There was never any doubt in my mind that I would go to college, but there had also never been any discussion in my family about what college that might be. Dad never actually finished college, and Mom attended a small college for girls in Jackson, so there wasn't anything in our family like what today is called legacy. We certainly had no understanding or knowledge about the so-called “good schools” and definitely no idea of Ivy League schools and the like as possibilities for me.

Some time during my senior year in high school, the subject, of course, was forced on me and my folks. My friends, for the most part, were planning to attend the University of Florida in Gainesville, where I thought I'd have a hard time with its long distances between classroom buildings and its campus crisscrossed with traffic-filled roads. Orlando was still a small town in many ways in 1956, and at that point I still wasn't a regular cane user and rather timid to venture forth on a walk by myself through a heavily trafficked area.

There were a couple of smaller institutions that I was considering, the first being Rollins College, a rather highly regarded liberal arts school, which was located in Winter Park, a town exactly adjacent to Orlando. The other school was Stetson University, which was located forty miles away in Deland. I had interviews at both schools and, though they were and are excellent colleges, I didn't find myself jumping up and down at the prospect of attending them.