TAMPA -- The year was 1955, and two black students in a 10th-grade biology class at a mostly white Philadelphia public school were up to another practical joke.

Their German-American teacher, Mr. Krouse, was unamused.To one student, he gave detention.

To the other, Israel Tribble Jr., Krouse ended up giving the world.

Tribble was the son of a single mother, a domestic worker with a third-grade education. But Krouse saw his potential. He told Tribble he was wasting it. He would pull him out of his trade school curriculum and plunge him into college preparatory courses.

"Some day," Krouse said, "you're going to make a mark for your race."

Five decades later, after a career in higher education, Tribble wrote his first book. It was titled Making their Mark: Educating African-American Children.

"Ike" Tribble has long been a champion of African-American history and scholarship. He has held some 30 appointed positions on various boards and committees. In 1997, he became the first black chairman of the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce.

But perhaps Tribble's greatest impact was becoming his own Mr. Krouse, of sorts, to thousands of young black Floridians. For 17 years, he headed the Florida Education Fund, a program that helped a generation of African Americans earn Ph.D.s and M.D.s, through financial aid, connections, emotional support and inspiration.

"They gave me a tribute a few weeks ago, and to sit there and see the fruits of your labor, for someone who considers himself an educator, that's the greatest reward," said Tribble, 62, in his African-themed living room that looks out on a canal in Dana Shores.

Tribble finds himself in delicate health. The last three years have been devoted to fighting for his life. His "triple (Type) A" personality, as Tribble's wife describes it, is winding down.

"The body's weak, but his spirit is strong, the compassion's still there," said Billy Close, 37, an assistant professor of criminology at Florida State University who credits Tribble with showing him the road to post-graduate academic degrees.

In 1999, Tribble was diagnosed with acute leukemia. After extensive rounds of chemotherapy, he got a new liver, then another. A transplanted kidney failed, and he's waiting for a replacement.

Tribble moves gingerly across the white carpets of his spacious home. "I never watched the mullet jump out of the canal," he says, gesturing to the waterway beyond his pool. Hanging on one wall is a large collection of African masks. A reproduction of an old advertisement for "valuable slaves" adorns another.

When people come into his house, Tribble says, "they get a sense of who we are and whence we come."

Claiming his African roots was an evolution. After Mr. Krouse's intervention, Tribble went on to earn a bachelor's degree in social studies and physical education at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

He joined the U.S. Army, rising to the rank of captain in the area of intelligence. While on a base in West Germany, he told his superior he wanted to attend a lecture by existentialist Jean Paul Sartre. The answer was no, that attending an antiwar protest wouldn't look good on his military record.

Tribble quit the military. In 1967, he passed through Berkeley, Calif.

"I had never seen anything like it before," he said. "It was just alive, just buzzing on every corner."

For the first time in his life, he met black intellectuals. He discovered that the richness of his heritage had been hidden by his Eurocentic education. He enrolled in a graduate history course and underwent an awakening.

"When you've been cheated in terms of basic knowledge and understanding of the history of this country, it angers you," he said.

A year later, Tribble was hired to create what he says was the country's first African-American history class in the San Mateo Union High School District, a largely white county south of San Francisco. "It was mind-boggling," Tribble said.

From there, he spent seven years with Mills College in Oakland as a history instructor and administrator. He got his doctorate in education from Stanford University and landed jobs with the federal Department of Education as special assistant to the secretary and with the Department of Defense as director of voluntary education.

In 1982, he moved to Tallahassee to work for the Florida Board of Regents -- which oversaw the state's university system -- as associate vice chancellor for academic programs. The McKnight Foundation recruited him to kick start a $15-million grant program, now called the Florida Education Fund, to generate black faculty for higher education posts. The need was acute.

"When I started the Florida Education Fund, we went back and looked at the production of the doctoral degree granting institutions, and for 10 solid years, they had not produced one African-American Ph.D. in . . . the sciences, mathematics, statistics, engineering, in the whole state," Tribble said.

Tribble was a natural at persuading university officials to admit the education fund's fellows, said Dr. Roderick McDavis, who worked with Tribble on the project in the early years.

"It's a trait he has that he can mix a very, very serious point with humor so that a person doesn't feel they're being lectured to," said McDavis, now provost at Virginia Commonwealth University.

While a board member of the NationsBank of Florida a decade ago, Tribble nudged the bank toward financing inner-city housing projects and youth programs, said Alex Sink, head of the bank's Florida operations at the time.

"Without Ike at the board table, a lot of things our bank did wouldn't have been on the radar screen," Sink said. "Ike's a very passionate person, but he's not the kind of person who's going to bang on the table."

Deanne Roberts, incoming chairwoman of Tampa's Chamber of Commerce, said Tribble had a lasting impact on the chamber by mentoring upcoming chairpersons and creating permanent seats on the board for the local Urban League and the Hillsborough County Classroom Teachers Association.

"He left a real legacy beyond the power of his own personality," Roberts said.

Those who call Tribble an inspiration are many. Brenda Jarman, a high school dropout and a mother of two by 15, credits Tribble with getting her admitted to the doctoral program in social work at Florida State University.

"He looked at my life story . . . and he believed in me," said the former McKnight fellow, now head of the social welfare department at Florida A & M University.

Tribble retired from the Florida Education Fund two years ago when his leukemia came back. His wife of eight years, Sheila Simmons, a labor relations consultant, said his illness had brought them closer. He has two daughters, Ahsha, who is getting her Ph.D. in meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, and Aiyisha, a sophomore at Florida Southern College.

For someone who has spent his life facilitating education, these are "scary" times, Tribble says.

"The conservative shift in our society doesn't lead one to think that we care enough about people and their plight," Tribble said.

Black achievement suffers because of it, he said. "For so many, they're not that confident to begin with. And then they hear that there's no more financial aid and 'We don't think you're qualified,' and it discourages people."

Tribble says the gains in black education are tangible. Yet, African-Americans are still underrepresented, particularly in the sciences.

"We're improving," he said, "but when you're going from zero to two, you're not kicking a lot of boogie."

About 25 years ago, Tribble sent a letter to his old teacher, Marlin Krouse.

Tribble received a response dated Jan. 20, 1978. Krouse wrote that he was living alone and had grown disenchanted with teaching, but he was proud that his former student had attained such heights.

Though the letter saddened Tribble, he always carried a copy of it.

"I wanted to remember how he had put me on the right track, but I also wanted to remember to thank people along the way," Tribble said.

Otis Segers was the student Krouse punished for the prank nearly 50 years ago. He now has his own tax preparation practice in Oakland, Calif. He has bitter memories of high school.

"I call it my four years of retardation, because no one challenged me," said Segers, 63, who eventually earned a degree in accounting -- thanks, he said, to Tribble's support through the years.

"Ike was a like a meteorite. He was steadily moving ahead."

-- Kathryn Wexler can be reached at wexler@sptimes.com or (813) 226-3383.

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