•OriginalNoise.Org
the players 
the bridge
The UF Gospel …
According to President Albert A. Murphree.
September 24, 1912 — The first edition of The Florida Alligator was little more than a transcription of president Dr. Murphree’s “Opening Speech” (sermon) to UF’s freshman class of 1912.
“From The Beginning”
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
1972 — Trilogy
((( >>> )))
dave hogerty
Alligator photographs (c.1980)
Vol.1 No.1
Tuesday
September 24, 1912
Dr. Murphree’s Opening Speech
Florida Alligator Staff
This year, enrollment will doubtless reach four hundred, if not four hundred and fifty. This extraordinary increase is due to the “loyal” support of the old students, each of whom has been an agent for his alma mater, and a propagandist of the standards and ideals of the University of Florida.
To the students, Murphree spoke words of welcome and of good counsel. He reminded them that while UF stood for “wholesome” athletics, all forms of “decent” student activities, and would lend every encouragement to “proper” student enterprises, he quickly added, “DO NOT FORGET, for one moment, that you are here primarily for study, for the mastery of the University of Florida’s curriculum. He urged every student to join the Y.M.C.A., observe the Christian “rules” of church attendance, and he impressed most forcefully, upon each individual man of the student body, to Yield himself to the more wholesome influences of the church and Christian organizations, to strive for higher levels in moral and Christian character, and do not surrender to low and insidious temptations.”
Friday
October 31, 1980
vol 74 no 30
The University of Florida’s Annual Halloween Festival (1971-1981) proved to be the “temptation” of which preacher Murphree had warned. Sixty years after the president’s opening sermon, UF was recognized, by Playboy magazine as one of top “party” schools in America. Much of UF’s reputation was “earned” by the annual [HALLOWEEN BALL*], a holiday event, lower and more insidious than any turn-of-the-century White Christian academic could have imagined. THE BALL PROVED TO BE NOTORIOUSLY IRRESISTIBLE.
“Temptation Eyes”
The Grass Roots
1970 — “Losing Your Religion”
((( Irresistible )))
alligator file
THE HALLOWEEN BALL* — When UF president A.A. Murphree gave his opening speech to the class of 1912, he warned UF’s inaugural class (400 young, white men) to resist “low and insidious temptation.” Murphree, a Southern Baptist preacher, couldn’t have imagined the temptation of what became the Halloween Ball. UF’s notorious night of SEX, DRUGS, and ROCK N ROLL, proved irresistible. Throughout the 1970s, the annual party was responsible for much of UF’s most salacious lore … the legendary stories that kept reverend Murphree’s bible college atop every PLAYBOY magazine’s “TOP TEN” PARTY SCHOOL list.
Between 1971, when Tom Petty and his band Mudcrutch played midnight ’til dawn, and 1981, when a near-naked Wendy O. Williams chainsawed a guitar, and blew up a Buick, the Ball was more than what Murphree had warned.
The same time Murphree’s newspaper, The Florida Alligator, earned its reputation. The first decade of The “Independent” Florida Alligator.
“Gator Country”*
FOOTBALL ALMIGHTY
UF’s first president, AA Murphree, was a Southern Baptist Preacher who seemed to love football almost as much as Jesus. Football, since 1912, has had much to do in defining Gainesville’s small, college town culture. A hundred years later, SAME AS IT EVER WAS.
((( >>> )))
albert diaz
It’s all in the game
Football — As it was, is, and will always be. — In addition to the cheers and jubilation in the photograph of UF head coach Charlie Pell being carried off Florida Field by his 1980 Gators, alligator photographers Kevin Kolczynski (top left with cap), Bill Wax (bottom left with glasses), and Tom Burton (squeezed between the big smiling Gator and the Florida Highway Patrol corporal’s shoulder), are “working” the celebratory scene. On this day, it was Alligator photographer Al Diaz who got THE shot.
Time Passages*
PG1 — From The Beginning
PG2 — Ride Captain Ride
PG3 — Into The Future
Alligator [PLAYLIST]*
North Florida [PLAYLIST]*
Dead Presidents
ALBERT A. MURPHREE* (THE HOLY GATOR)
Best Bible College in the Land. Southland, that is.
STEPHEN C. O’CONNELL* (GATOR IN CHEIF)
ROBERT Q. MARSTON* (GOOD CHRISTIAN GATOR)
•FLORIDA HISTORY
FRESHMAN LOVE (1936)
Front Page [Florida Gator] News
Henry Morrison Flagler (holding hat in circle) greets a crowd upon his arrival on the first train into Key West, Florida, January 22, 1912. Flagler built the Florida East Coast Railway as a way of linking his string of hotels and other properties in Florida, finally stretching the railway across seven miles of open water in into Key West, the southernmost point in the United States. (Hutton Archive)
florida photographic archive
Florida In Time
Henry Morrison Flagler, Guilded Age Railroad Barron and Florida’s first Land Developer, greets a crowd upon his arrival on the first East Coast Railway train to pull into the Key West station. (January 22, 1912). Flagler built the FEC (railway) as a way of linking his string of hotels along Florida’s East Coast, St. Augustine, Ormond Beach, Palm Beach, and Miami. Finally, and most challenging, was continuing south, across seven miles of open, water to the small island of Key West. The southernmost point in the United States, just 90 miles north of Havana, Cuba, had been “FLAGLER’S MOON.” the same as the Moon had always captured the imagination of another of Florida’s most imaginative dreamers. John F. Kennedy spent much of his youth (winters) in Palm Beach at the Kennedy oceanside estate on the island Flagler chose to make his permanent Florida Home, building Whitehall, a white, plantation style mansion, bringing the Gilded Age to the tropical south.
The Ormond Hotel — On his railroad’s way from St. Augustine to Key West, Henry Flagler made an important and personal stop in Ormond Beach. He built the legendary hotel in 1888, and at the turn of the century he invited his “titans of industry” buddies to join him, and “winter” in Florida.
John D. Rockefeller — Flagler’s Standard Oil business partner was first.
Henry Ford —
Harvey Firestone —
Thomas A. Edison —
University of Florida
The Evolution
1853 — East Florida Seminary (Ocala)
CIVIL WAR (IN FLORIDA)*
1861 — East Florida Seminary closes
1866 — East Florida Seminary reopens
1884 — Florida Agriculture College (Lake City)
In Lake City, the KKK calls itself Christian*
1903 — THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
1905 — Buckman Act restructures Florida’s higher education, bringing six individual institutions together, making one University of Florida.
1924 — A number of white women are admitted ( ERA*)
1930s — Despite the Great Depression, UF expanded its campus infrastructure, kicked off with the construction and opening of the original Florida Field in 1930. Throughout the decade, the university saw significant academic growth with the creation of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts, including new programs in landscape architecture, building construction, and, into the 1940s, (urban) planning.
1940s — Florida State University (in Tallahassee) was still a school for women, and the University of Florida (in Gainesville) was for men.
FSU-UF MEETINGS AT Ichetucknee River (SPRINGS)
The Ichetucknee River and Spring was halfway between the two, and in the 1940s became a favorite North Florida meeting spot for romantic, higher education liaisons.
1958 — INTEGRATION
1985 — Association of American Universities (BLAHBLAHBLAH)
2023 — Where’s The “Independence?”
New Student Edition
Featuring Ron DeSantis’ presidential (UF alumni) campaign staff
“Welcome to Gainesville” by Ben Sass
THE INCREDIBLE PULP
by Alligator Staff Writer David Klein
september 9, 1979
for The St. Petersburg Times
INSURRECTION DAY
thursday
october 6, 1971
vol 65 no 75
INDEPENDENCE DAY
thursday
february 1, 1973
vol 65 no 75
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