P: I Am About to Interview Marshall Criser, a Former President of The
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P: I am about to interview Marshall Criser, a former president of the University of Florida and we are here in his office in Jacksonville, Florida and this is May 10, 1994. I will ask you, first of all, for your full name. C: My full name is Marshall McAllister Criser Jr. My father was “senior” and I have a son who is Marshall McAllister Criser the third. P: When were you born? C: September 4, 1928. P: And where were you born? C: I was born in Rumson, a small town in New Jersey. It is a bedroom community, about fifty miles south of New York City. P: I want to go back, Marshall, and ask you to identify this building we are in now, so we have it on tape. C: Well, we are in the Barnett Center, which is a forty-two story high-rise building in downtown Jacksonville, the newest office building in the city. It is owned by Barnett Bank. There are several law firms and stock brokers and the like in this building. P: And we are on the thirty-fourth floor of the building. And what is the name of the law office we are in? C: The law firm is Mahoney, Adams and Criser. It is the oldest law firm in continuous operation in Florida. It was founded in 1854 by a former governor, [Francis P.] Fleming [governor of Florida 1889-1893] and it has had many name changes over the years and many personnel changes. P: This was Frances P. Fleming? C: That is right. P: and he was governor of Florida from 1888 to 1892 [dates of elections; inaugurations follow several months later], a very old family in this area. He started the firm here in Jacksonville? C: He did. And he was the original attorney when Barnett Bank was organized. P: All right. Let us talk a little bit about your family. First of all, tell me something about your father, Marshall Criser Sr. 1 C: My father was born in Roanoke, Virginia, and was raised in West Virginia. I never knew his parents. He had a falling out with his father after his mother died, and his father remarried and my father was not happy with the situation. He left home at a relatively early age, had a high school diploma and never had any further formal education. He was with the United States Army, stationed at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey when he met my mother. P: Was that during World War I or later? C: It was after World War I. My father was born in 1900, and he would have been in his twenties when he was at Fort Monmouth. As I said, I never knew my paternal grandparents. My paternal grandfather was Scotch descent. In fact the name was always pronounced “Cris-ser,” but for some reason, I never pronounced it that way. That was the way my father pronounced it. My maternal grandmother was Irish, and Mary McAllister was her family name. That is how I got my middle name. P: And the middle name is spelled with double “l.” So that was the family name on your grandmother's side of the family. But you have had no contact with the grandparents on your father's side, or with that part of your family? C: None, whatsoever. In fact, just in recent years, I obtained one of those books that trace the genealogy of families. I found there were some Crisers throughout the country, principally located in Virginia and in Kansas. There was one in Fort Myers, Florida that I saw on the list, but I have never contacted any of them. P: What business was your father in? C: My father was a meat cutter. When I was a young boy, he worked as a meat cutter in a grocery store, in a resort town named Sea Bright. It was right next to Rumson, a little resort town on the Atlantic Ocean. P: You said your mother and father met when he was in the military. Who was your mother? C: My mother was Louise Johnson. Her actual name was Hildur Louise Johnson. Her father was a Swedish immigrant, who came to this country as a very young boy in an interesting way. He also had a situation where his father had remarried after his mother died. [He] then married a woman who was not much older than my grandfather and he was embarrassed by that. He went to sea when he was eleven years old. He was a cabin boy on a sailing vessel out of Stockholm, Sweden. He was born in Göteborg. P: Göteborg, on the west coast of Sweden? 2 C: Yes, Göteborg. So he went to sea when he was eleven, [and] was a cabin boy. When he was fourteen, he was shipwrecked in the Gulf of Mexico and he floated on flotsam or jetsam, or whatever you float on, was picked up by the Coast Guard and taken to New Orleans. There was an organization known as Travelers Aid. They were called in by some social group and since [my grandfather] spoke no English, obviously, all he could tell them was that he had some relatives in Brooklyn, New York. They pinned a message on the front of his jacket and put him on the train in New Orleans and sent him to New York. He arrived in New York, somehow got to Brooklyn, and when he arrived there, he found out the relatives had moved. They had moved down to this little resort town, or fishing town, on the coast of New Jersey, called Sea Bright. He was able to get down there, and to locate his relatives, and he literally spent the rest of his eighty-seven years in that little town as a commercial fisherman. It was a community of Danish and Swedish and a few Norwegian immigrants, really, who were the fishermen. His schedule was such that he fished there, off the coast of New Jersey, in the summertime. In the fall, he went to the Hudson River and fished for shad which were netted, and lived with other fishermen on houseboats. And in the wintertime, first he came to Fernandina, Florida, for many years. Then, probably over the last thirty years of his life, he and my grandmother went to Salerno, a little town just south of Stuart, Florida [now called Port Salerno]. And he was an active commercial fisherman until he was eighty-three years old. P: What brought him to Florida in the first place? The weather? C: The weather. That was where the fish were in the wintertime. P: So he fished in Fernandina, and then later on, in [Port] Salerno? C: Yes, in [Port] Salerno. P: So he lived a long, long life? C: Yes. He worked for many years and was always healthy. Commercial fishermen have a feast and a famine existence. You either have a good catch, and you [have] a little money in your jeans, or there are no fish. P: How did your parents meet? C: They met at a meeting at the First Methodist Church in Sea Bright. My father was in the army, my mother was a telephone operator in Sea Bright, and they 3 were at a church meeting at the First Methodist Church in Sea Bright. And they courted after that. Quickly as he could, [my father] got out of the service. I think in those days, you actually had to buy your way out. It did not take much, but if you had not finished your service period, you could buy your way out. He got a job as a meat cutter in a little grocery store there in Sea Bright. P: What brought him into the army in the first place? This is after World War I. C: It was a peacetime army, it was a poor army. There were really no inducements to do it. He was a young man without a good education, he had cut himself away from his father. He probably did it to have a roof over his head and regular meals. P: Now what brought the family to Florida? Was the grandfather who came to Fernandina the first member of the family [to come to Florida]? C: The first one to come to Florida was the grandfather, then by that time my parents came to Florida. My grandparents went to [Port] Salerno every winter. In 1941, Thanksgiving of 1941, and I can I remember it well, my father had this little independent grocery store. These were the times when the depression was almost over, but the war had not started. He used to have to take his little truck and go down to Delaware the Monday before Thanksgiving, and load up the truck with turkeys. They had their heads cut off, and that was all. They had not been de-feathered and they had not been gutted. He would bring this little pickup truck full of turkeys back to his store and he would work all Monday night, all Tuesday and Tuesday night into Wednesday cleaning those turkeys for Thanksgiving. Then, of course, the orders were there and the people would pick up their turkeys on Wednesday for Thanksgiving. He would be absolutely exhausted by Thanksgiving. When he came home that Thanksgiving, he said, "We will never spend another winter in the Northeast." It was cold and drizzly on the coast, and he never liked it. I would like to say that he sold his business, although I do not imagine he got much for it.