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 would come out against it.

 Finally, after about three hours of argument, the chairman of the committee
 suggested that we have a little recess. When we had that recess, I went over to
 Senator Shands and said, "Senator, my wife appreciates the help you gave her
 on serving the dinner and cleaning up the dishes at the Laymen's League Supper
 at the Episcopal Church the other night." He looked at me and said, "Dr. Johns,
 is Mrs. Johns your wife?" She is an Episcopalian, you know, and I said yes.
 That is all I said. We went back to the committee meeting, and Senator Shands
 voted for everything for the Foundation Program. It is little things like that that
 will sometimes turn a person's vote. In politics, what you may think are trivial
 may be very important.

 Then we got the legislature [on our side]. The legislature was working on it, but
 in this we included capital outlay for buildings, and Governor [Millard F.] Caldwell
 was opposed to that. He just cut in and said, "I am going to veto any provision
 in that for capital outlay." Then Colin English, who was the state superintendent
 [of public instruction] at that time and Ken [S. Kendrick] Guernsey, who was the
 chairman of the Citizens Committee, ...

C: From Jacksonville.

J: Yes. [Guernsey was a member of the Board of Control. Ed.] He and English
 asked me to go to the governor with them and explain it and argue with him. I
 went to Governor Caldwell and gave him the reasons for it, he said, "Dr. Johns, it
 is very unsound for the state to put up money for buildings and then allow the
 counties to own them. That is just unsound economics." Well, I said,
 "Governor, the state puts up money to build bridges in the county and to build
 roads, and for all intents and purposes, the county owns them in the same way
 that it owns the school buildings." He scratched his head a little bit, and then he
 said, "Well, Dr. Johns, you recommended in this report that every county have a
 vote on consolidating the districts of each county into one. Some of those
 counties will vote against this consolidation, as you know. Many of them will.
 Then you have a program here to equalize educational opportunity in the state.
 I do not see why it is good policy to equalize at the state level and then
 de-equalize at the local level. I have noticed you have made several studies in
 the counties of the state, and you found that the districts varied widely in their
 revenue, so the educational opportunities differed among the various districts in
 the state because of that difference.

 "I will tell you what I will do. I will go along with you on capital outlay if you will
 change your recommendation to the legislature that it consolidate the districts.
 Why did you not recommend that the legislature itself consolidate all those
 districts into one?"