STETSON UNIVERSITY HISTORY NEWSLETTER
DeLand, Florida
December, 1974
Dear Former Stetson History Student (and a few others):
DELAND: Our town is especially delightful in the fall. The hibiscus and
poinsettias are in blossom, native birds are joined by newcomers from the North,
the giant old oaks retain most of their leaves and the oranges are no longer
green. The town retains the flavor of a rural, small village, where everything
is everybody's business. It is the kind of town where a salesman in a shoe store
remembers the size of your foot, although progress is encroaching upon us—high
rise condominiums, new shopping centers, and now MORGAN WELCH '68 is building a
Sizzlin' Steak House on the Boulevard where he formerly housed the DeLand Sun-
News. As I walk to the campus, I think that there cannot be any place as beautiful
as DeLand in the morning.
THE NEWSLETTER: This is the second (and the last for a while) Newsletter.
Like the last one it brings news of the department, and, for those who have not
yet contributed, a request for donations to the Lycan Fund. In addition, it is
intended to thank over a hundred people who have contributed to make the fund a
success. Although we have almost enough money to refurbish the seminar room,
we will continue to receive donations, and the surplus will be used for the
purchase of books to augment the History Department's normal budget. My friends
will be happy to know that I will forthwith retire from fund-raising and leave
this task to our able Development Director, MIKE CHERTOK. This is not to say
that we have met all of our needs. If you■ know someone who has the money and
would like to have a men's room named for him on the third floor of Elizabeth
Hall, let me know; we could thereby remedy something that John B. Stetson forgot.
One cannot write about Stetson history students without talking about non-
history majors as well. We have no way of identifying history majors from alumni
records. Everyone, prior to the last few years, took some history courses, and
the History Department fathered two other Departments, American Studies in 1955
and Political Science in 1965. Many alumni mentioned in this letter are majors
in other areas.
WHERE ARE THEY NOW: Some Stetson folk are embarrassed at the number of our
former faculty and staff members who have left us and gone on to greatness in
other institutions. I am proud that many of my former colleagues have done so
well and that Stetson has served as a training ground for some of the nation's
foremost scholars. JAMES D. BARBER, now Chairman of Duke's Political Science
Department, was in the History and Political Science Department at Stetson before
the Department was divided. Dave is the nation's top authority on the presidential
psyche (a real growth industry) and has published several books including
The Presidential Character. He writes fondly of his Stetson days.
ARTHUR F. (FAR) TUTTLE '57 served as Assistant to Dean McEniry in the days
when government and private grants were plentiful. Far's sharp blue pencil cut
through much of my prose in foundation proposals and improved the language to
such an extent that we sometimes received the grant. Indeed, while President
Edmunds and Dean McEniry were partially responsible for the large Ford Foundation
Challenge Grant that aided Stetson so much in the early 1960's, Far, too, was
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