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True love: charity, barbecue

While a lot of the county's movers and shakers reside in South Tampa, Adelaide "Alex" Sink said she and husband, Bill McBride, have developed a true fondness for east Hillsborough, and not just because they live in a beautiful 4,000-square-foot home on Lake Thonotosassa.

Sink said her family also has come to know Brandon over the years. It is where her children, Bert and Lexie, have engaged in sports. It is where she shops. And it is where she finds some of her favorite barbecue.

Over pork platters at First Choice Southern Barbecue, the former head of NationsBank in Florida (now Bank of America) talked about raising kids, the political landscape and creasie greens.

Pull up a chair and join us.

It's very simple. I'm a child of the rural South. I grew up on a tobacco farm in North Carolina, and for a period of time we grew hogs. You don't grow up in North Carolinda without loving barbecue. This is what I was raised on. Collard greens is my favorite vegetable. Actually, creasie greens, but nobody knows what that is.

Creasie greens. They grow wild out in the field. You go and pick them after the first freeze. If you pick them before a freeze, they're too bitter. After the first freeze, you go out and about in the wild and you pick these greens and you go cook them just like regular greens.

It was a great life. My dad worked really hard. In the summer, he would be up at 4 and 5 o'clock in the morning, out in the fields all day and come home late at night at dark. You learn about how everybody has to pitch in do their share. So, you learn how to appreciate the value of salt of the earth people.

We were all big into this home economics thing and my mother was the leader in the home economic clubs. We learned cooking, we learned sewing. They had contests to see how quickly you could iron a man's shirt.

No, it doesn't. But both of my parents were college graduates. My father had an ag degree from North Carolina State and my mother was a music major. So academics was a really a big focus in our lives and I was always a really good math student all along. I kind of just fell into banking. But you know, when I was 11 years old, my father's desk was in the middle of the living room and I would sit there with him and he would let me write the checks for the bills he had to pay.

I loved the big city life. I lived in New York, I lived in Miami. I lived in Africa for a number of years, Sierra Leone and what's now the Congo. I taught at an African Methodist girls high school, but I'm happy as a lark living on our 30 acres surrounded by orange groves.

Really paying attention to your kids. You don't have to be there all the time, but when you're there, you need to be paying attention to them. Know their teachers, really know the kids they're hanging around. I had a woman give me a couple of pieces of advice about raising teenagers. She said just remember two things. No. 1, watch them like a hawk. Know where they are and what they're doing. And No. 2, remember they're only one bad friend away from a disaster. Now that I've got a 14-year-old and a 15-year-old, I think she's right.

Between 5 and 12 are the golden years. It's true. I forgot how to do discipline. I used to do all this 1-2-3 stuff and time out stuff before they got to be 5, and then after they got to be 5, they just turned into basic good kids. Then when they got to be 13, I had to start the 1-2-3 stuff all over again.

My son is definitely. He goes to Armwood High School and he got the attention of a lot of girls being a freshman, the new kid. He started getting letters and he finally just told them all, "Not me. I'm going to be friends with everybody." That has served him very well.

She kind of went to the movies and different stuff with one of the neighborhood boys last summer and I'm thinking, "Ohmigod." She comes home last year and says, "Mom, I'm mature. I can handle this."

I've been thinking a lot about this lately because I'm also trying to think of what I want to do next with my life. I've just always kind of had a passion for worrying about other people and caring about other people and trying to figure out how I can help other people. I'm involved in this migrant work (Redlands Christian Migrant Association and the Beth El Mission charter school), and I made it possible for each of the children to have a Wal-Mart shopping card at graduation. To see the look on their faces, I get so much more out of it.

You come face to face with more diversity of all sorts. There's an area in Seffner between I-4 and where we live that's an historical middle class black neighborhood. You have farmworkers because of all the strawberry fields and agriculture. There's poverty unfortunately, people who are one step away from being homeless, and you kind of come face to face with it every day. To me, it's kind of what the world is really like.

I'm very concerned. It's not healthy to have one ideology so overwhelming in the majority. This year is an example of what happens. They didn't hesitate to raise the phone rates, but then they turn around and say they're not going to fund the medically needy program. I mean ... don't get me started.

Maybe. If I get mad enough.

Sink, 55, realizes she and Bill, who left his post as head of Holland & Knight to run for governor, are blessed to be in a position where they can sit back and plot their futures. She said the gubernatorial bid was expensive and joked, "That's why we're looking for jobs. Well, he better be looking for a job." In the interim, Sink continues her charitable work on a number of boards. She hopes to raise $7-million for Junior Achievement so it can build the county an Enterprise Village, a sort of mini mall that helps teach grade-schoolers how to run a business.

- Ernest Hooper also writes a column for the Tampa & State section of the St. Petersburg Times. Lunch With Ernest is edited for brevity and clarity. To suggest lunch partners, call Ernest at 226-3406 or e-mail hooper@sptimes.com