PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 20, No. 5. Sept. 7, 2000

At 90, Florio exercises mind and body regularly in Huff Hall

Becky Mabry, Assistant Editor
(217) 244-1072; mabry@illinois.edu

Photo by Bill Wiegand Joe Florio still goes to his Huff Hall office three days a week.

Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, Joe Florio goes to Huff Hall where he works out with some friends in a small corner of the gym, and then he spends a half hour in the pool. He finishes his routine with a brown-bag lunch in the office set aside at Huff for professors emeriti.

It doesn't matter that he turned 90 years old in June. The longtime professor of health and safety education still looks like he could jog a mile or wrestle a bear if he came across one. Wiry and fit, he's mentally sharp too, still serving as a judge in a well-known essay contest for high schoolers about driver safety.

He has scores of friends who admire him, from the UI and the community, said Thomas O'Rourke, professor of community health.

"He's one of the most wonderful, not only professors, but people I've ever met here at the university or wherever," O'Rourke said. "I was one of his students in the mid-'60s and then I became a faculty member and I had the opportunity to serve as a faculty member with him. He was and he continues to be a very accomplished person. It's like he never stopped being a part of the UI. It's just that he retired, but he continued to do many things."

Florio's history with the UI goes back to 1930 when he entered as a student. One of six children of Italian immigrants, he served meals at fraternities to pay for his own meals, alongside James "Scotty" Reston who would become a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist. Tuition cost Florio $25 a semester, he said.

He was a member of the soccer team, and they played on a field just south of Huff Hall on the mornings of football games. They traveled to away games in the Athletic Association's Cadillac and Lincoln. The soccer team was a low priority of the UI sports program, he said, and the players weren't recognized with a banquet like the other athletes.

"But 'G' Huff gave us a banquet in his home," Florio said. "He had a butler slide the steaks off. I sat near him and he said 'I wish I could eat like you guys.' He was a big man. So when he gave me my letter, it was a big moment for me to get a varsity 'I.' In those days a varsity 'I' meant something. It was a big moment to get to be a letterman with the university."

Florio's son, David, continued that tradition and lettered in swimming. Florio's brother, Nelio, played baseball at the UI.

"G" Huff, by the way, was the legendary George Huff.

"Everybody called him 'G.' " Florio said. "But I didn't call him 'G.' I called him Mr. Huff."

Huff hired Florio to work as an assistant football coach for the freshmen team during Coach Robert Zuppke's tenure. Florio remembers Zuppke as being a short, odd, German. Florio's full-time career began at the UI in 1935.

He rose through the ranks from assistant instructor to full professor by 1949. He has been recognized in the state and nation for pioneering work in teaching driver's education to high school students. He served on the Secretary of State's Traffic Safety Advisory Committee under four different secretaries of state, and he was a member of the Governor's Health and Fitness Committee until early this year.

He feels pride when he looks back at the 40 years he spent at the university.

"I think when they say this is a first-class university, it is," he said. "I've seen it from the time I was a freshman in 1930 when they had 10,000 students. I've seen the whole metamorphosis. And I was lucky I was able to teach the classes I wanted."

He laughs about the dress code when he was a faculty member. He wore a coat and tie. Today, he said they wear blue jeans and "everything else."

He retired in 1975, but never stopped coming into the office at Huff Hall.

"I used to go five days, now I go three days a week. Monday, Wednesday and Friday," he said. "There's a small gym in the southeast corner of Huff that has some exercise equipment and mats and there's about 10 or 12 of us, mostly retired, and we go through exercises. Then I go up to Huff pool and aqua jog. And I swim a length and get on my back a length. I put in about half an hour in the water. Then I go upstairs and get my lunch in the office."

Bobbie Leisure, administrative aide in the community health office at Huff Hall, said Florio is a welcome, cheerful visitor she and the others look forward to seeing those three days a week.

"He's a wonderful gentleman," Leisure said. "He's very personable and always has a smile on his face. He's a very well-known face around here."

Twenty years ago on his 70th birthday, Florio jogged a 10K (6.2 mile) course that ended in Memorial Stadium, where he was surprised with a crowd of family, friends, two UI deans, banners, and television and radio reporters.

Each year since, a Florio 10K race has been held on his birthday, and he jogged in it until he was 82. He rode a bicycle along with the joggers until a few years ago. Now he and some friends walk around Centennial Park a few times while the joggers are running the route.

This year, the Florio 10K ended with another surprise party, this one a breakfast buffet at the Illini Union. To mark the occasion, friends started an endowment fund in his name with the UI Foundation.

Bill Creswell, professor emeritus of community health and a longtime friend of Florio's, helped plan the 90th birthday surprise. He was not only a colleague, but also he and Florio jogged and swam together for many years. He has nothing but praise for the man who inspired Creswell to come to the UI.

"He really is a wonderful person. He's so consistent. He does his calisthenics, and he's been doing that all his life," Creswell said. "And his wife [Marana] is a lovely person too."

The couple lives at Clark-Lindsey Village in Urbana, and Florio is able to catch a bus right outside the front door to make his thrice-a-week visits to his office.

"He is 90 years old, but we don't like him because he's 90," O'Rourke said. "People have always liked him and we just continue to like him even more. He's gotten older, but he hasn't changed.

"Everybody likes Joe Florio. He's just a great human being."