A Place in the Sun
(See Cover) "This country," said General William Tecumseh Sherman, meaning Florida, "is not worth a damn."* Naturalist John James Audubon reported: "All that is not mud, mud, mud is sand, sand, sand." As of today, Sherman is wrong and Audubon is for the birds.
Florida, as any poolside statistician will confirm, is worth more every minute. Its present boom, five years old and picking up speed by the month, is no crazy-house of lot options. Governor Roy Collins says: "Florida stands on three sturdy legs. Tourism. Industry. Agriculture. The ultimate potential of all three has hardly been sighted, but all three must grow and thrive together, or none can survive." The common denominator of the three is the equable and reliable Florida sun, a priceless asset in a nation whose countless blessings do not, in its more populous regions, include a kindly climate. The sun draws tourists--5,000,000 this year, compared with half a million Americans who went to Europe. Some of the tourists stay as farmers or workers, and more would like to. Industry wants to go where workers, in this age of skilled-labor shortage, want to be. Two years ago, when Chemstrand Corp. opened its $88 million nylon plant (largest in the world) at Pensacola, it got 65,000 applications for 3,000 jobs, and most of them came from the hardest-to-get categories, such as chemists and engineers.
"The Whole State's Jumping." Out of the once-despised Florida mud and sand come annual crops of ever-increasing value. In the last five years, Florida frozen-orange-juice production has increased 58%, while California's has dropped 16%. Cattle raising has expanded.
From beneath the mud and sand have come other unsuspected riches--some as common as phosphate, some as fashionable as titanium.
As a result of the sun-made boom, Florida is the fastest growing state east of the Rocky Mountains. Items: ¶ Since 1950, its population has grown from 2,800,000 to 4,000,000, advancing the state from 20th to 14th in population.
If present rates of growth continue, Florida by 1960 will have 5,000,000 people, rank as the eighth U.S. state. Sixty percent of Floridians were born elsewhere.
¶ Since 1940, total individual income of Americans has risen 263%; Florida individual income is up 441%.
¶ Since 1946, U.S. industrial activity has increased 10.8%; Florida's is up 50.1%.
Mere figures, no matter how startling, cannot convey an adequate idea of the seismic social, political, economic and geographical changes that have come over Florida's face. "It's real crazy," a Florida State coed said one day last week in Tallahassee. "Things are happening. I keep asking people about it and they don't know how to explain it, but they go home for a weekend and find a new factory where there used to be an empty lot, or maybe 200 houses where there was a golf course. The whole state's jumping."
From Grove to Atom. Roy Collins, a middle-of-the-road Democrat who presides over this most active and restless of states, is one of the most interesting and effective governors in the U.S. today. He has his roots deep in the restful Old South. Although he is only 46, he grew up in a Florida as different from today's as the pinewoods around his native Tallahassee are from the palmy patios of the Miami Beach hotels. The Florida he remembers meant the jolt of a single-barreled shotgun on his shoulder and a bobwhite dropping through the yellow winter sunlight at the edge of a slash-pine grove. Or a 15-lb. turkey gobbler hurtling into a charge of No. 6 shot, and then falling through the Spanish moss on the oaks onto the dry palmettos below. Or the catfish, at his grandfather Brandon's farm, that stole his bait, sneaking off to its lair. Or how hot it was picking corn in the August sun.
Neither he nor Florida has left all that behind. The new Florida exists around, inside, over and under the old. Roy Collins these days walks to the governor's office from a stately old Tallahassee home, "The Grove," that has been in his wife's family for five generations; it was built in the 18205 by Governor Richard Keith Call, twice the territorial governor of Florida, the great-grandfather of the present governor's lady, Mary Call Darby Collins.
On the way, Roy Collins usually stops, as he did as a young lawyer 20 years ago, at a drugstore for coffee and a chat with the same friends he found there then. Once at his desk, Collins has to deal not only with today's Florida but with tomorrow's. He may have to attend a meeting of an agency that he sponsored, the Florida Development Credit Corp., to encourage the state's 234 banks to pool credit for new industries. Or he may hear, as he did recently, a report that a certain national corporate giant, deeply involved in atomic-energy development, is looking for a plant site in a town with a university atmosphere. That report sent Collins, an indefatigable salesman of his state boom, off to New York in a hurry.
Day after day, he deals calmly and skillfully with Florida politics, which carries into the atomic age the miasmic mist and the alligator snap of the deepest Florida swamp. The job keeps him busy. The other day, his 13-year-old daughter Mary Call asked him, "What's a lieutenant governor?" (the office does not exist in
Florida). When her father explained, she remarked: "Since you've been governor, what we've needed is a lieutenant daddy." A Matching Program. Thomas Le-Roy Collins' grandfather, a circuit-riding Methodist minister, came to Florida from Texas around 1870, died in a pulpit near Tallahassee. The governor's father ran a small grocery, later a wholesale grocery business. He did not have enough money to send his children to college, but he promised to match, dollar for dollar, whatever they earned and saved. "He was years ahead of Roosevelt," says Governor Collins, who deals these days with federal-state-aid fund-matching programs.
Roy worked 18 months at a Tallahassee grocery, saved $500 and bought a business course at Eastman Business College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He worked two years as a teller for the Exchange Bank in Tallahassee, saved another $500 and bought a law course at Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tenn. He finished the one-year course and passed the Florida bar exam with the second highest grade ever scored until then. "I came home," said Roy Collins, "boldly hung out my shingle--and proceeded to starve." Early in 1932 Roy spoke of marriage to dark-eyed Mary Call Darby, but there was a practical difficulty: "My law practice was earning me about $34 a month." So Roy ran for the job of Leon County prosecutor, which paid enough for two.
"I campaigned over every inch of Leon County," he said, "and Mary Call worked almost as hard as I did. The net result was that I wound up getting beat by about 100 votes." Three weeks later, on June 29, 1932, Roy Collins and Mary Call were married.
In the spring of 1934, Lawyer Collins submitted himself once more to the voters of Leon County ("I hated to quit after being beaten"), and won election to the state House of Representatives. He put in six hard-working years in the House and twelve in the Senate. Twice the state capitol press corps voted him the most valuable legislator.
Collins fought to outlaw slot machines, for higher state taxes on dog-track gambling, for higher educational standards and better mosquito control to hold down that old Southern malady, malaria. "I can hardly remember a summer when I wasn't sick with the chills and fever of malaria," Collins said last week. "I used to drink Dr. Groves's tasteless chill tonic by the barrel. I guess it was all that pulled a lot of us through. Well, when I became a legislator I got a chance to work for remedial legislation. Now there are doctors who have practiced in Florida for years and never seen a case of malaria. It's a good feeling to see results like that."
Switching Trains. In 1953 Senator Collins' close friend, Governor Dan Mc-Carty, died in office. Under the state constitution, he was succeeded by the President of the Senate, one Charley Johns, a former railroad conductor, who as a legislator had voted to put the brakes on improving educational standards and against a law to unmask the Ku Klux Klan. Roy Collins ran against Johns for the final unexpired two years of McCarty's term. Collins took his stand against what he called the "muster of the vultures." Despite Johns's lavish promises of road construction projects in key vote areas, Collins beat him 380,323 to 314,198 for the Democratic nomination.
On Jan. 4, 1955 Roy Collins, inaugurated governor of Florida, delivered a speech unusual for its force and clarity. He said: "I want the people of Florida to understand that progress in business, industry and human welfare can only go so far with a ward-heeling, backscratching, self-promoting political system.
"Our progress is sure to run into a dead end if our citizens accept the philosophy that votes can be traded for a road or for a job for an incompetent relative, or for a favor for a friend or for a handout through a state purchase order . . .
"Government cannot live by taxes alone, or by jobs alone or even by roads alone. Government, too, must have qualities of the spirit. Truth and justice and fairness and unselfish service are some of these. Without these qualities there is no worthwhile leadership, and we grapple and grope in a moral wilderness." A Constitutional. In that spirit, Collins pitched into the job of running the government of a state in transition. He gets up at 7 o'clock, likes to have some of his staff meet him at his home for an hour's work. "Once we get to the capitol," he says, "it's hard to get together." Collins describes himself as "constitutionally incapable of working by the clock.
I have to gear my work to the job at hand. If that requires getting up before dawn and working through till midnight, then that's the way I do it. But if there's nothing pressing the next day, then I'm likely to be an hour late getting to the office and an hour early leaving it. I'm one of those unfortunate men who have to have pressure to work well. So instead of efficiently spreading my work out and doing it on a schedule, I tend to let it pile up and do it all at once. I know it's terribly hard on my family and my staff, but it's too late to change now." Once a month he goes on a statewide radio-TV hookup to report on the $100 million-a-year public business that he runs. Handsome and easy-mannered, with . a personality made for TV, he refuses to use a script. He chats about a variety of governmental subjects, reads and answers some of his mail over the air and, to the amazement of the station crew, manages to wind up each impromptu broadcast on the second.
One morning, he got back from a Florida-selling trip to New York, window-shopped in Jacksonville, then set out for Tallahassee in his black Cadillac. During the two-hour ride he framed a speech for the next day, made a decision on the appointment of a new sheriff, signed papers and discussed an upcoming meeting of the Merit System Council (he is trying to give more than 5,000 state employees civil-service protection). Halfway home, he asked the driver to stop at a roadside lunch stand. Roy (as the proprietor addressed him) gulped his coffee fast, wandered out and down the street. His driver, used to his habits, picked the governor up three blocks away; he was deep in conversation with two oldsters sitting in front of a hardware store. "I need the exercise," said Collins, "and it gives me a chance to talk to people."
He lunched at the Grove, commiserated with his five-year-old daughter Darby over the illness of a doll, went to his office, where he found the press demanding a comment on Adlai Stevenson's visit to Florida. Said Collins: "I am not endorsing any Democratic candidate, as you know, but if you were to ask me who the next President of the U.S. was going to be, I'd answer: Mr. Stevenson."
When the reporters had cleared out, he swore in the sheriff, telling him: "The main thing I want you to understand is that I appointed you because you are a good citizen, not because you are the friend of a friend, and you are not beholden to me or anyone else but the people of your county."
Lions v. Wildcats. He went to a conference, cleaned up his mail, made some notes for his monthly TV report, that night went home to dinner, made his telecast and then went to the airport for a flight to Tampa. At take-off time, the governor was missing. A staffer found him in the baggage room, chinning with the porters. In flight, he worked on state papers, read a chapter in a book on Southern economic problems. Next day he made two speeches, talked to some old people basking in the sun and to some Democratic leaders at the hotel. He left without paying his bill, remembered, rushed back to do so. (Once he forgot three suits in a Chicago hotel. Says his wife: "Since he only had four, we didn't know what in heaven's name he was going to do.") He finally left Tampa for a 100-mile drive to Ocala, where he was to meet his wife and daughters Jane and Mary Call at a football game. "Boy," said the governor nervously, "if we don't get there by halftime, Jane will have my hide." He got there, but it hardly mattered. Moppets swarmed over him so that he could not see the field. He treated each with courtly courtesy, autographing crackerjack boxes, raincoats and match folders. He was glad when he heard that the game, between Tallahassee's Leon High School Lions and the Ocala Wildcats, ended in a tie, 13-13. "Well," said the governor, "that's one consolation. No one can be mad because I rooted for the wrong team."
Next day he drove to Gainesville, where he conferred with University of Florida officials on the chance, which he had discussed in New York, that a nuclear-energy plant might be located in their town. Then he went to a press conference with editors of Florida weeklies. "Governor," said one, "do you think we are becoming top-heavy with tourism?" The governor answered gravely: "Not so long as we keep the rest of our house in order." The Leisured Masses. A cold snap in the northern states got Florida's tourist season off to an early start this year, for what may be its biggest season ever--and it looked as if Florida's tourism might take a lot of balancing. Miami Beach, the Riviera of the leisured masses, will draw 2,000,000 of Florida's 5,000,000 annual tourists to its 378 hotels, 2,100 apartment houses and 415 swimming pools.
Miami Beach was already in full yak.
The Cadillacs nuzzled each other along the gaudy length of Collins Avenue. Women in sun-top dresses stretched beside swimming pools, contemplating headlines that happily proclaimed: ARCTIC BLASTS RIP COUNTRY. Flamboyant young New Yorkers leafed through stock-market reports.
A lot of men were in town for a Gerber Baby Foods convention.
The visitor to Greater Miami who wanted to be hypnotized could be, at the Svengali Club; he could determine his destiny through the auspices of a modest "life reader" ("I don't claim to do miracles") named Madame Avon; he could see clumsy girls competing in an amateur strip-tease contest or watch Seminoles wrestling alligators. Within the white walls of Miami Beach's Saxony Hotel the lazier man could maneuver round the clock from the Hulahut through the Bam-Boo-La Lounge, the Veranda Room, the Tropical Room, the Chuck Wagon ("All You Can Eat for Only $1.95"), Ye Noshery,-- the Nite-Cap Lounge and the Pagoda Room.
Klystron Tubes & Muck. Like all good Floridians, Roy Collins is proud of Miami Beach; more than most, he is aware of the danger of resting the state's economy too heavily on a vacationland--even in a nation where winter vacations are becoming more and more routine.
Today, so much else is going on in Florida that the peril of overemphasizing the playgrounds seems to be passing. Gainesville (pop. 32,000) has a new $600,000 Sperry Rand plant making klystron tubes.
At Palatka (pop. 11,000), the Hudson Pulp & Paper Corp. is considering building a $25 million newsprint mill. Tampa (pop.
276,000) rejoices over Southland Oil Co.'s plans for Florida's first complete oil-cracking plant. Jacksonville has two new insurance company skyscrapers, a new $2,500.000 branch of General Motors' Electro-Motive Division and a General Foods instant-coffee plant.
Three out of four oranges and nine out of ten grapefruit produced in the U.S.
now come from Florida. Good farm land is expanding, notably in the swamps and jungle of the Everglades, where a $250 million drainage and reclamation project is uncovering black muck soil as fertile as anything on earth.
Florida mines ilmenite and rutile ore.
from which the light metal titanium is derived. Its monazite sands offer the promise of thorium, a source of fissionable material. Underlying more than 2,000 sq.
mi. of Florida, centering 70 miles east of St. Petersburg, there is enough phosphate to last U.S. industry 1,000 years.
"A Gradual Shaping." As governor.
Roy Collins has helped give the boom dignity and balance--but not everyone thanks him. This year he was able to get through the legislature an appropriation for a turnpike down the middle of the state, but he lost a more important contest. Although he kept it in session all summer, the legislature refused to approve a plan to reapportion its seats. At present, sparsely populated counties, with 12% of the people, mostly in the north, elect 20 of the 38 ,state senators. Collins was criticized for not "forcing" the legislators to go along by using his patronage power and his right to veto bills for local improvements. Instead, he continues to preach reapportionment as a necessity of tomorrow's Florida. Says Collins: "It takes a gradual shaping of public opinion to win the really big fights." Although he has not publicly said so. he would like another term. The state Supreme Court will have to rule on his eligibility to succeed himself. (The issue: Will his two years count as a term?) If he clears that hurdle, he may face formidable opposition next year from ex-Governor Fuller Warren, a highly popular figure whose supporters stretch from the cracker counties of the north to the dog-track fraternity of Miami.
Collins has from now until the Democratic primary next May to get the voters used to his ideas about state government.
"Government services." he says, "should be performed at the lowest level of government having the capacity to do the job. But the important thing to remember is that the services must be performed.
If they are not. then the people will go elsewhere for them. If the city-hall door is slammed in their faces, they will go to the state capitol. If they get nothing there, they turn to Washington.
"Local governments--the cities, the school districts, the counties and the states--should face up to their own responsibilities. I hope I live long enough to see the day when they all find courage and honesty enough to tax their citizens as they should be taxed and then serve them as they should be served. When that happens, the Federal Government will be able to restrict its activities. Washington almost always comes into the picture only after local governments have failed to meet their respor, Abilities.
"If more people would be concerned with states' responsibilities instead of states' rights, there would be little loss of those rights." Unusual words for a Deep-South governor--but then both Roy Collins and his state are most unusual phenomena.
* A geographical judgment not to be confused with an observation by one of Sherman's fellow officers. Said General Phil Sheridan: "If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell." -- From the Yiddish noshyn, to eat a little (especially sweets) between meals.
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