About Glenn Emery

Glenn Emery was the creator and manager of the website, JacksonvilleStory.com.  He passed away on December 16, 2006.

A sixth-generation Floridian, his roots ran deep in Florida's sand.  Glenn's forebearers, the Sherouse family, were also early settlers of Georgia, first arriving in 1741.  They fled Germany to escape the persecution of Protestants.  

EARLY PIONEERS ~ Today, Florida ranks as the fourth most populated state, behind only California, Texas, and New York.  During the 1820s, however, all of the people in Florida would not have filled 1/2 of the 73,000 seats in Jacksonville's Alltel Stadium.  Fewer than 35,000 residents lived here, but some of them were Sherouses.  Members of the clan moved from Georgia shortly after the US bought Florida from Spain.  They set up housekeeping near Florida's oldest inland town, Micanopy.  This antique lover's paradise is located in Alachua County, about 55 miles southwest of Jacksonville, not far from Gainesville and the University of Florida.  

When downtown Jacksonville burned to the ground during the Great Fire of 1901, a handful of Sherouses resided in the city.  They worked in a variety of jobs, such as preaching, clerking in a bike shop, and maintaining the printing presses at the Times-Union & Citizen.  Some lived in the historic Jacksonville neighborhood of La Villa, traditionally the home for many African Americans, as well as for Cuban Americans for a while.  

One of Glenn's ancestors wore gray during the Civil War and lost an arm during the fall of Atlanta.  Great, great grandfather Israel served as a Florida private in the Confederate army.  His son Jerry earned a living as both a farmer and a coffin dealer near Windsor, a community in Alachua County.  In February 2002, Jerry's daughter Clara, Glenn's grandmother, died in Gainesville at the age of 100. 

"Granny" had long recalled the horse-and-buggy days of her youth.  A favorite tale centered on the Saturday trips into Gainesville for farm supplies.  At the end of a busy day of buying and socializing, young Clara & her family would start back home in a wagon.  Night would quickly descend on the unlit dirt roads.  Everyone in the farm cart would fall asleep -- And this included her father Jerry, the driver!  The horse would know where to go, though.  He'd eventually pull the wagon into the front yard and then wait patiently for someone to wake up.

Panthers used to prowl the roads around Gainesville, according to Granny.  Their ferocious screams could be sometimes heard at night while she and her family rolled along in their wagon.  Once when Clara was only four or five, she cried out with what she considered her best panther call -- And a panther roared back!  "Baby," her older brother cautioned, "You'd better be quiet or you'll get eaten by that big cat."  Little Clara never tried to talk to a panther again.

Granny also remembered how scared she was of her one-armed grandfather, Israel.  Whenever he visited, she hid under her bed.  His gruff voice & mannerisms, along with his thick, white, Santa Claus beard that was stained with tobacco juice, proved too much for a four year old.  And when her father took Clara to Israel's house, she couldn't believe how her granddad seemed indifferent to the bugs that floated in his soup.  He simply growled, "I ate worse things when I was enlisted!" 

There were fonder memories of an elderly woman, a former African American slave, who helped with the family's cooking & washing.  The service from this kind, conscientious lady proved indispensable after Clara's mother died at a young age.  (And no doubt she could've made a positive difference at Israel's home.)

PICTURES ~ Dating from 1992, the photo nearby shows Granny at a retirement home in Gainesville, Florida.  She was 91 years old.  She is surrounded by her grandsons Glenn (left) and his brothers, Rob (right) and Scott (sitting).  Shown in the photo below are Becca and Ryan Emery, Jacksonville natives who are Scott's kids.  Ryan met Granny several times before she passed away, and he drew the pictures toward the top of the page.  They depict his great grandmother going to town as young girl.  When Ryan grows up, he plans to be a doctor, a fireman, a football player, and a construction worker on a skyscraper.  He predicts that Becca will become a "fashion Barbie model."

First Coast News featured Ryan in a TV broadcast during the Christmas holidays, 2002.  As the camera rolled, he sold mistletoe by the San Jose Boulevard Duck Pond one Saturday morning.  A natural born ham, Ryan blew kisses to the ladies and waved to the men going by in cars.  It must've worked: He made over $40 in two hours!     

ABOUT GLENN ~ A native of Ocala, Glenn Emery had a master's degree in history and a master's degree in library & information science.  He specialized in Florida history at the University of Florida.  His senior thesis was entitled "The Medical World of Marion Surgical" (a hospital in nineteenth-century Ocala), and his master's thesis was "Urbanization in Florida during the 1890s."  Glenn worked as a librarian in Jacksonville, and he served as the manager of a Florida history collection there for many years.  

In addition to this website, Glenn's personal interests included racquetball, antique Florida postcards, and the study of movie history, pop music history, and African American history.  He enjoyed the music of Natalie Merchant, Jimi Hendrix, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Tom Petty, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and Paul Simon's "Graceland: The African Concert."  His pride and joy was a long-haired, tiger-striped, laid-back cat named "Parrot Head." Glenn also liked the songs & stories of Jimmy Buffett, the Florida-based leader of the flock of Buffett fans called "Parrot Heads."

His favorite films were "Nashville," "The Caine Mutiny," "Pulp Fiction," "Roots," "In the Heat of the Night," "A Christmas Story" (with the classic line, "You'll shoot your eye out!"), and "Plan 9 from Outer Space" (widely regarded as the worst movie ever made, and fun to laugh at).  All-time classic TV programs included "Seinfeld," "The Andy Griffith Show," "Six Feet Under," the early episodes of "Late Night with David Letterman," and the original "Star Trek" and "Saturday Night Live."

Glenn's favorite book wass Joseph Girzone's Joshua, the work that he reread the most.  Other top choices included the writings of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the Washington, DC native who moved to Alachua County in 1928 and penned such Florida classics as The Yearling and Cross Creek.

For more about Glenn, please CLICK HERE for a Florida Times-Union article entitled "One of Us: No Question Is Too Strange for Curious Librarian to Answer," by Alliniece Andino.

"Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it." -- George Santayana

"... modes of travel become more sophisticated, tools evolve into complex machines and robots, but man fails to learn much from the lessons of the past.  In spite of all the knowledge that has been amassed through the ages, people would still rather learn from their own limited experiences so their responses to life remain just as primitive as those of people a thousand years ago." -- Joseph Girzone

"All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality." -- Martin Luther King

"There is nothing to make you like other human beings so much as doing things for them." -- Zora Neale Hurston

"... to leave the world a little better; whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.  This is the meaning of success." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

  The photographs on this page were the handiwork of Glenn's mother, Velma.

  THANK YOU...  

       FOR VISITING THE JACKSONVILLE STORY,

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