President's Report - Gordon State College

And to everyone’s chagrin or amazement, Pattillo always knew the answer. Quiet as
the Sphinx until Miss Marion addressed him, he always knew the answer. And to this
day, it confounds Bobby as to how Frank always knew the answer. It also delights him,
and the story in its retelling strengthens their friendship.
Then Paul Cole’s name came up between them, because the two of them were going
to see him later in the day at a dog show where Cole was showing his Great Dane.
“Remember that guy who worked in the armory, a day student who played football”
Wines asked. “I think he’s the one who knocked Paul unconscious one night.”
It seems this unnamed cadet broke into storage lockers and cadets’ rooms to steal
valuables, and this is how Wines and Pattillo explain Cole’s weird story of being knocked
out in his own bed one night. The robber must have come into Cole’s room, they conjecture,
Cole awakened, and the robber punched him out.
“After this guy left Gordon,” Wines said, “they found the stolen suitcases of cadets
in his room.”
Bobby Wines grew up in Ocala, Fla., where during the seventh and eighth grades,
he and his friend, Curtis Martin, traveled a wide territory on their Cushman Eagles to
go hunting, fishing, or swimming at Lake Weir. He lived with his parents on five acres
off a dirt road that led into town where his father, also named Bob, ran a successful
outboard boat business from 1945 to 1972. “At one time,” Mr. Wines said, “I had 13
competitors, but none of them bothered me. They all went out of business.”
His parents still live on the property, but the dirt road that once ran through orange
groves to their home is now paved and lined with houses. The five acres, once mostly a
pasture for a horse his father would ride to go hunting, is now lined with rows of pine
trees that create a shaded area camellias love to grow in.
Camellias, originally from China and related to the tea plant, are the livelihood of
the Wines family and have been for decades. Mr. Wines started planting the flower as a
hobby around 1958 and shortly after started the Ocala Camellia Society with six other
men. Mr. Wines was so successful with his hybrids that the owner of Rainbow Springs,
now a state park, bought his entire collection to landscape his tourist attraction.
With the money from this sale, his father started another camellia garden. Bobby,
by then, was teaching reading to third- to sixth-graders at Belleview Elementary School,
but he had reached a burn-out point, and asked for a leave of absence.
The first summer after he was granted his leave, he took on the task of rooting a
large number of camellias on his father’s property with a friend of his who had come
down from Buffalo, N.Y., Buz Paterniti. Starting every day at 7:30 a.m., they cut, prepared
and planted 20,000 camellias of different varieties. He was bent on leaving the
teaching profession and turning his father’s camellia collection into a business.
His plans almost ended in tragedy. That winter, the winter of 1980, Ocala was hit
with a record 12-degree freeze. Thousands and thousands of his plantings died, and
Wines must have wondered if his business venture had not also died. Yet many plants
made it. In fact, as Wines will tell you, all the survivors of that freeze are still thriving on
the property. Furthermore, and better yet, the many varieties of his father’s collection survived,
which meant that Wines had more varieties of camellias than anyone in the entire
Southeast. Buyers soon discovered his nursery, and Wines never went back to teaching.
To walk through the nursery, especially when the camellias are most likely to be
in bloom (from October to April), is a treat to the eye even if camellias don’t have the
additional draw of being fragrant. They come in six different shapes and many colors,
although reds and whites, and their variegations, seem to dominate. Add to this a variety
of pistil shapes, colors and textures, and you have very nearly an endless variety
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President’s Report