M: That is right. Florida Power and Light Company had two primary missions.
 One was to operate an electrical system for those people who were then
 making demands upon that electrical system. It also had an extremely large
 construction operation in order to provide future needs--for next year, and
 five and ten years down the road. Florida Power and Light Company was
 acquiring more new customers in a year then many electrical companies in
 the United States had as their total load.

P: When was this happening?

M: This was happening throughout the late fifties and the sixties and into the
 seventies.

P: But in the earlier period--the twenties and thirties, which was a very slow
 growth period for the state of Florida because of the Depression and the
 hard times due to the collapse of the stock market and the land boom, which
 you have already commented upon--how did that impact Florida Power and
 Light?

M: Florida Power and Light Company became a very close-knit organization, a
 corporate family. Most people either knew everyone else in the company
 personally or they had heard of them. They were satisfied with the way that
 they were doing business, and through that period of time, until Mr. Smith
 came, there was really no need to do anything differently. He, as a new
 CEO who had been the CEO of a company in Louisiana, had his own ideas
 about how companies should be run, and the company was run exactly as he
 wanted it for over thirty years.

P: Before he arrived, was there any special person who was in charge?

M: I am not aware that there was any single, strong individual. There had been
 three or four presidents over the decade and a half of the existence of the
 corporation.

P: Was Florida Power and Light on the stock exchange?

M: Florida Power and Light Company had been affected, as other electric
 utilities were, by the Public Utility Holding Company Act which was passed
 in the late 1930s primarily because of the problems that Commonwealth and
 Southern of Chicago had. The large electrical utility holding companies were
 broken up by federal law. Florida Power and Light Company became an
 independent company in the early 1940s; I do not know the exact year, but
 I guess it was 1943 or 1944.

P: During the war years.


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