By Bill Bunker

10/2003

Editor's Note: This is the third of a multi-part series on the history of Seminole Boosters and is written by former FSU Sports Information director Bill Bunker who served from 1963 to 1966.

Early '70's bring disaster, then promise for the future

An array of new faces greeted fans attending Florida State's 1971 football home-opener against Kansas.

On the sidelines Larry Jones stood where Bill Peterson had paced for 11 years. Clay Stapleton had replaced Vaughn Mancha as athletic director. On the midfield turf, a painted Seminole head in full battle cry made its debut as the new symbol of FSU's athletic program.

The game program featured five pages of donors to the National Seminole Club, which had replaced the Seminole Boosters organization as the athletic department's fund-raising vehicle and included all sports, rather than just football. The new organization's executive director was Jim Olsen, a former Seminole lineman from Quincy.

Gary Huff

Catalyst for these dramatic changes was Dr. Stanley Marshall, who had assumed the Florida State presidency two years earlier in the middle of a student uprising led by some radical non-student imports which had driven his predecessor, John Champion, from office.

Student unrest over the Viet Nam war and other social issues was the byword of the times as FSU became known as the "Berkeley of the East." The athletic program, particularly football, would be greatly affected, but no one who saw the Seminoles win their third straight under Jones that sunny September day could possibly have predicted the chaos to come, nor its long-term effects.

Peterson's departure was both unexpected and impulsive. The popular coach had campaigned for some time for the AD's job, but Marshall was not inclined to give it to him. When his quest following the 1970 season was denied, he accepted an offer from Rice University which gave him the dual role he sought at FSU. He changed his mind the next day and asked Marshall to take him back, but the decision had already been announced in the media, and Marshall thought things had gone beyond the point of no return.

Marshall took an active role in picking his successor. "Bill Peterson had done great things in getting us ready for a better brand of football, and when he left in 1970, I was confident the program would advance," he said. "Larry Jones, who had been heading the defense at Tennessee, was highly recommended as the kind of guy who could build a great program, and had it not been for the catastrophe at the end of his second year, I think he would have."

Next on Marshall's list was the athletic directorship. Shortly after the arrival of Jones, Mancha left the post for a faculty position. Stapleton, who was athletic director at Iowa State, reported in April of 1971, bringing with him the concept of a new fund-raising plan.

"I was looking for an AD who would take charge and be responsible," Marshall said. "I thought Clay was a take-charge guy. The National Seminole Club was Clay's idea. He ran it past me, and I approved it."

When he arrived at FSU, Stapleton found a system in transition from a locally-controlled businessmen's club to a university-run scholarship organization. In 1970, the FSU athletic department had introduced a priority ticket plan tied to Booster contributions and had announced plans to assume administrative control of the funds. Booster contributions reached a milestone that year, raising $100, 231 under the leadership of President Doyle Pope of Quincy.

Stapleton brought a successful fund-raising model used at Iowa State and discovered compelling reasons for change in his new job. "I thought it was necessary," he said. "Money was going in every direction with each sport operating independently. I felt it necessary to organize our income."

Included in his plan was the hiring of FSU's first full-time athletic fund-raiser. Almost from its beginning, the Boosters had been administered by the school's alumni association with the alumni director doubling as executive secretary of the Boosters. Citing insufficient funds, the board rejected several requests by Alumni Director Tom Waits to hire a full-time worker for the Boosters during the 1960s.

Stapleton's choice, Jim Olsen, is a Pensacola native who went to high school in Quincy, played at FSU for Tom Nugent (1953-54), and spent a decade following graduation coaching in high school and college (Tampa U). He was in the insurance business in Tampa when, as a member of a local booster group, he helped sell tickets for the 1970 FSU-Houston game there, attracting the attention of FSU Athletic Business Manager Doug Messer and Ticket Manager Claude Thigpen who suggested him to Stapleton as a possible candidate for the booster job.

A large man, both in physical size and personality, Olsen hit Tallahassee like a whirlwind on June 6, 1971. "D-Day in more ways than one," he said.

Waiting for him, he found Stapleton's organizational concept and the new Seminole logo, not yet widely in use.

The story of how one of college football's most recognized symbols came to be is the opposite of the dramatic impact it delivers today. For years, Mancha, an accomplished graphic artist and photographer, had unsuccessfully sought a symbol to replace the cherubic little Indian that FSU was using.

The final product was developed gradually, according to Messer. "We got help from some art students, and our Sports Information Office under Lonnie Burt had a great deal of input," he said. "We probably had a half-dozen choices, narrowed them down, refined our final choice, and then just started using it without any big announcement.

Olsen, for one, jumped on it. "The minute I saw it, I fell it love with it and started using it on everything," he said. Olsen also initiated the trademarking process which has produced untold dollars for the university during the past three decades. "FSU's attorney thought I was crazy to want to pay $50 to trademark each item that might carry the logo," he said. "They said nobody would ever make any money off this stuff. I sat down in their office and made a list of about 50 things I thought we might sell.

"The logo was hot the minute it hit the street. We ordered some shirts and couldn't keep them in stock. At the inaugural Fiesta Bowl at the end of the 1971 season, the Seminole head was shown on national TV for the first time. It overwhelmed Arizona State's cartoon Sun Devil."

To flesh out Stapleton's National Seminole Club concept, Olsen traveled to Columbia, S.C., to meet with the director of the Gamecock Club, then the nation's top collegiate fund-raiser. "I copied a lot of stuff from them, including the club's logo, the double circle over a banner. I just substituted our Seminole head for their Gamecock and changed the text."

A major innovation of the National Seminole Club, continued to this day, was the establishment of levels of giving with corresponding benefits and recognition. The levels in 1971 were Full Scholarship Donor--$1,000; Half Scholarship Donor--$500; Quarter Scholarship Donor--$250; and Century Club--$100, in addition to regular $40 memberships.

In 1971, nine Full Scholarship Donors were listed in the FSU football game magazine. By 1973, there were 76. Amid radical changes, Herschel Williams served out his term as Booster president in 1971 collecting a total of $125,000.

The next year brought even more changes to the club's structure. Gone was the Tallahassee-dominated board of directors, replaced by a board selected and recruited by Olsen to reflect a national flavor. The new president was FSU law student Kim Hammond, an outstanding quarterback in the late '60s. He was followed in 1973 by Boston Celtic center Dave Cowens. Both were selected for name recognition, and neither was expected to assist in fund raising outside a few personal appearances. Still, the totals rose -- $150,525 in 1972, $200,000 in 1973.

Larry Jones

But, the times were catching up to FSU football. A 7-4 season, including the Fiesta Bowl, in 1971 produced great expectations for 1972. Although the Seminoles equaled their '71 record, opinions developed concerning a perceived lack of discipline on the team. Jones toughened up his offseason conditioning program, the widely-publicized "chicken wire drills" that resulted in numerous player departures and probably contributed to the player unrest that was a part of the widespread student protests of the times.

Jones never recovered from what he felt were unfair accusations. The Seminoles went 0-11 in 1973, and Larry Jones became the first FSU football coach to be fired. Marshall, to this day, acknowledges that decision to be one of the toughest he made as president.

Meanwhile, Stapleton used his national contacts to change Florida State's football future in a different way. In less than two years as athletic director, he scheduled more than 20 games, all on the road, against very substantial opponents--LSU, Ohio State, Nebraska, Notre Dame and more. Marshall fully supported the audacious endeavor.

"Clay came to me in the spring of 1972 and said he believed we could schedule Nebraska, Ohio State and some of those teams if we want to do it," Marshall said. "We sort of looked at one another and said it seems like an absurd thing to do. We believed that at some point Florida State was going to make the transition to major college football, and to do that, we would have to play the big teams.

"My reaction was that with Stapleton's ability to schedule those teams we had better take advantage of it, because it might be a long time before we had that chance again, however good we may be. He had personal acquaintances with all the Midwest people and was well-regarded. We were their homecoming opponents. I remember in 1973 looking at the calendar for 1981 and thinking, something good better happen here in the next eight years, and in my gut, I just felt it would."

Stapleton, a Tennessean never comfortable in Tallahassee, resigned in early 1973 to become athletic director at Vanderbilt. His successor, John Bridgers, would stay longer, smooth some troubled waters and launch FSU into its next period of accomplishment.

Darrell Mudra

In the spring of 1974, with new coach Darrell Mudra yet to play his first game, Florida State faced a financial crisis. Despite record contributions to the National Seminole Club, the athletic program was deeply in debt.

One Saturday morning, Marshall called a meeting which changed the course of the Boosters yet again. The National Seminole Club would disappear and Seminole Boosters, Inc. would resurface.

Through the years, this meeting has been described as an ultimatum for FSU football delivered by the Board of Regents. Marshall sets the record straight:

"I called the meeting of major supporters of our program and invited Marshall Criser, Chairman of the Board of Regents, because I thought the Regents should be informed about what was going on in athletics," Marshall said. "At the meeting were the mainstays of the boosters in Tallahassee. I told them if you want to have the kind of program that Florida State can have, then you've got to put up money of the kind you haven't done in the past. If you don't, the consequences are dire. I now hear people say I recommended that we cut back the program, but it was just the opposite.

"The response was fairly immediate. We had real participation by boosters. Before that time we had some well-meaning people who gave us money. With reestablishment of the Boosters, we had an organization."

Although the time of Clay Stapleton, Jim Olsen and the National Seminole Club was brief, positive effects linger. The schedules set in motion by Stapleton and Marshall propelled FSU into national prominence in the 1980s.

The basic outline of giving categories and recognition established then survives to this day in a much expanded format, and the Seminole head logo, which Olsen helped introduce, stands as one of college athletics most distinctive symbols.

Dr. Stan Marshall served as FSU's president until 1976. He is the founder and chief executive officer of the James Madison Institute in Tallahassee and a member of the FSU Board of Trustees.

Jim Olsen returned to active duty in the Army and retired as a full colonel. He lives in St. Augustine, is a Varsity Club member and season ticket holder. Clay Stapleton retired to a farm in Marshall, Mo. Doug Messer is the chief of operations of the Longhorn Foundation for the University of Texas.

Next: Seminole Boosters, Inc. answers the call as George Langford, Andy Miller, Bobby Bowden, Osceola and Renegade charge into a suddenly bright future.