Welcome! Imaginary Shirt is a project where I research visual elements from high schools’ histories and then use them to make new t-shirt concepts. If you’re associated with one of these schools and would like to make any of these imaginary shirts a reality, let me know! I’d love to help you accomplish that. This companion newsletter gives some more details on process and on the schools featured. Enjoy!
Instagram Week in Review
Monday, 11 September 2023—Leon Lions, Tallahassee, FL
On December 14, 1957, the Jaycees sponsored a “Teen-age Road-e-o” at Leon High School. The safe driving contest was open to any Leon County students, but only Leon High students entered. The contest was won by Tommy Simmons, who qualified to participate in a district contest.
According to two different articles in the January 12, 1958 Tallahassee Democrat, Tommy Simmons had a pretty good January 11, winning the district contest in Mariana and scoring 24 points for the basketball team in a 45-26 rout of “hapless Blountstown.” If the Democrat noticed that it was the same guy, they didn’t mention it.
But the fact that Tommy Lee Simmons played basketball and won the district Road-e-o didn’t escape the Leon High Life, whose January 17 profile of Simmons (who was born on the 4th of July, naturally), who described his own hair as “dishwater blond” and was interested in “basketball, baseball, and girls (particularly those whose name starts with an ‘M.’” What Tommy did not like was, “girls who fuss with their hair all the time.” His favorite food was fried chicken.
On Valentine’s Day, Tommy won the state Road-e-o at the state fair in Tampa. The next night, he scored nine points as the basketball team clinched the Northeast Conference Western Division. Simmons did travel to Washington, D.C. to participate in the national Road-e-o, but he didn’t place in the top three.
Here’s a fun and very 1957 narrative video advertisement for the contest:
See more designs from the Leon set here.
Tuesday, 12 September 2023—Godby Cougars, Tallahassee, FL
Godby is named for Amos P. Godby, who was a teacher and coach—at Leon. He then served five terms as Superintendent of Public Instruction in Leon County. Jeannie Roberts’ profile of Godby in the December 12, 1986 Tallahassee Democrat discussed his feelings about the two schools:
At times, it is clear that Amos Godby’s loyalties are divided. When Leon plays Godby, for example, he doesn’t know where to sit. “At those games, I just sell peanuts,” he says. He lives just a block away from Leon, and attends every Leon class reunion and Godby athletic banquet he can. And flowers at his wife’s funeral were either red and white arrangements (Leon’s colors) or white and blue (Godby’s colors).
A Leon Lion or Godby Cougar, no matter. Lions and Cougars all call him “Coach,” and it still thrills him every time they do. “I’ve coached some pretty famous people,” he says, referring to numerous prominent Tallahasseans who have played for him. “Well…they’re famous to me, anyway. Doctors and dentists and lawyers, you know.”
And they haven’t forgotten him since he retired. They still come by to visit often, and he can’t go out to dinner without several people stopping to chat.
“And when they do,” he says, “they call me ‘Coach.’ The pleasures of life go on, don’t they? They just don’t cease.”
See more designs from the Godby set here.
Wednesday, 13 September 2023—Bay Tornadoes, Panama City, FL
Panama City, Florida was incorporated on February 24, 1909, but developers had been seeding the area for years before. One of the men pushing forward the birth of Panama City was George Mortimer West, who would found the Panama City Pilot and other newspapers, and would rise to become one of the chief historians of Florida history. In the first edition of the Panama City Pilot, a writer (likely West) wrote:
Two hundred thousand emigrants have come to the South within the past year. It is admitted that Florida got very few if any of them. Why is it with land to give away. as fruitful as any the sun ever shone upon, and a climate that is the envy of the world, this State did not get its share of these people? There is certainly a screw loose somewhere when such conditions exist. We need and must have settlers, homeseekers, and home makers.
See more designs from the Bay set here.
Thursday, 14 September 2023—Escambia Gators, Pensacola, FL
Escambia High School’s nickname is “Gators,” but in February 1976, there was a very contentious debate over whether it should stay what it had always been (“Rebels”), or change to “Raiders”. Students were surprised when an unnanounced vote was held. With three hundred students alleged to have been absent, many felt that it was unfair that keeping the name “Rebels” would require a two-thirds vote of the total number of students enrolled. A violent riot ensued, with four students being shot, including the quarterback of the school football team.
Originally it was thought that three students were shot, but 17-year-old Franklin Scott Whitmire was added to the list. The February 6, 1976 Pensacola News noted:
Whitmire reportedly first believed he had been hit the head by a brick, but later developed nausea and went to the Baptist emergency room where the bullet wound was found.
See more designs from the Escambia set here.
Friday, 15 September 2023—Blountstown Tigers, Blountstown, FL
Calhoun County, home of Blountstown, was the site in the fall of 1860 of what has sometimes been called a war. A faction of people in Calhoun County calling themselves “Regulators” decided that they would like a family called the Durdens out of Calhoun County. They held a fish fry and decided they would do something about it. The Mariana Patriot of September 26, 1860 detailed what they did:
Yesterday a party in Calhoun, styling themselves ‘Regulators’ went to the house of one Jesse Durden, and we learn shot him, giving him a mortal wound. They then met and shot Willis Musgrove from his horse, who died instantly; also mortally wounding Larkin C. Musgrove.
This was just the beginning of the fighting, and future Confederate judges J.J. Finley and Macintosh McQueen, having declared the county to be in a state of insurrectionary war, ordered out the First Brigade Florida Militia to restore the peace.
It seems that the militia did the job. Even with some contemporary newspaper accounts, it’s hard to understand exactly what happened. It’s thought in some corners that the Regulators were trying to force the Durdens and Musgroves out of Calhoun County because they had abolitionist tendencies, but the evidence is murky. It’s also said that the Durdens had feuded with another family and forced them out of the county years before, and that they were unpopular after that. In an October 17, 1860 article in the Daily Constiutionalist and Republic, an article sympathetic to the Regulators matter-of-factly described the events:
Calhoun county in West Florida has long been notorious for immorality and crime among a portion of its inhabitants. To rid themselves of these a number of the citizens organised a regulating band, and sought to expel the outlaws by a regular foray. In the melee, two men belonging to the former were killed, whereupon the civil authorities interposed, and sought to enforce the laws.
See more designs from the Blountstown set here.
Saturday, 16 September 2023—Pensacola Tigers, Pensacola, FL
In October 1927, the Pensacola Journal began giving space for the second year to the Tiger’s Growl, a publication by students from Pensacola High School. In the October 16, 1927 issue, the Tiger’s Growl editors announced their ambitions for the section:
“The Tiger’s Growl” is not a new creation, but just a revival of the old, edited a year or so ago by Don Forsyth. It is now being edited by new parties altogether, and we hope to keep it up all during the school year.
It is to be printed in The Journal every Sunday morning. We are beginning with only a small section of the page given over to us, but hope that it will soon be necessary to be given more space. We can do this with the help of the high school students, who would like for the school section of the paper to become a success, by sending in as many students as they can find. We want jokes about different pupils, all the dope on the meetings of various clubs, and any and everything of interest that happens in school. Mail your contributions to “The Tiger’s Growl” care Pensacola Journal, or you may leave them with Mrs. Pierpont in Mr. Workman’s office.
An exciting idea, but I fear that there’s a problem a model that anticipates people volunteering to supply the articles you need to run. And by December 4, we see the cracks forming:
This is the eighth issue of the “Growl.” We have grown quite a bit but not as much as we should for a school as large as P.H.S. For some reason or other the Editor can’t get his small army of reporters and assistants to working correctly. In fact, the only one that has given any help on this issue is Everitt. So if any thing has happened in the school that should be printed in the “Growl” and is not, don’t blame the editors, for two boys cannot possibly cover every thing that happens in a school as large as ours.
We will try again to have the assistants get to work, there is called a meeting of the entire Growl Staff for Monday afternoon.
The last issue of the Growl I can find printed in the Journal was published on January 29, 1928, and concludes:
The “Growl” will not be published next week, due to the fact that all this week will be exams, and there will be no school. We come back the following Sunday stronger than ever.
See more designs from the Pensacola set here.
Sunday, 17 September 2023—Port St. Joe Sharks, Port St. Joe, FL
Close to Port St. Joe High is the Constitutional Convention Monument, marking Florida’s Constitutional Convention that took place in 1838 in St. Joseph, Florida (in fact, Port St. Joes’s yearbook is named The Monument). St. Joseph was founded in 1835, though not without some resistance. A letter to the editor printed in the January 16, 1836 Pensacola Gazette included this warning:
The history of our young, sparsely populated and comparatively poor Territory, affords already a number of instances of the ruinous and demoralizing effects of this proclivity to found cities and grasp fortune at a single jump:—Webbville, and Ochesee were to be flourishing towns, and Aspalaga was to be a magnificent city concentrating at its wharves the commerce of the Appalachicola and its tributary streams. But of all the schemes which have been offered in Florida to the patronage of a confiding public, the most splendid, but the most visionary and delusive, is the one for founding a city at the Bay of St. Joseph.
Despite attempts to stop it, St. Joseph was indeed founded, and just a few years later it was decided that the town would be the home of the Florida Territory’s first constitutional convention. Not everyone was happy with the choice, but the convention did meet in St. Joseph’s, and the Library of Congress has a copy of that 1838 Florida Constitution, signed by the Convention President, Robert Raymond Reid.
Three years later, an oubreak of yellow fever would be bad news for both St. Joseph and for Robert Reid, who had by that time been appointed territorial governor of Florida by Martin Van Buren. It’s suspected that a wave of the disease that swept through florida came in through the port at St. Joseph. The population of the town was decimated, and the July 12, 1841 Augusta Chronicle reported:
By a private letter from Tallahassee we have been advised of the death of Robert Raymond Reid, late Governor of Florida. He died on the second instant, of congestive fever, which is said to prevail to an alarming extent in and around Tallahassee, baffling the united skill of the medical fraternity.
The Republican Banner of Nashville noted that Reid, “was an accomplished gentlemen, mild and courteous in manner, possessing a warm and kindly temper, with a mind of the most cultivated order. He was a profound and learned jurist, and as an accomplished belles lettres scholar, he was surpassed by few in this country.”
As for St. Joseph, the town was mostly deserted by early September of 1844, when a hurricane finished it off. The September 21, 1844 Pensacola Gazette noted:
Considerable damage, we fear, has been done in St. Joseph, particularly during the last part of the gale, which was from the N.W., and had a fair sweep at that place across the bay. Also, other neighboring ports must have been more or less injured.
In 1907, the Apalachicola Northern railroad arrived at the site of the former town, and the new town of Port St. Joe was born. According to the May 3, 1914 Pensacola News Journal:
But there is no connection with the St. Joe of the past and the Port St. Joe of today; the former is interesting only from a historical standpoint, while the Port St. Joe of today is a thriving, prosperous little city that has a great future in store and its citizens are working along the most modern lines with a view to development.
See more designs from the Port St. Joe set here.
See you next week! Tell your friends!