Burt, Al

Alvin Victor Burt Jr. (1927-2008), Miami Herald reporter and columnist, was born Sept. 11, 1927, in Oglethorpe County, Georgia but grew up at the family home in Jacksonville, Florida. In later life, he prided himself on being both a native Georgian and a native Floridian. He always described Florida as "home," however, and would immortalize its people and places in his column "Al Burt's Florida."

Burt studied journalism at the University of Florida, where he was a member of Sigma Chi fraternity, served as an editor for The Alligator, and worked part-time at the Jacksonville Journal . His first job after he graduated in 1949 was condensing United Press wire service news to be read on the radio. "This was probably the best training I ever had," he said in an oral history interview in 1999, "to take a 600- or 700-word story and boil it down to two sentences for the radio."

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