The Origins of Florida Flambeau, a College Newspaper
Diane Roberts reflects on her time in a college newsroom.
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The Flambeau staff read a November 1985 issue. Photography courtesy of Diane Roberts.
I didn’t intend to become a journalist. I wanted to be a “writer”—not that I quite knew what that meant—and an English professor, a job in which you apparently got paid to read books and talk about them to 20-year-olds. As an undergraduate at Florida State University (FSU) I learned to research, craft long footnotes and wield literary criticism like a (rather dull) sword. Jerry Stern, my favorite teacher, gave me A’s while gently deploring my academic stodginess. After I presented him with a particularly arcane essay on Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady,” characterized by sentences that seemed to never end (what with all the subordinate clauses, parentheses, digressions and qualifications), he sighed, saying, “Maybe you could learn to write for humans.”
He sent me off to the Florida Flambeau, a pugnacious little newspaper operating out of a ratty, smoke-stinking cottage on the edge of campus. I crept in and asked for Steve Dollar, the arts editor. That would be the Steve Dollar who later became a movie critic for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, as well as a regular contributor to this very magazine. The boys in the newsroom (it was mostly boys in 1980) looked at me as though I were a bow-headed Pekingese who’d wandered into the dodgy end of the dog pound. I was wearing sorority pins. And pearls. But Dollar was kind and handed me a record to review. I stuck around all afternoon, sitting at a corner desk in front of a manual typewriter the size of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, eavesdropping on conversations about who was cheating on whom and with whom, how the United States undermines Latin American democracy, whether the P-Funkster Bootsy Collins or the Family Stone’s Larry Graham was the greatest of all bass players and where to get good uppers in Tallahassee.
Social justice was always the beating heart of the paper. —Diane Roberts
Back in the castle-like fastness of the English Department, Professor Stern asked how it went. “Well,” I said, “the toilet has no seat, they take drugs, they’re all sleeping with each other and they hate Ronald Reagan.”
“Did you like it?” he asked.
“I loved it,” I said.
I still love it. The Flambeau was my college of journalism, my graduate degree in political science, my education in American history (most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves? Seriously?) and eventually my soapbox. I started writing columns satirizing Florida government, which operated—then and now—like a cross between the House of Borgia and kindergartners hopped up on sugar. The column was called “Das Kapital,” largely because the reference to Karl Marx irritated certain people. They read the columns, though. I got lots of hate mail.
Dark secret: Journalists love hate mail.
The students who founded the Flambeau in 1915, back when Florida State University was the Florida State College for Women, may have been nicely brought-up young ladies, but they were still deeply engaged in the world around them. Sure, they reported on campus teas, but they also cast a cold eye on the powerful. In the 1920s, the content in the paper started advocating for female suffrage, and in the decades that followed, it advocated for the right to wear trousers and leave campus without an escort.
A staff member creating the layout board for the Flambeau in the 1960s. Photography courtesy of Florida State University Digital Repository.
It wasn’t all feminine wiles: The paper covered sports—especially after the college became officially coed in 1947 and instantly cobbled together a football team—as well as out-of-the-mainstream movies, books and bands. Until the counterculture became the culture at FSU, the Flambeau even had a “Greek editor” whose job it was to report on fraternities and sororities. Carter White House speech writer, politician and environmental activist Robert Rackleff held the proud title of “Greek editor” in the early 1960s.
Florida State’s small journalism program was abolished in 1959. Undeterred, the Flambeau’s editors and staff taught each other to report, write and put out a newspaper examining issues such as AIDS, abortion, campus rape and the exploitation of immigrant farm workers.
Social justice was always the beating heart of the paper. It supported Tallahassee’s lunch counter sit-ins and civil rights marches. In 1960, editor Virginia Delavan got arrested at a demonstration. She planned to put a big story about students’ anti-Jim Crow activism on page one. FSU administrators said no. She ran a blank cover in protest.
But as Bugs Bunny liked to say, “Of course, you realize this means war.” The more the legislature and the people running FSU disapproved of the paper’s embrace of racial equality and loud opposition to the Vietnam War, the more the paper fought back. It embraced activists such as “Radical Jack” Lieberman, who got expelled for teaching a class called “How to Make a Revolution in the United States” at FSU’s Center for Participant Education. On March 4, 1969, when Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held a nonviolent event on campus, FSU called in riot police carrying M1 rifles. The paper called it the “Night of Bayonets.”
College brass and lawmakers wanted to silence the Flambeau and the University of Florida’s paper, The Florida Alligator. That was never going to work: The newspapers had a right to free speech. In 1972, FSU President J. Stanley Marshall responded by cutting the Flambeau’s funding and kicking it off campus.
It trained us all to question authority, tell a good story and try to make a difference in the world.
—Diane Roberts
This was the best thing that ever happened to the Flambeau; it was throwing Brer Rabbit into the briar patch. The paper loved a good briar patch, the stickier the better. Freed from the administration’s censorious ways, the paper began to generate ad revenue while continuing to lob journalistic stink bombs at what was then called The Establishment. Rick Johnson, who had been a leading member of SDS, became general manager. In 1973, Tommy Warren, former quarterback for the Seminoles, Flambeau sports editor and now a renowned civil rights lawyer, helped the paper break a national story about how FSU coach Larry Jones tried to “toughen up” his players by forcing them to perform brutal and illicit “drills” in chicken wire cages. The following year, the paper scandalized the community with a photo of three buck-naked young gents cavorting outside Tully Gym. A witness observed, “That’s an awful unusual way to go about getting a tan on your heinie.” It was a legit news story: The streaking phenomenon had begun at FSU, and the paper reported it with a (mostly) straight face.
By the late 1990s, the world had turned: Many FSU students were more interested in high-earning careers than dissent. Advertising money dried up, and the paper shut down. A rival paper, the FSView, bought the name and began publishing as the FSView & Florida Flambeau.
During the Flambeau’s early days, the paper was delivered in a red wagon called the Flambeau Fiber. Photography courtesy of Florida Memory.
The Flambeau wasn’t just a great extracurricular college activity. It trained us all to question authority, tell a good story and try to make a difference in the world. Some Flam alums are lawyers, judges, mayors, teachers, community organizers, tech gurus and entrepreneurs. Many went on to stellar careers at the Associated Press, The New York Times, Politico, The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Tampa Bay Times, NPR and the BBC. Martin Dyckman, legendary St. Petersburg Times newsman, learned his craft at the Flambeau and continued speaking truth to power as a Sun Sentinel columnist. Former Flambeau editor Michael Moline runs the Florida Phoenix, part of the national States Newsroom network. The first editor I worked for, a red-headed boy named Sid Bedingfield, became vice president and senior executive producer at CNN; Doug Marlette, whose Flambeau cartoons satirized officialdom, won a Pulitzer Prize; Carol Marbin Miller of the Miami Herald holds extensive state and national awards for investigative reporting; Moni Basu, another writer whose elegant prose appears in this magazine, is an awarded Iraq War reporter and the head of the University of Georgia’s graduate Narrative Nonfiction program.
The Flambeau taught me to think about words: how they shape the world, how they can expose wrongs and help right them, how they can make people see what they’d rather not see. Every time I am lucky enough to get my writing in The Washington Post or The Atlantic or Flamingo, I know it’s because years ago, I—like all those people I just mentioned—walked into a scruffy newsroom full of clever misfits who believed first and foremost in journalism’s Great Commandment: comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
Diane is an eighth-generation Floridian, educated at Florida State University and Oxford University. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian and the Tampa Bay Times. She has also authored four books, including “Dream State,” a historical memoir of Florida.
