Readers, imagine my great surprise to find this item in my comb-through of the 1915 Pensacola Journal today: Naval aviation had only just been established at Pensacola as an attempt to re-open the base (which was closed during President Taft’s administration); hell, human aviation had only just been established a […]
Readers, imagine you are Emmett Wilson, seated in the VIP viewing stand with others of similar importance, at the 1915 Pensacola Mardi Gras parade. All is well; suddenly, the following float drifts by, and pauses in front of the viewing stand: Yes, people, someone actually designed and built a FLOAT […]
Readers, now that I’m back from the research trip to Pensacola, I can catch up on what I saw. I was pleasantly surprised to see that many of the buildings where Emmett lived and worked still exist, and are in good repair. This photo (right) of downtown Pensacola from 1910 […]
In the past week, I’ve come across what I consider the turning point, the downward slide, in Emmett’s career and life. It’s October, 1914. Up until this point, Emmett was the Golden Boy of West Florida, he was getting appropriations for his constituency, he was serving on important committees, he […]
Even after 100 years, nothing really changes. I found this article yesterday in The Pensacola Journal microfilm. I hope the game was good, but in keeping with the spirit of ‘nothing really changing’, the Washington team probably lost. It is unlikely that Emmett Wilson would have taken off during the […]
Today, we’ll put Atticus Finch, Anthony Weiner and Emmett Wilson into a room together, ask each man to name his key, defining moment in his career, then explain how that moment changed his life. An odd group with nothing in common? Maybe not. Each was a lawmaker, each was considered […]
Today I found two different film clips of Woodrow Wilson’s swearing-in ceremony at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Emmett attended both of these events, as a newly minted, and then, newly retired congressman. The first one was on March 4, 1913. The clip comes from a film archive source […]
That was my first reaction to Emmett Wilson when I ‘met’ him several months ago. I was in the midst of doing work on a biography about my great-grandmother, who, long story short, was a suffragette from Mississippi, and whose husband did not like her ‘activities’, so he put her […]
Tell my story. 