149
the American Institute of Managment, AIM. A friend of mine
was president of it, and he offered me a position. I felt at
the time that I couldn't accept it. He didn't know that I was
on crutches at the time, and I think he would have withdrawn
the offer if he had known that. I'd been offered the position
with them, but I would have had to have moved to New York City,
and I wasn't interested. Jackson Montindell who owned Who's Who
was also President of American Institute of Managment. I learned
a little later, perhaps knew by instinct then, that it was a tax
dodge. He made a lot of money and needed some way of spending
it wiser than he felt the government would spend it, so he
established the American Institute of Managment, and earlier
he had bought control of Who's Who and the Marquis Publishing
Company. So he offered me the job and I turned it down at the
time. A little later on I did a management audit for them. I
got a leave from the state and did a management audit of Pensacola
Baptist Hospital. I have a copy of it right there. Sc in '59
I felt we'd gone as far in the merit system as we could go and I
resigned.
I must confess, too, that at the same time I had some idea
that I might run for secretary of state. The job had been
mentioned to me by serveral people, but I had not used my position,
did not inform anyone what I had in mind when I resigned. When
I resigned, Mr. Gray had announced he was not running for reelection.
There was a member of the merit system council from Orlando, and
when I announced my resignation to the council, she said, "Why
don't you run for secretary of state?" Well, I'd already been
thinking about the idea, but I took this job with Marquis Publishing
Company, a publishing house, and ran for secretary of state.
Then afterward I kept my job with Marquis Publishing Company. It
was not very satisfactory. I had to travel throughout the
southeast and visit libraries and talk to people and ask them to
make contribution to libraries to set up-biological libraries.
I was not successful in persuading anybody to do that, but at
least I worked on it for about a year and a half.
Then I came to know a young man named George Langford who
had come to Tallahassee about 1950 and started a legal publishing
firm, Municipal Code Corporation. It codifies and publishes codes
for cities and counties in many states. We don't advertise it,
George is not intersted in local publicity, but they publish
over 1500 codes. We have published more than 1500 codes in 44
states, and we keep them up in loose-leaf booklets; and practically
every city in Florida now. We did lose Miami once, but Miami is
now a client.
P: Angus, you jumped ahead of yourself a little bit now. You said
you met Langford. Tell us how you became associated with him on