This past spring, FAU introduced an ROTC program on the Boca campus. It was the first time the Army stationed military here in nearly 50 years.
Armed forces were actually a mainstay on the campus – then called the Boca Raton Army Air Field – throughout the 1940s and 1950s. While radar training school cadets weren’t memorizing radar circuitry from hard-nosed buck sergeants in “temporary” T-Buildings, they rode Greyhound buses from Boca Raton’s town hall to Miami Beach. There, they boozed in oceanfront gentlemen’s clubs.
Once they returned, Army Air Corps officers slept in officers’ barracks like T-10 and T-11. Today, the barracks are gone, but T-11 is devoted to ROTC while T-10 is devoted to both a graduate art studio for painting majors and a $140,000 jazz collection called the “Ivey.”
The L-shaped T-10 encloses a courtyard about half the size of a football field. At its center are nine raised cement planters standing in columns arranged like a tic-tac-toe board, from which each have sprouted a tropical plant. The courtyard also behaves like an art gallery: a three-headed Cerberus dog glazed in burgundy guards one of the planters, while a two-piece golden-glazed tortoise shell sinks into a patch of weeds nearby.
A row of four brick atmospheric kilns border the courtyard’s south end, each with a chimney stack protruding from a large awning. This is where graduate ceramic students from T-6 sometimes go to fire pottery. Each kiln performs a different role in hardening clay, says Evan Crowley, a third-year art graduate.
“They each fire with gas,” Crowley says. “We have one just for burning salt, another for soda – or sodium bicarbonate – and another for carbon.”
LOOK BELOW for a profile on T-11’s ROTC program (fair warning: the Army’s come a long way since bunk beds). Then, flip to page 16 to learn about which FAU tenants inhabit both T-Buildings now.
T-11
Aten-Hut!A platoon of Army ROTC cadets line multiple-file behind the T-11 building. Unlike their predecessors during World War II on the Boca Raton Army Air Field, no soldier is armed. Nobody’s dressed in combat gear. Nobody carries a single brand of weaponry – not even standard-issue helmets.
Instead, all 26 are clad in dress uniform, practicing marching exercises and drill calls.
“We’ve been in the building since the fall, but we started the actual [ROTC] program this semester,” Rick Vega, an instructor and civil service employee, says from his T-11 recruiting office. The office has a lobby cluttered with stacks of “Join the Army” brochures.
T-11’s ROTC program is barely a semester old, but instructors are already requiring cadets take a swim test in the university’s campus swimming pool and shoot paintball during field exercises.
“We’re trying to get students from other universities to transfer to FAU just for ROTC. We’re fully enrolled this semester, so I say we got a positive response,” says Maj. Kenneth Harris, an enrollment officer. “We’re here to stay.”
Small Businesses for DummiesTheir office counsels every start-up or small company from Key West to Port St. Lucie – about 270 miles. They’re just one of 4,000 centers in the country. Not bad for a federal government branch that boasts a combined staff of just 30 people.
The Small Business Development Center (SBDC) services millions of Florida’s population from inside an obscure building on the northeast corner of FAU’s Boca campus: “temporary” T-Building T-11. Their mission? Joanne Cimillo gives it bluntly:
“We help people if they’re starting a business or if they want to improve their existing one,” says Cimillo, an SBDC training coordinator.
Cimillo’s office borders a “classroom” of sorts for small rookie and wayward companies. Three rows of 30 green chairs group around a single flatscreen TV with a VCR.
Monthly classes include “The Basics of eBay Selling” and a two-session Quickbooks tutorial for $100 apiece, to name a few. However, about 80 percent of sessions, Cimillo assures, are free.
“We’re the government’s best-kept secret,” Cimillo says.
T-10
I Can Hear Those Smooth Rhythms, ManLast Christmas Eve, Tim Walters got a $142,500 present without ever lifting a finger. Or without begging Santa Claus.
That’s because last winter 86-year-old music aficionado Henry Ivey donated an 11,655-piece traditional jazz collection to FAU. But instead of a front-row display inside Wimberly Library, the collected works rest in “temporary” building T-10.
“We preferred them here. T-10 is off the beaten track, and it’s much quieter and self-contained,” says Tim Walters.
The FAU director of jazz studies is crouched over a box of vinyls, his fingers delicately flipping through the faded cardboard slipcovers. All the jazz pioneers are here – Louis Armstrong, Eddie Condon, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman – plus newspaper clippings, ticket stubs, cocktail napkins, business cards, and everything else chronicling the history of jazz from 1910s ragtime to the present.
Soon, Walters will take this 68-year-old meticulously alphabetized and card-catalogued traditional jazz collection and index it on a computer database.
“The Ivey set came to me in 135 boxes, and it’ll take me a few years to sort through it all,” says Walters. “Now they have to be numbered sequentially and fed into a software program. Unboxed, the collection actually fits in here perfectly.”
The Ivey collection is evenly split between two rooms, stacked on several bookshelves as tall as the ceiling. One of the rooms, a rectangular studio with cobalt blue walls, houses a row of waist-high folding tables, Dell computers, an eight-track and a reel-to-reel player. Walters plans to outfit this studio as a “listening station” for students fascinated with jazz’s impressive history.
“It’s like T-10 was made for a listening station. This was [originally] built to be a keyboarding studio, so right now there are power strips all over the walls,” smiles Walters.
Music composition major Allison Weiner spends her graduate assistant work cataloguing the jazz collection with Walters.
“I would love to have an event in the courtyard this month to let everyone see the jazz collection, especially since it’s JAM [Jazz Appreciation Month],” says Weiner.
One Huge canvas If you told the Army Air Corps in 1942 that FAU graduate students would eventually paint oil murals on T-10’s walls, they’d laugh you off the Army Air Field.
They’d be shocked for two reasons: “temporary” T-Buildings were assembled slipshod and weren’t designed to survive past World War II; and T-10 (also T-11, for that matter) were officers’ barracks, not a blank canvas.
Nevertheless, since 2005, T-10 has functioned as painters’ studios for FAU’s graduate students. And it shows: on the wall mural, a woman’s smiling profile is bathed in midnight blue, her full red lips distinct from its “stained” paint technique.
Graduate Student Association director Emily Asbury shares the makeshift studio with three other students, each of whom create art in separate rooms.
“We love having our own little rooms. I’m able to come here without all the campus hustle and bustle,” says Asbury, who’s also a painter. “It allows us concentration. It’s so delightfully quiet. These are great art studios.”
Asbury actually discovered the T-Buildings while searching the Internet for a “private place” after finishing her MFA at FAU. She landed at T-10 three years ago, and coerced the College of Arts and Letters to transform part of the historical building into an art studio. She remembers well the controversy between the university and preservation groups concerning the T-Buildings’ fate.
“They were crapholes and everything leaked,” Asbury says. “[University officials] tore down a couple of buildings and the Boca Historical Society got pissed and wanted to preserve them.” Asbury even considers T-10 her second home, – she’s there every day. Were it possible, she’d sleep there overnight. Unfortunately, she can’t.
“Campus security is really on top of it,” says Asbury. “If we’re not outta here by 10 p.m., we’re in trouble.”
T-30
“Temporary” building T-30 is an ugly duckling. Unlike its historically important sister buildings further southeast on FAU’s Boca campus, T-30 hasn’t been reroofed for as long as any current FAU official can remember. It hasn’t been repainted or gutted for interior renovation.
In fact, when historical architect Susan McClellan – hired jointly by the Boca Raton Army Air Field preservation group and the T-Building Planning Committee – drafts a state grant proposal to refurbish T-5, T-6, T-10 and T-11 next year, T-30 won’t be on the list.
Since 1989, T-30 has warehoused everything from FAU’s radioactive and medical wastes to hazardous chemicals like fertilizers and bug sprays. During World War II, while the Army Air Force occupied the area to secretly test radar equipment, T-30 stored flammables. But Boca Raton Historical Society archivist Susan Gillis thinks this T-Building was neglected for another reason.
“I’m guessing [T-30] just wasn’t monumentally significant enough, on FAU’s part, to bother with,” says Gillis, also a BRAAF member. “T-30 was even out of the way [in the 1940s] from the officers’ quarters and the classrooms. It was essentially near the north end of the Army Air Field near the hangars and runways.”
Today, T-30 is covered roof-to-foundation in vines. A patch of leafy thistle travels up one side of the T-Building, zigzags around the iron bars nailed over the windows and spreads over the roof’s rain gutters. A giant oak’s branches extend far enough to shade the semi-abandoned facility from sunlight. “I don’t recall any reinforcements being made to T-30,” says FAU University Architect Tom Donaudy. “And I’ve been here for 10 years. I have no doubt it might be unstable; we have no long-term plans for it, because [President] Brogan only wanted to save four T-Buildings.
