What type of legacy will you leave?

By W.W. Brown

James Hawkins was loved by so many of his students because he was always willing to spend time with them. Which makes it fitting James Hawkins died about to do the one thing he was known for doing throughout his career — visit with a student.

Hawkins spent 35 years on the journalism faculty at Florida A&M University. The last eight years of his career were as dean of School of Journalism and Graphic Communication. He was the embodiment of “the college of love and charity.”



News of his passing hit me harder than any similar announcement in my life. It was a sucker punch to the solar plexuses that I wanted to believe was a rumor—the type of rumor Dr. Hawkins and other professors would have told us to investigate, but ignore.

The rumors were devastatingly true. Students, graduates, professors and so many others were stunned by the fact a man with such a huge heart was killed by a heart attack. Emotions reverberated around the J-School family faster than breaking news around Orr Drive because everyone had a story about how James Hawkins’ lessons touched them.

For a three semester period my grades plummeted. At other schools I would have been discarded, or ushered aside. At Florida A&M there were conversations with Dr. Hawkins and other professors to try and figure out the cause of my uncharacteristic academic performance.

When it came down to it, I graduated — barely.

Receiving my degree from Dr. Hawkins remains one of the happiest moments of my life.

Years after I graduated I would stroll into his office to shoot the breeze and see what was going on. Every time I did, Dr. Hawkins was always happy to see me and hear about how my life progressed.

He would ask about my girlfriend, who eventually became my wife; how my job was going; how I was doing. He was always eager to hear what I had to say, even if he had students waiting outside his door.

A move to Texas eliminated those infrequent visits. It had been a couple years since my last visit to Hawkins’ office.

The last time I went to the J-School, in January, Hawkins was retired. There was someone new in the corner office of the fourth floor of the still-to-be-named journalism building. Our conversation was cordial, but it wasn’t the same.

Trying to recreate what was so natural with the Dean— I was only at FAMU for a semester when Dean Robert Ruggles retired so Dr. Hawkins will always be “the Dean” to me — was not going to come easy. As the months went by, I once again realized just what a gem we had in Dr. Hawkins.

The first time I gave money back to the university that conferred a degree on me, and my father before me, was when I was told a scholarship was being endowed in Hawkins’ name. The minimum donation was $100. I gave a little more than that. It was the least I could do — give more in honor of a man who did that until his dying breath.

The official announcement came on Facebook, from an alumna who is now a Senior Producer at CBS News.

“He was traveling back from Atlanta this afternoon and decided to stop and have an early dinner with a former student in Macon, Georgia. We all know that is just one of the reasons we loved Doc. He kept in touch with all of us and made us feel special. He texted the former student at 3:18 to say he had arrived, but when he had not come inside the restaurant by 3:30, she went outside to look for him and found him unresponsive in his car.” 

As the swift and heartfelt reactions came in from classmates, friends and former Rattlers, I wound up liking the status of every person I knew who posted a tribute on social media. It was cheesy, but one of the few ways I knew to show them I was mourning with them.

In lieu of flowers, the Dean’s wife asked people to send donations to the James E. Hawkins Endowed Scholarship Fund. A donation would be a fitting way to continue the legacy of a man who gave everything for his students.


Laughs and liveliness,
-Wb

What happened to the Foreign Floridian?

As someone who spent his entire life living within smelling distance of the beach, I did not know what to expect upon moving to South Texas.

After dropping off my girlfriend at the airport in Houston my phone died on the drive back to Victoria. For nearly 90 miles it was just me and the music to pass the time driving through cities that seemed to get smaller the further south I drove.

There were no palm trees, or reminders to visit a beach to keep my attention. It was just the countryside. Clearly, this was going to be different. Outside of spending one summer on internship in Shreveport, La, I had never spent more than three weeks away from Florida.

Initially, when I told people I was from Florida it was as though I named some exotic and foreign place. (Candidly, that is what I thought about Victoria when I first moved here, which was why I titled my blog at the Advocate the Foreign Floridian.)

When the quizzical looks subsided what I found were friendly people who preferred good news above all else. Negativity was frowned upon, but tolerated if disseminated without spite or a sense of an agenda.

As I pack up and return to Florida this weekend there were far more positives than I ever imagined when I drove along that seemingly desolate highway 21 months ago.

Any conversation with Gary Moses; challenging a pair of gentlemen to a tennis match; covering a canoe race; the story of how my cell phone became waterlogged covering said canoe race; the passion of the football fans in Port Lavaca; the excellence of the 2011 Refugio football team; the time I wrote a story about a boy who loved football and his mother left three dozen cookies on my desk as a thank you; the Twitter banter with students and athletes at Victoria West high school—special shout out to my hype men Qualian Bryant and Jonathan Vahalik, who retweeted many of my comments – and the conversations in the press box at Victoria East football games are just some of those positives.

Two years ago I had no clue what Shiner Bock was, or where it was brewed. I still haven’t tried it, but I can say that people in Shiner, Texas follow the golden rule, which is to say that they treat everyone well.

Of course there were people and things that irritated me. As time goes on those things will be forgotten, the memories that remain will only elicit smiles.

Esther Perez became a dear friend. Through the Advocate I met Camille Doty, who is not only a friend, but the person responsible for introducing me to my church home while in South Texas. And a special thank you to my college classmate Gheni Platenburg. Without her encouragement, I never would have accepted an offer from the Advocate.

 Advocate business reporter Allison Miles may be the kindest person I have ever met in my life. Miguel Torres’ daughter attended the smallest high school in Victoria, but he was such a fan of every child in the community it was impressive. Even people my editor told me were “surly” and “difficult”, like former Victoria East soccer coach Tim Eaton, wound up being energetic and engaging.

If there was one thing I learned about life in Texas it was to give people a chance. Frequently, when I went on assignment I didn’t know anyone. But people were always willing to open up and share with me.

On my first week, I underestimated the distance between Victoria and Yoakum… while my gas light was on. Were it not for Yoakum resident Paul Ebner, the Sports Information Director at the University of Houston-Victoria, telling me there was a gas station right around the corner, unbeknownst to me, I likely would have been stuck walking in the wilderness on a sweltering summer day.

No matter where I was, I always found a gas station and a Whataburger. Those two things were just as important to my random journeys as a notebook and digital recorder.

As I write this I am sipping on a root beer from another late night run to Whataburger. There are a few 

Whataburger locations in Florida, but it’s not the same. Whether I was in Refugio, Portland, Goliad, Port Lavaca, Cuero, Corpus Christi, Schulenburg, San Antonio or Kingsville I always knew where to find a Whataburger because on Friday nights the restaurants became a mobile office.

Fittingly, the last story I submitted to the Victoria Advocate was filed from a Whataburger.

As much as I enjoyed covering other sports, and sporting events, my passion was catching soccer games. Whether it was UHV, or one of the area varsity teams, I found any and every excuse to write about the sport.

This March one soccer player told me “I didn’t know you played soccer.” Her coach looked at her, looked and me and said “He’s plays every weekend. Hey, Will, why aren’t you leading this goalie drill? Aren’t you a goalie?”

Indeed I am. Within a month of arriving in Victoria, I found a soccer team to play with. It didn’t matter that my Spanish was limited. It was a chance to play and release some energy. When word leaked out that I played on weekends my attempts at being a “portero” was a way to connect with local soccer teams.

The Victoria Advocate published for more than 160 years before I arrived. The newspaper will continue to publish long after I return to Florida. But, I will always cherish the connections I made and the friends I found in the time I was here.

Laughs and liveliness,

-Wb

p.s. Anyone who enjoyed my writing, or my work, should thank Advocate photographers, page designers, copy editors, like Esther, as well as my former colleagues Mike Forman, Clay Whittington and Albert Alvarado on the Sports desk.

The college of love and charity

Growing up my parents shared a 1985 Volvo 740 GLE. No matter how much they bickered about other things, one thing was always constant during my childhood — the orange and green license plate on the back of that maroon Volvo.

That simple plate celebrating the centennial of Florida A&M University was my introduction to a school and a history that is as much a part of me as my parents.

Florida A&M is not the best school, or the most perfect school, but it is my school. To this day there is a misnomer that the school only accepts blacks. Of course the truth is that only one of Florida’s three public universities founded in the 19th century has never excluded anyone because of race or gender — Florida A&M.

My dad went to the school so long ago it some people called it FAMCEE, because it was Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College. It didn’t become a university until 1953, the year my dad graduated.

Eventually, I found my way to the school which was once a slave plantation. Florida’s first territorial governor Robert DuVal owned the property. Until the 1940s there was a massive oak tree adjacent to where the current library sits that bore the blood of beaten slaves.

Traditions at so many colleges are being whitewashed by those who choose to only remember the good ol’ days when the sky was apparently bluer.

It would ruin a good story to know that Paul William Bryant and Wayne Woodrow Hayes frequently visited Tallahassee, Florida to get insight from a coaching wizard— Alonzo Smith Gaither.

Even when they were nothing but Jazzbirds playing on a combination of grass and dust, Saturday’s in the fall were always about an experience for Famuans. The smell of all sorts of unhealthy concoctions waft in the air prior to kickoff, some unfortunate opponent is pummeled for 30 minutes and then the world’s best marching band takes center stage.

The experience is what fathers tell sons and why mothers want their daughters to return to Tallahassee. It’s what has become a part of the lore of a school that is largely ignored or forgotten — even by its local newspaper.

Time may have grayed and thinned my dad’s hair, but the bushy mustache he had as a sophomore in 1950 remains. Pictures hidden away in archives only tell so much.

Older generations serve as modern-day griots, the ones who remind future Famuans that Foote-Hilyer was once the only hospital for black people in Tallahassee or how every building on campus tells the story of a person who was critical to the school’s mission of educating African-Americans.

Without those stories, we would not know the student union building, which was once a hotel, was named after an interim president, in H. Manning Efferson, who rarely gets credit for being the bridge between one of the university’s more unpopular presidents (William H. Gray Jr.) to one who became president emeritus upon retirement in George W. Gore.

It was a warm February afternoon, one where the sun prevented icy thoughts of the night to enter the consciousness. After hours canvassing North Florida talking to football players, I idled at a Kentucky Friend Chicken to write about what I witnessed that day.

While waiting to see just how bastardized Harland Sanders’ Southern delicacy had become, a group of people were talking about one of the boys I recently interviewed.

They started talking about his future and how his choice of college would be the perfect fit for him because of its proximity to home, the family atmosphere within the football program and the hospitality of the campus crowd.

They were talking about Florida A&M.

Laughs and liveliness,

-Wb