The Early Days

The Science Center was founded with a singular ambition: To be a hub for interdisciplinary science education for generations.

Born of a Cold War-era national mandate to build the nation’s capacity for scientists and engineers, the Science Center was a bold endeavor at a time when the nation needed it. And for the more than 22,000 children who completed its programs every year, it was a place where the future was literally in the air, the soil, and the water.

The father of the Science Center was William Guild, a recently-widowed retiree from Massachusetts who took a small apartment on Mirror Lake Drive in 1952. The wiry 60-year-old was a former newspaperman who’d subsequently spent 40 years as a realtor, but his passion was science.

Guild, who’d never finished college, was an amateur naturalist, and he found the mostly-undeveloped Pinellas County a veritable garden of discovery.

He and other naturalists created an informal group they called the Science Club of St. Petersburg. Retired entomologist and head of the local Audubon chapter Alfred F. Satterthwait was voted president. Guild, one of just two amateurs in the group, became head of the educational component. Others were experts in wildflowers, fossil shells, trees and taxidermy.

The group embarked on field-collecting trips (“walkie-talkies”) and met on the third Tuesday of each month at the Museum of History.

After a Science Club exhibit of local wonders attracted crowds to St. Petersburg Junior College, Guild reached out to the Pinellas County School system and proposed his group help supply experiments and exhibits for their science classes. “These individuals could be of inestimable value to our school in helping to collect, arrange and classify exhibits for science,” said St. Pete High principal C. Taylor Whittier.

Within a year, the club received project requests from 45 of the 54 schools in Pinellas, from electronics to hydroponics. The first semi-permanent iteration of the newly-named Science Center was at Mirror Lake Junior High.

The Science Center coined a motto: “Science is Fun. See it – Touch it – Do it Yourself!”

In April, 1954: Guild produced St. Petersburg’s first-ever Science Fair, held at Bartlett Park Youth Center. After working successfully with the Pinellas Science Teachers Association and a trio of state universities on 300 displays on everything from meteorological phenomena, astronomy and chemistry to live animals with taxonomy information, he began to formulate plans for an actual Science Center: A dedicated facility where regular classes could be held, experiments undertaken, the wonders of the natural world examined and discussed.

Plus, the apartment and garage on Mirror Lake Drive was getting cramped with equipment, and wall-to-wall with the constant visits from children wanting to know about turtles, snakes, plants or rocks.

Parents magazine profiled Guild in 1955; the story was subsequently reprinted in Readers Digest, which referred to the “lively little man” as “The Pied Piper of Science.”

“You know why I succeed?” he asked the reporter. “I don’t know very much. But I can think like a boy.”

The kids, reported the magazine, called him “Uncle Bill.”

When county crews widening Joe’s Creek with heavy equipment uncovered large animal bones, Guild was called in to identify them. They were, he realized, what was left of a long-extinct prehistoric mammoth. “The kids should be in on this,” he told county administrators.

His success mounted – the first State Science Fair was held in St. Petersburg in 1958, and by then the county science fair was so large it had to be moved to the gargantuan Gay Blades Roller Rink.

Guild’s pleas for a larger, centralized space were answered by the City, which offered the Science Center use of the former B’Nai Israel synagogue at 1039 Arlington Avenue for $1 per year. The synagogue had relocated after the congregation outgrew the building.

The Science Center’s popularity meant it quickly outgrew the antiquated facilities, and plans were drawn up for a new, modern location that would serve as an appropriate showplace for the cutting-edge science of the era.

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