The Plaza of The Americas
With the University Auditorium and Century Tower rising above it, The Plaza of The Americas, for nearly 100 years has served as the University of Florida’s ground zero.
“Spill The Wine”
((( War )))
One Hundred Years on The Plaza of The Americas
by JIM ELLIS
Special to the Gainesville Sun
(2006)
Brother Jed kissed Cindy. Jesus Gene stripped naked. And the Gatorman stood so still his eyelids didn’t move.
The Plaza of the Americas, a three-acre lawn tucked in University of Florida’s historic district and surrounded by Gothic-style buildings and towering trees, has been a siren song to the footloose and fancy-free since its inception in 1931.
But the Plaza, which turns a good-looking 75 years old today, knows when to be serious too, serving as a free speech zone for civil rights marches, peace demonstrations and political debates from the 1960s to the present day.
Gators have been slinging memories back and forth over hot coffee and cold beer for years.
Originally referred to as the Meadow, the Plaza has seen kisses stolen. Classes skipped. Frisbees thrown. Guitars played.
The Plaza has seen it all.
Given its new name in 1931 in honor of the first meeting of the Center for Latin American Studies, then known as the Institute of Inter-American Affairs, 22 live oaks were planted in the Plaza, representing each American republic existing at that time, according to Carl Van Ness, the university archivist.
During the early to mid-1900s, freshmen, even those late for class, couldn’t cut through the Plaza without risking a dressing down from the Vigilance Committee, a long-defunct group composed of 12 sophomores.
The Halloween Ball
In the 1960s, the quadrangle emerged as the ultimate college hangout, culminating in an annual Halloween Ball, which some called the “Gainesville Mardi Gras.” Thousands of students continued to descend on the Plaza during the 1970s to celebrate the increasingly popular costume party.
Get the Daily Briefing newsletter in your inbox.
Start your day with the morning?s top news
Scott Camil, a twice-wounded ex-Marine who served two tours in Vietnam and earned two Purple Hearts before enrolling in UF, said costumes included everything from mild to wild – Casper the Friendly Ghost to full-bodied breasts and penises.
“Everyone wore outrageous costumes and smoked marijuana,” said Camil, 60, a UF student from 1971 to 1973. Bands with names like Celebration, Flow and Road Turkey booked specifically for the Halloween Ball, said Jeff Jourard, who played guitar for frequent Plaza band RGF in the 1970s.
And these local bands contained musicians that would later change the face of rock ‘n’ roll. Jourard, who now lives in Santa Monica, Calif., and troubleshoots computer networks, played on Tom Petty’s 1976 self-titled debut and then went on to find success with the new wave band The Motels.
In fact, many of Petty’s Heartbreakers were once Gainesville guitar slingers happy for a chance to book the biggest show in town.
Ron Blair, the original bassist for the Heartbreakers, started out in RGF. And future Heartbreaker Stan Lynch played drums in Road Turkey.
Also, Gainesville native Don Felder, who would later join the Eagles and write the music to “Hotel California,” considered by many to be one of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll songs ever recorded, once stood on a stage overlooking the Plaza as a member of Flow.
Jourard said the Halloween Ball gained momentum every year. “You’d see folks you knew from around town, but you didn’t know they had that in them,” said Jourard, referring to the wild costumes.
He added: “I have been to some of the most decadent, wild, Hollywood Halloween blowouts here in L.A., and I haven’t seen anything wilder than the Gainesville Halloween Balls of the 70s.”
Protests and civil unrest
During this same period, Camil, who was honorably discharged from the military, became the face for the university’s anti-war movement.
“I’d skip class and go the Plaza and share my experience in Vietnam with fellow students,” he said.
Camil was thrust into the national spotlight when he and seven others – known as the Gainesville Eight – were charged with plotting to disrupt the 1972 Republican Convention in Miami Beach. The 30-day Gainesville trial ended with all eight exonerated.
UF Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus Michael Gannon described the quadrangle during the late 1960s as a “medieval bizarre.”
The professor added that marijuana wasn’t only reserved for late night costume parties. Gannon joked that when he walked across the Plaza lawn, he would be “high” before reaching the other end.
UF archivist Van Ness said the administration gave the Halloween Ball the axe in 1983 because things had gotten out of control. “There were rumors of sex and widespread drug use,” Van Ness said.
Spirituality and love
Not all students went to the grassland as disaffected youths to protest wars and social injustices.
Pam Pemberton, a freshman in 1968, said a friend pointed out Bob Tebow, who was passing Christian pamphlets out on the Plaza.
That was the first, but not the last time, she laid eyes on Tebow.
In 1969 the two became friends. The next year they were dating. And in June 1971, Pemberton had a journalism degree in one hand and a wedding band on the other, graduating from UF and becoming Mrs. Tebow all in one day.
The Tebows’ son Tim now gathers his own Plaza memories as UF’s newest quarterback after coach Urban Meyer recruited the dual threat last year from Nease High School in St. Augustine.
The year 1971 was also when Hare Krishnas began serving cheap vegetarian lunches on the Plaza.
Five years later, in 1976, Rtadhvaja Swami served his first lunch amid the live oaks. It’s been 30 years now, and the soft-spoken spiritual sage still stands with other Krishnas and feeds about 500 hungry students every day.
“We’ve probably fed close to two million students over the years,” he said.
As students sit cross-legged eating yellow rice and salad, the Krishna band, also sitting cross-legged, performs loud and proud. Some play cymbals and shakers. Some slap drums.
And while performing the Indian melody throughout the lunch rush, band members sing one song and one song only – the famed three-word Krishna chant.
Brother Jed
kissed Cindy
Brother Jed Smock, a former college history professor turned campus evangelist, stepped foot on the Plaza for the first time in 1974. He was 33 years old.
Peter Jennings, the longtime anchor of World News Tonight before his death last year from lung cancer, called Smock “an evangelist with sharp edges.” Smock’s fans, yes fans, call themselves “Jed-Heads.”
He’s not only a UF legend. He speaks on hundreds of campuses around the country every year.
But the UF Plaza will always be the place he met Cindy Lasseter – then a reporter for the Independent Florida Alligator who was sniffing out the story on the man known to most as Brother Jed.
The sharp-edged preacher said he pointed to her standing in the crowd in 1977 and commanded, “Repent of your sins you wicked woman.”
The two went out for a steak dinner a year later.
“I hadn’t kissed a girl in six years, and I admit, I was a little tempted,” said Brother Jed, adding that he immediately took Cindy back to her dorm and dropped her off.
The weekend passed and on Monday Cindy converted to Christianity in a fast food restaurant parking lot just off campus.
Four years later the two married, and Brother Jed said the decade-long drought without a single kiss finally came to a close.
“We have five daughters, so I guess I got a little more than a kiss.”
Gatorman and
Yoga man
The Gatorman, whose real name is Curtis Read, became a Plaza staple in the mid -80s when he would turn into a living mannequin, somehow causing his blood pressure to drop. He wouldn’t move, not even to blink, for as much as three hours at a time.
First rising to fame as the man who befriended “Albert,” a real-life alligator let loose in Lake Alice, he would rest on Albert’s back while Albert floated in the lake, or the two would sunbathe together on the bank. “I could call him, and he would come to me,” said Read, who now lives in Apple Valley, Calif.
The 57-year-old Read stays in shape biking 100 miles a week and said he has circled the globe twice performing the mannequin routine he discovered right here in Gainesville. According to Read, he’s even been featured on television shows, such as “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” and “Jenny Jones.”
The real-life gator got sick during one of Read’s visits in the mid-80s and died soon after.
“If Albert was still alive, I would give him a hug. I really would.”
Jim Hudson, known around the Plaza as Yoga man, graduated with a degree in mathematics in 1985 and performed Yoga on the quadrangle as a student, returning in 1996 for a seven-year stint as an instructor, hired by UF’s Department of Recreational Sports.
“I introduced many people to yoga out on the Plaza,” said Hudson, who held classes on the lawn for anyone who wanted to learn the body and mind exercise.
Hudson now lives in Lake Oswego, Ore., splitting his time between teaching yoga and seventh- and eighth-grade math.
Jesus Gene gets naked
The year was 1990. The day was Jan. 8 – Elvis Presley’s birthday. Gene Whitford, or Jesus Gene as his friends like to call him, said he thought why the hell not.
“You only live life once,” Whitford said.
He walked onto the Plaza of the Americas under a bright sun and stripped naked.
Whitford was arrested and jailed for indecent exposure and said he learned that he can get more accomplished at the Plaza wearing large signs around his neck and handing out bumper stickers and pens.
And that’s what he’s been doing for five years now. Lately, he’s been championing the release of Leonard Peltier, who was convicted to two life sentences in 1977 for murdering two FBI agents.
“I feel it’s my obligation to help in order to give myself some good karma,” said Whitford, who lives with his mom in Orlando when he’s not protesting in Gainesville.
On Friday, longhaired Whitford, wearing a wide-brimmed, white fedora and mirrored sunglasses, walked around the Plaza with a yellow sign covering his torso. Three simple words were stenciled in blue – “Free Leonard Peltier.”
Rise of Turlington
During the mid-1990s the epicenter of the university shifted with the construction of the Computer Science and Engineering Building and the Marston Science Library, according to Steve Orlando, UF’s director of news and public affairs.
He said that in addition to newly constructed buildings, the launch of several fast food restaurants at the HUB, which is also nearby, attracted students to start congregating in Turlington Plaza.
Even Brother Jed Smock uprooted to Turlington.
“The Plaza just doesn’t have the foot traffic it used to,” said the fisher of men.
It’s no has been either.
The Krishnas still serve lunch there. Numerous activists groups still hold rallies there. College organizations still plan events there.
The Plaza of the Americas has the grass and trees the paved Turlington will never have.
Take UF’s Dean of Students Gene Zdziarski for example. He and his wife, Cheri, renewed their wedding vows in the Plaza one year ago Tuesday.
Krishna leader Rtadhvaja Swami said the UF community should not forget the Plaza.
“I hope we have 75 more,” he said. “And I hope I’m here for all of them.”
Hugh Masekela
((( “Grazing In The Grass” )))
INAUGURAL BALL (A NIGHT OF INSIDIOUS TEMPTATION)
LUNACY (FULL MOON FEVER)
HALLOWEEN ’79 (THE YEAR FRANK CAME EARLY)
QUEEN OF THE BALL ’80 (OH, WENDY)
HALLOWEEN ’80 (GATOR FROM ANOTHER PLANET)
The Swimming Pool Qs recall opening for Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics.
TALKING HEADS (MAN IN THE OVERSIZED SUIT)
ROBIN WILLIAMS (GATOR GROWL 1982)
“I’d like to fertilize her buds” [Gainesville Is Green]