When Lynn Laurenti started her undergraduate work in English, the Boca Raton campus was barely a year old. Just five buildings stood erect, 867 students were enrolled and 64 faculty merely shrugged off the huge disparity in the student-to-professor ratio.
With class sizes overflowing and teaching staff overwhelmed by swelling student attendance, the founding faculty hunted for a new set of classrooms to house them – at least, temporarily. Luckily, there just happened to be a couple on the northeast corner of campus: the last batch of undestroyed temporary buildings from the Boca Raton Army Air Field days. Somehow, they’d all managed to dodge demolition and weather the elements for 20 years.
Laurenti, 66, joined FAUafter glimpsing a one-paragraph announcement in the Miami Herald about a new university opening. Then a Sun-Sentinel reporter, Laurenti scraped together enough cash to pay tuition.
“When I got there, I saw jack rabbits hopping around, boing boing, and weeds sprouting out of the cracks in the deserted runways,” says Laurenti. “There wasn’t an official campus yet. Mostly everything still looked like an Army base.”
Before graduating in December 1966, Laurenti registered for a Shakespeare class in T-6, which was once a schoolroom for radar testing by Army Air Corps cadets during World War II.
Laurenti is now special assistant to FAU’s vice president.
IN HER WORDS: “The setting could hardly have been less Shakespearean: a small, starkly lit, boxy classroom that once provided the top-secret setting for American enlisted men to learn the wartime skill of radar operation. By the time I found my way to T-6 on a cool evening in the winter of 1965, the building had stood unused for years; it was being pressed into service once again as a place where students attending the newly opened Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton could take classes. Mine happened to be in Shakespeare.
The class size was ideal – only eight or nine students – and our professor was excellent. Dr. Norman Fedder, a member of FAU’s founding faculty who went on to become a distinguished professor of theatre at Kansas State University, was just a bit older than most of his students. His deep love of language and its ability, in the hands of the Bard, to probe deeply, almost surgically into the human condition was both illuminating and inspirational.
That was an important experience for me, and I’m very glad that T-6 will be restored to serve again, in yet another way.”
