Chris Cate: Welcome to the Fluent in Floridan podcast featuring the Sunshine State's brightest leaders talking about the issues most important to the people of Florida and its millions of weekly visitors. I'm your host Chris Cate and in this episode created by Salter Mitchell PR, I talk to Pulitzer Prize winning reporter, Lucy Morgan, whose status is one of Florida's most influential reporters that's supported by her inclusion in the Florida Women's Hall of Fame and the Florida Newspaper Hall of Fame. In our conversation, we discuss everything from getting her start in journalism to her jail sentence for protecting sources, her coverage of [inaudible 00:00:35] governor's and lobbyists and much more. You can hear it all right now.

Lucy, thanks so much for being on the show. You've written countless stories, but your life story is as interesting as any of them. Can you start by sharing how you got your first newspaper job?

Lucy Morgan: Yes, I was a stay at home mother of three children, living in Crystal River, Florida, when a woman knocked on my door and said she was the area editor for the Ocala Star Banner, at the time, a small afternoon paper in Ocala that had distribution out into the counties around it. I said, “I've never written anything. Why would you knock on my door?” She said the local librarian had told her that I read more books than anyone in town, and that I could probably write. I said, “Well, I've never really tried it, but I could use the money and I'll try.” They asked me to cover Citrus and Levy counties. That would be Cedar Key Runs and Crystal River ... Sometimes Inverness, although there was another guy in Inverness ... County government, crime. Essentially anything that happened in the two counties.

I started out. I think my first trip was to a rotary club luncheon or something, and then I covered the Crystal River city council where there were local correspondents who sat on one side of the room during a council meeting, and if they got to a contentious point in the meeting, the council president would point over at them and say, “Now, y'all don't write this.” They didn't. I had never had a journalism course, still haven't, but I didn't think that that sounded right, so I wrote what they did. I've been in trouble ever since somewhere. It's just I've always been curious. As a child, I had an older sister who loved fairy tales, and my mother tells me that when I came along and she would start to tell a story, my question stopping her from telling the story was, “Is it really true?”

If it wasn't really true, I wasn't interested in listening to it. I guess that has stood me in good shape to be a reporter over the years. 

Chris Cate: Welcome to the Fluent in Floridian Podcast, featuring the sunshine state's brightest leaders, talking about the issues most important to the people of Florida and it's millions of weekly visitors. I'm your host Chris Cate, and in this episode, created by Salter Mitchell PR, I talk to Mary Adkins, a professor at the University of Florida and author of the book Making Modern Florida: How the Spirit of Reform Shaped a New State Constitution.

In our conversation we talk about what Florida's constitution was revised in the 1960s, and why leaders created the constitution revision commission. We also discussed the impact of these commissions and what Floridians can expect from the current revision commission, and you can hear it all right now. Mary, thanks so much for being on the show. We're in the middle of a very unique time in our state right now when the constitution revision commission, which meets every 20 years, gets together to review our constitution and propose new amendments for Floridians to either approve or reject. Can you start by sharing a little bit about how this whole revision process got started?

Mary Adkins: Sure, Chris. It got started as a part of the new constitution that Floridians voted on and adopted in 1968. The new constitution was needed because it, among other antiquated features, had a very rigid legislative apportionment system. It was very hard to change, it could only be changed by the legislator, and in the meantime, it was accurate for 1885. By 1960-ish, things were pretty malapportioned. All the people lived in the South, all the legislative districts, I'm exaggerating this, but most were in the North, and something had to change, and it was very hard to get it changed. The legislator did pass a bill calling for a constitution revision commission. 

That commission met in 1966, it was chaired by Chesterfield Smith, it had a bunch of, a mix of reformers and [inaudible 00:02:07] in it, and they created a draft of a new constitution. They submitted it to the legislator, which had just been reapportioned. It was young, urban, progressive, it tweaked slightly this constitution and it adopted the new constitution, and that constitution contained within it a unique way to be amended, and that was a regularly automatically recurring constitution revision commission made up of the attorney general and appointees, and it was there because the people who voted in, or excuse me, who drafted that new constitution knew that the people of Florida needed a way that they could have power over their own constitution and not be dependent just on the legislator. This group had seen that the legislator was not always going to be responsive to what the people needed.

Chris Cate: Were there any other examples of states setting up a revision commission like we were doing, that Floridians could structure a model after, or was Florida's process really a one of a kind process?

Mary Adkins: Florida's constitution revision process was and remains unique among the states. Some other states have provisions for a revision commission. Typically, they are triggered by some event, or they can be voted into existence, but Florida is the only one that has an automatically recurring, regularly reoccurring revision commission, and also one that does not have to submit its proposals anywhere before putting them on the ballot. That's an awesome power.

Chris Cate: How aware are most Floridians of the effort to modernize our constitution back in the '60s, and were most Floridians in favor of it or was it a pretty controversial change for Florida?

Mary Adkins: It's hard to tell how aware most Floridians were. There were quite a few newspapers articles at the time, but there are plenty of newspaper articles now about the CRCs work, yet the average citizen isn't aware of its work. There were groups like the League of Women voters and the Florida Bar that were very active in trying to get there to be a new constitution.

As far as controversy, yes, there were still plenty of people who felt the old constitution was just fine. I think there was a little bit of fear of too much more change, because Florida was changing really fast then. The moon race was happening, more and more people were flooding into the state, Disney was coming. There may have been a little bit of sort of digging your heels in against change. On the other hand, many people, particularly people newer to the state, and very strongly people in urban areas, were strongly in favor of a new constitution.

Chris Cate: In what ways did our constitution change then? I mean did it, apart from just the kind of reapportionment, how did the laws actually change to benefit Floridians in the South?

Mary Adkins: One big thing was that it provided for local home rule. Before the new constitution, localities could do very little beyond the most routine duties by themselves. Everything else they had they needed to go ask their legislative delegation for help, and needless to say that clogged up the legislator, it kept it busy with local bills, and made it very hard to pass state wide bills. 

Putting hands in the, putting power in the hands of the localities was a big change. The court system, which actually got adopted a few years after the rest of the constitution, was a huge change. It had been almost random under the old constitution. Many, many statutory and local courts, under the new constitution of course there's a uniform system for levels of court and they're uniform across the state.

Chris Cate: The commission meets every 20 years, but the second commission after the initial creation was in the '70s, only 10 years after the first. Why did they set that first commission to happen only 10 years after we had just revised our constitution?

Mary Adkins: Well the easy reason that I could tell you is because the constitution was written that way, but I'm sure you'd like to know why it was. The writers of that 1966 constitution realized that they were making a pretty different constitution, and they did not fool themselves that they were getting it perfect.

The built in this earlier review that would kick off the 20 year cycles, with the thought that, "Just in case something that we have put in here that's new doesn't work out, the people won't be stuck with it for too long before they have a chance to change."

Chris Cate: How successful would you say that the CRCs have been, the last two or three commissions that we've had?

Mary Adkins: Well the one working right now is the third since the new constitution. In 1977 and '78, that was the first CRC under this constitution, and they were quite ambitious and put a lot of proposals on the ballot, zero of which passed. It would be a mistake to call them unsuccessful because many of the things that they proposed eventually became part of the constitution. For instance, they proposed a right to privacy, an explicit right to privacy, that didn't pass, but two years later it did pass as a constitutional amendment. Similarly, they wanted to reduce or abolish the state wide elected cabinet. That failed, there was a whole controversy about whether they were going to propose a reduced or an abolished cabinet. They proposed and abolished on, that failed, but again 20 years later, the cabinet did get reduced.

They also served as a great lesson, almost like a classroom lesson for the next CRC, the 1997-98 one, which learned, "Let's make sure we have a broad consensus before we put anything on the ballot. Let's also be realistic and think about what might actually get passed by the public before we place it on the ballot." That CRC had eight of its nine proposals pass, including reducing the cabinet, including having a local option for gun background checks. Having a local option for trial level merit retention of judges, which it passed in theory, but then no locality ever took it up and voted on that. They also put in some very strong language supporting public education. They were, they had more success, if you count success as how many of the proposals passed. 

Chris Cate: You mentioned earlier that, there really isn't a tremendous awareness of the CRC right now amongst Floridians. What kind of obligation does the state have to makes sure voters are informed about what's going on right now?

Mary Adkins: I think the state is a big entity. I do think that there is an obligation to inform voters. I think voters also have an obligation to inform themselves. The CRC seems to be very, quite aware of news. It has a very easy to use website, flcrc.gov. They regularly produce press releases with their schedules and with other announcements that they make. The website itself is easy to use. Every meeting that the group holds, even committee meetings, is broadcast free on the Florida Channel. 

All these things are wonderful, but people basically have to already know about the CRC to find it, right? The trick is getting people to know about it otherwise, and newspapers cover it. Very interestingly, 20 years ago, the 1997-98 CRC commissioned a focus group, and the focus group was made up of people who self identified as well informed, "I read the paper every day. I watch the news on TV every day." Yet of that group, this is at the end of that CRCs work, of that group, only 24% of them were aware that there was a CRC.

Chris Cate: Wow.

Mary Adkins: I don't know if people just see the word constitution and they turn it off, or they see the letter CRC and they don't know what it is so it doesn't draw them into read in it or watch it, but it's a challenge. 

Chris Cate: Since these amendment proposals are not approved by the Supreme Court before they're voted on, how much does the Supreme Court have to reject them once they've been approved by voters?

I mean will the amendments be constitutional as they are approved, because they are I guess constitutional once voted upon and not subject to review, or can the Supreme Court step in at some point and say, "Okay, this was too far and not inline with the rest of the constitution?

Mary Adkins: That's a great question. I think that they would be, quote, constitutional, because they would be a part of the constitution. They would still be subject to challenge as being say, inconsistent with another part of the constitution, or inconsistent with the United States constitution. Challenges would still be possible, but it, you wouldn't be able to say, "That's not constitutional under the Florida constitution," if it's part of the Florida constitution.

I think the place where it might show up the most readily would be in a situation in which, for instance, with restoring voting rights of felons. There's a citizen's initiative going around right now that would do that. There are also proposals before the CRC that would do that. They're worded differently from each other. If both passed, the court would probably face a challenge from someone saying, "Which one of these is correct?" They would probably have to figure out a way to either make them be read together in a way that would make sense, or interpret it some other way.

Chris Cate: Amendments are seemingly always very complicated when they're on ballots to understand exactly what impact it's going to have, if you're not, if this is really the first time you're learning about it. Do they, does the CRC have more room to add more language onto the ballot, or what kind, do they have any restrictions about how things are worded on the ballot?

Mary Adkins: Well they have to be clear, but they don't really have rules that would prevent them from, for instance, grouping unlike proposals into one amendment on the ballot. That would be possible, and in fact, the 1977-78 CRC did that a little bit, where you would perhaps put something about education and something about homestead on the same amendment. 

It's possibly not a good idea, because I think voters understand, voters don't want things like that. They understand that maybe somebody's putting on something that you might not like in with something that you really want, so then you've got to take the bitter with the sweet. What I'm saying is, they don't have constitutional rules that keep them from doing something like that. 

Chris Cate: Well what advice would you give to the current members right now sitting on the CRC?

Mary Adkins: You know what, the best advice I've heard came from an interview that I did with a member of the 1997-98 CRC. His name was Carlos Alfonso, and here's what he said, and I think it's beautiful advice. He said, "Lay your ego at the door. Don't think about your party and be a Floridian."

Chris Cate: Yeah, that's good advice. Do you think the, I mean it seems to be, I don't know that it's necessarily a equally bipartisan group. Can you, how would you describe the makeup of the current CRC?

Mary Adkins: I've heard it as described as Republicans of all stripes. It is mostly, and predictably, made up primarily of members of the Republican party, and I think that's to be expected, given the people who appoint the members of the CRC. A Republican governor, a Republican House Speaker, a Republican senate president, and then the Chief Justice, who is officially non-partisan, has just three appointments. 

Then the automatic member, the attorney general, is of course also Republican. I've heard said that there are three Democrats on the CRC, but there are I think an array of voices and different kinds of viewpoints. Nobody is defined solely by their party affiliation, and I don't think that we have 34 people that think exactly alike simply because they're all Republicans.

Chris Cate: Do you think that still doing this every 20 years is a good idea?

Mary Adkins: I do, because it gives us a chance to really look at a whole document, and it keeps it from just being amended piecemeal as the former one was. Now we have lots of ways to amend this constitution.

A lot people feel that it's already a sort of slapped together piecemeal, but really the every 20 years review gives us a chance that most states don't have, to just look at the whole document and say, "What is in this that doesn't make any sense? Maybe I'll make a proposal to take it out?" Or, "What is in this that is in conflict with another part of the constitution?" If something like that were to have happened. I do still think it's a good thing.

Chris Cate: Well I want to transition now to the final four questions that I ask every guest at the end of every interview. The first being, who is the Florida leader who you admire?

Mary Adkins: There are several, but probably Reubin Askew the most. I think that he took Florida during a difficult period, and restored integrity to the government. He also did a whole lot to I think save the judicial branch of the government. 

Chris Cate: What is something in Florida that you think deserves more attention than what it's getting?

Mary Adkins: If I can give two, one would be public education needs to be strengthened, not weakened, and the judiciary needs to remain independent and be, and have independent funding so that it can remain independent.

Chris Cate: Where is a favorite Florida location for you to visit?

Mary Adkins: Anywhere there's water.

Chris Cate: And finally, what's your favorite Florida sports team?

Mary Adkins: I am a Florida Gator.

Chris Cate: Not surprisingly. All right, well I really appreciate you sharing all this information and for taking the time to chat with us today.

Mary Adkins: Thank you, Chris, I've enjoyed it.

Chris Cate: Thanks for listening to the Fluent in Floridian Podcast. If you aren't subscribed to the podcast yet, I hope you'll look us up and subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app, like Apple Podcast, Stitcher, or Google Play Music. If you leave a review, that would be great too. Thanks to my team at Salter Mitchell PR for making this podcast possible. 

If you need help telling your Florida story, we've got you covered. We offer issues management, crisis communications, social media, advocacy, and media relations assistance. We also have our own in-house creative and research teams. Look us up at saltermitchellpr.com for more information. You can also find more information about the Fluent in Floridian Podcast at fluentinfloridian.com. Have a great day. Given your inexperience when you started out, how did you find a way to become successful? Did you have a mentor that showed you the ropes, or how did you go about learning how to create-

Lucy Morgan: I had a lot of editors over the years, first at Ocala. I read a lot. I always read a daily newspaper, so I was fairly well informed about what was going on, I guess, which was the first step, I think. I think too many people, even now with as many sources as we have of news, too many people don't pay attention to what's going on around them. You see that every now and then in a poll which asks people if they could name the Vice President of the United States. An enormous number can not. I had that advantage, and I just fell into it. I had taken debate in high school. At the time that this happened, I had a high school diploma. I later got an AA at Pasco-Hernando Community College while I was working full-time and had three children, which is no small feat. 

I still haven't had a journalism course. I'm a little afraid to take one. If I flunked it, how can I explain it? I married 49 years ago an editor at the Times, who has a Masters in Journalism from Northwestern. He's taught me a lot so I feel like I owe Northwestern a little along the way. He was always there to correct me, and he was the kind of editor, who if he was editing a story or writing one and the guy's name was Brown, he would make 10 phone calls to confirm that it didn't have an E on the end of it. He was just always a stickler for being correct. He still is. I, a few years ago, wrote a story with a dateline of Stark that had to do with the death penalty. That's where executions occur. As soon as it went up on the web, the first thing I get is an email from him saying, “Starke has an E on the end of it.” It's a daily lesson that I get, I guess you could say.

Chris Cate: How did you end up at the St. Pete Times?

Lucy Morgan: I worked for Ocala for three years. During the final two years at Ocala, the Times lost the person who had been its local correspondent in the area. They asked me if I would be willing to occasionally file a story for them. Ocala didn't care because they didn't consider the St. Pete Times to be competition for them in that rural area. I parlayed that into making pretty good money out of two papers. Neither one paid a lot, but together it was more than I had ever expected to make. I couldn't continue to work those kinds of hours. Ocala was an afternoon paper. St. Pete was morning. It meant I had a 24 hour a day deadline. I would wake up at 6:00 and dictate stories on the phone to an editor in Ocala. This was long before we had the kind of communications and email and things that we have today. 

Everything I communicated to either paper had to go by Greyhound Bus, such as film, or be dictated on the telephone or mailed in. The biggest improvement in my life was the ability to communicate and the portable computers, some of which weighed a ton, but it made us able to file a story without having to dictate to it to somebody who couldn't spell. 

Chris Cate: In 1973, you were sentenced to eight months in jail for refusing to reveal an anonymous source. Can you share how that situation came about and how it was eventually resolved?

Lucy Morgan: Sure. We had a grand jury investigation going on in Pasco County of city government and the Dade City Police Department and the County Building Department, I think were all involved in it. I was babysitting the grand jury on its final day of meeting, simply sitting in the hallway of the courthouse watching who came and went. I had interviewed the state attorney and a lot of the witnesses, and a lot of what they were doing was based on stories that we had written. I knew more than the average reporter about what they were doing behind those closed doors. I wrote a story for the next day speculating on what the grand jury had done, which was indict nobody but Chris [Izalot 00:08:08]. 

The state attorney did not like that, so the next day, a couple hours after the paper hit the streets, they served me with a subpoena to appear later the same day and answer his questions. I went with an attorney from the Times and our CEO, Gene Patterson to Dade City at 4:00 in the afternoon. The state attorney had a lot of questions, all of which I refused to answer. I just decided that if I answered any question, I was walking down a path I didn't want to go on. He had a judge waiting in the next room who immediately sentenced me to five months in jail. As we walked out of the courthouse, Jean Patterson and I were talking. He said, “You've done a great thing here. Don't worry about this. We'll do everything we can to keep you out of jail, but if you go, you may have to write a daily column,” which did not make the Sheriffs very happy in that area. 

I thought people would not understand the concept of a reporter going to jail. I was very wrong. I got thousands of calls, letters. These were handwritten letters ... We didn't have email then ... and elderly citizens of the area who simply walked into the office with a cake or a loaf of bread and left it on the desk. They had baked hacksaws inside of the loaves of breads and the cakes. It was their element of support for it. I was stunned that in the three or four years ... Well, let's see. That was 73. We finally won the case at the Florida Supreme Court in 76, so for those three years, I got maybe two or three people who were mad and called and said we hope you go to jail or something like that. I got an avalanche of calls and letters from ordinary citizens who totally understood and thanked me for supporting the First Amendment and the right to keep a source confidential.

I was amazed at it. It was a learning experience. It also taught me a lot, very early in my career, about being the subject of a news story. There was one occasion where a seasoned UPI Bureau Chief came in to interview me about it on the same day that I was interviewed by a young graduate of Vassar, who had never worked for a newspaper, but was writing for Editor & Publisher, a magazine that was pretty much the bible for newspaper editors. Anything that got written in that magazine would be read by any editor I might ever work for, so when this young woman knew almost nothing about sources or news, I was very horrified at what could come out in her magazine. The UPI guy, I was just comfortable as I could be with. He knew everything. He worked the area.

When the two stories came out at about the same time, the UPI guy had made a handful of mistakes, including having listed the wrong city in which it occurred. The Vassar grad had written a beautifully done story, Mother of Three Faces Jail, which casted in a very human light. I realized how very wrong I was to think that a person who had never worked in the news industry, but it taught me a lot about being the subject of a news story. I hope I always tried to keep that in mind as I dealt with people over the years.

Chris Cate: Was that situation one of the scariest situations of your career? Was there anything comparable to that?

Lucy Morgan: Oh yeah. No, that was not one of the scariest. It was one in which I felt I had enormous support, both from the newspaper, from Dick ... A week or so after that first jail sentence, one of the issues we had raised in court was questioning whether the state attorney could of his own volitional question me without getting grand jury to issue some kind of a document. Apparently, the state attorney decided maybe that was a mistake, so he subpoenaed me a second time to appear before the grand jury. I picked up another three month sentence for refusing to talk to him that day. However, in front of the grand jury that day, I took a copy of the story and I colored it with crayons. I colored the parts of the story that had come from sources I wouldn't name ... two paragraphs in the story ... and the parts that had come from just simply observing the process that was going on in the courthouse.

I colored that in green and the other in blue, and then I colored in bright purple all of the information in that story that had come from the state attorney himself. That did not make him a happy man, but Walter Cronkite kicked his newscast with that that night. It made me instantly notorious, I guess you could say, and it made it kind of fun. It also gave me a reputation of someone who could keep quiet about where they got information. For years, I would call a law enforcement officer, lawyer, somebody in the state that I didn't know to ask for information and when I said, “Hi, this is Lucy Morgan”, they would say, “As in Morgan v. State?” It helped me get information for many years by developing a reputation that I didn't tell everything I knew about where I got information.

I think that still works today. I still get calls today from people, even though I'm retired and try not to get in the middle of everything. Most of it, I pass on to the Bureau but occasionally I write something still. 

Chris Cate: What then might have been a time where you were a little bit scared writing a story?

Lucy Morgan: I suppose, oddly enough, the worst stories, the ones that did frighten you were the times that I investigated law enforcement agencies. I should say more the investigation of sheriffs. Particularly if you investigated the sheriff in the county in which you live. I had the best patrolled house in town. A series of stories for which we won the Pulitzer involved the sheriff of Pasco County. I had deputies in my yard almost every night. I could hear the walkie-talkies right outside our bedroom windows. I was followed almost everywhere I went. I, one night, got a phone call from a voice I had recognized as belonging to a former deputy who said, “Lucy girl, would you go somewhere else and call me?” 

I know what that means. That means my phone is tapped. I went over to a neighbors and called him back. That was indeed what he was calling to tell me, that he had been a deputy in that department and was working for another department in the state, and someone in the Pasco Department had called to tell him they had a tap on my phone. That meant I had to be real careful about who I let talk to me on that line. I just started working around that. We didn't have cellphones then. I had to go find a payphone, and for the key sources that were involved, I would have their wives call as though they were chatting about children or groceries and as soon as I could pick up the voice, I would go call them back from somewhere else. 

It meant because I was followed, and some of the deputies who were suspected of talking to me were followed, that I frequently had to meet to get documents and things from them in odd situations. One of my favorite ones was to go to Belk Lindsey, the department store at the local mall, and go into the ladies clothing wear department, find something to try on. Go into a booth and the wife of a source was doing the same thing and handing me documents underneath the booth in the try on area for whatever I was working on. A lot of people left documents in my mailbox overnight. It was scary because if they got caught, they were in trouble. There was one time one of them had passed me a copy of a report about a particular embarrassing escape at the county jail. I was trying not to write about current news, but about other corruption in the department.

The person who gave me the document said, “There's so many copies of this floating around the department I don't think anybody could track it to me, so let your cop reporter use it.” I gave the document to the police reporter, and we wrote about the escape. Well, the sheriff went berserk. He had a tradition of polygraphing almost everybody who he thought might have talked to me. On that occasion, he ordered a polygraph for everybody in the department. The sole question being, “Have you talked to Lucy Morgan?” I get a panicked call from one of my sources in the department saying I don't know how I'm going to get by this. I can't pass a polygraph. I said let me give it a little thought. A few minutes later, I had a partner helping on the story, and I said, “Let's call and ask for copies of all of his bank statements for the last five years.” 

We knew one of the things we were going to look at was his banking. He was making bank deposits, moving the department's money around from one back to another and then borrowing money from that bank, among other things. We though since all those bank statements would be of public record, we knew we were going to look at them so I just moved it up a little and asked for all of them. He went absolutely crackers worrying about that and he forgot about polygraphing everybody in the department. Those are the kinds of things where my own safety and that of my family, someone ... We don't know who, but in that timeframe, someone poisoned our cat. We had a screen back area. We lived in the middle of eight acres, so our house was a little isolated. We had a swimming pool that had a screen enclosure around it and we had traditionally let our cats out on the screen area, but left the kitchen window open enough for them to get back in the house if they wanted to come.

Every morning as I was getting ready to go to work, I would open the sliding glass doors, let the cats out onto the porch and they did pool patrol, or whatever. Slept, probably. They would usually come back in the house during the day to eat or find the litter box. On this particular day, someone slit the screen with a knife and put in a lid of something that had poison in it. Trouble, our four year old Siamese, at it. At the moment, we had only one cat and he was desperately ill. We got him to a vet. The vet was a good friend and a neighborhood who did everything he could to save him. Finally, after having him on IV's and all kinds of stuff for almost a week, I think, he calls me on a Friday and he says, “Lucy, Trouble will not eat. His liver is starting to rebuild, but he will not eat anything we give him. He's got to eat or he's not going to live.” 

He said, “It occurred to me that it might be that he's afraid to take anything from a stranger. I think maybe if you take him home for the weekend and try to get him back to eating, but you'll have to bring him in for his IV's during the day, we might be able to save him.” We got him, brought him home and I opened cans of tuna and took a little flake and put it on my fingers and fed him one flake of tuna at a time. That was the thing he loved most of all. He got back to eating, and that cat ... He was four at the time ... he lived to be 19. He defied the Sheriff, too. There were things like that. My daughter-in-law was seriously threatened. I had a grandchild that was born just as I started on that project. He would be about a year old by the time the story started to publish. My daughter-in-law put him in daycare every day and went to work.

One day, she has a guy come into work and say, “Aren't you Lucy Morgan's daughter-in-law?” She says, “Why yes I am.” He says, “You better go back and tell her to quit picking on the Sheriff. I know you came to work today in a little red Hyundai with license tag number so and so, and you live at this address, and you dropped your child off at daycare today. We know where he is, and here's what he was wearing.” This kind of stuff terrified her. Me too. I wasn't sure who the guy was, but her description of him was good enough that I could guess. My children happened to live at the time in the city of New Port Richey. The police chief in that town was a guy who was no friend of the Sheriff's. I just called him up and said I really wish that you guys would pay a little attention to anything that you see happening at their house and here's what happened. 

He said, “Lucy, I'll do something else. I'll go talk to the person we think it is and tell him you think he's the one that did it, and then if anything else happens, we're going to want to talk to him again.” Well, he did that. The guy never appeared again. I think we had him pegged. Those kind of things were common. It meant that the couple of years I spent on that project were very tense times. We could go almost nowhere that we weren't followed. We had no belief that anything we said or did was secure. We had, let's see, only one child living at home at the time for part of that. He was not there all the time. He moved out. He was the one that had the child. He had married and moved. I guess we were fortunate that it was most of the time it was us and the cat that were there. 

I learned that there are just a lot of things you have to do if you're going to investigate a law enforcement official who will do anything to survive. I told Larry Campbell, who was Sheriff of Leon County, years later that he was totally safe as long as I lived in Leon County because I was not going to ever investigate the sheriff in the county in which I lived. Now, I did investigate a lot of other sheriffs, but I think that sheriffs as an entity have way too much power under Florida law. The statues do not limit them in the same way other public officials are limited. They can buy anything they want to buy without having to get bids for it. They can hire and fire, with some exceptions. In some counties, they have granted civil service to the department so that you have to have just cause to fire somebody, but in most of the smaller counties in Florida, the Sheriff has so much power to hire, fire, spend money that he becomes above the law, if you will, and we don't have enough people looking at him.

Chris Cate: I read that you were the first woman to win the Pulitzer in the investigative category that you won. In your career, did you ever feel that you had to work harder to earn respect because you were a female reporter?

Lucy Morgan: Probably. I think that most women do have to work harder to get somewhere in any job, whether it's journalism or something else. I think that's changing. I think what we've been seeing happen of late where women are raising their hands and complaining when they are sexually assaulted, or even propositioned. I think that that's changing the dynamics here. I don't know where it goes from here. I do see women much more willing to step forward and say, “Wait a minute. My boss has been propositioning me for a long time and I keep saying no, and he keeps trying. What do I do?” I recently had a young woman come to me with exactly that scenario who works at the Capitol a lot. 

He hasn't touched her, but he has made her life a living hell. Sending her text messages, making demands on her ... Come to my hotel room or let's go out to dinner ... all of these things. These kinds of things, I think, are going to have to stop happening. I don't know whether this atmosphere is hot enough that it's going to make them stop, but surely what's happening to senators who've had to resign to members of Congress that are out, it's going to teach a lesson to some of these guys who simply can't keep their hands to themselves.

Chris Cate: You did spend close to three decades as a St. Pete Times Capitol Bureau Chief. When you reflect on that time when you were here in Tallahassee, what sticks out in your mind the most? 

Lucy Morgan: The fact that lobbyists are so much in control. People write about what the legislatures do for the most part, but the legislatures themselves have very little control over what's going on. The earliest lesson I learned in the Capitol was if you want to know what's going on, go talk to the lobbyists that know that issue. They can tell you what's going to be in a bill, whether it's going to pass, who's going to do it, and usually when they're going to do it. There is just an enormous amount of power, and the reason is money. The lobbyists are the ones who are diverting money to campaigns run by legislatures. Now, the money comes from power companies, sugar companies, all of the big players on the field, but most of the time, the legislator or candidate that gets that money, it's being funneled through a lobbyist's office.

The lobbyist for sugar is going to tell sugar these are the candidates you need to give money to. You put an enormous amount of power in the hands of a few lobbyists. There are a few that are more powerful than others. In part, because they represent clients who have more money than others. The amount of money on that stage is appalling, and I don't know how to change that. I've always thought that if we could pass a law that fixed the money problem, you might get better laws out of there. Until then, I don't think Florida is going to be able to fix its problems. I don't know how we do that exactly. We have such enormous infrastructure problems, education problems, criminal justice system problems that are not being solved in part because we're not spending the kind of money we need to spend to fix them, or doing it the right way.

In many instances, for instance, take the prison system. We're building new private prisons around the state. The lobbyists who work for the private prison systems like this, and a lot of the money that's flowing out of it. That's the way our system is working instead of doing what would benefit the public the most. 

Chris Cate: What were your relationships like with the governors, who were governor at the time when you were Bureau Chief?

Lucy Morgan: Pretty good. Bob Graham was governor when I took over. Now, I had been up from time to time from the day of Kirk through Askew, but Graham was governor when I came in to take over the Bureau. He, at least, appeared to be very open. Now, I'm sure there were things he was doing that we didn't know about. For instance, on the last night of session in 1986, which was his last session as governor, I asked if I could sit in the Governor's Office where he was throughout the evening as everything happens in the final night of the session, thinking he would probably tell me no but he said okay.  It was very enlightening to watch him. He was running for the US Senate at the time, so I'm sure he wanted to look good, but he was day to day more open than any of the governors I covered after him.

The close exception would be Bob Martinez, who was a very interesting governor. On the day that all the newspaper were filled with the news of the Miami Herald having followed Gary Hart, the US Senator, and catching him in an affair with someone, we were asking public officials what did they think of that. I ran into Martinez in the courtyard at the Capitol and asked him. He stopped for a second and looked at me, and he said, “Lucy, I have always presumed surveillance”, which is not bad advice for any governor. Since Martinez, we've had several governors who are much more secretive. The current governor probably being the worst. I mean, I knew that we were in a lot of trouble on the day he was inaugurated when our photographer called from the scene of the prayer breakfast saying that there were some security guards that would not let him in to the prayer breakfast on the morning of the Governor's inauguration.

Well, that's just the beginning of the problems that we've had in getting access to anything this current governor does. I don't think he can be cured. I think we will have to find another governor and make some demands that that governor disclose what he's doing at any given time. When I started, when a governor started his day, we had in our hands a schedule that we received the night before that told us where the governor was going, what all of his appointments for the day was, the identification of the plane he was going on, the names of all the people who went on the plane with him, the wheels up and wheels down time of that airplane, and essentially what he would be doing in all these places. Now, no reporter in the Capitol knows where the Governor is, even what city he's in, unless he chooses to tell them later. 

We have no schedule that has any detail to it. He puts out ... It's a laughable schedule that usually says no scheduled events. Even Chiles, when he came in ... who had been a US Senator and was a little less open than Graham had been ... I think because although he had once been a state senator, coming out of the federal system where things are a little tightly wrapped, he had a lot of trouble getting used to the scrutiny that was there. Even he put out a schedule every day that listed all the people on his plane, where they were going, what they were doing, and you had the feeling that at least you could know that if a plane went down in Jacksonville that day, that was a private plane, “Geez, maybe that's the Governor.”

You don't have that feeling with this guy. You just don't know where he is or how he's getting there, or who's going with him.

Chris Cate: You think that's played a role ... Obviously, the newspaper industry is changing and people losing their jobs, but because there's not much transparency coming out of the Governor's Office, do you think that's cost reporter jobs, too, because editors just aren't placing reporters here in Tallahassee as often?

Lucy Morgan: I think getting reporters added to Tallahassee has always been a problem. In part because, with the exception of the Tallahassee Democrat, the editors who run those papers are in St. Petersburg, Tampa, Miami, Fort Lauderdale so they're looking out into their newsrooms and seeing the people who are there. The people who are way up here in Tallahassee, they don't see as day to day, so they tend not to elevate them on their radar as much. I think that's part of it. Money is part of it. All these bureaus cost a lot of money to operate. In an era where everybody is cutting staff and trying to figure out how to save money, I think that has figured in it a lot more than what the Governor does or doesn't do. I personally would like to see a lot of people assigned to really digging in to what the Governor does do, and I don't think we've had as much of that as I would be satisifed with.

Part of that is that the Governor is so difficult to deal with. They don't answer questions. To me, the amazing thing is that day after day you can ask the governor, anybody on his staff, and you simply don't get the answer. One of the last stories I did before I re-retired in 2013 involved the Governor's dog. I didn't intend to do a hit on the Governor's dog, but one of our young reporters had been assigned to do a feature, a soft feature, on the Governor's wife. Well, for a year, the Governor's office had refused to let her even speak to the Governor's wife. On the first of December of 2012, they had said you can have 15 minutes with her. She by then was in St. Pete working for [Poltivay 00:38:46]. She came back, got her 15 minutes with the Governor's office, which was minded by one of his press people, who wouldn't let her ask some questions but would let others.

There was a dog in the room. She realized when she went back and looked through the clips and everything she had that that was not the same dog that the Governor had gone on Facebook and had a contest to name during the campaign. She called the press person to ask if the Governor had two dogs now. They wouldn't answer the questions. How stupid is that? Who cares how many dogs the Governor has? Or, whether he's got a new dog. We didn't really care but she was trying to put it in this ... buried in the middle of this feature. She sent a note to the Bureau to ask if anybody had been around the mansion lately and had seen a dog, and this particular dog that had been the contest winner named Reagan. Nobody had seen a dog other than the dog named [Tally 00:40:03], I think. I was in the Bureau working on another story and I said I'll make a few calls for you.

I called Brian Burgess, who was then at the Republican party but had been in the Governor's staff, and asked about the dog. He wouldn't answer the question. After two days of playing with me about whether he was going to answer the question, he then refers me to the press secretary in the Governor's office, who also won't answer the question. Well, that's just stupid and I'm just stubborn enough, I guess, that I'm going to push to get an answer to the question. Finally, the Governor answered it sort of. He said that the original dog had threatened to bite ET, the photographer, and others and that they had to give it back to the original owner. Of course, we write what the Governor says assuming that that would at least be close to the truth, only to have ET call and say, “Wait a minute. I raise pit bulls. I'm not afraid of a little dog.” It's something as simple as that they can't tell the truth about.

We later learned they had taken the dog back to some place in south Florida. We don't know to this day whether the dog is alive or dead, or whether he ever actually really did something. To me, they missed an opportunity to say the dog wasn't well suited for a mansion that's visited by a lot of members of the public so we had to give him away. I don't think anybody would have cared one way or the other if they had done that. It might not have even made the story. They lied when the truth would serve them better.

Chris Cate: The First Amendment Foundation created the Lucy Morgan Award for open government reporting to honor your outstanding work in open government. I'm curious. Are there any changes to the law that you would like to still see as it relates to open government?

Lucy Morgan: Yes, I'd like to get rid of a lot of the exemptions. Every year, somebody adds a stupid exemption, and they add it usually because of a one time instance. Maybe a caseworker for the building department has someone get irate at them and throw an egg at them or something. Well, then they want to make all building department officials exempt from the records laws so you don't know their names or any kind of information about them. I think personnel files of public agencies should, without exemption essentially, be public record. Now, when they've made so many exemptions ... social security numbers, other details that they have exempted ... You used to be able to go into an agency and ask for the personnel file, look at it, determine to some degree whether the person was qualified to do the job he was doing, what his past experience had been and how he got hired, who recommended him. 

Nowadays, if you go in and ask for a personnel file, many agencies will painstakingly go through each piece of paper. They won't let you see the original file. They will blank out parts of it, copy those pages and let you see the copied pages. You don't have any feeling that you're seeing the real document when you deal with it. It makes it much harder to be a reporter trying to cover those agencies. It doesn't give people any confidence that you're hiring good people, experienced people who know what they're doing, when you can't get into those records. All throughout government there are these little tiny exemptions that have been added one at a time by the legislature. Sometimes there's been an incident that makes them want to draw the thing broader than it should be.

For instance, utility accounts. The cities where they own utilities. I'm not sure where the law stands on this right now, but there has been a movement to make all those accounts secret. Well, how would you know, if all of them are secret, ether the mayor is giving all of his friends free water and electricity or even paying his own bill. You don't know the answer to those questions when you can't see the records themselves. I wish we had a real champion in the legislature and in the Governor's office who would just kill all of those exemptions as they come up. Most of them have no merit.

Chris Cate: I want to transition out to the final four questions that I ask every guest. The first being who is a Florida leader who you admire?

Lucy Morgan: Well, LeRoy Collins would probably ... That dates me a bit. I think Collins was one of the most honorable governors we ever had, who saw the need for a governor that cared about the people, who was just totally without the kind of problems you see now that money brings us with governors. I would rank LeRoy Collins first. Askew did a lot to make financial records of public officials public, forced disclosure, and to put in the Constitution the requirement. He campaigned for a tax and for disclosure in a campaign that was historic, and was a good governor. Dempsey Barron, the longtime dean of the Senate, used to say he never trusted anyone that didn't drink bourbon or some other liquor. Askew did not, and he didn't allow liquor to be served at the mansion, but he was still a very good governor. 

Bob Graham, I think, followed in that tradition. He was open, easy to deal with. You had a little trouble getting an answer to a question. There was nothing more frustrating to me than to ask Bob Graham a question, holding a tape recorder in front of him, and think he had answered it, and get back to my office and start to make a transcript of what he had said only to discover that he hadn't really answered the question. He had just been friendly and nice and made you think he did. Lawton Chiles had a good reputation. I think he really wasn't interested in being governor a lot of the time, but he did have some good people around him who were. He didn't like to be bothered by answering questions, so it was difficult to deal with him at time. Crist probably wasn't there long enough. Crist did some things to open up government that were great, by appointing Pat Gleason to run his-

Chris Cate: Office of Transparency?

Lucy Morgan: Transparency thing. I think that set a really good standard, and I'm sorry that we don't have it now. The current governor, there's nothing transparent there, and it saddens me greatly to see such a lack of transparencies over such a long period of time. I think it damages the state as a whole. I think Bob Butterworth was a good public official. He was Attorney General for eight years. He had served as head of the Department of Highway Safety in a time of trouble and straightened it out. He had been a Sheriff in Broward County. We've had a lot of good public officials. It's just at any given moment in time, there are not enough of them. 

Chris Cate: What is an issue or just something in general in Florida that you think deserves more attention than what it's getting?

Lucy Morgan: I think transportation issues don't get the kind of attention they need, although all of us sit in traffic a lot. I think the death of the high speed rail is a big problem for Florida. There are a lot of people who opposed that, saying it was boondoggle, but I think the day will come when we're not going to be able to get around Florida very easy because there's just too much traffic. It drives me crazy now to go back to the Tampa Bay area and try to drive in it. You can not predict how long it's going to take you to get from Point A to Point B. You haven't been able to in years, but it's getting worse. If you want to live in Clearwater and work in St. Pete or vice versa, some days it'll take you an hour to get that 15 miles or so. Other days, you can whiz it through in 20-30 minutes. 

The lack of predictability of transportation, I think, is going to turn out to be a huge problem. We've got a lot of other problems. Our whole education system needs work. We have siphoned a lot of public funds off into charter schools. I think somebody needs to really be studying that to see what the total impact on education is in the state. I'm not sure that anybody is. There's also a religious element to some of those charter schools that I don't know how we're not holding those schools accountable to the same standards that we're holding the public schools. I would like to see some comparison of that so we had a real good idea of what the education is that's coming out of there. The criminal justice system is just a cesspool at the moment. All you have to do is pick up the papers and read a story here and there about what's going on in the juvenile detention centers and the state prisons. You know that we're not looking at them close enough. We're not spending enough money on them. We're not making sure that they have good corrections workers in some places.

We're letting slip things that don't treat people decently for far too long. Usually it takes a scandal to make anything like that change. I think we've gone a long time with officials who are unwilling to spend the dimes they need to spend to get public things done. Until they get the courage to do that, we're going to have more problems.

Chris Cate: Where is your favorite place in Florida to visit?

Lucy Morgan: I like the St. Pete beaches. Most of all I guess I like Cedar Key. It's an odd little village at the end of a road that dead ends on an island midway between St. Pete and Tallahassee. They have good seafood and it's very quiet. We were there last year, but we used to go every year and spend the long weekend. Now, we tend to go to North Carolina instead. It's a nice little village to visit that has great seafood.

Chris Cate: Finally, do you have a favorite Florida sports team?

Lucy Morgan: I have to say the Florida Seminoles. I like the Bucks, since I came out of Tampa Bay to come up here, but I think the Seminoles have become our team if you will.

Chris Cate: Thank you so much for taking the time to chat.

Lucy Morgan: Thank you, Chris.

Chris Cate: Thanks for listening to the Fluent in Floridian podcast. If you aren't subscribed to the podcast yet, I hope you'll look us up and subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast app, like Apple podcast, Stitcher or Google Play Music. If you leave a review, that would be great, too. Thanks to my team at Salter Mitchell PR for making this podcast possible. If you need help telling your Florida story, we've got you covered. We offer issues management, crisis communications, social media, advocacy and media relations assistance. We also have our own in-house creative and research teams. Look us up at SalterMitchellPR.Com for more information. You can also find more information about the Fluent in Floridian podcast at FluentInFloridian.Com. Have a great day.