Stetson Kennedy

Died August 27, 2011 at age 94. Kennedy was named for his mother’s kin, the hatter John Batterson Stetson. His parents were Willye Stetson and George Wallace Kennedy. His father was from Statesboro, and his mother's family was from Macon and Milledgeville. The Stetson Sanford House in Milledgeville, which serves as headquarters for the Old Capital Museum Society, is a family home on his mother's side. Kennedy became enamored with Floridian folkways at an early age, and wrote poetry about Florida nature during his youth. He was educated in Jacksonville's public schools and in 1935 enrolled briefly at the University of Florida.

"He was a giant, said Peggy Bulger, a friend, protege and director of American Folklife for the Library of Congress. "He never quit working. Last time I talked to him he was still full of p--- and vinegar.

He was Florida's Homer, a talking history book, a troublemaker, a scamp, a radical and a shameless promoter of everything Stetson.

I got to know him late in his life. Now and again I visited him at the North Florida home he called Beluthahatchee — "Heaven" in the Seminole Indian language. His little paradise, sort of a rickety cabin on stilts perched over a swamp near the St. Johns River, will become a museum now that he is gone.

He grew up down the road in Jacksonville, left home for the University of Florida, enrolled in a writing class taught by an up-and-coming author named Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, quit college, took the train to Key West, drank rum, chased woman, married his first wife and wrote down everything he found interesting, which was quite a lot.

He made his mark during the Depression as a writer and editor of Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State, which was part of a Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal project to provide work to unemployed writers. Helping him gather information in the Florida hinterlands was another pauper, the African-American author Zora Neale Hurston, who had recently published her novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

SOURCE: http://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/wildlife/floridas-homer-fo...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stetson_Kennedy