FNP 51 Page 27 one, and Carroll Lamb is a Madison County boy [who] was head of the Florida Forest Service, and I asked Carroll if he knew of anybody out there that we could use. He said he had the best assistant for the job that he knew of, and that was Reg Ivory. We interviewed Reg Ivory and a whole bunch of other folks, and we hired Reg Ivory. When we fired the manager, Jim, I had made a motion to get rid of the two girls, too. Let's just clean house. I was talked out of that, and I'm glad I was because those two ladies turned out to be as fine a workers as they could be. They just didn't have any leadership [to follow]. Consequently, they could've done a good job themselves if they hadn't had the poor leadership. So, we got that. Reg took over, and we worked really hard and heavy on trying to get the profitability of it turned around and get a positive image, and it worked. P: How many did you get to join the FPA who had not been members? G: I don't know. P: But you obviously increased the ... G: We brought in members, yes, sir. Yes, we brought in a bunch of members. P: When you talk about lobbying, give me an example of what the FPA would do for the members of the Association. G: At any given session, and the fate of no man is safe as long as the legislature's in session, and especially the fate of the newspaper because somewhere in this great state of Florida, some newspaperman has ticked off some legislator. So they go to Tallahassee with a spur under their blanket, and they're going to get that newspaper. Well, this last time, that man [who] was caught running around with somebody else's wife and then wife abuse of his own and a divorce and all that, it made all the newspapers, and, consequently, he put in just this last legislature-which I spent the time over there because we published a book over there called The Third House ofFlorida-he was determined to eliminate the three times that you run the delinquent tax rolls and bring it down to one time. So, had it not been for Dick Shelton and the publishers . of course, the first thing I did was contacted my three representatives. We had one state representative and two senators representing this county. It's a split county. The first thing I did was call them and got them on my side, so they were opposed to it. Dick Shelton kept us aware of what was going on, all the newspapers across the state. Consequently, that bill never got out of committee. Now, had we had somebody over there that was not as sharp enough on it as Dick Shelton or a Reg Ivory, if we'd had someone else that was coming in drunk and not showing up at these meetings, that thing could've eased on through. P: And how would that have affected you? G: In that one particular instance, it would've cut our revenue by two-thirds. It would be real