R: Well, I had a group of faculty who came to me one time who wanted to do this, and
 I said, "Well, do you think we can do it in a way which will make it reflect well on
 the college?" They said, "Well, we will have to start small, but we think we can."
 They started on the Thomas [Center] grounds as a very small thing.

 But it did seem to be a good thing, a very good thing. So, as it grew, they came to
 me, later on, after we moved and said, "Now, we have to have a place to do this."
 So I went to the city and said, "We would like to expand the Spring Arts Festival,
 and we would like to do it on 1st Street. Can we get the city's cooperation?" Well,
 there was some back and forth, talk to the people on the street, the churches, etc.,
 and everybody said okay. So we agreed that we would supply the staff and
 everything, and get a lot of volunteer help, and proceeded then to move it from the
 Thomas Center to 1st Street, and the rest is history.

P: Now thousands turn out.

R: But we paid the salary of the coordinator and the person who did it, it was usually
 a part-time faculty member, so this way we could pay that person a little more. In
 fact, eventually, we wound up with a full-time faculty member doing that as about
 half their work load, and spent a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of fun doing it.
 It has grown and grown and prospered.

P: It has grown and grown. I mean, they had thousands out there this year over the two
 days.

R: But it was something that a group of our faculty wanted to do, and I could not see
 anything wrong with it and we were willing to put a few dollars into it where needed.
 I always thought that was good to spend money on something the faculty wanted to
 do. So it really was a nice thing.

P: Your involvement in community colleges went beyond Santa Fe; were you not
 president of the Florida Community College Council?

R: I was for two years. I really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed the community college
 presidents' council activity, and I gave a lot of time and energy to it.

P: What is it?

R: What it really was, was a way in which the twenty-eight of us met, and I think we
 met about eight times a year, to really talk about what we were doing, what kind of
 problems [we encountered].

P: You met on different campuses?

R: No. We usually met somewhere that was easy to get to, in Tampa, most of the time,
 or Orlando.


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