Tom Jackson

Bexley buzz isn’t just marketing hype

November 30, 2016 By Tom Jackson

LAND O’ LAKES — Late on a recent Saturday afternoon, as the sun’s slanting rays cast their golden autumnal glow, Tommy Brown and his young sons mounted their bikes and set off in search of adventure.

Luckily, they didn’t have far to go, and their destination was known. In fact, from their side yard near the northeast corner of Ballantrae, they’d had their eyes on it for weeks: the BMX (bicycle motocross) park in the neighboring, emerging community of Bexley.

All they needed was for the construction zone barriers to come down. That Saturday morning, in conjunction with Bexley’s grand opening weekend, they did.

A family enjoys the playground during Bexley’s opening festivities. (Courtesy of Brian Swartzwelder) — A family enjoys the playground during Bexley’s opening festivities.
(Courtesy of Brian Swartzwelder)

Now as the lads on their tyke-bikes jounced over the moguls, careened through the twists and catapulted across the banked turns, they hooted with laughter.

“This is fun!” whooped Alec Brown, 5, fairly hopping astride his bike while, nearby, Oscar, 9, clattered triumphantly over the wooden plank extension that rises like a dinosaur’s frill above the signature banked curve.

Their dad, meanwhile, was discovering the limitations of a mountain bike on a layout designed for tiny wheels. Never mind all that. Bathed in the patina of a fading fall afternoon, the 42-year-old computer programmer and his boys were making memories that would last into all their golden years.

Now, Pam Parisi, regional marketing director for developer Newland Communities, will tell you Bexley is selling a lot of things — houses (ranging from $215,000 townhouses to single-family houses in the mid-$500,000s), desirable amenities, nature-friendly design, abundant get-outside activities and a killer location (no one is closer to the Suncoast Parkway) — but, if you suggested, ultimately, the whole place is about filling your life with moments you’ll cherish, she wouldn’t disagree.

“Bexley is all about being families again,” she says. “It’s all about getting outdoors again. It’s not about having kids sitting on the couch ‘playing together’ with other friends on other couches.”

About that. Bexley comes front-loaded with “boot camp” fitness trails, miles of bicycle paths — one of which ultimately will link to the 42-mile Suncoast Trail — and a variety of parks. Some for kids. Some for dogs. Some for every recreational taste.

The playgrounds, in particular, hold your attention with slides laid into manmade hills and high-rise wooden play structures that, engaging the imagination while challenging young muscles, could be anything from a frontier fort in the Wild West to a magical abbey in Nepal.

No doubt some readers will consider this attention to a single master-planned community overwrought. In fact, the region embracing the Hillsborough-Pasco border from Trinity almost to U.S. 301 teems with similar villages, and many are splendid in their own right.

It bears noting, however, Newland has a history of reshaping how people regard things. Twenty-odd years ago, when it began carving out a mini-town at the end of a two-lane road near a sleepy incorporated settlement in southeast Hillsborough County, skeptics wondered whether the hotshot developers had lost their minds.

Now, as Parisi correctly notes, the area formerly known as “Lithia” is a reference reserved for mapmakers. For everyone else, it’s Fishhawk Ranch.

This is not to suggest the keepers of the Land O’ Lakes flame should prepare to take to the barricades. For openers, at 1,200 acres, Bexley is somewhat less than half Fishhawk’s sprawling 3,000 acres.

Instead, it’s merely to acknowledge the buzz about Bexley is warranted. Parisi describes the new community as Fishhawk Ranch improved by 20 years of experience and evolutionary thinking.

She points out the amenities are front-loaded, and not dependent on hitting a certain number of committed homeowners before artist’s renderings begin to transform into facts on the ground.

From Day One, residents will have access to the niceties mentioned above, plus a cafe (The Twisted Sprocket) and clubhouse worthy of a country club, plus a full-service bicycle shop, the first offshoot of the venerable, nearby Suncoast Trailside Bicycles, run by the energetic Geoff Lanier.

Next door, a cafe — open to the public — serves Bexley burgers (cheeseburgers topped with an onion ring) and beers crafted by Odessa-and-Clearwater based Big Storm Brewing Co.

Figuring out what’s going to erupt from the commercial frontage along State Road 54 is another matter. The first hint broke a couple of weeks ago with the announcement of a 110-room SpringHill Suites by Marriott, the first of its kind in Pasco County. Stay tuned.

And, as we have seen, even before the first families take up housekeeping, Bexley is fulfilling its mission: Getting people out and about. Getting them moving. With fresh memories to savor, the Browns of neighboring Ballantrae are happy it’s here.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published November 30, 2016

Refreshed by a reunion of old friends

November 16, 2016 By Tom Jackson

I was confronted recently by the enduring question posed by the Clash and memorably highlighted in an ad for Choice hotels: Should I stay or should I go?

I’m talking about the King High School Class of 1971’s 45-year reunion.

Brenda Nichols Pressly and Jim Evans enjoy themselves at the King High School Class of 1971 reunion. (Tom Jackson/Photos) — Brenda Nichols Pressly and Jim Evans enjoy themselves at the King High School Class of 1971 reunion.
(Tom Jackson/Photos)

It’s always easier to invent reasons not to go, of course. What’ll we talk about? Haven’t I heard all their stories? Haven’t I told all of mine? Don’t I see the people I care about from time to time anyway? I didn’t lose those 20 pounds. I really could use that weekend catching up on, I don’t know, something.

A further wrinkle cropped up a month or so ago: Some of my work for the late, lamented Tampa Tribune had made the finals in the Florida Press Club’s annual contest; the awards banquet announcing the fate of those efforts (in commentary and feature writing) was set, in St. Augustine, for the second night of our reunion.

My decision, then, wasn’t merely binary: Should I go or should I stay? It was tertiary: Should I go here or should I go there, or should simply chuck it all, put my feet up and stay home?

In the end, for me there was only one viable option.

I went to my high school reunion. After all, they come around only every five years. And, truth be told, as one of those pushing for it when some of the usual organizers thought of calling it off, I’d crossed the point of no return ages ago.

From left: Debbi Stevens Haverty, Vilia Johnson, Herb Fluitt, Marsha Spain Fuller, Dennis Asbel, Lynn Munoz Murray and Nancy Ringelspaugh Johnson pose for a group shot at the 45th reunion of the King High School Class of

It’s not like sticking by my commitment wasn’t complicated. The heir apparent, who is built like a dream offensive tackle but preferred beating a bass drum to getting his head beaten on — wise lad — was, that Friday night, a part of the Senior Night festivities at Tampa Catholic High.

Now, I’m a big fan of the traditional reunion first night mingle, but Senior Night happens just once a lifetime. So, while my classmates were snacking on hors d’oeuvres and reacquainting with one another, the redoubtable Debbie and I escorted The Boy to midfield for polite applause and photographs, then settled in for the Crusaders’ annual drubbing by the Jesuit Tigers.

Even then, however, it never crossed my mind we wouldn’t go. Never mind the event site was nearly an hour away in Indian Rocks Beach, and that most everybody — because we have achieved a certain vulnerable age — would have packed it in.

After the final horn, we caught up with The Boy to say our farewells and reiterate our expectations — he was about to be home alone for the next 36 hours or so; it would be excellent if he didn’t burn the place down. And then we set off. Finally, close to midnight, we arrived to find a healthy collection of stragglers around tables near an outdoor bar.

Here’s another perspective of, from left, Robert Harrison, Rose Campisi and Lois Snow at the 45th reunion of the King High School Class of 1971.

Just as I was about to attribute this lingering to alcohol-fueled inertia, someone sang out one of the sweetest phrases known to humans. “There you are! We’ve been waiting for you!”

To be clear: I was not one of the cool kids, exactly. I was a perpetual ’tweener: Not quite an athlete (I was a football placekicker), not quite a scholar, not quite a politician (though I ran frequently, I lost routinely), never (ever) a stoner. I was fringy, associated with lots of groups, rarely occupying the center of any.

Once upon a time, I was not the guy two dozen of the happening kids would have waited to catch up with. Not just in high school, but certainly not at the 10-year or, probably, even the 20-year reunions.

But time — with our class, anyway, and I expect it’s this way with most — peels away clique structures. As the years mount, and the memories fade, we warm to those who shared our coming-of-age experience. This strikes me as against the odds, but the phenomenon is real.

Public high schools throw together collections of kids from backgrounds, family structures, socioeconomic status, ethnicities and ambitions so varied, each and everyone of them could serve as a sociologist’s dream laboratory.

Then there’s the expectation this random population ultimately will gain sophisticated academic knowledge while developing the skills necessary to become suitable human beings — all while coping with surging hormones and awkward bodies. It has proved an imperfect system.

Indeed, it’s a wonder any of us emerge still talking to each other, let alone regarding ourselves as friends. For life. But, we do. People are weird.

And so we gathered, 60-some-odd of us out of a class of more than 500 (admittedly, we need to recruit better). We came together to remember the good times, smooth over some of the bad, refuse to talk politics (on the weekend before Election Day) and to ignore, as well as we could, the passage of years.

Anybody who’s attended a high school reunion past the age of 50 knows the joke: Who invited all these old people?

Well. That might have made the rounds last time we gathered, but nobody uttered it all weekend. This is not definitive, of course. Super hearing is not among my powers.

Maybe the reason I didn’t hear it is because, frankly, for a bunch of folks staring down the barrel of full retirement age, we looked pretty good.

With the possible exception of your humble correspondent, the Class of 1971 has held up exceptionally well. Despite the gray (or white) hair — or lack of same — the full-time eye gear, and the lines of wisdom etched on our faces, it was still possible to detect a twinkle of the kids we were all those years ago.

There is a freshening, too, in reliving old stories. One talked about the summer he picked tobacco in North Carolina — dirty, backbreaking work — and another before our senior year when he and two football teammates acted as counselors in a Blue Ridge Mountains camp run by our head coach.

Then, Sunday night, after we’d dispersed to the lives we’ve fashioned apart from each other, I got a private message from this very classmate who, inspired by the gathering and the photos it produced, joined Facebook to enroll in our online family.

This is not someone who wears his sentiments on his sleeve. In fact, well-suited to his chosen field — engineering — he is the essence of reticence. He studies. He analyzes. So when he speaks, people lean in, as I did when this uncharacteristically revealing assertion popped up:

Getting the gang back together wasn’t just a weekend well-spent, he wrote. It made him feel 20 years younger.

It made me realize I’d felt springier in my steps, too. Somehow, a weekend among my high school mates stirred the optimistic, idealistic kid within.

He’s still there. All he needed was a little nudge from the past. Which brings me to a recommendation for others weighing the high school reunion stay-or-go question.

Go, by all means.

It turns out marinating in memories can be your own Fountain of Youth.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published November 16, 2016

Restaurateur encounters proverbial fork in the road

November 2, 2016 By Tom Jackson

SAN ANTONIO — Curtis Beebe might not be an economist, but time and again he has demonstrated shrewd understanding of the most complicated, most vital of economic principles: opportunity cost.

Investopia calls that “the benefit a person could have received, but gave up, to take another course of action.”

Confused? I know. Economics is hard.

Curtis Beebe hopes that the recent decision to close two of three restaurants that he and his wife, Rebecca, operated, turns out to be low on costs and high on benefits. (Tom Jackson/Photo) — Curtis Beebe hopes that the recent decision to close two of three restaurants that he and his wife, Rebecca, operated, turns out to be low on costs and high on benefits.
(Tom Jackson/Photo)

Luckily, we have Robert Frost, the turn-of-the-20th-Century philosopher/poet, who explained opportunity cost simply and elegantly (and possibly inadvertently) in his masterpiece, “The Road Not Taken.”

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

In short, life is about choices, and each selection contains both a cost and a benefit. Which brings us back to Beebe, who, having analyzed and agonized, hopes his latest decision in a series of headline-worthy elections is low on costs and high in benefits.

It’s not hard to like his chances. Not just because Beebe is an analytical guy, but also because he is a demonstrated entrepreneur with a little Beat Generation philosopher/poet in him — Donald Sutherland’s cerebral “Oddball” from “Kelly’s Heroes,” minus the Sherman tanks.

Having worked most of his life in IT and dabbled in local electoral politics, in his latest iteration, Beebe (“bee-bee”), 54, is a restaurateur, who lately has added through subtraction.

Until about a month ago, he and his wife of 31 years, Rebecca, presided over three east Pasco eateries: The Pearl in the Grove (whose farm-to-fork menu won a Florida Trend Golden Spoon last year) near St. Joseph, Rebecca’s at City Market in Dade City and, in downtown San Antonio, the LOCAL Public House & Provisions.

Now they’re down to one, the LOCAL, a hybrid of the neighborhood pub and upscale dining experience. In the space that was once the town’s only grocery store, and after that a coffeehouse, Beebe offers 16 local craft beers on tap and a menu of delights that borrows heavily from the Pearl’s farm-basket-fresh experience.

What didn’t make the transition is the full complement of employees from the closed restaurants. Six came to the LOCAL from Rebecca’s, none from the Pearl, leaving 15 – “Mostly part-timers,” Beebe reports – out of work.

The closings also meant Beebe had to negotiate early exit agreements with his landlords.

Still, retrenchment wasn’t at all what the Beebes had in mind when they expanded for a third time late in 2015, opening Rebecca’s on the back side of the block that includes Kiefer Village Jewelers and Williams Lunch on Limoges.

“That really was a classic case of my reach exceeding my grasp,” Beebe concedes now, tucked into a couch in the side room of the LOCAL. “We got way out over our skis trying to do three.”

It’s not that Beebe didn’t love each in its own way, as a parent does children. But, chef-driven restaurants rarely survive when the chef is often absent, and that quickly became evident as 2016 ground on.

The IT-guy-turned-high-end-cook probably will miss the Pearl the most. After all, it had turned out to be a rare gem: a destination dining experience that lured visitors from around the region. “Lightning in a bottle,” Beebe says.

Opened in 2010, for a while it was all good. But, “all good” in the restaurant industry has a different definition than it might elsewhere. Beebe calls this the “interesting economic realities of fine dining.”

He explains: “If everything goes perfectly, you clear 7 percent.” Seven percent. If the stars align ideally and remain that way indefinitely. That’s cutting it close.

Again, opportunity cost intrudes.

The sharp investor guys at the Motley Fool can, for a small fee, point out a basket of stocks that, between growth and dividends, project a 7 percent return and then some. And, you have your evenings free.

Alas, everything was not exactly perfect at the Pearl, which, for all its allure, was full, Beebe says, only two nights a week.

“The Pearl, by itself, was never going to support my family,” Beebe says. And, again, it suffered from his divided attention. The LOCAL, on the other hand, does business enough to keep the Beebes, including son Jackson, who helps manage the place, in the black.

Beebe concedes disappointment that he couldn’t make three work. But, once the decision was made in late September, there was no looking back. After all, he’d been down this road once before, when he shed the business that had been his identity — IT guy — the first 25 years of his working life.

For ages, when he’d share beers and stories with other professional geeks, he’d drill down on the source of his career discontent.

“When was the last time,” he’d say, “the dollars your client spent on you was highest, best use of their money?”

This probably is not a question with which anyone who supplies product or a service wants to wrangle. But Beebe, his 40s unwinding in a series of unfulfilling projects — “The technology never worked, or it broke, or it was complicated,” he says — was insistent. Was this all there was?

At the end, he was both self-employed and “very, very underemployed.”

Somehow, he found his way into the kitchen, and from that, at an unlikely age, a new life bloomed.

Still, and to his credit, Beebe appears to learn from every experience. Having done four years as a Dade City commissioner — time he seems to regard as a hitch as a draftee in the Army — Beebe says he gained respect for career politicians and professional bureaucrats.

“They’ve created this process that’s not easy to figure out,” he says, “and they know how it works. They know how to keep things running.”

As for him, he has figured out how to be the best restaurateur he knows how to be, and it swirls around a single kitchen in one location to which he can be devoted. And now, when he’s sharing beer from his own taps and hearing stories from his guests, he no longer has to worry whether he’s delivering the highest, best use for his clients’ dollars.

Their return patronage says he took the right road.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published November 2, 2016

Uniting Pasco with love, from The Angelus

October 26, 2016 By Tom Jackson

As sure as armadillos tear up gardens and raw kumquats pucker lips, this much is verifiable about Pasco County: Despite what its borders suggest, the massive slab of real estate that squats atop Hillsborough and Pinellas is not one county, but instead is at least two, if not three, each neatly defined by a north-south thoroughfare.

Skip Schaer and Mike Mezrah, who owns Tampa Bay Sporting Clays. (Photos courtesy of Tammy Williams) — Skip Schaer and Mike Mezrah, who owns Tampa Bay Sporting Clays.
(Photos courtesy of Tammy Williams)

You know how it works. East-siders cluster around U.S. 301. West-siders rarely venture past Little Road. And, that leaves those in the center to squabble over where Land O’ Lakes — which, as you very well know, was here first — ends and upstart Wesley Chapel begins.

All this (generally good-natured) geographic division accounts for much of why there’s a county fair in Dade City and a remarkably similar festival in New Port Richey, and, more pragmatically, why there are essentially duplicated east and west county government offices.

Nothing, outside the occasional election, seems capable of bringing Pasco together.

Except, perhaps, this: The Angelus, a group home for severely handicapped people, has demonstrated uniquely how to bridge Pasco’s recalcitrant divide. Relocated from St. Petersburg to Hudson in 1986, The Angelus has episodically united not just Pasco, but the entire region on its behalf.

That season of unity is approaching once more, and once more, we are caught up in the magic of what individuals, pulling together on behalf of the less fortunate among us, can achieve.

Charlie Daniels talks to a resident of The Angelus.

In that spirit, three devoted west-siders — proving there is life east of Little Road, and even the Suncoast Parkway — gathered recently in the shade of the breeze-swept pavilion at Tampa Bay Shooting Clays and Archery, a remote destination that, nonetheless, occasionally becomes Pasco’s throbbing heart.

Assembled around a newly assembled picnic table on a gentle October afternoon hinting at autumn, the place smelled of fresh-cut wood and anticipation.

These three — raconteur and events director Tammy Williams, Port Richey businessman Steve Farrell and county Commissioner Mike Wells Jr. — had come far at the behest of Land O’ Lakes developer Skip Schaer to tout the virtues of Charliepalooza 2016 (for the headliner, country music star Charlie Daniels), No. 26 if you’re keeping score at home.

Instead, they kept drifting back to the extraordinary things that happen every day at The Angelus, where perfectly bright people, locked by sheer happenstance into substandard bodies, see their dreams nurtured, hopes encouraged, efforts rewarded, delights shared and disappointments comforted.

Dazzling. Remarkable. Bracing. Enchanting.

Much of what is achieved there, as the foundation’s literature likes to point out, comes from unalloyed love. The rest of the operation, however, takes money — large piles of the stuff — and the board’s efforts are both tireless and unending.

This is where even those who rarely, perhaps never, set foot on the far side of Starkey Park come in. This year’s three-day affair (Dec. 1 to Dec. 3) has the right stuff to conjure up a generous holiday mood. For golfers, there’s a pairing party (plus a mini-concert) that Thursday night at the Seminole Hard Rock Casino, followed the next day by a golf tournament at Hunter’s Green in New Tampa, plus an awards dinner (and a mini-concert) that night.

Charliepalooza moves that Saturday (Dec. 3) to Tampa Bay Shooting Clays, in the Ehren Cutoff bend, and wraps that night with a full-blown concert at the Dallas Bull, about a mile south of the Florida State Fairgrounds on U.S. 301. Headlined by Daniels himself, the event features Montgomery Gentry, Confederate Railroad and, from Hudson, the Embry Brothers Band.

Here’s why we came to the range: As extraordinary as each phase has been over the years, the Saturday of blasting away at clay targets — entering its fourth year — has begun to emerge as the linchpin.

“It’s a big challenge, like golf,” Wells says. “But, it’s quicker than golf.” And, not to put too fine a point on it, “I’m better at it than I am at golf.”

Better still, there’s no telling who you’re likely to bump into. A NASCAR driver, maybe a NASCAR crew chief. Buccaneer Super Bowl hero Mike Alstott is a regular. Cartoonist Guy Gilchrist. You might even catch Daniels himself going incognito, swapping his Stetson for an identity-disguising ball cap.

Reiterates Williams, “You never know who’s going to show up.”

Well. Remember that part how The Angelus, for its remote locale, brings Pascoans together? He’s not what you’d call a celebrity, exactly, but well-known rancher-developer J.D. Porter, of Wiregrass notoriety, has vowed to field at least one team of Saturday shooters.

And, as he has in the past, Paul Harvey — of Harvey’s Hardware on Land O’ Lakes Boulevard — is conspiring with Case on an assortment of unique collector’s knives for auction. Imagine that: the knives that bind.

The bridge to a tighter, better Pasco is there. All we have to do is cross it. Begin by investigating your Charliepalooza options at TheAngelus.com, or by calling Tammy Williams at (727) 243-8293.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Riding the Route 54 County Connector

October 19, 2016 By Tom Jackson

They cut the ribbon on a posh new bus a few weeks ago, signaling optimistic expansion of Pasco County’s two-year-old east-west route linking Zephyrhills and New Port Richey.

Assembled under a fan-cooled tent in the parking lot of the Medical Center at Trinity, officials spoke buoyantly about the future of mass transit in Pasco County, with the bus in the background lending physical evidence to their commitment.

And, what evidence it is. Sleek. Ocean blue, emblazoned with a green and yellow stripe undulating across the side — a wave below a bright ball of sun and a seagull taking wing.

Courtesy of Pasco County Pasco County is using this new bus in an expansion of its east-west route, linking Zephyrhills and New Port Richey. — Courtesy of Pasco County
Pasco County is using this new bus in an expansion of its east-west route, linking Zephyrhills and New Port Richey.

Inside, more blue. Soothing. Welcoming. Comfy, upholstered padded seats that say, sit, rest, stay awhile. Overhead, adjustable air conditioning vents and reading lights, just like on intra-city buses and airliners. Upscale.

And, that’s not all. Over the next several months, they’ll add free Wi-Fi, introducing the option of online productivity or entertainment to your ride, while Pasco County Public Transportation drivers get you pretty close to where you need to go.

It’s all perfectly splendid. But, so far, it’s also all a dream. Not that the new buses, two of them, aren’t authentic. Or, that Pasco’s commitment to mass transit isn’t both enthusiastic and genuine. But, there’s a reason there’s no mention of “rapid” in the system’s official name, as we shall see.

Let’s be clear. If, just now, it serves as nothing more than a symbolic reminder that Pasco is a single, unified entity, and not some geographic hybrid stitched together by whimsical bureaucrats and maintained by stubborn tradition, then the connector serves a valuable purpose.

Still, the additional buses, acquired through a $1.031 million grant from the Florida Department of Transportation, represent a severe test of the “Field of Dreams” launching instructions. If they drive them, will riders come?

Having traveled the line, designated the “Route 54 County Connector,” roundtrip from Zephyrhills to the Trinity hospital recently, I can say without hesitation: Winning converts is going to take time.

And, that’s a generous review. The trip, which, even following the bus’ roundabout circuit, could have been accomplished by car in about two hours, took more than twice as long.

Possibly because of this snail’s pace, there were long stretches where I was the only passenger aboard. At its most crowded — after a late-afternoon stop at the Wiregrass campus of Pasco-Hernando State College — I shared my ride with five others.

Not that you can’t meet pleasant company along the way, among them Jonathan Funnel (pronounced “foo-NELL,” accent on the second syllable), 25, who routinely rides from the Zephyrhills City Hall stop to The Groves for his job at the Cobb cineplex.

Funnel, who reports he loves all movies, everything having to do with baseball, plus the NFL’s Packers and Eagles, likes that the bus drops him near the Grove’s Dick’s Sporting Goods store. “It’s heaven,” he says.

Among the notes jotted by Funnel’s traveling companion: “We rode together about 25 minutes. A car couldn’t have done much better.” Our driver, Jose Rojas, 62, a retired postal worker from Land O’ Lakes who piloted heavy machinery as a Marine, observes pleasantly, “Today’s been rainy. There’s no traffic. I love it.”

About then the radio squawks. The bus out of Zephyrhills goes only as far as The Shops at Wiregrass. There, in the parking garage, westbound passengers switch. But, the connector, bound from Trinity, is caught in a snarl triggered by a crash near Collier Parkway.

“Uh-oh,” Rojas murmurs. When we arrive at the mall terminus, the driver apologizes for the delay with a what-are-you-gonna-do shrug, adding “He’ll be along in a while.”

He’s seven minutes early, so he gets out and stretches, groaning pleasantly. No passengers board before Rojas makes his on-time departure, half-a-million-dollars of empty bus.

“A while” turns out to be most of a half hour, which allows time to strike up a conversation with Odette Rennie, 69, a Virgin Islander who settled in a Land O’ Lakes village along State Road 54 sometime after a nearly catastrophic accident in Los Angeles broke her right arm in three places and convinced her to swear off personal transportation almost completely.

She’ll ride if her husband or son are driving. Otherwise, she takes the bus, even though she concedes — as do many fans of public transportation — managing the last half-mile home presents challenges of its own. Some days it’s brutally hot. Today, near the Ferman new car dealership, she exits into a downpour, lamenting she’d left her big umbrella at home.

Worse, because the bus is designed to drop passengers onto raised platforms, Rennie makes a big step onto an unpaved shoulder, punctuating the maneuver, “Ow, wow!”

After that, riders come and go singly. One seems to have just finished a shift at Big Lots; he falls asleep immediately. Another, at the Suncoast Parkway, has come from a bike ride. He loads his two-wheeler on the front, drops coins in the slot, slumps into a seat and, buds in ears, studies his smartphone. Farther up, a boarding passenger complains that the bus is late. She doesn’t want to hear about the accident.

Nobody does. If the buses are adequate, and this one is more than that, nothing kills ridership quite like blown schedules. On the day they snipped the ribbon, Commissioner Kathryn Starkey conceded as much. “We’ll never get people out of their cars as long as buses can get stuck in traffic. We need real bus rapid transit” — that is, buses traveling in lanes reserved only for buses.

Still, if you’re not in a rush, there’s something to be said for riding, especially if you take one of the scenic seats a couple of steps up in the back. Not driving means you can fixate on industrious egrets following a tractor-drawn mower hacking through a pasture. Not driving and sitting up high means you finally see over the reeds to the little lagoon with a small dock framed in lattice west of Keystone Community Church.

Being alone, being chauffeured, means your thoughts can wander. I’m thinking, from time to time, riding the bus just might be therapeutic. And, at $3 a roundtrip, it will be cheaper than any shrink.

This is the buzz in my head at the end of my four-hour odyssey. It could have been worse. And my mind is oddly at ease. If I’m ever not in a hurry again, I could do this.

Published Oct. 19, 2016

Mock election: A welcome alternate reality

October 12, 2016 By Tom Jackson

Perhaps the most revealing development in this year’s unique — to say no more — choice of presidential candidates is this:

Even as we rumble toward the election’s Nov. 8 resolution, everyone from paid pundits to your next-door neighbor keeps replaying the events that brought us to this sad pass, and wondering how, out of 300-odd million American citizens, the finalists are an undisciplined, incurious billionaire reality TV star and a career politician who, evidence suggests, swapped top-level government access for financial gain.

Sophie Metellus portrays Angela Johnson, Democratic vice presidential nominee. (Photos courtesy of Jonathan Shoemaker/Saint Leo University) — Sophie Metellus portrays Angela Johnson, Democratic vice presidential nominee.
(Photos courtesy of Jonathan Shoemaker/Saint Leo University)

And so, like survivors winding through the stages of grief, we spin up alternate realities. If only this had happened, or that, we might have at least one candidate to whom we could devote ourselves unreservedly.

If only, indeed.

Well, if it’s an encouraging alternate reality you seek, Saint Leo University is where to find it. Even now, up in the peaceful rolling hills surrounding Lake Jovita, students are embroiled in a mock presidential election campaign that — minus the combined 10-figure budget and personal invective — looks and feels remarkably like the real thing.

If the real thing was a contest rooted in ideas and policy proposals, that is.

This is not some lark. Instead, under professors Jeff Borden and Frank Orlando, it is a massive and massively serious undertaking that crosses majors and disciplines, involving nearly two dozen students on each side assigned almost every imaginable responsibility common to modern presidential campaigns: candidates, campaign managers, party chairs, policy advisers, strategists and — you don’t get more state-of-the-art than this — even social media operatives.

It is, in short, teaching by turning broad swaths of the student body into a full-time method-acting class. You catch a glimpse of their buy-in when, after the Oct. 3 debate between vice presidential contenders, one of the candidates introduces himself not as Mark Saunders, a 20-year-old junior majoring in economics from Temple Terrace via Land O’ Lakes, but as Paul Friedman, a libertarian-leaning Republican nominee for president. Yes, a libertarian economist named Friedman, as in Milton. Well played, Mr. Saunders.

Amanda Miceli portrays Catarina Castillo, Republican vice presidential nominee.

Old-timers and traditionalists tempted to arch an eyebrow at play-acting-for-grades should know this: Alternate-reality education is an actual thing, dating back to the 1990s. And, also this: Borden was there at the start, putting students through their paces in such things as mock trials and viral contagions. Partnering with Orlando, the resident political science guru, the pair are in their second year staging a mock presidential showdown.

“The idea is to make it as authentic as possible,” Borden says. “We want to present them with realistic tasks, to get them thinking on their feet … and get them to realize that learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum.”

How real? Both campaign managers — the GOP’s Kevin Abbott, 20, from a New York suburb, and Emily Alfaya, 19, from West Palm Beach — love organizing and strategizing, but neither is keen on public speaking.

The same can be said of Democratic Party chairwoman Cassidy Whitaker, 21, a junior from Brandon, who regards her role as that of chief cheerleader, an impression she gleaned from working as a volunteer for Hillary Clinton over the summer.

The candidates, by contrast, feast on arguing in the spotlight. Unabashedly leonine in wondrous blond-tipped dreadlocks, bespectacled Jacksonville senior Leandrous Chieves — who tops the Democratic ticket of Marcus Howard and Angela Johnson (that’s right: Howard-Johnson) — says he’ll argue politics anywhere, anytime, with anybody, “as long as they’re coming with facts.”

Chieves/Howard and Saunders/Friedman are scheduled to tangle Nov. 7, Election Day eve, with a student vote immediately following.

“Last year, we even had demonstrators,” Borden says proudly. Students in the Department of Education rallied outside the presidential debate. “I expect it will happen again.”

The vice presidential debate was rather more sedate, the only sparks coming from the candidates themselves. Playing Johnson, Sophie Metellus, 20, a sophomore from Miami, brought the sort of passion for doing the right thing that can’t be faked. As Caterina Castillo, the former ambassador to Russia, 19-year-old Atlantan Amanda Miceli parried with earnest and deeply researched policy positions, revealing the self-admitted “political junkie.”

Most of their debate fell along the lines you’d expect, each taking the traditional party line on taxes, free college, public education, sanctuary cities, the Iran nuclear deal and hiking the minimum wage.

In a surprise, however, Republican Castillo/Miceli declared plans to slash military spending and shift that money to domestic projects.

Johnson/Metellus counterpunched with ISIS, retorting as long as ISIS is active, military spending shouldn’t be touched. The American people need to know, she said, if ISIS attacks, “We’ve got their backs.”

All of which prompted Chieves to tweet from his @Howard4prez account, “A republican wanting to slash the military budget? Unheard of.”

Still, this was substantive stuff, and with the possible exception of snarky exchanges over whether one candidate understood the point the other had made, it was collegial, even uplifting.

Sigh.

The candidates feel your pain.

As someone who is old enough to remember when the GOP nominated candidates whose knowledge of public policy was broad and deep — four years ago, then just 16, he worked the phones tirelessly for Mitt Romney — Saunders is already envisioning, if not outright plotting, a post-Donald Trump Republican Party.

“It’ll be a future without the extremists,” he says. “We have a chance to build a better way forward.”

Chieves is no less enamored of Hillary Clinton, who fairly curled his lip in describing her — within earshot of his I’m-With-Her party chief — as “no saint” and “far from perfect.” Just bringing the facts.

Imagine that. A committed Republican and an equally committed Democrat, each disappointed with their party’s nominees.

Maybe they’re not living such an alternative reality after all.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published October 12, 2016

Celebrating San Antonio’s small-town charms

October 5, 2016 By Tom Jackson

When you’re young and restless, Betty Burke says, San Antonio is the sort of town you leave. It’s small. It’s sleepy. It’s a long way from anywhere.

It scarcely helps that its mascot is the Eastern Diamondback rattlesnake, the deadliest serpent in North America. More about that in a moment.

So you go. To college. To a fast-paced career. To bright lights and busy streets. To places that, famously, never sleep. And, you stay far, far away, reveling in the distance and big-city tumult … until something fundamental and ancient clicks inside, and you’re ready to rear children.

Betty Burke, head of the organizing committee for the San Antonio Rattlesnake Festival, is busy preparing for the festival’s two-day 50th anniversary celebration. Here, she is at last year’s festival, in front of the event T-shirt tent. (File Photo) — Betty Burke, head of the organizing committee for the San Antonio Rattlesnake Festival, is busy preparing for the festival’s two-day 50th anniversary celebration. Here, she is at last year’s festival, in front of the event T-shirt tent.
(File Photo)

Then you return, knowing, even as the town changes, in all the essential, pleasing ways, it will have remained the same. San Antonio still will offer, for your offspring, the simple treasures you couldn’t properly appreciate until you lived apart from them.

Burke knows this because she has lived it. She is among those bright-eyed lasses and lads whom the town methodically sends into the world who, upon review, find the entire leaving-home business unsatisfying.

It’s then, feeling the biological magnetism of bringing up offspring as they were brought up, they find their trajectory arcing toward home, toward its friendly faces, familiar rhythms and reassuring appeals to the senses.

All of that, and so much more, will be in play next week when, precisely on schedule on the third weekend of October, the little town’s biggest adventure — its 50th annual Rattlesnake Festival — is scheduled to unfold.

It is for such reassuring predictability that Burke became a human boomerang 35-odd years ago, returning — after two years at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and career-related stopovers in Miami, Tampa and St. Petersburg — to the ancestral 40-acre plot off State Road 52. She arrived accompanied by husband Bruce Calvert, a since-retired Tampa Bay Times building maintenance manager, and, restored to her roots, they added to the family line.

Now, about the Rattlesnake Festival: Among the things you learn, fast, in small towns is that for good things to happen, everybody has to pitch in. So, even as responsibility for the autumnal celebration with the arresting premise has passed from one group to another — the Rotary Club of San Antonio, 15 members strong, has topped the masthead these last three years — making it happen remains very much a community effort.

The city makes sure adequate electrical power is installed in the park and dispatches maintenance supervisor John Weaver to troubleshoot. The town of St. Leo supplies a well-received pumpkin patch. Jay Vogel, whose dad was among the festival’s founders, coordinates volunteers.

More? Of course, more. Amy and John Greif conduct races of hand-carved wooden gopher tortoises (the live versions having become endangered and, therefore, off-limits). Eric Herrmann — because it’s not a legitimate San Antonio event without at least one Herrmann — provides a history presentation.

Of course, if there’s more than one Herrmann involved, it’s a certifiable “Major Event.” Nurseryman Steve Herrmann makes it so by employing his landscape trailer to fetch bleachers from the athletic complex and transport them to the City Park. Margarita Romo brings her Farmworkers Self-Help associates over from Tommytown to fix Mexican corn-on-the-cob.

And, to prove she doesn’t play favorites, Burke reserves the most thankless task of all for her spouse: Calvert manages the supply and good working order of the 30 portable toilettes.

“This is how small towns work,” Burke says, “and that’s how we like it.”

She says this even as outside forces surge San Antonio’s way — recently, city commissioners heard from Metro Development Group about the mini-city with the mega-lagoon planned for northeast Wesley Chapel — possibly threatening the town’s last-century ambiance.

On the upside, development has reduced rattlesnake encounters in the wild. Burke says she hasn’t seen one in eight years, at least. That could explain why there’s no longer a rattlesnake roundup at the Rattlesnake Festival.

Otherwise, Burke hopes the things she loves will resist outside influences. For instance, the corner post office is where information — OK, gossip — has been swapped, like, forever. Surely that will endure.

And the termite-ridden bulletin board that will be replaced with Rotary funds from the festival? It’s always papered over with announcements and opportunities; it was San Antonio’s Facebook long before there was Facebook.

These things, she says, are worth preserving. So, too, is the Rattlesnake Festival, even as it evolves, with food trucks replacing barbecue cookers and bounce houses substituting for carousels.

And now, another one is upon us.

Something happens the week before, Burke says. “You know how they talk about, ‘When the circus comes to town?’” We do. It’s anticipation, the pulse-quickening phenomenon that triggers the brain’s pleasure centers in what psychologists call “rosy prospection.”

Well, Burke adds, “When the tents start going up, the same thing happens in San Antonio.” How could it not? That thrill comes from knowing they’re about to be in the regional spotlight. Organizers expect 6,000 visitors to experience their small-town charm, and return home better for the experience.

For Burke, it all comes with a shot of melancholy. Even as the Rattlesnake Festival looks forward to its second half-century, this year’s event brings endings, and she is full of anticipation about that, too.

After three years as head of the organizing committee, she is stepping down. At a vibrant 73, with a confident gait and sparkling eyes, she nonetheless says, “It’s time for someone younger to take it on.”

She has her eye, eventually, on Brady Whalen, recent Pasco High alumnus, Pasco-Hernando State College freshman and all-around reliable go-fer. (Surprise, Brady.)

And, when the festival closes, so, too, will Park Place Antiques, the shop she has run with her sister and nephew in the old Bradshaw house across Main Street from the park.

About this she explains, simply, “There are other things I’d rather do.”

None of which will involve leaving San Antonio. Not for very long, anyway. After all, she’s been there and done that. This is one boomerang who’s never wants to make another extended round trip.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published October 5, 2016

Zephyrhills’ police have a hairy, happy situation

September 28, 2016 By Tom Jackson

People of Zephyrhills: Do not adjust your eyewear. You can believe your eyes. The facial hair you’ve noticed on your policemen is not an illusion or a sign it’s time to change your prescription.

In a scheme to raise a treasury for an awards banquet in January, the department has altered its position against hirsute cops, meaning, at least through the end of the year, you’re going to be seeing more than a few beards on the boys in blue.

And Officer Caleb Rice, for one, couldn’t be happier.

These members of the Zephyrhills Police Force are growing whiskers for a good cause. They are, from left, Capt. Derek Brewer, Sgt. Nathan Gardner and Officer Caleb Rice. They are standing outside of the Zephyrhills Police Department Headquarters. (Tom Jackson/Photo) — These members of the Zephyrhills Police Force are growing whiskers for a good cause. They are, from left, Capt. Derek Brewer, Sgt. Nathan Gardner and Officer Caleb Rice. They are standing outside of the Zephyrhills Police Department Headquarters.
(Tom Jackson/Photo)

Mere weeks ago you wouldn’t have guessed, but thickly thatched faces have been part of Rice’s family tradition for, literally, as long as he can remember.

“I have never seen my father’s face,” Rice says, flipping through smartphone photos until he arrives at the image of a proud man sporting a beard the color of a bronze statue, cooing into a baby’s smiling mug.

“That’s my dad,” he points, “and that’s me.” The picture is nearly 35 years old.

Then, another photo, a recent family portrait. All the men, save one, boast beards worthy of Vikings. Which is appropriate. His mom descends from Norwegians, and there’s a rumor about a family connection to Erik the Red.

“We can’t nail it down,” Rice says, a little forlornly, “so I don’t claim it.”

Now, about the bare-cheeked one: That’s Caleb looking alarmingly like Steven Furst’s sweet-faced “Flounder” from “Animal House.” Small wonder Rice readily concedes, “When I don’t have a beard, personally, I feel like I’m less” — he pauses, getting his mind around the confession — “manly.”

Let’s get this much straight. Aside from soft, beguiling features that promise to age well, there is nothing anyone would consider unmanly about Caleb Rice. Pushing 6 feet 3, he’s built like an offensive tackle: square-shouldered and sturdy, with a low center of gravity. He’s no pushover.

For the first 10 years of his working life, Rice was a truck driver, a profession famously lax regarding codes of appearance. When he became a Zephyrhills policeman about four years ago, however, the beard had to go.

“Maybe I’m old school; maybe it’s the way I came up,” says the town’s Dickensian-named — for the purposes of this story, anyway — police chief, David Shears. “I just never thought it was a good idea for policemen to have beards. It was part of the image. We were a clean-cut profession, and we ought to look that way.”

In his day, he says, if a patrolman showed up with so much as an overnight stubble, his sergeant would shove a Bic disposable in his hand and point him toward the locker room.

But, with an end-of-the-year banquet to fund, Shears was persuaded by a couple of entrepreneurial subordinates to give bristles a chance.

Here’s how the plan, cobbled together by Capt. Derek Brewer and Sgt. Nathan Gardner at the urging of patrol officers, works:

In exchange for $10 a month, Zephyrhills police are allowed to grow and keep modest, well-tended beards, no longer than 3/8ths of an inch in length. Civilian staff, who are not facial-hair restricted, can buy a full week of wearing jeans each month for that same $10.

Because in his family the beard makes the man, the day the fundraiser policy became official, Rice dropped $40 on his sergeant’s desk, announcing himself good to go through New Year’s Day.

In all, about two-thirds of the sworn staff is participating, including all the overnight shift — which somehow seems appropriate — as well as Brewer, a first-time beard grower.

“There have been times on vacation when I didn’t shave for a couple of weeks,” he explains, “but, that’s just ‘not shaving.’ It’s not the same as actually growing a beard.” Every man knows the truth of that.

At home, the reviews are mixed. While his wife loves it, he says his 9-year-old daughter “looks at me sideways.” Explaining the situation, and also that Mommy has blessed his dashing new look, the following exchange occurred:

Daughter: “Do you always do what Mommy likes?”

Dad: “I always try to.”

Daughter: “You’re going to regret that someday.”

Gardner, who, as a sergeant directly responsible for his troops, played the linchpin role of guaranteeing order despite this break from tradition, personifies irony. His cheeks sprout only fuzz.
“The only beard I can grow is a neck beard,” he says, “and nobody wants that.” So Gardner, 32, shaves and donates, donates and shaves, because, “It’s been great for morale.”

Heaven knows cops patrolling beats, even in little, relatively peaceful towns like Zephyrhills, can use some spiritual pick-me-up. Truth be told, Gardner says, interactions with Pasco County Sheriff’s deputies during the early weeks of beard-growing season have produced clucks of envy.

“I expect,” says mustachioed Sgt. Billy Adams, a Dennis Quaid double who plans to keep applying the blade until hunting season, “our recruitment pool numbers will skyrocket.”

Rice, for one, couldn’t be more pleased.

While readily declaring, “I’ve never loved doing anything more than I love this job,” Rice concedes giving up the beard he’d had since he was 15 was “a sacrifice.”

With his face once more ear-to-ear whiskers, he says, “When my three-day weekend is over, I say, ‘I’m ready. Let’s go.’ ”

This sort of happy talk is a rhapsody to those who endured and survived the department’s dark days in 2014 — well before the nation’s current unrest over policing began — and ended only after Shears and City Manager Steve Spina tackled the department’s shortcomings exposed by an external review.

And Shears, who’s still getting accustomed to the idea of patrolmen looking a little like Serpico-meets-Hans Gruber, concedes that cops wearing beards helps achieve one key law enforcement goal. “It makes us look more like the people we interact with,” Shears says. “It makes us look more like individuals, like people.”

See that? Everybody wins.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published September 28, 2016

Dreaming of a golf league of their own

September 21, 2016 By Tom Jackson

WESLEY CHAPEL — As a self-proclaimed “range rat,” it doesn’t take much to keep Ron Nelson happy. Give him a bucket of balls, room on the practice tee and a game on the radio for company, and he’s set.

“It’s golf heaven,” he says.

It is insufficient to call the 69-year-old Nelson a regular at Pasadena Hills Golf Driving Range; he is, more accurately, a devotee to this little patch of paradise off Handcart Road.

It might be the range’s proximity to his home in Zephyrhills. It might be the ease of using an electronic key to retrieve a practice bucket from the ball dispenser. Location and convenience are always big sellers.

Most likely, however, it has to do with the red sign affixed to the entrance gate that declares the range home to the Florida Veterans Golf Association, and also that half the ownership team — PGA teaching professional Fred Bender — served, as Nelson did, in Vietnam.

Fred Bender is seated with, from left, Robert Jones, Melvin Blair, Ron Nelson and Jim Murphy standing behind him. (Tom Jackson/Photo) — Fred Bender is seated with, from left, Robert Jones, Melvin Blair, Ron Nelson and Jim Murphy standing behind him.
(Tom Jackson/Photo)

Bender, a Marine, endured in 1968 the four-month siege of Khe Sanh, a U.S. stronghold in the northwest corner of South Vietnam near Laos. Whatever else he took from the experience — bitterly, as people back home turned against the war, U.S. forces abandoned Khe Sanh within months after winning the battle — Bender knew then he always would be the brother of anyone who wore an American military uniform.

On a recent Monday in an air-conditioned corner of the golf center, Bender was surrounded by military kin, fellows such as Nelson who remember vividly their days as young soldiers, sailors and Marines.

Here was Robert Jones, 65, a 24-year Navy man who experienced Vietnam as a 19-year-old orderly transporting other 19-year-olds, amputee patients, between air transports and the U.S. Naval Hospital in Philadelphia.

And here was Jim Murphy, 74, a Marine machinist who spent six years in the Pacific just as Vietnam was beginning to heat up. And here, too, was Melvin Blair, 69, who learned to hit golf balls as a 12-year-old in the north Florida citrus groves where his father picked for a living, then earned four Purple Hearts as an infantryman during a two-year tour in Vietnam.

And, even if those wartime experiences aren’t the sum of who they are, they still shape how they think and how they form their happiest associations.

Put him in a room with 60 random strangers, Bender was saying, and he’ll look for the nearest escape route. But last year, when he screwed up the courage to attend a reunion of Khe Sanh Marines in Savannah, the welcome felt like being surrounded by 300 family members.

Even as he began making plans for the next Marine gathering, “It got me thinking, about what I could do to help get veterans together here,” Bender says.

He thinks, at last, he’s onto something: a veterans’ golf league that tours area courses on a regular schedule, then gathers in the clubhouse to share a meal and whatever is on their minds.

The inaugural event is set, appropriately, for Veterans Day at Silverado Golf and Country Club, off Eiland Boulevard in Zephyrhills. “I just think it would be great to get the guys together on a regular basis,” Bender says, “somewhere other than their usual watering holes.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with watering holes, he says, and here Nelson interjects, “But, you never get to know someone like you do when you play golf.

“It’s four hours together, alone in the outdoors. It’s quiet. You’re playing a game that makes you think. And, you start talking about things that would never come up anywhere else. Stories you’ve never told anyone.”

Nelson, himself, isn’t one to tell stories, even though the one he has to tell is as plain as the scar on his face: a jagged disruption working its way across the bridge of his nose to just below his right eye.

“I picked it up in the A Shau Valley,” he shrugs.

“A Shau?” says the often-wounded Blair. “Man, I get scared just hearing the name.”

Rightly so. A Shau served as a conduit for soldiers and supplies flowing from North Vietnam, and attempts to thwart Hanoi’s operations were costly and largely ineffective. The most infamous of these, in May 1969, involved the taking of an insignificant nob survivors dubbed “Hamburger Hill.”

Nelson, a member of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, came in on a helicopter and left on a stretcher. He survived, but kept the shrapnel in his sinuses; now it rarely comes up in conversation unless the X-ray tech at the dentist’s office is new.

Then, inevitably, it’s, “What the hell is that?!” And, Nelson patiently explains how he came by his souvenir from the Viet Cong.

Jones told of the courage of lads his age, fresh “out of country,” getting used to the idea of facing life without a limb or two, “and not one of them said, ‘I can’t.’ ”

Blair recalled sitting by the mess hall door nearest the bunker after the Tet Offensive, because you never knew when a rocket would come flying through the window. “If that seat was taken,” he says, “I didn’t eat.”

The conscientious Murphy, who’d already given blood that Monday morning, spoke with pride about looking after machine guns that never broke down on his watch.

All that and much, much more, came out of an hour spent in the vicinity of a golf practice range. Imagine an entire day on actual links.

Area veterans don’t have to imagine. They can hook up with Fred Bender and turn a dream of ball-striking camaraderie into a tale-spinning reality. You can visit his web site — PasadenaHillsGolf.com — or catch him at (813) 857-5430.

The same contacts work for potential sponsors. Ring up the man. Send him an email. He survived a siege to make this happen. But, even a Marine capable of creating golf heaven can’t take this hill alone.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published September 21, 2016

Freedom to pledge allegiance … or not

August 31, 2016 By Tom Jackson

Social media sites blew up recently with news out of Leon County regarding, because we have a shortage of things to disagree about, the Pledge of Allegiance.

It seems the uncle of a Leon County elementary school student was presented with a form that gives custodial adults the option of having their youngsters literally sit out each morning’s traditional recitation of the Pledge.

Outraged, the uncle wrote in red ink his response across the form — “This is the dumbest thing I have ever read and I am so ashamed of this” — and, of course, posted it on his Facebook page, whereupon it went classically viral.

Traditional media as far away as Detroit and St. Louis took notice, producing coverage about outraged parents and blame-shifting bureaucrats. A district spokesman said the district was following the Legislature’s newly minted direction; the state Department of Education retorted Leon’s interpretation went too far.

The whole thing was like a summer storm: furious and eye-catching, but over fast. Only days later, Leon’s media-challenged Superintendent Jackie Pons — he says he was unaware of the published waiver until a parent called him on the way to work days later — ordered a halt to the form’s distribution and had the online code of conduct revised.

If parents or uncles or otherwise guardians wanted to exercise their rights under the statute, Pons reasoned, they could write their own darn note.

And, that was pretty much that, except for the lingering suspicion expressed in an email interview with the Tallahassee Democrat by Micah Brienen — the alarmed uncle — that the statute passed by Florida’s overwhelmingly Republican, certifiably conservative Legislature, and signed by its hard-right governor, was somehow “just another example of progressive politics destroying our school system.”

The next thing you know, Brienen said, they’ll be taking Old Glory out of the classroom and stripping her off the pole in the courtyard.

Well.

What the Legislature did last spring was nothing more than codify what plenty of school districts — Pasco and Hillsborough included — already had in their policy books where for years, students who have objections to reciting the Pledge have been able to decline without it going on their permanent records.

That, and lawmakers added a codicil: If a student wants to demur, he/she must provide a written-opt out. If anything, it seems legislators toughened the provisions.

And, Pasco County Schools Superintendent Kurt Browning, above all a reasonable fellow, is not sure he gets all the fuss. “It’s not a big deal for us,” he says. Pasco’s longstanding policy notwithstanding, there have been few reported episodes of students sitting out the Pledge.

The addition of a written excuse “might mean a little more work for school board staff,” Browning says, “but I haven’t heard any news” about students exercising their stand-down option.

So, is the fuss all tempests and teapots? For Browning, rising and reciting the Pledge at the start of each school morning represents a cherished ritual, one of those things that help set the tone for learning in the land of liberty.

“We stand, we pledge the flag,” he says. “It’s who we are as Americans.”

That said, Browning makes abundantly clear his administration’s determination to defend students who find the pledge offensive, whatever their reasons.

And, that brings us back around to the idea that letting students off the hook is somehow introducing the Kremlin to our public schools. Wrong.

Giving students the option to pledge, far from being the work of subversives, is, in fact, a blow for liberty. Yes, we live in a splendid country, the best in history and still the most alluring on the planet. It passes the fence test — put a fence around a country; open the gate and see which way people go — every time.

But, the reason for the United States’ exceptional status has nothing to do with its grand vistas, abundant natural resources and favorable location on the map, and everything to do with the fact that it was, as the great man said, “conceived in liberty.”

And, if liberty means anything, it means this: Under certain circumstances, you cannot be forced to say things contrary to your faith or philosophy or even your mood, if it comes to that. Finding yourself in a taxpayer-sponsored classroom on the orders of the government — up to a certain age, school attendance is compulsory — qualifies as one of those exemptible circumstances.

In truth, obliging anyone, anywhere, anytime, to pledge to the Pledge is a persistent source of tension. The very notion of liberty sternly implies an opt-out clause.

Of course, it’s counterintuitive. Celebrate self-determination and in the next breath reject a vow of loyalty to the country that stands ever-poised to defend liberty with blood and treasure? Yes, this strikes me as freeloading on freedom, too, but we have to take the noble with its consequences.

Therefore, fans of freedom should not recoil, horror struck, when private citizens, even students, reject the taking of a loyalty oath. Allegiance coerced is allegiance unworthy.

And, a pledge recited against one’s will isn’t worth the breath expelled to utter it.

Tom Jackson, a resident of New Tampa, is interested in your ideas. To reach him, email .

Published August 31, 2016