The date? March 3, 1908, the day after Mardi Gras. The place? The private dining room in the The Osceola Club, Pensacola, Florida The occasion/connection? Good question. This is another oddball jigsaw puzzle in the life of Emmett Wilson that I like to work out. Not to sound disparaging of anyone sitting around […]
Emmett’s best friend, Paul Carter, was the original valedictorian of the Stetson University Law School Class of 1904. But fate — a job opportunity as private secretary to U.S. Congressman William Bailey Lamar — intervened. It was the opportunity of a lifetime for a smart, ambitious 23-year-old not even out […]
Last time I checked, I realized that I’ve collected over 500 individual newspaper articles about Emmett Wilson. That’s pretty good, considering that when I started this project, I didn’t expect to find more than a few dozen, given his obscurity in Florida politics. Granted, most of these newspaper articles aren’t […]
The Internet says today is National Puppy Day, and with that, I give you a little story about a dog in Emmett’s life, named Grits. While Emmett attended Stetson University from 1902 to 1904, it turns out that he had group ownership of a yellow Labrador Retriever/pit bull terrier mix. […]
There’s Wilson family lore about a silver pocket watch that’s I’d love to prove. I don’t know what it looked like, other than it was smooth, silver, and had Emmett’s grandfather’s initials engraved on it — AEM — for Augustus Emmett Maxwell. It probably had a chain, and maybe a […]
With all the protests going on in and around Washington lately, I wondered if Emmett Wilson ever participated in a march or protest? At first, I couldn’t have imagined it; certainly not in Chipley or Marianna, Florida. What would there be to launch a protest in either of these small […]
For the past week, I’ve been working on the section of the book about Emmett’s graduation ceremony from Stetson University, and searching for Emmett’s valedictory speech. While the archive has a few things from 1904, such as Emmett’s commencement program, Emmett’s speech isn’t there — and unless his Elusive Scrapbooks […]
Yesterday, I came across this little article, nothing more than a little snippet from a news roundup about weekly goings-on in Washington, D.C. It was something easily overlooked, buried away on the second page of the paper. Actually, I found it about two years ago, when I was busily collecting […]
The research project about Emmett’s junior-year dorm-mates was not some big distracting side-adventure: I was going somewhere with it. Namely, Ormond Beach. Two months before the essay about the Earls of East Hall appeared in The Stetson Collegiate, I came across this item: Which of these guys had an automobile […]
The final installment/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, Worley was the master of tall tales. He was enrolled in the Liberal Arts program; and, according to […]
