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L: I was very unhappy and I knew I was going to have to leave the
university, and then I had brick thrown against my home late one
Saturday afternoon and I had a wife and two young babies. I felt
it just wasn't fair to my family to be involved in that kind
of situation so when I was .
P: You think that was a disgruntled faculty person perhaps?
L: I don't know wno did it, but I didn't like it. Well, one
thing I protested earlier, a boy objected to a coach, wrote
a critical article in the Alligator. Some of the football
players went and found him in his room one cold night, took
him down to Lake Wauburg, threw him in the lake. The Florida Times
Union had a story about it, said that's one way to get rid of
critics. And I was a critic at the time too.
P: And you didn't want to go swimming in Wauburg.
L: I was with the state merit system until December of 1959. My office
was here in Tallahassee. It was the state merit system; they
changed it to the personnel system.
P: This is what brought your move from Gainesville to Tallahassee.
L: In '46 to Tallahassee. First as supervisor, then the legislature
passed an act extending the merit system. Bill Shands introduced
the measure, I understand, supported it at least. It passed by
unanimous vote in the House of Representatives, and only one
person voted against it in the Senate. That was L. K. Edwards
and he was a great supporter of Dr. Tigert. After it had been
passed by a vote of all the Senate except one, L. K. went in
and had them change his vote in favor of extending the merit
system in the state, and the director of it was named the personnel
director, so I ended up my career as personnel director. I
thought at the time that I had reached the top of my field, that
there was no further place to go. I organized the comprehensive
classification and pay plan for the state. The cabinet members
had not put their employees under the merit system. It didn't
hit them until Kirk came along, and when he was elected they
hastened to put their employees under the merit system. I
thought to myself that we'd never had a Republican elected in
this state, and unless we had a Republican governor, we would
never have any selection on the basis of merit in the cabinet
departments. And under Leroy Collins we did have a real merit
system.
P: So you stayed in that position until 1959.
L: In '59 I resigned. I had previously been offered a position with