10/24/2017
The Last Gentleman, Part 2
I can talk about a couple of things that made him such a great friend and mentor, and so beloved. One of them is that despite his sense of the often-tragic history of the south, he made history fun. You know, teaching is a performance art. Those of us who do it, don’t like to admit it. We like to play the role, as my former dean at TCC once put it, of “a sage on a stage.” Those I know who actually had him in class, tell me that the captain had this wonderful, infectious sense of enthusiasm and irony that made it so much more than that. He understood and communicated that the study of history is, and should be, a very personal thing, not involving, so much anyway, abstract concepts and sweeping generalizations, but human foibles and follies, the human heart in conflict with itself, as one of his favorite authors, William Faulkner, put it. He also understood many things about history. One is that history is local and that history is memory, and that to lose our memory—individually, locally, nationally—is to lose our identity. He understood the difference between historical fact and historical truth, and he dealt in both. He also understood that the writing of history is as much a creative project as a critical one, which is why the best histories—Thucydides, Gibbon, and lots of others—are also part of our literature. And finally, he understood that because history is both made and written by human beings, it is, by definition, interpretive. There is no such thing as objective history. The best we can do is to try and be accurate and fair. He considered it an ominous sign when colleges and universities, not just in Florida, but particularly in Florida, began to de-emphasize the study of history and all that it entails, in favor of such slogans as “Workforce Development.” Education, he frequently told me, is so much more than making money.
I also want to talk about Captain Midnight’s sheer curiosity. Ten years ago, I asked him to compile a bibliography of his publications for me. What he came up with was nearly 10 pages long, books and articles and monographs, co-authored projects and sometimes the most obscure stuff that simply caught his fancy. And he didn’t stop there. He was still writing and publishing in 2015 and starting other projects. He was like the energizer bunny. He would call me every few weeks, float an idea, ask me what I thought, and then make plans as to how we should proceed. When it became difficult for him to climb stairs in his home to his office, he moved everything into the dining room. Last Christmas, he discovered a long-lost manuscript that he and Dr. Jerrell Shofner at the University of Central Florida had co-authored back in the 70s about Florida in the Great Depression. Apparently they had both just forgotten about it. Imagine my astonishment when I read his book, Outposts on the Gulf, and discovered that my great grandfather, in the early years of the 20th century, owned St. George Island. All of it, at the cost of about $1,500, I think. And then had sold it to my friend Doug Smith’s great uncle at what can only be described as a fire-sale price. Doug will never let me forget that. He was always coming up with information like that, and with stories like that of J.H. Triplett, a confederate guerilla from East Tennessee who went off to fight in the Kansas border wars of the 1850s, and then the civil war, and afterwards came to Thomasville where he founded the Thomasville Times and became nationally renowned for the publication every Christmas, of letters to Santa Claus. The irony of that, and the redemptive aspect, I think, is unmistakable.
And finally, there is Sentry Press, the small publishing company that he started in 1972. I’ve never known quite what to make of Sentry Press. First of all, it has never been a vanity press. You couldn’t just show up with a check and a manuscript and expect it to printed, without going through a rigorous process. The stories of Captain Midnight, patiently wrangling with authors over various issues, meticulously editing them, overseeing the production process, using his personal credit card to meet expenses, shanghaiing former students to move the boxes, even hawking books from the trunk of his car, are numerous. I don’t even know for certain, how many books Sentry published over the years, or whether he made any money at it. But that wasn’t the point, was it? The point was to publish good books, particularly good history. It was a way of getting the word out and it was an added benefit, I think, that a good portion of the output was his own. Bill Rogers left a lot of legacies to this community. I think his willingness, almost his urgency in helping young historians get in print was one of the most important.
I shall miss him terribly, his phone calls asking about my good wife, and our legion of cats, his inquiries about going to Thomasville or Apalachicola, his ideas about our next project, his stories about his colleagues and teaching at FSU, his often pronounced criticism of where the history profession and education in general was going of course, politics. There was never any president for the Captain after FDR. And, oh yes, the barbecue. And I shall miss his bright, good humor about it all and his insistence that we are, each of us, fallible human beings, simply doing the best that we can.
