FNP 51 Page 25 intentions of doing anything with the Madison News, except keeping it legal. P: Let me talk about your association with the Florida Press Association [FPA]. You mentioned when you started business you were a member, but you eventually became the youngest president of the Florida Press Association. How did that transpire? G: Well, our first Press Association [meeting] that we ever went to was in [1965], and, if my memory serves me correctly, it was in St. Augustine. My wife and I were both twenty- five years old, and it looked like everybody in that bunch down there was 100. I realize now that they [weren't]. I just, from the beginning, knew that if we stayed in the newspaper business, we needed to find out something about the newspaper business and that nobody should know better than the people associated with the Florida Press Association. I didn't even know that there was a Florida Press Association when we opened up the newspaper business. Again, I stayed in the newspaper business out of sheer energy and ignorance, and that is the absolute truth. I didn't know what we couldn't do, so we did it, and I had the energy to do it--the good Lord gave me that. One of the first people that I met down there, and we became lifelong friends, still are real good friends, was Hoop Teabault from St. Augustine. He had the St. Augustine Record at the time and later bought out the strong weekly and opened up the Clay Today and sold it also. Then, I became just heavily involved with the Association and wound up on the board right quick-like. It was several things that I was interested in. We [were] having some real problems in Tallahassee, and I've always been politically oriented, I guess. I made my best grades in history and political science in school. So I got involved with that. I was very concerned about the fact that everybody that knew anything about the Florida Press Association at that time was very concerned about the direction it was headed in. In the very beginning, John Paul Jones was heading it up, and we had an extremely good operation. It originally was in Gainesville and then, you know, the hub of politics is Tallahassee. So, about 1965, I think, is when they had that real movement to] move the capital to Orlando, and Mallory Home was given credit for stopping that. But the more I got involved with the Florida Press Association, I got involved with the National Newspaper Association, and I was the state representative for the National Newspaper Association for twelve years and would go to Washington and work with them. But one of the things that I wanted to do was to get our Florida Press Association on good financial ground, which, during my years on the board in the beginning, it was not, and we were all very concerned about it. Another thing I was concerned about was that fifteen seconds and thirty seconds and sixty seconds all over the world was fifteen, thirty and sixty, wherever you went, but a column inch was not. So I wanted to try to get some sort of uniformity to what is a column inch. You know, it's so much by so much. During that time, we [were] able to get it down to twelve picas by one inch. Then, the Florida Press Association membership was extremely low, and, again, I have more energy than control. That's always been a major problem of mine, I think. But I told them, if I become president, I will visit every single newspaper in this state. So I wound up as vice president, and then I became president.