuban, Spanish and what-not.
M: Well, how did they handle it at Questalduring these years
without that platoon system?
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
68
W: Well, we put them in the regular classes because by the time I
went to Questa ninety per cent of them ) were speaking English.
M: You 1, didn't have that kind of problem?
W: Didn't .' have a need.
M: And you didn't have the problem with older kids at Questa then
did you?
W: No, not as many, I had a few, but not as many.
M: It just wasn't there.
W: Only if they moved into that district, but most of them that
came in here they'd heard of Ybor City so they went to Ybor
City. Cigar factories and what-not. They were mostly in
Ybor City; there were two or three in west Tampa.
M: I know it, I've seen one out there the other day. Did the
school board, did you ever get any feedback from the school
board on your activities at Ybor in terms of the ...?
W: Well, I never had any contact with the school board. My
contact was with the supervising principal and the trustees
of district 4.
They
M: '- still had a supervising principal in those days?
W: Oh, yeah.
M: I think they don't have them anymore. Do they have them?
W: We had a supervising principal of all the district 4 schools
-___ at that time. And then we had an ele-
mentary supervisor and we had a secondary supervisor and we
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
69
had an art supervisor. And I brought Bob Gates in here as a special
education director when we started doing a whole lot in special
education.after the minimum foundation program was passed.
M: Bob Gates?
W: Yeah.
M: Who was he?
W: Well, he was Dr. Gates, now he went from, I got him moved from
here to the state department, took over the state on special
education. The gal that was in there hadn't not anything much
so I knew Tom Bailey real well; I brought.-him into Tampa, he
and I brought in here.
M: Oh, boy.
W: And so whenit became 1948 Tom either had to run for superintendent
or more or less get ; out, so I got him tied in with the
FEA, and then from there to the state department of education
and the he ran for superintendent and was elected state super-
intendent, which he held for eighteen years.
M: Bailey was down here for some time?
the
W: Yeah, he was/supervising principal in district 4 for some time.
We brought him here from Ocala. And we brought, later we
brought Bergason here from Ocala.
M: Fergeson or Bergason?
W: A. L. Bergason, B-e-r-g-a-s-o-n. Who retired finally as the
assistant superintendent for administration at the county office.
M: Tom Bailey later became state superintendent.
Ybor City School
WIlson interview
70
W: Yeah, for eighteen years.
M: Same one.
W: Yeah.
M: And Bergason was supervising principal, too.
W: Yeah. And then he went down to the county office when we
abolished the trustees.
M: YOu also mentioned Tom Gtes, no, Bob gates.
W: Bob Gates. Dr. Robert Gates. Last I heard of him he was a
$40,000-$50,000 man for Philco.
M: Philco? He's just in private enterprise righjnow. What was
his role here?
W: His role here was the county director of special education.
M: When would that have been?
W: Thbf I don't know.
M: In the forties or the fifties?
W: I don't remember just when it was. The records would probably
show it. And then when Tom Bailey left here in '48 and went
to the FEA and then went to the state department Bob stayed
here for quite a while. Then when Tom became state superin-
tendent doing some revising and I strongly recommended Bob
Gates to him as the state director. I had my hand in every-
thing.
M: Just offhand, is Gates still around Tampa?
W: No, he was in Philadelphia or somewhere up there.
M: Ah.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
71
W: See, he's educational director, educational consultant for
Philco last I heard of him. Got a real good job. He was the
head of the, he was quite active in, I was on the first board
of directors of educational data systems, FAEDS, Florida
Association of Educational Data Systems. I put the first
IBM stuff in here when I was at Plant. I got some of it at
Hillsborough and some at Plant, some at Jefferson, I think,
and we got some at the county office. Then when I went to
the county office I got the whole thing established in there.
It started with just the high schools, we were doing our,
not our registration, we were doing our people accounting,
and report cards. I thinkve had a 402 and a, I khow.: we
a a
had/keypunch,/sorter, a 402 down at the county office. And in
thehigh schools we had keypunch and a sorter.
bet.
M: Wish you had that back in the thirties, I / That really must
have ...
W: No, that was in the fifties. That was in '55, '56, '57,
around there. Around '57 I think.
M: No, I'm saying if you'd had that back in the thirties it
would have simplified things.
W: But I can remember when the county office had the super-
tendent, a rural supervisor, and two or three 4 people in the
bookkepping department period. And the secretary to the
superintendent.
M: The county superintendent?
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
72
W: Yeah.
M: Just four people.
W: Well, there was the superintendent, his secretary, a county
supervisor, rural supervisor and three, about three people,
maybe in the accounting and in the office.
M: They never did come up with city supervisors, did they?
W: Not city. Well, they had some supervisors out of district 4.
They had an art supervisor when I was here and they had the
supervisor or the director of, which is called a supervisor
then I think, of the special education. And Frank Miles was
supervisor of Negro education.
M: Was he black or white?
W: No, he was white. Miles Elementary School is named after
himr He died.
M: Was West Tampa an elementary school for blacks?
W: So far as I know we didn't have any black students in West
Tampa.
M: Hmmm. I'm sure there was ...
W: Oh, yeah, we had Dunbar and Carver in west Tampa. Then we had another
one, too, Bethune, which was back over toward the Palmicia area.
M: And those were strictly, well, those two in west Tampa must
have had a lot of black Cubans ...
W: They were all black, didn't make any difference what they were.
M: I'm sure I remember there was a west ...
End of side 1, Part 2.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
73
M: Uh, I just ...
W: I started the summer program in Hillsborough County.
M: What summer program? You got me.
W: The 1947 mimimun foundation program provided for ASIS units.
One-fifth of the number of units that you had during the
school year could work in a summer program, which basically
started out to be a so-called recreational program. But I had
thirteen different activities when I started in Hillsborough
County. I produced a brochure on it accepted ... even in
universities and then in, that was '48. In 1950 or '49, I
don't remember which it was now I made a complete one, which
went all over the United States and some of them went to
Canada. But it was a forerunner now. We had no academics
then. We had a special academic summer school that they
paid tuition to. But I understand now they have some academic
programs in the summer program.
M: You mean in Hillsborough County?
W: Yeah. And the new one, a new situation, I don't know what's
going to happen to the summer program because on the new funding
program, which was adopted in '71 or '72, I don't remember
what the situation is. I've seen some articles in the paper
about is Hillsborough County going to carry it on out of federal
sharing funds or just what I don't know. But I haven't kept up
much with it. I left the Hillsborough County system in '65
to become vice-president of the National
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
74
which was a tax shelter company I helped along. .I had
no idea when I got the program built that I'd ever be associated
with it. After we got it built and accepted, built it so that
it was greatest thing for teachers at that time 'on the market
The closest competitor we had was charging teachers fifty per
cent more, what we call front-end load, than our company was
charging. And we had a better program,'cause I research forty or
fifty companies before I built it.
M: That's the way you do things. You have to do your homework
on it.
W: And I had been working with it on a national council. The first
thing we had no availability for a tax shelter until
'62. It was passed for corporations in '54. And if I owned
ABC Corporation, and you worked for me, any money I put aside
for your retirement I could deduct from my income so that it was
tax sheltering 'asfar as I was concerned. But teachers were
not included or excluded. The National Council of Teacher
Retirement went to work on it back in '55 and '56 and finally
got.it.past.Congressain February of '62. It became available
for teachers. And I went to work on it from a national level
and then from the state level then from the local level in '63,
'64 and built our program in '65.
M: You did a lot of your important work when you got older, too.
I noticed I' that. You start off working in schools ...
W: You need the experience. And you need to establish yourself
"A\
Ybor City Tape
WIlson interview
75
as a person they listen to. If they had something they wanted
to experiment they'd come to me. I'd try it and consider it.
If it was any good I'd say it's real good; we did this, this
and this. If it wasn't I'd say, throw the damn thing out th-
window.
M: This even as a principal?
W: Yeah.
M: It seems like as a principal, you pretty much ran the show.
W: I did. I told them that if I wasn't good enough to run it,
they could get somebody else.
M: What would the teachers do most of the time? Did they have their
own, did they have a teachers' association or somehting?
W: Back then we had a Hillsborough County Education Association and
CTA, which the CTA didn't do anything mostly.
M: What was the CTA?
W: Classroom Teachers Association. And then later, the CTA, when
some of these, what we called them, young radicals at that time,
took over and the ATEA disbanded a year or two later. And
they have a strong CTA now. An executive secretary, an assistant,
and whatnot. They took over the building that the Hillsborough
County Educational Association built and so on and so forth.
M: How did you feel as a principal about the teachers organizing?
W: I felt the greatest organization we could have at that time was
the Hillsborough County Educational Association because that
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interveiw
76
included everybody.
M: Principals and teachers.
W: Yeah. And county office people, too. That we could do
more for them than they could do for themselves statewide.
M: Which was probably true.
W: Which was I think definitely true. I was on a committee on
salaries and I was the only one representing senior high
schools. And they had a comm iee composed of some principals
of elementary schools and then a proportion of junior highs
and then I was the senior high. And when we drew up, I drew
up several salary schedule I got the first single salary
schedule passed in Hillsoborugh County in 1942. Up until that
time anybody got anything. For instance, a guy out here in
was going out for school board so they upped his
salary fifty dollars a month. And they took it away from
a guy out here at Twin Lakes.
M: Oh. By single salary you mean a standard salary?
W: Yeah. Based on units; based on number of teachers and so on
and so forth. The principal of a little Point school
because it was a separate district, they had a lot of money n
in it, made more more than a Hillsborough High School principal
that had seven times or eight times as many teachers. A prin-
cipal over at McFarlane Junior High School had thirteen teachers
and the principal at Seminole Elementary School had twenty-
eight teachers and the teacher at McFarlane made fifty or sixty
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
77
or seventy dollars a month more than the one at ... you know.
M: How could you get this passed with resistance?
W: Well, just handing that in and got the school board to approve it.
M: This was a local law or what?
W: No, it was like a regulation.
M: Oh, a school regulation.
W: There was no local law. No law anywhere. Every school district
according to its amount of money set its own teachers' salaries
and principals' salaries.
M: Well, didn't the school board have to approve everything they
did? Or no.
W: I don't remember whether they had to approve it or not, but
they couldn't disapprove it. More or less.
M: No, because Inwould read the minutes and they would say,
"district so-and-so petitioned for such and such."
W: Well, I think maybe they did approve it but they never did
disapprove it, that I know of if a district recommended it
M: And yet they accepted the regulation in 1942 of standard
slary or single salary system.
W: Well, you see, by that time, by that time the districts
weren't as powerful as they were before.
M: There's been a lot of consolidation.
W: The county school board members had organized statewide. The
trustees hadn't.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
78
M: Oh, you mean you had two factions.
W: Oh, yeah.
M: I thought they t were altogether.
W: No, they weren't at that time. The school board was very
jealous at that the fact that they didn't have authority over
the whole county system and the trustees wouldn't let them
have it 'cause they were constitutional officers., Not until
1947 did we have s single district.
M: YOu're saying there was a balance of power then?
W: Well, suppose you were trustees in Point. Alright,
you've got the district millage. If you had a wealthy
district you got more money. So if you were the trustees
you hired the principal, you hired the teachers. In some cases
they took the principal's recommendations, some cases
the principal didn't know who they were going to have until
they got them.
M: It was just the trustees.
W: Yeah. Port Tampa, for instance, little old elementary school
which
in Port Tampa /s paid a lot more i money than the prin-
cipal at Hillsborough. So when I got the thing set up I set
it up on teacher units and graduated it so that everybody that
had that size school got the same salary.
M: Now there was one thing here you said ...
W: In some cases nobody got any raise, somebody didn't get new
raises, but a lot of other people did get big raises.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
79
M: Which was unjust.
W: Well, depends on what you started with. Why should r you be
Sa twenty-eight teacher school and make fifty, sixty, seventy
dollars a month less money than the principal of thirteen-people
school?
M: Oh, I see. In other words they're beginning to equalize things.
W: Yeah.
M: So people would .... Now you said that the county school board,
oh, there were districts, there was a Tampa district ...
W: Originally there was sixty-seven districts and when I came in
here there were thirty-seven, I think it had come down to
thirty-seven districts.and a set of trustees and a supervising
principal, or a principal of each of those districts. As far
as I remember the only supervising principal was the one in
the Tampa district, which was the big district, district 4.
M: Weren't there also three overall districts of some kind?
W: Oh, no. There's the county-wide, which the county superin-
tendent and county school board had. Then the Ui districts
within the county each had their own set of trustees and
or
their own principal,/ c supervising principal.
M: I remember now what it was. It was somebody, like the three
county school board members each came from a different area.
W: Yeah. They came from a different political district.
M: So that was a different type of ...
W: Yeah.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
*J 80
M: I think it was administrators ...
W: They had to live in that district to be elected from that
district.
M: Okay. That was something entirely different.
W: And then they were elected by districts.
M: Which were the special school tax districts, weren't they?
W: Yeah. Well, no, they were the countywide districts, but they
were political districts. You had to live in that district,
you were elected only by that district, where they're now
elected countywide regardless of which district they're'in.
And at that time there were three county school board r onSo
There's seven now I think.
M: Right.
W: After the trustees were abolished by referendum why, then they
moved the school board from three to five and then later they
went from five to seven.
M: When was the school board or the trustee system ... you're
talking about 1947, aren't you?
W: Not, I don't know when it was, but it was after '47.
M: Oh, thta was something else then.
W: Well, in '47, no, in '47 they made one district whose boundaries
were coexistent to the county, but you still A had that three
trustees who had the district millage controlled and employ-
ment within that district. But gradually they became reccending,
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
81
they became a recommending group rather than a controlling
group. The county board took over.
M: And finally those trustees were ...
W: Then finally, later on those trustees were abolished by
local referendum, a Hillsborough County referendum.
M: So what you're saying is there was a pretty big fight between
the trustees and the school board.
W: Yeah, 'cause the trustees are the ones that
had to put a roof on the building and they had the control of
the districtimillage*throughtthe principal-who looked after
it.
M: How would*hat interfere with your attempts to bring about changes
for example, with retirement? Didn't ...
W: Well, you see, that was before the retirement system we put in
in '39 was a state thing. It- wasn't county. And still is. Well,
now the county has to pay their share, ...
M: Right.
W: But originally they didn't. But the state, the state when
they first changed it so that the county had to pay it they
allowed the county five hundred dollars per unit to pay their
share of it. I don't know what they allow now. I just don't
know. Since '65 I've lost contact with a lot of it. Two
reason: I was awfully busy, and second was by choice and
after Farnell went out I didn't I didn't have any more
particular interest in it anyway. The only member of the
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
82
top staff, the administrative staff, that's still there is
Dave Irwin; that was there when I was there. Bergasen retired
and retired; Fisher got fired; Benton Cooke retired
and went to some island in Formosa somewhere. There were
five or six of us in all. Riley Colson became the assistant
superintendent of personnel. At A that time they had a director
of personnel who wasn't on the staff at that time. Assistant
superintendent for finance, which was Fisher, got fired after
Crawford Greene died. And then the man that came in
brothers. They brought Wayne Hull in from, who used to be
superintendent in Hernando County, now the assistant super-
intendent for Business Affairs. Rodney Colson is assistant
superintendent for Personnel. Assistant superintendent for
Administration is Paul Wharton. And assistant superintendent
for Instruction is Frank Farmer. And Vocational Education is
still When they put in the county coordinators
who were really supposed originally to develop into assistant
superintendents for these areas and they were supposed to
have a staff and so forth. It's never come to that yet. They're
the go-betweens between the principal and the staff. And the
staff and superintendent are go-betweens between the coordinators
and school board.
M: That's still a far cry from the way things used to be.
and
W: Oh, Lord, yeah. There's so many people down there now/I don't
even know a third of them hardly and I've only been gone since
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
83
'65.
M: You know, as you talk, I get the impression of sort of a
pioneer place back in the early thirties. And all at once we
come up to the present and all I can see are the machines and
things.
W: Well, it's more back, back ... the only qualification a super-
intendent had to have at that time was to get elected. When
I came here W. D. F. Snipes was superintendent. I think he
had an eighth grade or a tenth grade education. And then when
he went out, I don't remember who they got, I think he got beat
in an election; Dr. E. L. Robinson, who was secondary super- -
visor when I came here became superintendent. And he was a -
very fine cultured gentleman, but he believed..primarily that
problems if you let them alone, they'd solve themselves.
He was a bench warmer. Very fine man.
M: I know her wrote a book about the Hillsborough County, history
of Hillsborough County.
W: I don't remember.
M: What was he like?
W: He was superintendent until McGlocklin was elected.
M: That makes him almost twenty years.
W: Yeah. Let's see. He became superintendent ...
M: About 19312
W: '32 or I think he took office January, '32. And stayed in until
148.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
84
M: 1He held office then?
W: Yeah. And Jeter had run against him four years before and lost.
And I think the reason that when three of us ran, when Robinson
was retiring, I think Jeter got the backings of the Masons and
the old crowd, because he had run once before and showed a
good race against E. L. Robinson But Jeter didn't get the
votes. The votes Jeter got was against E. L.
M: He didn't really run so well / as he thought.
W: But the Masons and all got behind him and he and McGlocklin were
in the runoff. And McGlocklin beat him by 375 votes or some-
thing like that. Very close.
M: What was E. L. Robinson like?
W: He was a very fine, cultured gentleman. Used to be principal of
Hillsborough High School. Then he was secondary supervisor,
then he became superintendent. But he ...
M: What kind of a ship did he run?
W: Very, let everything alone type of thing.
M: Was he raised in Hillsborough County, was he a ...?
originally
W: No, I think he came here .-/I from Alabama. I'm not sure.
I think he brought from Alabama.
M: Brought what from Alabama?
W: that psed to be principal of Hillsborough
High School. Well, he was principal of Wilson and then Plant,
then that ... oh, the one out on 40th Street right close to that
junior high school when you went to Hillsborough.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
85
M: Middleton?
W: No.
M: Seminole?
W: No. Middleton was a Negro school.
M: Middleton was a Negro school?
W: T Yeah, Middleton was built as a Negro high school.
M: Yeah, right, right,.
W: Middleton and Blake.
M: So Middleton was originally ...
W: Middleton originally was the only Negro high school.
M: Because now it's a junior high, and before that it was elementary.
W: No, it was built as a high school for Negroes.
M: But it became a school for whites.
W: It was mixed.
M: Oh, now it's mixed, right. No longer a high school.
W: But it was built as the first Negro high school. Then when
they got too many for that they built Blake.
M: Uh, huh.
W: Over on the river there's a Negro high school. Then when they
had integration why, of course they turned the whole thing over.
M: I think: you were starting to tell me about something else
when I broke in.
W: I don't remember now. We were talking about E. L. Robinson, I
think.
M: Right.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
86
W: I'd go down and get on him about this, this and this. And he'd
say, ... "if you just let that alone it'll solve itself." I
remember back here when they had bonds and we were
having seven months of school a year and those bonds were taken
over by the county commissioners and I wanted to pass a piece
of legislation to sell those bonds and provide money for
schools. And finally I went down to the school board. They
didn't approve it at first. I said, "Well, gentlemen," I said,
"If you don't approve it tomorrow morning the Tribune and the
rest of them are going to know where, why we don't have nine
months of school." That afternoon they called me. I went
back down there and E. L. said, "go get your bill prepared
and let me see it." I said, "Well, who do you want to prepare it?"
He said, "Well, Judge Hyams is probably the best." I said,
"Well, who'd going to pay for it?" He said, "The school board
will pay for it." So I went over to Judge Hyams and told him
bill
exactly what I wanted ifi-the / and he drew the bill. E. L.
approved it. I got in an automobile and went to Tallahassee
to get it through the legislature. Nat Whittaker was our
senator at that time.
M: What bill was this now?
W: This was a bill to sell these bonds at public or private
auctions and the money would go to the school board.
Then I got another bill through up there that gave the school
board a pro rata share of the race track funds which the
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
87
county commissions had gotten all of. I even got the county
commissioners to approve it. Passed a bill so that, say, you
got $60,000 and the school board was entitled to $20,000 or
$25,000. Actually at that time iwas 52% of it. We got it
through and so that money helped to keep us going.
M: You know, Robinson also during the forties there when you
were with Ybor City did you ever go to him with any problems?
W: Oh, yeah.
M: What was his feeling the special problems?
W: Well, it depended on how he felt about them. He finally,
he finally, well, he finally more or less approved the single
salary schedule. I had gone through the trustees; I was
public relations or something, chairman of the Elementary
Principals Council at that time. And I drafted that thing for
single salaries ; worked up all the schedules and
everything and took it down there and finally got it passed
by the school board.
M: Now how did he feel about things like the platoon system?
W: If he ever felt anything about it, he never even expressed it
to me. I guess it was during his administration maybe, I don't
know. Maybe it was after McGlocklin went in that we changed
the platoon systemto a regular school system. Dr. Geiger,
the fellow over here from St. Petersburg, I think took Tom
Bailey's place. And then following him was N. S. Hale. I
don't remember who followed him. Maybe Geiger followed Hale.
Ybor City Tape
wilson interview
88
I don't know. But anyway, they were there.
M: Well, do you have anything you want to add to this?
W: No, nothing I i know of.
M: Anything ...
W: Anything that you want to add?
M: I couldn't think of another ...
W: You'd have to ask the questions 'cause I, I'mAs; just rambling.
M: You sometimes get off into these subjects about the ...
W: Well, they're all tied in together in a way.
M: Yeah, that's the thing. But ...
W: I was on the coordinating committee that helped draft M4 the
minimum foundation program. I wrote the, we had no real
lunchroom accounting there. I wrote into that bill that everybody,
every school had to have a budget, and have an accounting and
the lunchrooms had to have an accounting, drew up
for the lunchroom and accounting. And got the ASIS units in
there and went up to Tallahassee with the superintendent. And
we wrote the state board of regulations to control the operation
of the ASIS units and so on and so forth.
M: The thing is that mos of my concern is with the problems of
the foreign population and of course you've had a lot of
other experiences ...
W: Yeah, the foreign population actually, back in the thirties and
early forties was just a foreign population more or less. Yet
they were amalgamated into the city and so on and so forth.
Ybor City Tape
Wilson interview
89
And gradually the people begin to move into areas that they hadn't
been in before. And as the kids got grown up and married they
moved out into the outlying districts at that time. The old
folks stayed in Ybor. That's one of the reasons that the
population, schoolpopulation
M: One of the things, too, is Ybor apparently adjusted, Ybor
Elementary adjusted to the Latin people.
W: Well, it really was Latin to begin with.
M: Well, it could be Latin but it had these special programs.
W: Oh, yeah.
M: But you mentioned Questa, A. L. Questa. And it didn't seem to
adjust ...
W: It was Latin but it didn't have it. I don't know whether the
need, the need for some of them were there. That's why I put
in the homemaking- and put in the arts and crafts or shop,
minimized shop, I didn't ;call it shop, I called it arts and
crafts shop. We built an exhibit for the fair out of wood
for the flagand a bunch of other stuff. We won first prize
every time we presented it over there.
M: The i ,
State
W: Yeah. Florida : -. Fair.
M: Oh, oh. Florida-wide, statewide.
W: Well, it was held in Tampa .But it was called the Florida
State Fair. They still have it. We put in clothing and we
put in the stuff that we made in there and we made everything.
Ybor City Tape
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90
The gal I had head of it, I had a woman head of it over there.
two
Her/sons ran trunk factory. She originally had
been in a trunk factory so she knew how to built and make
things. And she was a grand old gal. Name was King. I had
two Kings over there. I had the King that I had down there
and I had an Etta King which taught upstairs and taught one
of the grades, fifth grade or something like that. So we had
some things going. I had two full drawers of stuff that
went all the way back to the first salary schedule that I got
adopted. And I just cleaned them all out and threw them .away
about a month ago. One time I was going to write a book;
never did. So I just finally decided it wasn't no use taking
up any more space with it.
M: I'll say this. Ifj you can't write a book sometimes, if you'd
just do an article. That helps..
W: Well, when I came to Ybor we found a need, that first Halloween
out there the kids were messing up things down on Broadway or
down on all over town and everything. There were no organi-
zations so Al Shermanti, who was a trustee, or county school-
board member at that time and Albert Knapp, who was very
much interested in kids and in Ybor City, worked with the
post office. And three or four of us, and I got the principals
together and we decided f we'd start the Ybor carnival. That's
when we started that.
M: What was the Ybor carnival? I don't understand.
Ybor City Tpae
Wilson interview
91
W: That was the one we held at Park for Halloween every
year for the three schools. Phillip Shore and ...
M: Orange Grove.
W: Orange Grove and Ybor.
M: Ybor. And three of you gentlemen got together on this ...
W: I got together with Al Shermandi and this other guy and they
did the promoting of it and we did the things.
M: How did the kids like that?
W: Oh, they loved it.
M: Lot of parents come to that thing.
W: We had as many as fifteen or eighteen thousand people there.
M: What were some of the other big events like the carnival, be-
sides the carnival that you had?
W: That was about all we did out there. Except we had PTA.nights
and we had kids perform and all that other stuff* 1
M: During PTA nights?
W: Yeah. They'd come, more people would come if we had their kids
in something.
M: Oh. Well, then how would, what would you do at a PTA meeting,
you'd just have a play orr..?
W: Well, I started the PTA in Ybor. There wasn't any when I
got there.
M: Wait a minute. There was no PTA when you came in '41 to Ybor?
W: No.
M: No PTA at all. How did the parents get involved with 9?
Ybor City Tape
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92
W: They wouldn't.
M: They just ignored it?
W: Yeah. Only time a parent got involved when the kid got in trouble.
M: That was the relationship between the school and the parent.
W: Yeah. Or the parents would run to the trustee; ''that's why
I elected you, to look after me." And the trustee would get
in touch with me and I'd tell them my side of the story and
the !. get the parent down and see them.
M: Well, would these be Latin parents.talking to ...?
W: Latin trustees.
M: Oh, they had Latin trustees. I didn't know that.
W: Yeah. Angelo Greco and Jimmy Greco was one of the district
4 trustees. We always had.a Latin on there.
M: Yeah, well, I just didn't know. I thought they were Anglos.
W: No.
M: Anglo-Americans.
W: George Chamberlain was a trustee at one time;
from Plant City; and Jimmy Greco were the three trustees.
M: You had Latin trustees breathing down your neck all the time.
W: Oh, occasionally.
-Ju. They hired the teachers, they hired me.
A-W- How did they feel about your administration there?
W: Well, apparently they liked it. They left me there for ten
years until I asked to move.
M: Uh, huh.
Ybor city Tape
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93
W: '41 to '50. Nine years I guess.
M: That was long enough.
W: Well, September '41 through June of '50.
M: Nine years is a long time to spend at anything.
W: Yeah.
M: You mentioned that the parents started the PTA. You started
the PTA after you got there. How did you start this?
W: I called, I just called a bunch of the parents that I had be-
come acquainted with and the trustees and so forth. And we
called them into a meeting at Ybor School.
M: You got the trustees.
W: I had the trustee that was in that area.
M: This is important because it means that if you call in a trustee
this gives you ...
W: I had to have him; had to have his influence, too. And the
other people had PTAs and I said, why can't we have one?
M: Oh, there were other PTAs in the area butjust Ybor ...
W: There wasn't none at Ybor.
M: How about Questa? Did they have one there?
W: I don't remember. I think I organized one I'm not sure.
M: I'm almost afraid to ask. Phillip Shore?
W: I don't know.
M: Orange Grove.
W: I don't know.
Ybor City Tape
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94
M: But the parents came and the trustees came and you came.
W: The trustee.
M: The, oh, there's only one trustee.
W: Well, there was only one from that area out there.
M: I thought there 1# were three trustees per district.
W: There were. One of them was from, one of them was ... one
of them was George Chamberlain and the other was, I believe
it was statewide, uh, countywide trustees at that time, after
'47. But now originally out in Ybor we had three trustees
locally, but I don't member who the other two were. Because
the one I worked with was the trustee, was Jimmy Greco, uh,
Angelo Greco, and then Jimmy. And we just sat up there and
said, "Don't you think that we could do a lot more f for
these kids if we had the PTA and these parents interested
and coming to school and becoming a -, part of it and helping
us out with building a program?" So they did. And we
elected a president and called another meeting of the parents
and we elected a president and a vice-president and a
secretary and all the other things in PTA. And we met once a
month. At night.
M: This is another thing you did then. You can add that to the
list of contributions.
W: Yeah.
M: And the meetings once a month, you'd have the children ...
Ybor City Tape
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95
W: Well, we'd use the, yeah, the auditorium or the home ec. or
somebody else would put 6n a program for them.
1: That would bring in the parents.
W: Yeah. Everybody's child who was participating brought in a
parent and the rest of the kids.
M: Did they have parent committees?
W: I don't know. I don't remember any.
M: In other words who::would do the work on the PTA of raising
money and doing things like that?
W: Well, they had fifty cents or something like that. Any-
body that came and joined the PTA paid fifty cents.
M: Did a lot of people join?
W: I don't remember. Must have been !. quite a few.
M: In other words it helped that they could get some money to do
something. What are some of the things the PTA did?
W: Well, they helped get that stuff in the lunchroom down there
and so forth. And they helped wherever I needed them. I'd
call on them to have their money and or if I needed some
influence. See, Peter was president at the time that
he helped us build those ... he was a carpenter, built those
platforms out there under the shed that ..we used for the
carnival.
End of Tape II, side 2.
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