The butcher’s son became UF president

Our Oct. 15 column on the former Southboro post office prompted a note from Oliver Earle Young Jr., now 82.

He notes that the butcher shop across from that post office was owned by a man named Criser.

The butcher’s son: Marshall Criser, who went on to become president of the University of Florida.

Except, Criser said recently from his retirement home in Gainesville, the shop wasn’t across from the post office.

It was at the corner of Lakeview Avenue and Dixie Highway in downtown West Palm Beach, he said.

Criser’s father had sold his butcher shop on the New Jersey shore and piled his wife and 13-year-old son into their car for a new life in Florida.

The trip took two days. They were in southern Georgia when they heard a news bulletin on their car radio. It was Dec. 7, 1941: Pearl Harbor.

Criser’s father left him and his mother in Port Salerno with his grandfather, a commercial fisherman, and headed to West Palm Beach.

He cut meat for a market for about four years, then got his own shop.

Marshall worked weekends and in the summer.

“Butter was rationed,” he said. “My father would always try to set aside butter for his customers. Every day we were in the shop, a stream of cars would come by. They just would open the window and say, ‘Any butter today?’ We’d shake our heads ‘no’ and they’d go on.”

Because of its location, 80 percent of the shop’s customers were Palm Beach mansions, so business was great in the winter, slow in the summer.

Cooks would call in orders for pickup or the senior Criser would drive over the bridge in his delivery wagon, his son said.

Business lagged and Criser closed the shop and worked a few years as a paper salesman. Born in 1900, he died in 1962.

By then his son had graduated Palm Beach High and the University of Florida and was at a Palm Beach law firm where he’d work for three decades, before taking the reins at his alma mater from 1984 to 1989.

Post file photo
Marshall Criser and wife Paula at his swearing in as new University of Florida president in 1985.

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