It’s a pleasure to introduce UCC member, Alicia Addeo!
From Long Island, NY, Alicia moved with her parents to Colorado Springs, CO when she was in junior high school. There she took chess lessons and learned both cross-country and downhill skiing, loving the outdoor life. Just three years later, her family moved again, bringing her to Tampa Bay where she enrolled in Seminole High School. She has pride in her academic record and has always embraced learning as well as adventure. Alicia was active in the Spanish Club, Science Ecology Club and, thinking ahead to life after high school, went to Coast Guard Boot Camp between her junior and senior years. During senior year she was called to do weekend drills and eventually earned an honorable discharge from the Coast Guard. She went on to serve in the Coast Guard Reserves for 2 years, volunteering again for active duty after USCGC Blackthorn collided with the tanker Capricorn in 1980.
A high achiever, Alicia shares that assimilating back into high school was difficult after attending boot camp. She found her high school peers to be immature, so she worked ahead with her classes to graduate early in January and then worked as a teacher assistant. Going on to earn an associate’s degree at St. Petersburg Junior College, Alicia set her sights on her true interests and set off to study Anthropology at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. She is quick to point out that she was not interested in “dirt digging 101” or archeology, how most people connect with the discipline, but cultural and linguistic anthropology, living anthropology.
Moving home with a freshly earned BA in Anthropology, Alicia went to work at Fort De Soto as a Park Ranger and Fort Historian. There, she immersed herself in research, writing a grant proposal to the Pinellas County Historical Society, which she won! She was granted travel money and time to travel to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. where she created a historical account of Fort De Soto, the Quarantine Station and Egmont Key. Her research led her further to study gun barrels and gather information from many sources. What culminated from her thorough research was the building of the Quartermaster Storehouse Museum at Fort De Soto Park.
During her sixteen years at Fort De Soto, Alicia also earned an MA in American Studies from USF, as she says, “the American version of Humanities”, because of her continued curiosity about cultural influences. With a keen interest in architecture and preservation, she has attended annual conferences for National Trust for Preservation, Florida Trust for Preservation and the Florida Association of Museums where she presented a paper about the Henry Plant Museum collection of letters about Henry Dobson, “Tampa is a BUM Place: The Letters of First Sergeant Henry A. Dobson in 1898″. Check out her published work by Googling “Alicia Addeo historian”. Following her time at Fort De Soto, Alicia spent five years as a Museum Specialist at Heritage Village and retired from twenty-one years serving Pinellas County Government.
Alicia is also a long-time, dedicated Truth student. Her mother, Gloria, introduced her to Unity and Unity Church of Clearwater many years ago when she studied with Leddy and Dell deChant. Alicia would read all her mother’s books but during her years at Fort De Soto could not attend Sunday services. Alicia was also intrigued by the teachings at the Unitarian Universalist Church right across the street and was involved there for some years. She is an activist at heart. But missing the spiritual side of Unity, returned to UCC in 2019. Alicia faithfully attends Wings, Table Talk and Bible Study and enjoys her hobby of locating vintage Fillmore and Unity books on the web, which she gifts to friends in the community.