7 Questions with Melissa Sullebarger, Curator of Education at the Henry B. Plant Museum, Tampa

 

    Melissa Sullebarger considers herself a native of Tampa, FL, despite the minor detail of having spent the first several months of her life in upstate New York. She began working in informal education at 15 years old, teaching children about nature and history as a counselor at local summer camps. She has been working in the museum field since graduating college, when she took on a part-time position at a living history museum and fell in love with museum work. Eight years and a MA in Museum Studies later, Melissa is the Curator of Education at the Henry B. Plant Museum of Tampa, FL. ( https://www.plantmuseum.com/ )

 

1.            How and when did you get hooked on history?

 

My parents were both big advocates for education both in traditional academia and as a form of casual entertainment. Every family vacation from a very young age included museums, historic sites, botanical gardens, aquariums… all kinds of informal education. My parents made a particular point of traveling around different parts of Florida as my brother and I were growing up—neither of my parents is originally from Florida, but after moving here when I was less than a year old they wanted us to grow up knowledgeable about our new home.

Growing up as the talkative youngest child in a family full of well-educated lively conversationalists may have also been a contributing factor. I wanted to participate! It was a strong early motivator both to learn and to get good at communication.

I didn’t truly recognize how much interest I had developed in history until I was working toward my undergraduate degree—initially an English major, I added History and became a double major due to the influence of several excellent history professors.

 

2.            What role does history play or has it played in your personal life?

 

A shared interest in history connects me to my family as well as my closest friends. My partner and I initially bonded as friends by watching documentaries together and discussing history as filtered through the lenses created by our respective experiences.

 

3.            How does history play a part of your professional life/career?

 

As a current Curator of Education and in my previous roles in museums, history has played an extremely prominent role in my work. Communicating history to the public via planned exhibits and programming, training docents, and writing physical signage and online content has made up a large portion of my work.

In a less direct sense, as someone who works inside a National Historic Landmark, I am surrounded by history both in the sense that the walls of my office are lined with books and binders full of research, and in the sense that 100 years ago, my office was a part of a suite of guest rooms in the Tampa Bay Hotel that served as temporary home to countless prominent people throughout the years of the Hotel’s operation.

 

4.            Why is studying/knowing history important ?

 

We all benefit from larger context and broader understanding of the world we live in, and we all benefit from more of us having that understanding. No moment is an island, every event or development in our modern world has roots throughout historical events, which in turn have their own genealogies through history. Knowing history, and continuously broadening our knowledge of history from multiple perspectives gives each of us a stronger understanding of the world we live in, and better prepares us to create a positive future.

 

5.            What is your favorite period or aspect of history to learn about and why?

 

This question is a real challenge—the answer changes constantly. My work over the past decade both in my current and previous positions has been very focused on Reconstruction Era-1910s Florida, and it is a region and era that I have loved studying and bringing to the public. In many way it is an era in which Florida accelerated rapidly into “modernity.”

My first historic love was ancient and classical Mediterranean history, in my case with a particular interest in Egypt and the Phoenicians. I also have a strong interest in 20^th century American sociocultural history, I’m fascinated by the shifted forms of Americana throughout the decades.

 

6.            What is the history of the Henry B. Plant Museum?

 

The Henry B Plant Museum occupies the first-floor south hallway of the enormous minaret-topped brick building in downtown Tampa. The structure and 150 acres of the land surrounding it (most of which is now the University of Tampa campus) were once the rail and steam tycoon Henry Plant’s most elaborate all-inclusive winter hotel—the Tampa Bay Hotel. The Hotel opened in 1891 and in 1898 became the staging point for US military forces fighting in the Caribbean theaters of the Spanish-American War. The hotel was purchased by the City of Tampa in 1905 and continued operating as a hotel until 1932, when the costs of operation became too high in the face of the Great Depression.

 

7.            What do you hope visitors to the Plant Museum learn and take away with them?

 

The Henry B. Plant Museum holds the distinction of accreditation by the American Alliance of Museums. Its mission is to interpret the Tampa Bay Hotel and the experiences of the diverse individuals who contributed to its success. The Museum ignites thought and transports visitors to another era through exhibits and innovative programs, so that they may be educated and inspired by the lifestyles, times and experiences of Florida’s early tourist industry. Visitors are immersed in the opulence of the 1891 Tampa Bay Hotel and its rich history.

 

7 Questions with Author Joshua Ginsburg

 

Joshua Ginsberg is the author of “Secret Tampa Bay: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful and Obscure,” and the upcoming “TB Scavenger.” He is a writer, entrepreneur, blogger and curiosity seeker who moved to the Tampa Bay Area from Chicago in 2016. He has had numerous published works of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, and has been a business proposal writer and professional resume writer for over 10 years. He currently lives in Tampa’s Town and Country neighborhood with his wife, Jen, and their Shih Tzu, Tinker Bell. 

1. How and/or when did you get hooked on history?

I’ve been fascinated with history for as long as I can remember. As a kid it was medieval times, as I got a bit older I developed an interest in ancient history, especially Mesopotamian history. I grew up in a house of readers and my father especially was a reader of history. I think he really helped instill that appreciation in me – we shared books like Steven Pressfield’s “Tides of War” about Alcibiades and the books of Gary Jennings. A lot of historical fiction around the idea of exploration. 

My mother later on went back to school and studied art history, which tells the story of our collective past in a very different way. I’ve always been interested in art as well, so she and I also shared this interest. She liked a lot of impressionists, particularly Mary Cassatt. I gravitated a bit more toward the more intense works of Caravaggio, but still we found a lot of common ground. 

And as a Gen Xer, of course I also grew up watching the Indiana Jones films, which had me and all my friends firmly convinced as kids that we wanted to be archeologists when we grew up.  

2. What role does history play or has it played in your personal life?

Different types of history have and continue to play an increasingly integral role in my world. For one thing there’s personal history – my memories of my childhood and the friends I had back then. In particular I think a lot about my close friend Steven who passed away several years ago – he and I were both awkward, geeky kids and writers. I remember the mystery and novelty of everything – the way the whole world seemed to be infused with magic and secrets to uncover. That sense of wonder is something I’ve focused on trying to recapture, and in doing so, it put me on the path to write Secret Tampa Bay.

And then there’s History (with a capitol “H”) – our shared human experience of a time and place. For me the focus has largely been on the history of a specific location. After Steven passed on and my wife and I decided we didn’t want to spend the rest of forever in Chicago, I put together a list of things you can only do in Chicago, and we started working our way through it together as a way of saying goodbye to that city. Some of the things on the list were touristy like riding the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier, or taking a mafia tour, or having a brownie at the Palmer House Hilton, and some were pretty obscure like finding the grave of Captain George W. Streeter. But all of these things showed me the city and its history in a new way. What I quickly realized was that even though I had lived in Chicago for ten years and thought I knew it pretty well, really all I knew was a couple dozen blocks of it. I had barely scratched the surface! The Haymarket Riot, the Pullman District, the Chicago Fire, and of course all the astounding architecture – so many things I’d never deeply examined before. It was a paradigm shift for me. It gave me a new way to see and understand a place, both its beauty and its ugliness. What started as a lark pretty quickly became a real passion for me. 

3. How will history play a part of your professional life/career?

It has certainly been playing a vastly larger role than I expected. When I started writing Secret Tampa Bay, the prospect of filling ninety chapters with different local oddities and unique sites seemed pretty daunting, but by the end of it the issue was just the opposite – that I actually had more content than I could include. And the more questions I sought answers to, the more questions I found I had. The deeper I delved into the rabbit holes of local history, the deeper they seemed to go and I’ve still yet to reach the bottom of them. 

I’ve just finished a first draft of my next book, “TB Scavenger,” which is essentially a massive scavenger hunt throughout the Tampa Bay area composed of sixty rhyming riddles. This was great because it let me include a lot of things that I hadn’t been able to fit into Secret Tampa Bay. It’s also a way of “gamifying” the exploration of local history and sharing not only what I’ve found along the way, but a bit of my process – how I seek these things out and the thrill of finding them.

And then next year I’m scheduled to release “Oldest Tampa Bay,” which will be a compilation of the oldest of everything in the area, from boatyards to bars to bridges and lighthouses and skyscrapers. I didn’t realize it at the time, but these books are also a way of preserving history – even in the five years I’ve lived in Tampa I’ve seen the city change, and a lot of things are vanishing. A couple years ago Airstream Ranch – a local roadside attraction, was removed. Just this past year after a century Haslam’s Bookstore closed its doors. So seeing and writing about these places is important to me, because not all of them will be around in the future. 

4. Why is studying/knowing history important?

I like to understand not just how but why things happen, why cities get their nicknames, why the Cuban Sandwich became the official food of Tampa. That’s history – understanding why things happened, and as a result, being better able to understand what’s happening today. From politics to economics to technological innovations to environmental changes – these aren’t things that just happen spontaneously, but rather often over years and decades and even centuries. Being able to understand that – the direction of things, I guess what some would call “the arc of history,” without any interest in or sense of that, we become a sort of amnesiac culture. 

Living in Tampa has opened my eyes to ancient history in a new way too. Growing up, ancient history always seemed like something that happened somewhere else – Greece, Egypt, Europe, Asia. Distant lands. But being here in Tampa I’m surrounded by shell mounds and earthworks that are every bit as old as some of the pyramids, it’s made me fundamentally rethink what “ancient” is. Living here has really shaken me out of the persistent fallacy that American History begins with the arrival of Europeans, when it had been going along for thousands of years before that. 

Trying to understand the secret face of a place – that’s become a passion for me, and there’s just no way to understand a place or its people and culture without really getting familiar with its history. And in coming to understand a place, I’m finding that I come to understand new things about myself as well.

5. What is your favorite period or aspect of history to learn about and why?

I wouldn’t say that I have one specific time period that I’m focused on, but lately I find myself fixating more on the idea of “Americana.” By that I mean those things that are quintessentially American, from road-side attractions to the circus and tiki culture and drive-in movie theaters. Most of those are from before my time, but I’ve developed a real affinity for them. And some of it is being lost – the last of the big top circuses is gone now, for example. I guess the closest thing to that today would be something like Burning Man or one of the big music festivals, but they’re not really quite the same things.

Conversely though, the pandemic has actually brought some of these things back. Last year was the first, I believe, in decades when more drive-in theaters actually opened than closed down. That gives me hope that maybe these things aren’t really truly lost but rather waiting for the right circumstances to be reborn.

Why is that important to me? For a few reasons, I think. For one thing, these were shared experiences that in many cases transcended gender, race and especially politics. These were American experiences, and in losing them we lose these shared points of cultural reference. We lose a bit of who we are. 

6. How did you come up with the idea to write Secret Tampa Bay: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful and Obscure.?

Maybe you’ve heard the expression, “luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity” before? That’s very much the case with how the book came to be – it was the confluence of several different things at just the right time. As I mentioned earlier, before moving to Florida I had just started to see places in a new way and was on this mission to reawaken myself to a sense of awe and wonder and curiosity. When my wife and I moved to Tampa, we continued on this trend, creating our adventure lists. I had found several resources like Roadside America and Weird Florida and especially Atlas Obscura, and eventually I wasn’t just using that latter site but also submitting my own writeups. 

A couple years into living here, my pipeline of work as a resume writer and business proposal writer started becoming less reliable, and I started thinking about ways to add in a new stream of revenue.

And then my wife and I were scheduled to go see my family in Philadelphia, but had to cancel when her dad had a health problem. I had this book I’d picked up called “Secret Philadelphia: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful and Obscure,” and as I was leafing through it, I thought to myself, I could write something like this about Tampa. Suddenly it struck me that between my blog and some of the pieces I’d been writing for Atlas Obscura, essentially I already had written it. So I looked online to see if the publisher, Reedy Press, had a title covering Tampa Bay, which they did not. I put together a mock table of contents based on the things I would want to include, then I called and asked the woman I spoke to there if they were looking for someone to write Secret Tampa Bay. I expected her to say they weren’t interested, but instead I was asked to follow up with the owner, and after some discussion, writing samples and a marketing plan, I had a signed contract. Preparation and opportunity. It is in no way hyperbole to say that call changed my life.

7. What are a couple of your favorite Tampa Bay secrets?

It’s hard to choose just a few, but I feel a special sense of pride about those things I really had to dig deep to discover. The Warlock’s House in Wesley Chapel – that’s the sort of thing that really only a small number of locals know about. The same with the Grave of Charlie Smith who claimed to be America’s oldest man. Kapok Gardens is another local gem – arguably one of the best places to take a date on a picnic. But almost every day it seems like I’m learning about new and unusual things, like the Weeping Icon of St. Nicholas in the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Tarpon Springs to the country’s first open-air post office in St. Petersburg (which is a remarkably beautiful building) to the prayer grotto at St. Leo University. 

Ultimately, for me there’s as much of a thrill in seeking these places as in finding them, so I guess you could say that my absolute favorite Tampa Bay secret is always the one I’m going to find next.

7 Questions with Ersula Odom

 

Ersula K. Odom is CEO of Sula Too LLC, a legacy writer, the author and co-author of several books including African Americans of Tampa and her poetic memoir – At Sula’s Feet. She is a motivational speaker, creates legacy walls, and portrays Mary McLeod Bethune as a one-person show. As founder of Sula Too, LLC she has published books for clients from Georgia to California. She was raised in Georgia, graduated from Eckerd College and is deeply rooted in Tampa with business, family, and friends. 

Recent commendations: Signed copy of Congressional Record of Dr. Bethune’s decision to place her stature in Statuary Hall in DC presented to her by U.S. Senator Bill Nelson.  Performance written about in the Wall Street Journal. She received separate commendations from Tampa City Council Commendation for her roles as co-founder of Fortune Friends and as member of the Citizens Advisory Committee on the Economic Impact of Cultural Arts. 

As a motivational speaker, Ms. Odom has the uncommon ability to relate to multi-generational and multi-cultural audiences by sharing experiences from such areas as rural living, college life, Fortune 500 corporate management, spirituality, being a mother, entrepreneurship, sales, and genealogy to publishing books. 

Today, the title of her performance is “Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune Comes to Life.” Dr Bethune “comes to life” during the 1950’s to share  her thoughts regarding  her life’s story.   She will then answer questions. After Dr. Bethune leaves the stage, Ersula will answer questions regarding her research and personal journey. www.sulatoo.com . She also leads black history walking tours of Tampa for the Tampa Bay History Center.

1. How and/or when did you get you hooked on history?

My earliest memory is crawling under my grandmother’s bed and retrieving a box full of wonder. A “Have a Tampa” cigar box full of old photos, letters, stamps and a lot of my grandmother’s sister’s hair. I have been hooked on such things since that moment.

2. What role does history play or has it played in your personal life?

I am my family’s historian. The go to person for the family tree and keeper of the memories

I authored my first book  At Sula’s Feet which is rooted in those memories. Life lessons learned at my grandmother’s feet. I remembered and wrote about the wit and wisdom that made my childhood sweet.

And I formed a publishing company to help others tell their stories. 

3. How is/How was history a part of your professional life/career?

Publishing company focus

I formed a publishing company to help others tell their stories. Everyone has at least one story that circle around their head and exits far too many times to the same people. Sula Too Publishing helps these people release the stories to the universe in search of those who may need them.

4. Why is studying/knowing history important?

History shortens the time and path to informed decisions.

5. What is your favorite period or aspect of history to learn about and why?

Post slavery through 1950s because I know these people. They were my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. They were bits of me.

6. How did you start telling the African -American story of Tampa and Florida?

I was a reporter and then editor for The Weekly Challenger News which led to my writing, photographing and collecting local stories. 

I was approached by Arcadia Publishing to write a book. Accepting this opportunity set me on the joyous journey of wandering through 15,000 archived photos and going house to house in searching to the names of the faces I held in my hands.

7. Why is telling local African-American history so important ?

It is now so timely. The students are ready. Lessons can be learned that will help make sense of the world we live in.

History is the key to understanding humanity, life situations and people.

History aids in “predicting the future”