Guitar Store man, brickyard builder, and a world checkers champ make the Tallahassee 200

The TLH 200: Gerald Ensley Memorial Bicentennial Project is proud to announce the seventh installment of our rolling list of 200 people who laid the foundation for the growth of the civil society we find today in Tallahassee.

As the city commemorates the 200th anniversary of its founding, the Tallahassee Democrat and Real Talk 93.3 have cast a wide net to find artists, educators, civil rights leaders, politicians, athletes, builders, business titans and neighborhood icons who earned a place in the spotlight.

We need your help in identifying those individuals.

You can email your suggestions of candidates to be profiled and other suggestions to history@tallahassee.com . And listen to Greg Tish’s morning show on Real Talk 93.3 where we'll discuss the legacy of these history makers.

The only condition is that those featured below must be deceased. Ten names will be added twice a month, so be sure to check back for updates.

Without further ado here is the seventh edition of 10 people who helped make Tallahassee someplace special ...

Read the full list online at tallahassee.com/tlh200.

Richard A. Shine (1810 -1862)

Twenty-year old Richard A. Shine arrived in Tallahassee in 1830 and left a mark on the capital city that remains visible today. They include some notable tourist attractions .

Shine was a builder and supervised construction of the 1845 state Capitol, known today as the Historic Old Capitol.  Other projects include the First Presbyterian Church, the Bloxham House at 410 Calhoun St., the Chittenden House at 323 Park Ave, and the main house of Goodwood Museum and Gardens.

According to Census information from 1840, Shine was listed as the owner of 30 slaves. Historian Andrew Frank said Shine was known to have used slaves on his projects in Tallahassee and also hired them out as skilled laborers.

The bricks for the construction projects were made at a 50-acre brickyard located between Mahan Drive and Miccosukee Road that Shine owned. Remnants of the kilns were visible as late as 1934, according to the Tallahassee Historical Society Annual.

But he was also an engineer who made the deep cut along Mahan and under Magnolia Drive to lay the tracks that brought the Pensacola-Georgia Railroad to east Tallahassee in 1857. That cut, dug by enslaved people, is still in use today.

A Quartermaster General of the Confederate army and Florida Militia, died in 1862, at the height of the Civil War. No written account of his death has been found. The Shine family tomb is in the Old City Cemetery.

Seeking clues: Help solve mystery of two portraits found at Goodwood Museum

Marion Franklin Tinsley (1927 - 1995)

Marion F. Tinsley was so good at checkers that he ran out of human opponents. The Florida A&M and Florida State math professor spent the last five years of his life beating increasingly more powerful computers.

Tinsley earned a doctorate at The Ohio State University in 1957 and then taught math FAMU for 26 years and 10 years at FSU. He also served as a part-time minister at Tallahassee Christian Church.

Tinsley won the world checkers championship in 1954 and today is recognized as the greatest checker player ever.

He was world champion from 1954 – 1958, and again from 1975 – 1991. He also claimed four consecutive Florida Open championships, 1974, 75, 76, 77.

He claimed he was a mediocre checkers player until at age 14 when he stumbled on a book of checkers while researching a math problem at the library.

“Checkers can get quite a hold on you. Its beauty is just overwhelming, the mathematics, the elegance, the precision. It’s capable of wrapping you all up,” said Tinsley, according to a New York Times obituary.

Two of the seven games Tinsley lost during a 50-year run were to a Chinook computer program. It had a repertory of 250 billion moves and could make 3 million calculations a minute. It beat Tinsley once when he was intoxicated, and again during an exhibition when Tinsley competed in two matches at once.

Before cancer forced Tinsley to retire from competition, he fought the computer to six straight draws.

“Tinsley was the Mount Everest we wanted to scale,” said program developer Jonathan Schaeffer after Tinsley withdrew from the 1994 world championship competition.

Burt Norton (1943 - 1995)

It was 1966, about the time the Beatles released the landmark Revolver album, when Burt Norton drove into Tallahassee. He arrived in a Ford station wagon loaded with a 1960 Fender Jazzmaster, a Fender Pro Amp, a stand alone Fender reverb tank, and a few clothes.

Thirty years later when Tallahassee music community gathered for a memorial concert in his honor, the Tallahassee Democrat wrote, “no doubt there would have been a music scene in Tallahassee without Burt Norton. But just as certainly it would have been entirely different.”

Burt Norton was the man behind Norton Audio and Music on Jackson Bluff Road. Tallahassee’s first rock n roll music store. It stocked the name brands that powered the Woodstock Generation. It became known as Norton Music, “The Guitar Store;” a mecca for musicians and fans.

Norton provided services for his products, never charged for guitar string installations or setups.

“It was just a given, Burt was always there,” recalled John Paul Waters before the 1995 tribute concert for Norton. “He didn’t make a big deal about it. Whatever you were looking for in the music world, he was a great resource.”

People poured into the store – students, musicians, transients – to share stories and talk music.

“I always found it interesting how I could wait on a farmer early in the morning and a state supreme court justice toward closing time,” recalled Ken Norton, who worked the counter at his brother’s store.

Eventually Norton decided Tallahassee needed a recording studio. So, he went off to Nashville and toured the studios where Roy Orbison recorded.

He opened a 16-track recording studio at the Jackson Bluff location.

For the next 10 years, Sweet Bay studios recorded dozens of local groups. Among those who cut songs or albums at Sweet Bay were LaBamba/Flipside, Meisburg and Walters, Bill Wharton, Drew Reid, BB Jam, Dixie Drive, Rainbow Band, Tallahassee Band, McKenzie Brothers – and a teenage country singer from Quincy, Billy Dean.

In 1986, amid growing competition from other music stores, Norton closed the store and took a job with the state. He passed away in January 1995 at age 52.

Laura Mae Thompson Dixie (1925 - 2017)

Laura Mae Thompson hailed from the Chaires neighborhood east of town and became a key organizer in the Civil Rights Movement in Tallahassee.

“The Mother of the Movement in Tallahassee,” is how Bethel Missionary Baptist Rev. R.B. Holmes eulogized Dixie.

Dixie was an activist. Served as vice president of the Leon County National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Was a board member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and president of AFSCME Local 2847.

Visiting people who were sick, taking in first-generation Florida A&M students, and feeding people were the foundations of Dixie’s approach to community organizing.

Dixie didn’t like speaking in front of crowds and avoided the spotlight. She was the person that others depended on when funds needed to be raised, voters needed to be registered, or when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., needed a place to stay during a Tallahassee stop.

Dixie was persistent. When the pace of desegregation at W.T. Edward Hospital proved to be slow, she quietly went to work.

"I had a long fingernail file and they had these signs also where, you know, they had the patients segregated," she recalled in a recorded interview .

"They had a white wing, black wing, white bathroom, colored bathroom, white eating dining room, colored dining room, and so I took my fingernail file and went 'round and unscrewed every one of those segregation signs off the door ...  the supervisor said, 'I can't picture nobody doing that but Dixie,' but they still couldn't prove that I did it. I was acting just as innocent as I could be."

Charles Saxon Ausley (1907 - 1972)

There were some impressive shoes Charles Saxon Ausley had to fill.  Tallahassee appreciated the work of his dad, the physician Charles, so much they named Ausley Road on the west side in his honor. And his grandfather George Saxon was the founder of the Capital City Bank, the city’s oldest operating business.

Charlie, who carried both men’s names, set out to be, in the words of the Tallahassee Democrat, a “good citizen.”

He left his mark on the community. In 1930, he teamed with future Florida Gov. LeRoy Collins to create the Ausley McMullen law firm, one of Tallahassee’s oldest law firms.

Ausley wrote the first charter of the Florida State Foundation, founded the Tallahassee Jaycees, served as president of the Chamber of Commerce, and as corporate officer of the Tallahassee Democrat and director of the Orange Bowl committee.

Charlie also was a municipal judge, city commissioner, and state senator – filling in for Collins when he resigned to join the Navy during World War II.

When he died, a Tallahassee Democrat editorial acknowledged he served as the newspaper’s legal counsel but also extolled him as a “good citizen.”

Wrote the editorial board, “In the 42 years since he returned to Tallahassee with his law degree from the University of Florida, there was hardly a worthwhile project or mission on which his help was not sought and given without hesitation. It is such good citizens as Charlie Ausley who have made Tallahassee the place for the good life it is.”

Gene Calvin Cox (1935 - 2009)

Gene Calvin Cox is the winningest football coach ever to walk a Tallahassee sideline.

In a 27-year run as head football coach at Leon High School, the Lions were 238 – 67 and won two state championships, 14 district championships, seven regional championships and eight conference championships.

More than 100 players would sign a college scholarship.

A Lake City native, Cox played at Columbiana High, and was listed behind Lee Corso on the running back depth chart for the 1954 Florida State University team, which won the Sun Bowl.

After coaching at high schools in Jefferson and Suwannee counties, Cox became head coach at Leon and a football legend.

Under Cox, the Leon Lions ran off 25 straight wins in 1968, 1969, and 1970. On two other occasions, Leon won sixteen straight games. And in 1984 –1985 the Lions posted a 19-game winning streak.

“He was so serious about and so intense that when you came to college at FSU, that it was really easier than what we were used to at Leon – the intensity of the workout and at practice. And you knew how to win,” said former FSU quarterback Wally Woodham.

Under Cox, the Leon Lions became a feeder program for Bobby Bowden’s teams at FSU.

The 1979 11 – 0 Seminoles featured seven Lions, including two quarterbacks, Woodham and Jimmy Jordan, along with QB coach Billy Sexton. The Lion-led Noles only loss was to Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl.

Cox retired from Leon in 1990 but would return to the sidelines for Aucilla Christian Academy a year later. When he successfully retired as coach after the 1995 season, his 313 wins were the most ever in Florida.

In 1997, the Tallahassee Sports Commission, the Leon County School Board and the Leon County Commission renamed Capital Stadium to Gene Cox Stadium.

Helen Patsy Gilliam (1926 - 2006)

Helen Patsy Gilliam dance students started performing revues at halftime of Leon High School football games in 1947. A New York trained ballet instructor, Gilliam had a studio in the Randall-Lewis House where students from age 2-and-a-half to 16 learned tap and ballet.

Throughout the 1950s, troupes of Gilliam students publicly performed in dance reviews to popular songs. Gilliam outfitted dancers in calico dresses and bonnets for a “Gal in Calico” performance, and in Spanish-theme costumes for "The Lady in Red.”

Before Tallahassee desegregated Gilliam opened her studio to Black girls for ballet lessons.

Carla Richardson joined the classes in 1964 and said she and about a half dozen other girls were not fully aware of the controversy Gilliam created by agreeing to enroll them.

It was a bold stance. Gilliam lost a lot of her white students, and ultimately her downtown studio.

Looking back, Richardson said she and her classmates were unaware of the controversy Gilliam provoked by welcoming them into her studio. They were younger than 10 at the time and would learn more about race relations when the city integrated public schools.

“I just think we didn’t realize at the time this woman was a civil rights activist. She was phenomenal. A single woman who risked her business to teach African American girls,” said Richardson.

One of those girls was Joyce Warner Tobias, Miss Black America 1971.

“Miss Patsy contributed to her winning. Joyce used dance as her talent in the competition,” said Richardson.

Gilliam closed her School of Dance in the early 1970s, and worked as the superintendent at Lewis State Bank.

Alexis Roberts McMillian was among the group of little girls who showed up at Gilliam’s studio in 1964.

“I attribute my agility and movement – that is good for a pretty-plus senior citizen – to my ballet lessons,” said McMillian. “I stuck it out through the 11 ^th grade as one of the last students she had until she stopped teaching. Those classes were finally desegregated ... We raise a glass of cheer to Helen Patsy Gilliam.”

Alvan S. Harper (1847 - 1911)

Norristown, Pennsylvania’s Alvan S. Harper studied photography in Philadelphia. A chance meeting with Tallahassee Judge J.T. Bernard at the 1876 Centennial may have led Alvan and Agnes Harper to move to Tallahassee where they set up a studio to take “artistic photographs.”

Harper posed portraits with backdrops in his studio and photographed residences, buildings, farming, hunting, railway activity and political leaders.

His portfolio includes hundreds of views of late 19 ^th century Tallahassee street scenes, and about 1,300 portraits of men, women, and children taken between 1884 and 1910.

Alvan had a special interest in Tallahassee’s African American community. While Jim Crow was enforced, he portrayed Black people in a way that defied the legal restrictions they faced. The Museum of Florida selection of his photographs has been made into a traveling exhibition, and his quiet contributions to civil rights were recognized by the University of Florida, the NAACP, and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

In 2017, a “Trolley ride through Alvan S. Harper’s Tallahassee” was held at the Pensacola Museum of History.

"Some of Harper's best negatives were lost when his studio was torn down in the 1920s," according to a state archives report. "The negatives had been given to a Tallahassee historian who, because they were dirty, left them on a porch where they were mistaken for trash and taken to the dump."

About 2,000 Harper negatives were found, however, in 1946 in the attic of a house the Harpers owned. The negatives were turned over to the State Library.

Alvan and his wife Agnes never had children. Both are buried in the Old City Cemetery.

Freeman Delano Lawrence (1918 - 2013)

Freeman Delano Lawrence was the final principal for segregated Lincoln High School. Lawrence grew up on a farm near Old. St. Augustine Road and Chaires Crossroad. He and his brother would walk the seven miles to attend Lincoln High School as students.

Upon graduation and service in the U.S. Army during World War II, Lawrence would teach in Live Oak and Quincy before returning to Tallahassee. In 1957, he was named principal of his alma mater and would keep his students focused on education during the turbulent 1960s. Lawrence encouraged both academic and vocational students to pursue the highest level of education. He was Lincoln’s principal until the school closed in 1967.

During his 25 and more years as a principal at “Black” elementary, junior high and high schools, Lawrence advocated and promoted a higher level of service and financial commitment for the education of Black children.

Additionally, he assumed responsibility for his teachers, encouraging them to pursue graduate degrees and to this end, made promotions into leadership positions in the Leon County School System possible.

Many attributed Lawrence’s ability to create alliances and negotiate helped make Leon County’s transition to integrated schools look effortless while integration elsewhere came under duress and sometimes violence.

After integration, Lawrence became principal of the newly created Lincoln-Griffin High School. He later moved on to Nims Middle School, before retiring in 1978,

In 1996, he received a Florida A&M University’s Distinguished Alumni Award, and in 2012 the Tallahassee Urban League bestowed its Legend Award to Freeman D. Lawrence.

He was remembered in his obituary as "one of God's best servants."

"I once bought a three-piece suit just so I could look like Mr. Lawrence," then Sen. Bill Montford said at his funeral. "In education, we as a state are always looking for the answer. I would suggest to you, we had the answer at the original Lincoln."

Margaret Leonard (1942 - 2022)

Journalism and justice inspired Margaret Leonard.

Raised in Macon and Atlanta by parents who were reporters, Leonard would report for the Chattanooga Times, Miami Herald, and the St. Petersburg Times before she joined the Tallahassee Democrat as a government reporter in the 1980s.

Before making Tallahassee home, Leonard made history in 1960 as a Tulane University student when she became the “first unmistakably Southern white student" to join the Freedom Riders to register Black people to vote in Mississippi.

A teenage Leonard was repeatedly arrested as the Freedom Riders registered voters. She was jailed and spent time in the notorious Parchman Prison.

Leonard told an oral history project in 2001 the experience traumatized her and inspired her journalism.

“I wrote a lot about prisons, power stuff,” she said. “That was the question that I was interested in my whole life: What do people do when they have power, and what do you do about it if you don’t have it?”

Leonard was open and frank in discussions with friends. As an editor, her comments were pointed but softened by a lilting Georgia accent.

Late in life, after suffering a brain aneurysm, Leonard carried a dictionary to help her reprogram her brain with words she needed to keep her job.

Leonard had an aversion to the limelight and praise for her work. Before she died, she asked her obituary not to begin with her role as a Freedom Rider.

When she passed her family asked in lieu of flowers for contributions to the Equal Justice Initiative.

“We’ve come a long way, but we ain’t through,“ Leonard reflected in 2012, in an article recognizing her work.

This list is part of TLH 200: the Gerald Ensley Bicentennial Memorial Project . Throughout our city's 200th birthday, we'll be drawing on the Tallahassee Democrat columnist and historian's research as we re-examine Tallahassee history. Read more at tallahassee.com/tlh200 .

This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Guitar Store man, brickyard builder, and a world checkers champ make the Tallahassee 200