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JOHN BALZShawn Harrison was once a shy, reserved teenager, but the City Council member is now considered the face of New Tampa - and his aspirations are even higher.
HUNTER'S GREEN - Shawn Edward Harrison's splash of degeneracy was garden variety: boisterous college keg bashes in slovenly apartments and fraternity camping trips.
Once, on his wedding day, a guest's camera caught him standing atop a white-clothed dinner table, champagne bottle in hand. But at his bachelor party, while groomsmen ducked into Mons Venus for lap dances, he waited in a limo with a deck of cards, as the story goes.
Turpitude is a slippery slope. Harrison, a City Council member, the face of New Tampa, aspires to even higher office. So he has left no skeletons in closets, only a few beer cans, his freshman roommate and best man jokes.
Peel back a layer and find a shy, studious teenager living in rural Anderson, Ind. Harrison's mother and stepfather set an 11 p.m. curfew but expected him home by 10:45. As a boy, he suffered from severe asthma and played sports not just to win but to fit in as an equal.
So there is a flicker of pride in his voice when he describes his duties as Sigma Nu rush chairman.
"I organized the parties," he says.
Harrison's livelihood in law, politics and Florida was accidental, born, like the livelihoods of many, in the humility of a failed dream.
He ruled junior golf in east-central Indiana - impressive, though not the pedigree of a professional. To be passed over by the country's top programs is to become a realist, to join the multitudes whose current occupations would be unimaginable to their childhood selves.
Of politics, he says, "I fell into it by happenstance, because I wasn't as good a golfer as I wanted to be."
But failure was not a one-punch ticket, and enrolling at the University of South Florida with the intention of studying marine biology did not guarantee passage of inorganic chemistry. Marine biology lost to Sigma Nu, skipped classes, a grade point average that sank to 2.3 and the real possibility of dismissal. Then, like a life preserver in the middle of a stormy sea, the promise of a political science degree fell before him in those days before law school at the University of Florida.
Quiet, reserved Harrison suddenly was running for USF student body president and asking his friend, Charlie Crist, now a state senator, to make his banners.
Even in defeat, his tenacity was evident. When Harrison alleged election fraud, a reporter at USF's student newspaper, the Oracle, wrote about it. The stories read as if he were training for the real thing.
Ask Harrison why he veered from the rigorous path demanded by a giant silk-stocking law firm.
At the end of an answer about long hours and family sacrifices he says: "I'm not dedicating my life to anyone except myself."
Perhaps one day his loyalty to the Republican establishment will be tested. It hasn't yet.
City elections are non-partisan. Harrison is not an especially active member of the Republican Party. At USF he led the College Democrats, and later, he even married a Democrat. His stepfather cast votes for George McGovern and Ronald Reagan and calls himself an Independent.
Over the last 40 years, Madison County, Ind., surrounding Anderson, has voted for the winner of every presidential election except one: In 1992, it picked George Bush over Bill Clinton.
But New Tampa's biggest gripe knows no party affiliation: Can you fix the traffic jams, please?
The divide here is over a $104-million road linking Bruce B. Downs Boulevard to Interstate 275. On one side, developers and northern and eastern New Tampa homeowners say yes; western homeowners, most of whom live in the neighborhoods of West Meadows, say no.
Harrison's support for the giant asphalt strip makes him both a tireless champion and a battered effigy.
His enemies point to a campaign contribution list that includes Bay Hill Homes, Star Property Management, the Bay Area Construction PAC and the Florida Manufactured Housing PAC, and they accuse him of being a puppet of the powerful. A 1999 St. Petersburg Times editorial suggested Harrison would not challenge the annex-build-expand philosophy, a style it called "the politics of accommodation."
Harrison's response:
"I'm a pro-growth Republican and that means I'm going to share some of the same philosophies as the developers. I'm pro-business and pro-growth. I live in an area that is growing rapidly. I'm not one to slow that growth. I think it needs to be controlled."
His Hunter's Green neighbor and friend, Jim Davison, knows to expect that sort of comment from Harrison.
"Some may be put off by Shawn's matter of factness," Davison says, "but Shawn basically tells you how it is."
As a young man, Shawn Harrison's first impression on his wife was not a good one: cocky, arrogant, a bit uncouth.
There was a certain juvenile quality to the way he and his best friend, Joe Rodriguez, recited obscure lines from known and unknown movies.
Harrison played up the country hayseed image to his early employers and then capitalized on their surprise when he proved his efficacy.
But the strategy was not applicable to romance. When he showed up at Susan's apartment on the eve of two final exams, driving a black pick-up truck with a chrome roll bar and secretly eyeing her blond roommate, she was unimpressed.
Still, she called him three months later, attributing the overture to "feeling quirky," and they ended up chatting for three hours.
In Susan's version of the love story she played him classical music, poured him dry wine and listened to him return from Karl Wagner operas declaring, "You know, I really liked that."
He proposed on a bluff overlooking Mercer University's law school in Atlanta on the eve of her 1994 graduation. He seemed almost sophisticated, except that the ring didn't fit.
Imagine the shock on their wedding day, when Rodriguez quoted Chinese foreign exchange student Long Duk Dong, in an infamous scene from the teenage movie Sixteen Candles: "Oooh, no more yanky my wanky. Donger need food!"
Harrison, walking down the aisle, fighting to keep a straight face, lapsed into the man with the black pick-up.
Shawn Harrison's trinity is a father, a stepfather and a grandfather they call "Bob-O."
He plays golf with his father, Philip Thomas, at Grandview, a public course across the street from their modest house.
His father goes by "P.T." The sixth-grade teacher is known for fairness, integrity and perseverance, along with an ability to control his emotions. Harrison's friends - and even his critics - see the same traits in him.
Susan Harrison says her husband's compassion is very much real and very much inside his heart.
Marshall Adams, president of Citizens for West Meadows, wrote in an email that Harrison, in his zeal for the east west road, "was far too willing to sacrifice part of his district in a cold, calculated manner."
His stepfather, Gary Porter, who met Harrison's mother, Pam, on a Delco-Remy assembly line, is the risk-taker. The Vietnam Veteran opened a series of lucrative out-patient clinics for other veterans suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
By his own admission, Porter was an inattentive stepfather. Bob-O, a construction manager more formally known as Robert Lawrence, stepped into the vacuum, spending weekends with the teen. But Porter's drive and determination rubbed off anyway, evidenced by Harrison's enthusiasm for expanding his law firm and his suggestion to Susan that she take out a line of credit to start her own home-business.
He is the son of three men. In the words of Porter, "He has taken the best of all of us and somehow put them together."
Shawn Harrison's 38-year-old forehead is slightly longer today than when he first moved to Tampa in the summer of 1990 and lived alone in an apartment on Bruce B. Downs Boulevard.
His face is still square, his eyebrows bushy and his caramel lager-colored hair neat. When his Indiana friends see his pictures, they say he has not changed much.
But he has. He eats sushi rolls and Indian food and burns the midnight oil not with legal papers but with build-it-yourself home office desks.
He is a sucker for Walt Disney World trips with his wife, his 6-year-old daughter, SarahCate, and 2-year-old son, Ethan, and he often packs the three into the car Sunday afternoons for what Susan calls "old-fashioned family drives" around New Tampa and later to the ice cream parlor.
Inside the family's 3,800-square-foot Hunter's Green home, kitchen remodeling catalogs and Disney DVDs conspire to create an atmosphere of permanence.
What will he run for next? One rumor has him in pursuit of the mayor's office or a state Senate seat. Or to the state House, to which Harrison flatly answers, "If I had an interest I would be there already," noting that he would have run against former Rep. Sara Romeo, a Democrat, for District 60.
For now, with a house in need of work and a daughter in private school, Harrison says he will concentrate on finances.
The state capital remains a powerful draw. Term limits will force his friend Crist out of office in 2008, at which point Harrison says he will take a "hard look."
"We were talking once, and he said his ultimate goal was to get to Tallahassee because that's where the power is," says Tampa Palms homeowner Curtis Stokes, who solicited Harrison's advice during a failed City Council run last year.
It would be the next step in the career of a man who knows where he wants to go and why.
- John Balz can be reached at 813 269-5313 or at balz@sptimes.com