In 1980, Gary Mormino spent a year in Rome as a Fulbright scholar.
In Rome, Mormino read the news from Florida. There were the race riots in Miami, a campaign to make English the only language in U.S. government documents, a mass emigration of people from Cuba and Haiti to Florida.
Mormino thought: “The greatest story in my lifetime is unfolding not in Rome, but in Florida.”
Upon his return, Mormino dedicated his research to Florida history.
Since then, Gary Mormino co-founded the Florida studies program at USF St. Petersburg and became the Frank E. Duckwall Florida professor of history emeritus.
And in 2015, Mormino was awarded Florida Humanities Council’s 2015 Florida Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing. The award honors living Florida authors who published “a distinguished body of work” that has a major influence on Floridians.
“It’s a heavy award in that one of the previous recipients was Carl Hiassen,” said Mormino, the sixth writer to receive the award.“I find it gratifying that a historian won. Because of all the disciplines now, I think historians write the best prose for both an academic and a popular audience, and I hope I’ve bridged the two.”
From a field of 15 nominees, a five-person panel chose him. The award will be presented at the Florida Book Awards held at the Governor’s Mansion in Tallahassee on April 10.
Despite the honor, Mormino doesn’t let it go to his head.
“I also realize that awards are very subjective, and I don’t take it too seriously,” he said.
Mormino, whose office is in the Snell House on campus, thinks that some of his colleagues in the Snell House would also be good candidates for the award.
“This is an amazing collection of talent in this one house,” he said.
His best-known work is “Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida.” He has also written about immigrants in Florida, and the impact that World War II had on the state.
“Florida went from being the least populated state in the South to the third largest state in the Union,” Mormino said. “I wanted to capture the fury of that growth.”
Mormino also received the Theodore Saloutos Prize for his outstanding book, “The Immigrant World of Ybor City,” where he surveys ethnic-immigration history. “The first draft is never any good, but by the sixth draft, it can be pretty good.”
This week, USFSP announced the creation of the Gary Mormino fund, according to University Advancement’s publication HarborNotes. In honor of Mormino, the university plans to raise $30,000, which will fund the Florida Studies program. More than 25 people have already agreed to contribute to the fund, according to HarborNotes.
Mormino is also a frequent contributor to the Tampa Bay Times. He recently wrote a perspective piece entitled, “Dastardly cats and the pelican massacre.” His writing is also familiar among other Florida newspapers, as well as to the New Yorker and the New York Times.
Growing up, Mormino learned the value of hard work from his father. He honed his writing while working on his doctorate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“Writing has never been hard for me,” he said. “I always believed that I belonged in the mills and the factories, not higher education. This is a privilege. I’ve had profound influences from teachers, especially at the college level. ”
Even in retirement, he teaches one class a year on the history of food and considers himself the cook of the family.
