Betty Castor squeezes in late afternoon reading time with her grandchildren, from left, Julia Lewis, 7, and Chrissy Lewis, 5. Castor's day began at 8 a.m. and ended around 8 p.m. with a evening fundraiser.
Betty Castor speaks to the crowd with retiring Sen. Bob Graham, far right, at a recent fundraiser. Castor was the first woman elected to the state Cabinet.
Betty Castor stood before supporters at a Gainesville mansion, charming them with old political tales and firing them up about her bid for the U.S. Senate.
She pumped her fist and raised her voice as she leaned into the crowd, getting more excited as she talked.
As always, she smiled broadly.
"I truly subscribe to the policy of good, clean positive elections," said Castor, 63, wearing her customary suit and pumps. "I also subscribe to the policy that you've got to answer when you get attacked."
Beneath Castor's warm veneer is a determined woman who can't stand to lose.
She plays Scrabble as if it were a death match. She got a black eye playing basketball with her future daughter-in-law the day they met. And when she wanted to run for the state Senate, she didn't wait for an open seat; she beat the incumbent.
Now, in the biggest campaign of a 30-year political career that blazed a trail for women in Florida, Castor is displaying the split-screen persona that is so familiar to those who know her best. On one side: a mother and grandmother who engages voters with a smile. On the other: a survivor who lives to compete.
"She's tough as nails," said Jim Williams, a former lieutenant governor who picked Castor as his running mate when he ran for governor in 1978. "If someone jumps at her, she's going to fight."
* * *
Elizabeth Bowe Castor was born into politics.
For most of her childhood, her father was mayor of Glassboro, the small college town in New Jersey where she and her parents were raised. Her uncle was the school board chairman.
Her first political role models, she called them.
Her dad, Joseph Bowe, owned a store that sold newspapers and magazines; his wife, Gladys, and their five children helped out.
Castor, a middle child with her twin brother, Tom, grew up fighting for attention. She danced on the 1960s TV show American Bandstand in nearby Philadelphia.
She lived in the same small house her entire childhood, walking to elementary school, high school, college.
At 22, she left home.
Inspired by President John Kennedy, she went to Uganda for two years to teach English to African schoolchildren. She coached field hockey and led 40 girls up Mount Kilimanjaro.
While traveling in the Middle East, she met Don Castor, a lawyer who later became a Tampa judge. He proposed two months later in Florence, Italy.
Don and Betty Castor moved to Miami, where she went to graduate school and took a job as the first white teacher at an elementary school in Miami's Liberty City. In 1968, they moved to Tampa.
Castor was a Carrollwood housewife and mother of three young children, but she wanted more. She joined the League of Women Voters.
"That's when she became familiar with political leaders and became a player," Don Castor said.
She quickly moved to the forefront of a generation of women who would assume considerable power in the Tampa Bay area.
They included former state Sens. Helen Gordon Davis, Pat Frank and Jeanne Malchon; former Hillsborough County Commissioner Fran Davin and former St. Petersburg Mayor Corrine Freeman.
* * *
Nancy Sever recalls sitting around the dinner table in 1972 with friends at the Castors' house and discussing who should run for County Commission after a scandal. Every name was a man's.
That's when Castor, 31, said she wanted to run.
"She was a very conventional mother," Sever said. "It's amazing how she's changed over the years."
Volunteers, mostly League of Women Voters members, walked door to door. Friends held spaghetti dinner fundraisers: "Spaghetti for Betty."
"She changed the way politics was done in Hillsborough County," Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio said. "Today walking door to door is the norm."
Castor won the primary, despite 11 male opponents suggesting to voters that she was neglecting her children, ages 6, 4 and 2. She became the first woman elected to the County Commission, focusing on growth and the environment.
A generation later, Castor's daughter, Kathy, is on the commission.
Castor made national headlines in 1974 after she was tossed out of a luncheon at the elite and all-male University Club in Tampa. She bought a hot dog at a nearby stand and told her story to reporters.
After four years on the commission, Castor defeated a six-year legislator for a state Senate seat.
Though the couple divorced in 1979, Don Castor would spend weekdays at the family home when his ex-wife was in Tallahassee, and they all attended church together every Sunday. They remain close, celebrating holidays with their children and their current spouses.
Former Democratic state Rep. Mary Figg of Lutz shared an apartment with Castor in Tallahassee and remembers an early riser who rarely tired.
Former Republican state Sen. Mary Grizzle of Belleair said Castor did not usually work on women's issues, such as maternity leave for teachers, women's property rights and day care licensing.
Castor was considered in the moderate Democrat majority, and took a special interest in education. She proposed a more equitable distribution of school money, allowing counties to switch to nonpartisan school boards and expanding remedial education.
Castor was the first woman to hold the No. 2 spot in the Senate. She resisted the title of president pro tem until she was sure the job was not ceremonial.
In 1978, Jim Williams picked her as his gubernatorial running mate. They lost in the primary to Bob Graham, whose U.S. Senate seat she is now seeking.
It was her only political defeat. The usually cautious Castor calls her decision to run "hasty."
* * *
When Ralph Turlington retired as education commissioner in 1986, all eyes turned to Castor, the Senate's education funding chief. She became the first woman elected to the state Cabinet.
Castor reduced the size of the Department of Education by firing people she considered friends, expanded health care for poor students and worked to raise teacher salaries.
In her first year, she prodded the Legislature to increase education spending by 17 percent. She favored reducing the $25,000 homestead exemption or rewriting the sales tax code to raise money.
She boldly walked into a state Capitol men's room one day to find out what happened after lawmakers met privately about school funding.
Castor tackled difficult tasks, including Blueprint 2000, a program that created school accountability, but only after meticulously reviewing the data and listening to her staff. She prefers to delegate work to employees, though she checks in on projects frequently.
She is not afraid to tell those she works with what she thinks, but prefers to use her personality to defuse confrontation and gently guide them to her point of view. Friends and former employees say they have never seen her raise her voice or get upset.
"Everything she has done has been tough," said Altha Manning, a former deputy education commissioner. "She thrives on that."
Still, Castor could not raise standardized test scores or fix the dropout rate, ranked the worst in the nation. At the time, she called reducing the dropout rate a top priority but today, Castor downplays the figures.
Castor enjoyed entertaining staff and legislators at her tree-shrouded home in northeast Tallahassee with lively conversation, board games, snacks and wine - but not dinner. Castor leaves the cooking to others. She loves Chicken McNuggets.
Sam Bell, the then-House budget chairman, sparred with Castor when the Senate stripped funding for a community college in his district. Two years later, at a dinner in 1987, they discovered they had much in common. The next day they played tennis.
They married in 1989.
Today, Castor and Bell enjoy golf, tennis, hiking and birding in the mountains near their summer home in North Carolina, and travel the world.
"She's the same Betty," Bell said. "She's the same person I married."
* * *
Castor had a lot of friends in high places when sought to lead the University of South Florida in 1994.
She also had a lot of skeptics.
More than 200 USF professors signed a petition declaring her unqualified for the job because she was a politician with no doctorate.
But Castor got the job, and she won them over.
The endowment more than doubled. Campus construction boomed. Research money reached record levels. Students were achieving. And she personally convinced state leaders that USF deserved to be in the top tier of Florida universities, with the University of Florida and Florida State.
Castor reluctantly embraced USF football, steering it through a tough approval process.
"I didn't think her political skills would translate to the university, but they have," said Linda Lopez McAlister, a retired women's studies professor who had publicly questioned Castor's "force of intellect."
But some thought Castor did not do enough to clean house, did not pay enough attention to academic matters and delegated too much to employees.
A low point: Five women professors accused Castor in a lawsuit of not helping to resolve longstanding pay equity issues. It was embarrassing for Castor, a member of the Florida Women's Hall of Fame.
Marine sciences professor Pamela Muller, one of the plaintiffs, credits Castor with finding a creative way to settle the suit in 10 months.
Dr. Robert Urban has a different view.
The former ophthalmology professor complained to Castor that his department chairman ruined his academic career because he didn't share his Christian beliefs.
"She did nothing," said Urban, who sued and settled for $230,000. "To see her running for U.S. Senate, it's not even funny."
Castor had no plans to leave USF when a nonprofit education group wooed her away in 1999. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards trains public school teachers, one of Castor's passions, and it wanted to expand.
In three years, she doubled annual revenues to $54.9-million and turned the organization into one of the largest nonprofits of its kind. She moved the national office from Michigan to Washington, D.C., and opened satellite offices around the country. She more than doubled the number of employees.
But she also posted losses of at least $4.8-million twice in her three years there, IRS records show.
* * *
Castor returned to Tampa in 2002, living off her $125,000 annual state pension, and grew increasingly angry at the Republican-controlled Legislature, mostly over education policies.
She had long considered running for higher office, and when Graham decided to run for president, she began thinking about running for his seat. One day, Bell said he was going to a fundraiser for their friend, Miami-Dade Mayor Alex Penelas, who was running for Senate. She told him not to go. Weeks later, she was running.
The positive name recognition and the large, influential circle of friends from three decades gave her an easy win in the Democratic primary. People all over the state know her simply as Betty.
"It's a very high-stakes race," said Castor, who wears her strawberry blond hair closely cropped, the same way she did 30 years ago. "There is more a level of nastiness that I haven't had to face in the past. That makes me even more and more determined."
Castor, slender and 5-2 in heels, takes a disciplined approach that some find abrupt. She rarely strays from her schedule or her message. She is so busy on the campaign trail that she has lost weight, and has to remember to eat.
If she wins, Castor will be 69 at the end of her first term, and she knows critics have already questioned how long she will serve.
She smiles at the question. Several terms, she says.
Times researchers Cathy Wos and Kitty Bennett contributed to this report.
BETTY CASTORU.S. Senate candidate, D
PERSONAL: Born May 11, 1941, in Glassboro, N.J.; lives in Tampa and Tallahassee; married to Sam Bell; six children; 10 grandchildren.
RELIGION: Lutheran.
PROFESSIONAL: president, National Board of Professional Teaching Standards in Arlington, Va., 1999-2002; president, University of South Florida in Tampa, 1994-1999; Florida education commissioner, 1987-1993; state senator, 1976-1978, 1982-1986; Hillsborough County commissioner; 1972-1976; teacher in Uganda and Miami-Dade County, 1963-1966.
EDUCATION: B.A., Education, Glassboro State College, 1963, and M.Ed. Education, University of Miami, 1968.
