Category: Tampa Bay

            As we’ve all been noticing over the past few years, the Children’s Gasparilla Parade down Bayshore Boulevard is no longer some cute spin-off. It’s no longer just a nice, wholesome — but token — sop to the sober. Nor is it simply a nostalgically modest reminder of what parades once were: a really big deal for little kids.    

            Indeed, last Saturday the Children’s Parade drew more than 200,000 spectators and attracted more than 100 floats and 50 participating krewes. Plus marching bands, dance squads and various school and community groups.

            It’s that big. No wonder it also merits its own air show and a culminating “Piratechnic” extravaganza.

            But more to the point, it proved, once again, that Tampa can put on an impressively big parade – with all the trappings – without drunks and punks. It didn’t ooze booze; lemonade was the thirst-slaker of choice. The aerial banners flown overhead pitched “Legos Pirates” –not Happy Hours and Bud Light. Chi-chi corporate tents didn’t crowd out the hoi polloi. Beads were bestowed without breasts being bared.

            And even more to the point, it was an all-call for Family Tampa, black and white and brown. Parents and their kids. What a concept.

No fights, no obscenities, no boorish attitudes, no ad hoc vomitoriums or port-a-lets. No inebriated teens “trespissing” on private property.  

Thus, no need for a “safe house,” which has now become a staple of the main Gasparilla Parade, the adult-themed Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla invasion on Feb. 7.

After seeing how the Children’s version is conducted — and how well it is attended — and what a logistical and behavioral mess the adult version is — I would say this of next week’s drunk-and-litter fest: Move it.

It has outgrown its Bayshore Boulevard parade route. The mystic crude invasion of the surrounding neighborhoods is now a given — and unacceptable. It’s reassuring, of course, that there’s a safe house, courtesy of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Hyde Park, but it’s disturbing that one is needed. The annual message has once again been sent: “We fully expect a number of drunk, drugged or, as a consequence, injured teens.” And thanks again, enabling parents, for providing Buffy and Biff with a free pass for the day.

As diligent and high profile as Tampa Police officers are, they are woefully outnumbered in a parade venue that’s easily overwhelmed. Mardi Gras doesn’t look like this. Too many local residents – and in the interests of full disclosure, I’m one – feel under house arrest. You have to guard your property or hire a cop. Or both. 

Put it this way. If there must be a parade in addition to the Children’s, then start it in downtown and take it through Channelside, where there is more open space and more parking.

When you can’t confine the “invasion” to Bayshore Boulevard, and when you can’t curb the conduct of “attendees” who are drunk before the parade begins, you’d better have a Plan B that’s not Bamboleo. And you’d better hope it gets implemented before there’s a serious injury or an invasion fatality that prompts a civic outcry for change.

            In 1964 the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. won the Nobel Peace Prize, Cassius Clay became world heavyweight champion and Tampa Theatre still had a “whites only” admittance policy.

            Fast-forward to 2009.

            More than 1,000 locals — black and white, office workers, students and media — turned out at the 83-year-old downtown icon to collectively witness the televised inauguration of the first African-American president.

            It was political theater within a movie palace. Now playing: “Revel With A Cause”: The re-told, updated story of America’s singular journey of ideals and ideas, however imperfect. This day it was still resonating.

History and jubilation were in the house. It was palpable.

Tampa lawyer Herb Berkowitz, 61, who was a Hillary Clinton delegate to the Democratic convention last summer, was equal parts sentimental and celebratory.

“I had planned on watching it at home on the couch with a glass of wine and crying unabashedly,” he said. “But tears of joy are best enjoyed with like-minded people.”

Now playing: A stirring reminder that while America’s destiny as a beacon for freedom — not geopolitics as usual — had been distorted and detoured, it had not been discontinued. If America could transcend the racial dishonor seemingly woven into its fabric, then there really were no limits to its ultimate greatness. Indeed, there was reason to expect that its best days might yet be ahead.  

And no such epic moment could have credibly passed without Tampa’s own poet laureate, James Tokley. He is a Tampa Bay treasure. When this imposing black man reaffirms that “America still is hallowed ground,” it must be so.  

The politics of euphoria prompted thunderous applause for Teddy Kennedy and Al Gore and a standing ovation for Barack Obama.

            The ambience of history-meets-pep rally created its own hybrid dynamic.

            The politics of payback induced a chorus of boos for Dick Cheney, which had to be some sort of precedent. Bronx cheers for a guy, albeit the quintessential neocon, in a wheel chair. Strangelovian.

The formal introduction of outgoing President George W. Bush was accompanied by the familiar stadium anthem that’s disdainfully aimed at losing teams: “Na, Na, Na, Na/ Na, Na, Na, Na/ Hey, Hey, Hey/ Goodbye.” It was not an occasion for pure, non-partisan nuance.

The only references to Bush that did elicit applause were an “Arrest Bush” sign and a shot of a van behind the White House that was obviously moving out the last of the Bushes’ belongings.

But these were knee-jerk reactions from a crowd that needed to emote more than gloat. It was much more about the history. And the moment. And the peaceful transfer of power. And the promise of a better tomorrow.

“Since I couldn’t be in D.C., I’m here,” said Gina, a 42-year-old black woman who didn’t feel at liberty to give her last name. That’s because she was “between meetings” at work, she coyly acknowledged with a wink. She was holding seats for two cousins.

“Of course it’s about the history,” explained Gina, “but that’s not all it’s about. Poverty comes in different colors. I think it’s everyday people who identify with Obama.” 

For Jim Shirk, 65, a white civil engineer who had worked for Obama in Florida, it was the culmination of a campaign that had morphed from long-shot idealism to crowning, almost unfathomable, achievement.

“Imagine, this comes a day after MLK day,” he noted. “How’s this for an epic confluence of events? I’m here because I wanted to be part of an historic event and be with a lot of other Democrats who worked hard for this guy.”

And then there was Rodger King, 63, a white investor who came by to check out the scene.

“I was curious about what kind of crowd it was,” said King. “You could say it looks like America.

“I’m a staunch Republican,” pointed out King, “but I’m well pleased with Obama so far.”

King’s was the sort of sentiment — the pragmatic benefit of the doubt — that Obama has to hear more of.  Not just the approving voices of true believers and party zealots. A sense of meaningful bi-partisanship isn’t merely preferable. It’s now a prerequisite if America is to move beyond parlous times and truly fulfill its unique destiny.

On balance, it was a very good start.

“This is a special moment for everyone, not just African-Americans,” said Clifford Gordon, a black 18-year-old in a Middleton High School jacket. “I mean Obama’s not just promising to make the black economy better. It’s everybody’s new era.”

Now playing: An African-American — who was three years old when blacks were finally admitted to Tampa Theatre — as the newly inaugurated 44^th president of the United States.

                                                  Intercession Leads To More History

For Tampa Theatre to have opened its doors for a free showing of the historic, Barack Obama presidential inauguration was a natural. It has a big screen, some 1,400 seats and a community-outreach mandate. And it’s, well, full of history itself.

An obvious choice?

Tampa Theatre, which had hosted campaign events for George Bush Sr. and Bob Dole in the past, had never staged an inauguration viewing before. It took some outside intercession.

“(Tampa City Council member) Linda Saul-Sena called me and said ‘I have a great idea. Let’s show the inauguration,’” explained Tara Schroeder, Tampa Theatre’s director of programming and public relations.

“Initially, I wasn’t sure it was possible,” said Schroeder. “But I investigated, and it was doable. We had to rent a few wires, pick up a satellite feed and run it through a projector onto a screen. We pay for a satellite service.”

And with the concession stand open, Tampa Theatre didn’t lose money.

“This is not a profit-center day,” emphasized Schroeder. “This is a community day.”

So, once suggested, would there have been such a “community day” for a President McCain inauguration?

“Absolutely,” said Schroeder. “It’s wonderful for the community to come together. And it’s part of our responsibility to provide opportunities like this.”

But it’s problematic that Linda Saul-Sena would have made that call.   

          Talk about historic. That was the unveiling of the snazzy new Tampa Bay History Center that overlooks Garrison Channel across from Harbour Island.

*No cost overruns or design overhauls to delay matters. Barely a year after ground-breaking, the three-story, 60,000-square-foot museum is up and visitor-ready. Only minor details remain to be addressed.

*No political infighting or posturing. It was textbook collaboration among the city of Tampa, Hillsborough County and the private sector. Petty parochialism was relegated to the ash heap of local history for this $52-million project.

*No venue has the charge or wherewithal to better remind us all who live here that we have much more in common than conflict. This is our collective history, and it’s critically important — for the Tampa Bay area is home to so many who have relocated here. A sense of identity, which helps regional residents work together in common purpose, is imperative for meaningful Bay Area progress. From mass transit to high-tech recruitment to tourism.

Before there was a Jamestown or a Plymouth landing, there were Panfilo de Narvaez and Hernando de Soto exploring parts of present-day Pinellas and Hillsborough Counties.

*No problem with energy efficiency – in an area where the concept and its implementation is still a work in progress. The TBHC facility is cutting edge. Another historic precedent: It is the first Hillsborough County-owned, LEED-certified “green” building.

And if historical exhibits, icons, galleries and interactivity – including European explorers, Seminole tribes and Florida cowmen, as well as railroad tycoons, phosphate shippers and Cuban cigar rollers — aren’t enough, there’s also the Columbia Café, a destination in its own right.

                 Several things seem clear in the aftermath of that contentious meeting last week at Coleman Middle School over the proposal to construct a cell phone tower on the school’s campus:

*If there’s a serious nay-saying element, they will always outnumber and outshout their opposition. It’s the dynamics of such gatherings.

*No principal should be put on the spot and in a position that belongs to engineers.

*A lot of South Tampa parents will now need to make good on those fund-raising boasts. In the midst of a severe budget crunch, Coleman lost $36,000 per year in lease payments from Collier Enterprises II of Tampa.

*Because of the need for increasingly expanding cell phone service, a new tower will go up nearby anyhow. Just not literally on the campus, where it would have brought Coleman approximately $430,000 over 10 years.  

        Say this for Ronda Storms. Amid all the sound bites and fury over her library-related comments, sense was made.
        We live in an age where the printed word is under assault. We are increasingly a video culture with all the attendant concerns about becoming a less literate society.
        Libraries are the last bastion of literacy. Arguably, they don’t need to be in the business of loaning TV sit-coms.
This is not a censorship or micromanagement issue, as some – including the American Civil Liberties Union – would contend. It’s a books issue.

               I have this shirt.

               It’s pink and black and festooned with flamingos. I bought it in Key West. I wear it as often as I go to Key West, which is infrequently. Thin line between fashionably whimsical and, well, cheesy.

               Last Saturday I wasn’t in Key West, but I wore the flamingo shirt anyhow. The occasion: a unique, memorial gathering for a unique, deceased friend.

               No, it wasn’t Hunter Thompson.

               It was Judy Dibbs, 65, who you may not have heard of. She wasn’t famous — merely important.

Judy’s main societal contribution was working hard at making the world a better place. When not doing that, the Sumerville, Mass., native was the avatar of courage for the way she confronted her terminal breast cancer.

Judy was a Florida HRS medical case worker for nursing home placement in Ft. Lauderdale. But that’s like saying Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer. She quickly earned renown for empathetic advocacy and relentless persistence. She was the lady — the pretty one with the Doris Day smile — that no bureaucrat dared cross.

“She helped people without a voice,” recalled social worker Ruth Gartland Michael. “She focused on the least of the least. She was so compassionate – but she knew when to be political and pragmatic. She cut right through the bs. The bureaucracy never got the best of her.”

After stints as an Eastern Air Lines trainer and the director of human resources for Cellular One in Chicago, Judy (and husband Dave) moved to Tampa, where Dave grew up. The last four years became the ultimate crucible. Each day – after the reoccurrence of her breast cancer – a daily mortality memo.

And, yet, she had these other priorities: she had four “perfect grandchildren” that needed doting, and she was a Guardian ad Litem volunteer, once again advocating for the powerless. In this case, abused and neglected children.  

She later became an inspirational Survivor Speaker for the American Cancer Society and was honored in 2006 with the ACS Courage Award. She was also a fund-raising force. In 2008 her Making Strides Against Breast Cancer team topped all others in Hillsborough County. 

“Judy was very intelligent, very well spoken and always professional,” said Charles Nelson, regional director for the Guardian ad Litem program. “She was never satisfied with the status quo. She could be tough. She had a remarkable ability to go after the issues while still making people feel good.

“Despite the pressures of the (GaL) job and her health, she never lost her sense of joy of life,” noted Nelson. “I saw her a week before she passed. She was still the one making us feel good.”

Stena Campagna, who coordinates the Moffitt Cancer Center’s FACTors (patient support) program, remains in awe of Judy’s indomitable spirit.

“Judy Dibbs lived every day to the fullest – and gave back,” said Campagna. “She didn’t live her life as if she were dying. She was always high-spirited. Coming here for chemotherapy was her ‘spa day,’ she would say…The fact that she was a Guardian ad Litem was amazing. Everything she did, she did with great gusto.

“Even though she knew there was nothing else to be done, she continued to fight the fight and raise money for those coming behind her,” added Campagna. “She took charge of her care and always looked for options. She spoke her mind freely but politely. She was the ultimate patient role model.”

                                            Festival of Judy

 So we gathered — per Judy’s final wishes — with Dave, her two sons, Elliot and Scott, and relatives — and each other — for “The Festival of Judy” open house in South Tampa. The theme was Key West good times, the dominant motifs: flamingos and anything pink. To celebrate the life she led, to savor the lives she touched, to revel in her “killer margarita” recipe — and to swap Judy Dibbs stories. Morrison Avenue as Margaritaville.

“I looked down (from his back porch to an overflow crowd) and I thought, ‘What an eclectic mix of people,’” recalled Dave Dibbs. “I knew it was right. I got the lump out of my throat. And, then, after that first chuckle, I knew I would be OK.”

The Improv this was not.

It was humor as the universal antidote for loss. The sort of humor – from self-deprecating to the ironic — that Judy employed shamelessly as a coping mechanism.

Dave referenced one of their first dates. He was a Virginia Military Institute cadet and Judy a scholarly undergraduate at Duke University – back in the days when few of those scholars were female.

 Dave was visiting Judy on the Duke campus. But it coincided with a big Duke-Michigan basketball game that night. And Judy was as hardcore a Duke Blue Devil fan as any guy.

And a certain life-long trait would manifest itself. Even then, Judy was into taking charge, however politely, on behalf of a worthy cause.

“She said,” deadpanned Dave: “‘If I can get you a ticket, great. If not, I’ll see you after the game.’”

The crowd loved it.  

Others spoke of Judy as a mentor, as a mom and as a model for guts and grace under fire. There were accounts of the “Judy stare” that indicated a level of consternation or disapproval that might have elicited a rant from others. She also had a grammar-maven side. The exercise in redundancy that is “very unique” was repeated with impunity in Judy’s memory.

Inside, a video of images chronicled Judy’s life. One photo was particularly poignant. It showed a chemo-bald Judy surrounded by her grandchildren. She had just submitted to a face-and-pate painting.

She didn’t want her grandchildren to be afraid of the disease. She wanted to max out on the limited time they would have together. It gave them a wonderful memory. And it was one more opportunity to thumb her nose at the Grim Reaper relentlessly stalking her.

Then there was Pat Knowlton, a breast cancer survivor who became one of Judy’s countless “best friends.” Only more so. They were comrades in harm’s way who both found it therapeutic to treat cancer with wickedly humorous disdain.

“I never felt depressed after talking to her,” said Knowlton. “She would laugh about the side effects. She always found hope. She was my personal cheerleader. Judy Dibbs lived more every day than most people I know who are not ill.”

Near the end, Judy made her promise that she would wear a certain teal,  flamingoed muumuu with a complementary blinky-light necklace to the inevitable “festival.”

“This is what Judy wanted me to wear,” explained Knowlton. “I said, ‘This is God awful.’ She said, ‘If anyone can pull this off, you can. And I expect you to.’”

It was vintage Judy. Thinking of others. How do you grieve inconsolably in a teal muumuu with blinky lights?

He couldn’t just go quietly.

No, Buddy Johnson, the Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections who had become synonymous with incompetence, had to thumb his nose on the way out. And by doing so, he added to a legacy that already included leading the state in most (November election) voter complaints and topping all supervisors-of-elections in controversy and reproach the past few years.

            Johnson – through an office proxy, chief deputy Kathy Harris – had asked for an extra $2.3 million for election-cost overruns. It was, at least in part, the cost of being unprepared for that record Nov. 4 Hillsborough turnout. Then he rescinded the request — but not the chutzpah of his approach — after an eruption of criticism and a county commission order for an audit. Then, in what seemed a fit of pique and paranoia, he accused his successor, Phyllis Busansky, and County Attorney Renee Lee of a “surreptitious investigation” of Hillsborough’s voting machine supplier.

            All of which continues the ongoing begging of this question: How the hell did this guy ever pull 233,000 votes last month? Not even hardcore partisans and Buddy-Freddy regulars should have accounted for 47 percent of the vote.

A couple of final comments on the sorry situation that became the Lex Salisbury saga: the man who put the Lowry Park Zoo on the map and himself in an ethically compromised position.

Salisbury had to go and he went. Now the board, which is staying, has to finally step up.

            Second, now that a search is beginning for a new president/CEO, the criteria are coming into fiduciary focus. It includes this tip from Satch Krantz, the immediate past chairman of the Association of Zoos and Aquariums. The AZA has suspended the Lowry Park Zoo’s accreditation.

            According to the St. Petersburg Times, Krantz stressed the twin priorities of a business and nonprofit-management background for Salisbury’s successor.

            An animal background? A plus, but hardly necessary.

            Not necessary?

            Of course, there are generic business and management skills that apply across the nonprofit board. And scrutiny will presumably unearth any record of ethical lapses.

But a zoo, especially one that has been successful and notably progressive in its treatment and habitat of animals, is not the United Way or the Red Cross.

Of course, zoos have bottom lines and public obligations, but their purview also includes education and natural history as well as species protection and breeding.

Yes, an animal background would be quite the plus.

Obviously things did not go well last Friday for Ahmed Mohamed, the former USF student who pleaded guilty to providing material support to terrorists. In effect, he could never overcome that YouTube video he made that showed how to target “infidels” via a remote-controlled toy car.

All he could do at his sentencing was throw himself on the mercy of the court and hope that U.S. District Judge Steven D. Merryday would not throw the maximum sentence – 15 years – at him. His last shot was his statement, which was read by his attorney. It did not move Merryday; Mohamed got the maximum.

            More surprising than the sentence was Mohamed’s statement. With plenty of time to prepare a self-serving plea, if not rationale, and plenty of motivation to try and move Merryday to a less-than-maximum sentence, Mohamed came up short.

            “I do apologize because I never intended to harm anybody in particular,” he said in the statement…“I am convinced that I have learned a lesson. …I am no more than a college guy.”

            In effect, Mohamed said: “I only intended to kill indiscriminately. No one in particular. Such is the way with remote weaponry…But I learned my lesson. That’s the last time I post anything on YouTube. Go Bulls.”

            Next case.

Arguably our most blatantly overused and misused word is “hero.”  Time was when it connoted feats of courage in the context of a noble, selfless purpose or an intrepid, even death-defying, end. These days – even in the throes of two wars – it’s more typically used to characterize athletes and their exploits in the arena.

            So, how welcome it was to read of those annually honored by The Carnegie Heroes Fund. And how gratifying that one of the 19 heroes honored by Carnegie is one of our own.

            Qemal Agaj, 65, of Tampa helped save a drowning woman, Maureen A. Jennings. Agaj received a Carnegie medal and $6,000. Jennings received much mor

Congratulations again, Qemal Agaj, for helping save a life – and for helping remind us all of what a real “hero” is.