Rae O. Weimer founded the University of Florida’s first school of
journalism, and within one year of his arrival in Gainesville, the
school received accreditation. No longer would Florida’s students have
to leave the state to pursue dreams of becoming journalists.
Just Call Me Rae
chronicles the life of the man who pioneered journalism education in
Florida and built one of the most innovative journalism and
communications programs in the country.

Rae
grew up in a small Midwestern town where he learned to be resourceful
and hardworking, traits that would make him—along with his
reputation—the prime candidate to lead UF’s small journalism department.
Due to economic hardship, he dropped out of college in his final year,
but he knew he was destined to be a newspaperman. He learned everything
he could about the profession, taking any job that came his way.
Between 1925 and 1940, Rae worked for eleven
newspapers in six states, including the Akron Beacon Journal and
Cleveland Press in Ohio and the Buffalo Times in New York. The
culmination of his newspaper career was his role at the revolutionary
and historic PM newspaper in New York City. At PM, Rae rubbed elbows
with some of the greatest journalists and writers of his generation,
including Dorothy Parker, Ernest Hemingway, Ted Geisel (Dr. Seuss), Max
Lerner, I. F. “Izzy” Stone, Dashiell Hammett, and Pulitzer Prize-winner
Edna Ferber.
Rae’s reputation ran ahead of him
to Florida, where the state’s newspapers were agitating for upgrading
journalism education at UF. Rae might not have had the degrees that
other candidates had, but he had the credentials—he was a seasoned
newspaperman, a trained newspaper technician, and his years at PM had
honed his teaching instinct. UF President J. Hillis Miller agreed to
hire Rae, and so would begin the legend of the degreeless dean.
Rae re-envisioned journalism at the University
of Florida. With his leadership, what had been a three-person department
that rarely exceeded twenty students grew into the School of
Journalism. He expanded the school to include advertising and radio and
television journalism in the curriculum, and by the 1960s UF's School of
Journalism was the fastest growing journalism program in the country.
In 1968, shortly after Rae retired, the School
became the College of Journalism and Communications, and today it is
still ranked among the nation’s top journalism programs, with students
hired at news organizations across the country, including highly
competitive newsrooms in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Los
Angeles. With the communication skills they developed at the college,
many pursue careers in public service, politics, law and public
relations.
This book is an eye-opening chronicle of Rae Weimer’s lasting legacy to journalism in the state of Florida.
Distributed by University Press of Florida on behalf of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications