There it was in black and white, “The naked and the red”.  It was October of 1974 and I had just started working full time at the University. After moving out on my own after I graduated from high school in the summer of 1970, I had been going to the University full time and been working part time at various jobs at the University, stock clerk, keypunch operator, lab assistant, and in 1974 as a student computer programmer at the University’s computing center.

I really liked working at University’s computing center. Officially it was called the North East Regional Data Center or NERDC for short. You could say that working there, I was a NERD long before the term became popular.  NERDC had a single IBM 360 mainframe computer which ran all the University’s computing needs; business, student registration, faculty research, and student programming for classes.  I started as a student computer operator doing manual tasks like feeding punch cards into the computer, filing computer printouts and mounting computer tapes. Although they called me and several others “student computer operators”, official we were “key punch operator trainees” making $1.63 an hour. It wasn’t much but working there I got free computer time on the mainframe and I began to teach myself computer programming which led to me moving to a “student programmer” job.

In 1973 the University decided to separate the academic computing from the administrative computing splitting the staff into two groups. The administrative portion and staff remained NERDC while the academic computing and staff became the Center for Instructional and Research Computing Activities or CIRCA. My student programming position went with CIRCA. I would tell people that I had joined the CIRCus, or you could say a nerd in the circus. [read more about working at CIRCA]

 
From the 1974 UF Course catalog

In 1974 a full-time programming position came available at CIRCA and I jumped at it. It was good timing for I was running out of money. I had resorted to collecting soda bottles for their 5¢ deposit to buy gas.  At 35¢ a gallon I had to collect seven bottles to get a gallon which would last me a week if I drove conservatively, which was hard to do with my gas-guzzling 1968 Camaro with its V8 engine. I was having a hard time coming up with the money for tuition which was $150 a quarter and collecting soda bottles wasn’t going to be enough. In desperation I asked Mom if she could loan me some money. I asked Mom as she managed the money in the family, if I had asked Dad he would have said to ask Mom. Mom said they didn’t have the money at the time, which was probably true, but I think she was hoping I would move back home.  But she then suggested I ask Grandma Junior. Grandpa and Grandma Junior were quite well off. I don’t think Grandpa ever made much money from being a preacher, but his businesses were always quite successful. Although Grandpa Junior clearly managed the money in their family, Mom thought I would have better luck asking Grandma. It was a hard thing for me to do, asking Mom and Dad was hard enough, but asking Grandma was even harder. I managed to get up the courage and Grandma surprisingly gave me a hundred dollars, it was the first time I had ever seen a $100 bill. I was very much appreciative for the $100, which didn’t even cover tuition, but it did help.

So when the full-time position came up at CIRCA jumped at it. It paid $3.83 an hour, more than doubling what I was making an hour and working full time, doubled the hours, I made $7,997.04 a year. I was rich, or so I thought. Even better, working for the University I would get to take two classes a quarter for free so I continued working on my degree part time.

On most days upon arriving at work I read the University’s student newspaper, The Florida Alligator, or I should say “The Independent Florida Alligator” since it freed itself from the chains of the University the year before. It was a big deal at the time, you had to be there. Well anyway, I read the Florida Alligator hot off the press on the days it was published which depended on when school was in session. I usually arrived at work around eight o’clock, and with few students wanting eight o’clock classes, I was always able to get a copy before they were all gone when the rush of students arrived for classes.

Most of the other full time employes at CIRCA didn’t get in until nine or even later, except for the secretary and department head who were there by eight. Or I should say “Administrative Assistant” as they were then being called, Mom would have corrected me if she heard me say secretary as she was the “Head” Administrative Assistant in the Physics Department. She was more than just a secretary, she would say.  Arriving around eight I had an hour or so of quiet solitude before work got busy.

CIRCA offices were on the fourth floor of Weil Hall which is directly across from the football stadium. I usually entered using the main front entrance where there was a stand with a stack of Alligators, on this day I grabbed one and walked up the stairs to the to my office. Weil Hall was an old building that had been recently renovated. Each floor had a broad center hallway with offices or classrooms off each side, each having a heavy eight-foot-tall wooden door. My office was about halfway down the hall, on the back, or south side, of the building, which was nice as it got lots of sunlight.

Half-way down the hall was not an ideal position in Weil Hall if you need to go to the restroom as Weil Hall had an odd restroom arrangement with each floor having a men’s room on one end and then down the fifty-yard-long hall, a women’s restroom on the other end. On alternating floors, the men’s and women’s restrooms were on opposite ends. The restrooms were as old as the building, small, one stall and one urinal which were often out of operation or busy. I soon learned never go when classes let out. The problem was if the restroom was busy or not working, you had a choice, you could either go down two floors to the next men’s room or go down one floor then to the opposite end of the fifty-yard long hall.  And if that bathroom was not working or busy, you had to do it again. You could spend half an hour trying to find an available restroom. In later years I would have dreams about going to the bathroom at Weil Hall and finding the ancient restroom fixtures not working and walking down the endless hall to the bathroom at the other end and then waking up and having to go pee.

Arriving at my office, well I say my office, I shared it with five other student programmers. It wasn’t so bad, they all came in and worked around their class schedules, you never quite knew when they would be there, but never at eight in the morning. Besides, just a few months before I was one of them.

It was a nice office, around fifteen feet wide and thirty deep with 15-foot-tall ceilings and two eight-foot-high windows at the back letting the south sun in. There were six desks, three along each side wall. Mine was in the back corner under a window. It was all quite bright and cheerful. In later times I would not want a desk under a window because of the glare from the window on the computer monitor but this was the time before computer monitors, we used a main-frame computer the size of dozen refrigerators. There was no monitor on the desk, just stacks of computer printouts and decks of punched cards.

Being the first one in the office, I settled into my chair and started reading the Alligator.  On the front page was news about University having funding issues. What! Richard Nixon, Billie Graham and Marlon Brando flew into Gainesville, and no one noticed them. They spoke across the street from where I worked at the Florida Gym where I had seen Elton John on his Yellow Brick Road tour. I wouldn’t have gone to see Nixon anyway, I didn’t vote for him, and I got tear gassed protesting in the street over the Viet Nam war. With him resigning as president perhaps people will start spelling my name right, its “MIXSON” not Nixon. The Alligator quoited Nixson saying, “I could have refused a pardon, but that would have been a cowardly thing to do.”  And Billy Graham, the great evangelist Baptist preacher, and being a preacher himself, one of Grandpa’s heroes. I wouldn’t have gone see him either, by 1974 I was becoming disillusioned with religion. And Marlon Brando, he was some movie actor which I didn’t have any interest in seeing. His movie The Godfather had come out a couple years before which I thought was pretty good, he got best actor academy award for it. About the only thing I remembered about the movie was some guy woke up with a horse head in his bed.

I skim through the pages of the Alligator, mostly articles about various things around campus. I totally skip the sports section having little interest in sports. I glance over the classified ads, sometimes finding interesting things in them like my all white cat which I named Kathleen but later found out it was a male.

Then a surprise, a special section, EXTRA!, “THE GREAT GAINESVILLE UNCOVER UP” with a couple of half-naked people on the cover photo. Wait, I looked closer, that is a woman’s breast! Only in the new “Independent” Florida Alligator would you see that, you never would have seen that before they became independent.

I turn the page and there in the contents of the special section is the silhouette  of a naked woman.  I quickly turn the page looking for more finding an article titled, “The Electric Iced Tea Mushroom Test”.  I read the first few paragraphs, “Eating mushrooms can be the most shattering experience…”  reminds of that time when….  I move on wanting to get to the naked part, I get back to the mushrooms later.  A few pages later there it was, buck naked people in all their printed glory.

And there it was, Gymnos Health Club, a nudist club, had opened at Magnesia Springs. The pool was once again open with a few new rules added to the sign, No Sex Allowed, No Drugs, Alcohol must be in an unmarked cup.  They even had nude volleyball on a sand court. I bet that would be fun, sand in all parts of your body. One guy in the article said he was worried about getting an erection, “but you really don’t get erotic thoughts.” he explained. Yeah, like I believed that.  It went on to say that applying suntan lotion was a massive job, people sometimes got sunburned on unprotected parts of their bodies. Families were encouraged to come, children under 12 were free, sounded a little creepy.  There was a warning, the water was cold.  The cold water probably a good thing as it probably discouraged sex, it sure made my you know what shrink up.  There was an issue with zoning, they thought, with the right interpretation, they were OK under both Florida and County laws but there was a problem with county approval. Commissioner Tom Coward, yes that was his real name, said he would like to deny the permit but in the end the permit was granted. 1

Over the next year or so I continued to see ads in the Alligator for Gymnos Health Club and considered checking it out sometime. I was half hippy by then with hair down to my shoulders. I had even been streaking across the campus one night when the craze swept universities, going to a nudist colony couldn’t be all that different, and just think of all the naked college girls that might be there, I thought. Yeah, and I would probably get a hard on, but then remembered, the water was cold, if I just stayed in the water, it just might work. 

I moved away from Gainesville on July 4th, 1976 and never did make it to the nudist club at Magnesia Springs.

In 1977 Gymnos defaulted on their payments and the club shut down. The Reber family retook possession of the spring and again opened to it the public for several years but was never able to make it successful and it closed again. Reber sold the property to Dr. Charles LaPradd in 1982.

1. "County approves Gymnos land rezoning", The Independent Florida Alligator, October 15, 1975, page 5.