If you have ever had the privilege of receiving an email from Gary Mormino, you will assuredly notice the unique way he always signs off his missives. “Florida dreams amid the storms” tells us much about Gary as a person, as a scholar, and maybe most importantly, as a Floridian. For nearly 50 years, Mormino has been the leading chronicler of modern Florida history, reaching both academic and public audiences with his anecdotal style and deep archival investigation. He can usually be found in front of a microfilm reader, checking out old Florida newspapers for articles that flesh out the state’s interesting and often untold history. With that assiduous research, he tells the story of a now-seminal state to anyone who will listen, whether it be in a classroom, a public library or museum, or at a table in a coffee shop in Ybor City.
Like so many others, Mormino came to Florida during a post-World War II demographic explosion. Arriving in 1977, in the midst of the Disney boom, he took a job teaching history at the University of South Florida Tampa campus, although he moved to the St. Pete campus of the school in 2003 to open their Florida studies program. While there, he became the Frank E. Duckwall Professor of Florida History. He remains there today as an emeritus professor, still writing and researching about Florida.
Born in the Midwest with a history degree from UNC Chapel Hill, his first book examined the Italian immigrant community of St. Louis that produced baseball legends Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola. Upon moving to Florida, he turned that ethnographic lens to Tampa’s Ybor City as he co-wrote (along with the late University of Florida professor George Pozzetta) the award-winning The Immigrant World of Ybor City in 1987, using oral histories to record the stories of Tampa cigar workers and their families as their way of life ebbed away. Mormino then moved from looking at immigrant Tampa to investigating Florida as a whole when he produced his master work Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida, in 2005. Part history, part sociology, part love poem to his adopted state (just read the chapter entitled “The Beach”), it was, in the words of fellow Hall of Fame initiate Michael Gannon, “the book by which all future studies of modern Florida will be measured.” Though he stopped this story at the turn of the 21st century, Mormino added a coda in 2022 when he published Dreams in the New Century: Instant Cities, Shattered Hopes, and Florida’s Turning Point, examining such disparate things as the great Real Estate Bubble of the early 21st century and the rise of the Villages as a social and political phenomenon.
If he was just an academic, Mormino would still be an important figure in contemporary Florida life. But he is so much more. He has traveled around the state, giving talks and public lectures from Key West to Pensacola on themes as diverse as Florida during the 1880s, Florida in World War II, and iconic Florida foods. All the talks are punctuated by his wry sense of humor and his amazing story telling skills. He has been a stalwart supporter of Florida Humanities for decades, running programs for teachers, introducing the public to iconic Florida folksingers like Frank Thomas, giving his famous walking tours of Ybor City, and mentoring generations of younger scholars.
Gary Mormino has received many awards and accolades for his work on Florida and its people and history. In 2003, Florida Humanities named him its first Humanist of the Year. Nine years later, Florida Trend magazine honored him as a “Florida Icon” and the Florida House of Representatives gave him a Distinguished Author Award. 2015 saw him receive a Florida Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing, again from Florida Humanities.
These awards and kudos do not tell the full story, however, of why Gary Mormino is a worthy entrant into the Florida Humanities Hall of Fame. That story is better told by the thousands of Floridians who took his classes, who attended his public lectures, who participated in his workshops, and walked the streets of Ybor City with him, searching for the Florida dream.
