When Guggino Family Eye Center on Swann Avenue becomes a de facto overflow parking lot for Blount & Curry Funeral Home on South MacDill Avenue, you know the B&C service was for somebody special. And this was no exception. The memorial service last Thursday was for Bill Gray, 82.
In addition to family, this was an eclectic gathering that included bank presidents, politicians and media members. Bill Gray, for those not fortunate enough to have known him, was the Tampa Bay area’s acknowledged public relations’ guru. In a business known more for the clichéd look-at-me shills and damage-control hacks, he was the consummate pro.
Bill Gray knew what was truly newsworthy. His credibility was impeccable. If he thought enough of clients to agree to represent them, then they surely had a legitimate story to tell. That’s how Gray — always the well-reasoned gentleman — was viewed by the media, a congenitally skeptical lot — when they aren’t cynical. Gray’s word, his unflappable presence and demeanor of class, his aptitude for synthesis and consensus, and his sense of humor separated him from the professional pitchmen.
“He would have made a great secretary of state,” Ed Roberts, former Editorial Page Editor of the Tampa Tribune, told the Daily PRNewser.
To use a term uttered by many at the service, Bill Gray was “one of the good guys.”
When the global PR firm of Hill & Knowlton opened its first Florida office in Tampa in the early ‘80s, it was through the credibility-assuring acquisition of Gray & Associates. Gray, a Jacksonville native and University of Alabama alum, had been in Tampa since 1955. His reputation was the gold standard. He gave Tampa PR gravitas.
Gray would retire five years after the H&K acquisition, but he would remain a communications force through his commentaries and book reviews in the Trib. He also penned a novel.
Final details, including last week’s service, were scripted by Gray and bore his inimitable touch. The music was Gershwin, the mood humorous. He loved “Rhapsody in Blue” as much as he loved a good pun or practical joke. Well, almost as much.
And Gray directed that his ashes be scattered – whether over a golf course or a backyard pond or the Gulf. His reasoning was vintage. He didn’t want those inquiring about his final resting place to be directed to a given plot in some cemetery. No, he preferred that the only viable answer be: “We don’t know where the hell he is.”