April 27, 2016
McKeldin Library
The University of Maryland
College Park
The final study of Emmett and his junior-year college roommates at Stetson features John N. Worley, of St. Augustine, and Fred Fee, of Fort Pierce, Florida.
According to the East Hall essay below, Worley was the master of tall tales.
Worley and Fee are mentioned in the red box. Source: Stetson University Archives.
Fee was enrolled in the Liberal Arts program; and, according to the 18th Catalog of Stetson University, had no specific classification, but was taking electives at the University.
Unfortunately, I haven’t found much about Worley beyond a few articles in the Stetson University student newspaper. He mostly led a quiet life as a student on campus; he was Emmett’s dorm mate again in 1904 during their senior year.
I think life was hard for Worley and his family: Five family members (including an infant) died in 1918, likely victims of the influenza pandemic. There is very little additional information about him, other than the fact that his vocation was, first, as an engineer in the early 1920s; from the mid-20s onward, he was a plumber in St. Augustine.
I don’t believe Emmett would have seen him on any regular basis; I have no record showing Emmett traveling to St. Augustine in his lifetime.
Passport photo of Fred Fee. Source: Ancestry.com
Fred Fee was born in Kansas in 1880, and attended Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Stetson with an A.B. in 1904, and an LL.B. in 1905. While Fee was at Stetson, he was a member of the Phi Kappa Delta fraternity, and he wrote articles for college publications.
Fee set up law practice in Fort Pierce. In 1906, he was elected Judge of St. Lucie County; later, he served as mayor of Ft. Pierce. He has an interesting family, with deep roots in St. Lucie County: I found an obituary for his oldest daughter, F. Mary Fee, which goes into detail about her family’s life. You can read it for yourself at this link.
A youthful CHB Floyd. Unfortunately, he died at the end of the influenza pandemic, in Florida, about 1920.
A side note: Fee was the law partner of Apalachicola’s poet laureate and entertaining journalist-lawyer, Charles Henry Bourke Floyd. Floyd died in 1920, at the end of the influenza epidemic.
“Harry” Floyd wrote regular syndicated humorous and critical essays about Florida politicians and lawyers for several state newspapers.
In one of his essays, Floyd specifically dogged both Gov. Albert Gilchrest and Emmett about the fact that they were still unmarried (despite being besieged by women) and leading important, prominent lives. In 1912, people liked their governors and political leaders to be married, to appear ‘settled down,’ to conform to general society standards. Gilchrest
and Emmett were bucking tradition.
Floyd made much of this in one particular column that ran in 1912, in The Pensacola News, as he put the question, plainly, to both Gilchrest and Emmett about their still-unmarried state:
“What’s wrong with you?”
Emmett spent much time with these guys during what I consider the best years of his short life.
It is interesting to get a general idea of Emmett’s friends, what they were like, what they did, where they were from, activities, sports, habits, and so forth. People with similar habits and likes/dislikes tend to hang out together; and, until I get my hands on Emmett’s scrapbooks, or a journal, or letters, I have to extrapolate what his life might have been like via the college bios of his roommates.
It’s not a perfect approach to this research project, but it does give us some idea about Emmett’s time at Stetson.
(Updated from the article originally posted by the author here.)
Categories: Book Florida History Interesting & Odd
jsmith532
Professor,
Communication, Arts, and the Humanities
The University of Maryland Global Campus
Tell my story. 
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