M: Because we had nuclear plants.

P: I see. It was the nuclear situation.

M: That is right. We had to look to the safety of any of our officers who
 appeared in public enough to where their names and faces became
 recognizable.

P: So you were a very involved man as far as the business was concerned, and
 yet you had a young family, a relatively new wife because you had gotten
 married just before you came to Florida.

M: It was six years before.

P: So you had two lives to live and only twenty-four hours a day each day to
 do all of these things.

M: That is right.

P: Now, getting up into the 1980s, Florida Power and Light changes. I want to
 get into the change from Florida Power and Light Company to the holding
 company [FPL Group].

M: During the ill-fated [President Jimmy] Carter years, when the seed of inflation
 was planted which grew into full bloom in the early eighties .

P: It seems to me that you are never going to forgive Jimmy Carter.

M: Not if I can help it. [laughter] That was a national disgrace, in my opinion.
 We found that the financial community acceptance of our securities was so
 poor that in order to sell common stock we were having to accept a price
 approximately 80 percent of its book value. Now, when you sell stock at this
 price, it means that you are disenfranchising stockholders who had paid more
 than that for it; you are, in effect, stealing from them. This is never a
 position that the CEO of a company ought to be comfortable with. But the
 company did not have a choice of whether it sold stock or not. We had this
 building program that we had to maintain in order to have the facilities for
 the growing number of customers that we had, and we had to sell stock as an
 integral part of the financial needs for the company.

 At that time I decided that we had to find some way that we could spark the
 interest of the financial community in responding to Florida Power and Light
 Company, even in periods when electric utilities, and more particularly
 nuclear electric utilities, were out of favor. -The best way to generate interest
 seemed to be to invest in activities other than the electric utility industry.
 Then the cycles of acceptance by the financial community for these other

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