Art Bagley, a reference librarian at UT of 25 years, who is also in charge of the library’s archives, has gotten a closer look into the university’s history than perhaps anyone else currently on campus. His stories encompass historical events such as the car races that were once held on Plant Field, funny pranks like wrangling alligators, visits from influential people like Queen Elizabeth and even the conspiracy surrounding why we are called the Spartans.
Since 1987, Art has been hearing about, reading up on and personally experiencing UT’s greatest moments as a college. He told the Minaret about the start-up and near collapse of UT and explained that, “We’ve always been a tuition-driven university. As the country prospers UT prospers.” Of course in recent years one could question this logic as, “we’ve been in the doldrums economically but UT continues to have record enrollments.”
However, we were not always on such stable grounds, as Bagley admits that around 1993 there was a demographic fluctuation in the number of college-aged students in the United States causing many schools to suffer, including UT. With only about 1,600 students enrolled, “there were whispers of USF buying out the University of Tampa. They had always coveted a downtown location,” stated Bagley. Luckily with a few more than generous faculty members who agreed to cut their pay instead of allowing for layoffs, and the inauguration of President Vaughn in 1995, we began to see an upturn in enrollment and an increase in stability.
We are now continuously growing as a university both in population and by development standards. With our nine residence halls we still lack the room for all of our students but this was not always the case. In 1933 when the hotel was bought from the city by Frederick Spalding and turned into a junior college, the students inhabited the third, fourth and fifth floors of Plant Hall, without the addition of any new residence halls until 1987. While living in the hotel’s upper floors and taking classes in the two below, students were mostly confined to this single building until UT acquired the rest of the property surrounding it.
In the midst of the great depression the city agreed to sell the hotel to Spalding for pennies on the dollar. While they agreed to sell Plant Hall, “the city still retained ownership of Plant Park and all of what is west campus today. The students and faculty had to ask for permission if they wanted to use any of the surrounding areas.” This is why the Florida State Fair and the races were held at UT until relatively recently.
“As a Boy Scout in the early sixties I remember coming to the fair and walking past the 12 foot walls around the race track and getting pelted by sand and rocks,” stated Bagley. He also informed the Minaret that the ferris wheel and roller coasters were all held where the Martinez Gym and West Parking Garage are currently. The ROTC building, Jaeb Computer Center, both Walker lecture halls and the Furman Music Center were all used as exhibition buildings as part of the fair as well.
These exhibits were usually made up of “Florida’s major industries: lumber, fishing, citrus, agriculture, honey and sugar cane. The stranger the better. Tampa even used to have a rattlesnake meat-canning plant at one point,” he exclaimed.
Bagley’s catalog of interesting UT stories did not stop at the racetrack though; he proved that even the library could be an interesting place harboring strange history. “We might be one of the few libraries in the world to house cremains,” or human cremated remains, he said with a grin. Apparently when Martinez, Ybor’s grandson, donated scholarship money to the university, “we asked what we could do for their family and in return and they said that they needed a place to store their dad.”
Bagley related the story of the “Procession of the Urn” as one of his former colleagues, Gloria Runton, had related it to him. “It was done during the summer so we were able to accommodate the needs of the family by turning off all the library lights, draping the room where the urn would be housed in sheets of blue velvet and forming a small group of staff to attend.” He continues to explain the procession itself which included the late Ybor’s wife, “a Scandinavian woman, dressed in blue velvet and accompanied by her ‘personal astrologer’ or wizard, who was donned in similar attire complete with the pointed blue hat,” Art stops to snicker then continues, “they proceeded with their ceremony, then instead of joining him in the second urn when she died, she decided to run off to New York and get remarried,” where she was buried after her death.
Because the stipulations put on Ybor’s scholarship donation were so extravagant, such as the recipient having to be of Spanish heritage, major in Spanish and spend a certain number of years abroad at a Spanish university, the money was never claimed and eventually went to the renovations of the language lab in Riverside instead.
Another interesting set of stories in Art’s mental catalogue are those of the pranks that were allegedly played in the very early days of UT. When students still lived in Plant Hall there was one occurrence of some football players dragging “a compact car, probably a little fifties or sixties Fiat” up three flights of stairs and proceeding to “drive it up and down the hallways. I don’t know how they didn’t get caught,” admitted Bagley.
Another one of these prank stories actually came out of an Alumni magazine, in which “a few of this guy’s roommates found an alligator in the Hillsborough river and somehow captured it, taped it up and put it under their roommate’s bed.” Later he “woke up to some scratching and grunting and when he looked under his bed he was only a few inches away from this alligator,” said Art.
These pranks, like some of the ghost stories Art has heard, are up for debate. This is similar, in his opinion, to the story of how we got our mascot: the Spartan. “Most people believe that we got our name because in 1933 our rivals, St. Petersburg College, were the Trojans, but I don’t buy into that.
My way of thinking is that it was the Spartan attitude of the people who came to UT to teach, to administrate and to learn that gave us our name.” Art further explains that students, faculty and staff all had to work hard when starting up at UT. As previously mentioned, teachers were only paid once a year and this was after all other university expenses were paid. Likewise students split their own wood since the only heat in the rooms came from the fireplaces. Students also cleared out the kitchen of Plant Hall, moving “stoves, refrigerators and all sorts of equipment and installing benches and lab tables in the science wing of Plant Hall,” to form what are the current chemistry labs. In Art’s eyes it was this Spartan belief in never giving up and working hard for what you have that really gave us the right to call ourselves Spartans.
He claims that this attitude still prevails today with faculty, staff and students. “Even the students in the past few years have had to put up with the inconveniences of living in the hotels, shuttling back and forth in rain or shine,” in the case of the hotel on Westshore some miles away. Although he admits that some of the demeanor has changed over time, he strongly believes that we still embody the strong, prideful Spartans of ancient Greece.
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