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Speaker battled to success
Allan Bense overcame loss and hardship in his climb from humble roots.
By STEVE BOUSQUET
Published March 8, 2005
PANAMA CITY - Allan Bense began life at the bottom.
When he was a boy, his parents went bankrupt running a dairy farm. With nowhere to go, they remained on the land as squatters.
Today Bense is worth nearly $10-million, lives in a spacious bayfront home and is speaker of the Florida House, one of the three most powerful people in state government.
He still drives a Ford pickup, helps local charities and lives a few miles from where he was born. He also keeps hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank to remind himself that he's financially secure.
Success did not come easy.
Both of Bense's parents died when he was a boy. The youngest of three children, he worked his way through college by pumping gas, mopping floors and waiting tables at a sorority.
After his father died, a 14-year-old Bense obeyed the advice of Charlie Hilton, one of the richest men in town, who became a father figure.
"Give out," Hilton told him, "but don't give up."
Bense, 53, has bought and sold banks, managed hotels and golf courses and helped build a cable TV system. He was better at business than politics.
He lost a 1992 race for the state Senate and failed in his first bid to be chairman of a tourism board.
But he followed Hilton's advice and tried again, and won a state House seat in 1998. As a member of the largest freshman class in history, he immediately went on a mission to become speaker. It took him four years.
Like many of his Panhandle neighbors, Bense was raised a Democrat but became a Republican. A pragmatic conservative with an easygoing manner, he made friends easily with fellow House members and simply outworked his rivals.
"I've always loved a challenge, and I've always been willing to take great risks," Bense said, "because when you're on the bottom, there's no other place to go."
Humble beginnings
Allan George Bense was born in Bayou George, a speck on the map north of Panama City. The pungent odor of the local paper mill hung over the town throughout his childhood.
When he was in junior high, his father, Herbert Bense, died at age 45.
"He had a stroke one day and my best friend was gone," Bense said.
His mother, Bette Bense, died a few years later. Both parents belonged to the Optimist Club with Charlie Hilton, a lawyer and developer who seems to have a hand in every aspect of life in Panama City.
Hilton became a surrogate father to Bense, and his influence would have a profound impact for decades.
As a student at Rutherford High, Bense enjoyed baseball and basketball. His 1969 senior class yearbook shows him stretching to field a grounder and smiling in his No. 40 basketball uniform. He was captain of the basketball team, he said, but a bad shooter, which his mother might not have liked.
Bense remembers his mother as a perfectionist, a demanding "hard hitter."
Bense's grandmother cared for him until she, too, died in 1974. It was another shattering loss. Bense paid $10 a week for five years until the funeral bills for his mother and grandmother were paid off.
After two years at the local community college, Bense went to Florida State University to get a history degree. He had a passion for European history, but knew he needed a degree in business, too. He juggled three jobs to pay his bills.
"I knew exactly how long I had before they would actually cut the power off. That's how you lived," Bense said. "Man, I hated college. Hated it. But I knew I had to have a good degree."
Working his way up
With a master's degree in business in hand, Bense went home to Panama City to make a living. He went out on a blind date with Tonie Johnson, an elementary school physical education teacher just arrived from Mississippi.
"Everybody was trying to fix up the new teacher in town," she recalled.
Their matchmaker was Freddie York, a close friend from high school who still teaches science at Rutherford's crosstown rival, Bay High.
"If you can't like Allan Bense, you can't like anybody," said York.
Bense picked up Tonie in his black Mercury Cougar. She found him even-tempered and a good listener, but he was so poor she soon bought him a pair of shoes for his birthday.
After they married they lived in an "itty bitty garage apartment," Mrs. Bense said, but Bense wasn't there much. He was too busy working.
To this day, she said, Bense relaxes through manual labor. "He details the family cars and does yard work," she said.
He joined one bank, then another. He borrowed heavily and bought a troubled community bank with three partners. With Bense drumming up customers, the bank's business grew and Bense made millions when he sold out to his partners.
It was more than enough to help his wife open two dance studios.
Bense and his wife had three children. He was doing so well Hilton made him a partner. The pair joined forces in the 1980s and Bense helped run Hilton's empire, including four beachfront hotels, an asphalt company and a golf course.
Hilton, who fixes a visitor with a cold stare, has a libertarian's dislike of taxes. He failed miserably when he ran for office and has donated more than $400,000 to Republican candidates.
Bense was Hilton's likable alter ego, who helped smooth over his partner's hard edges.
"Sometimes Charlie gets mad with Allan and he'll tell Allan off, and Allan will just smile and say, "We can't agree on everything,"' said Charles Whitehead, a retired Panama City car dealer and former state Democratic chairman.
The two men have a complex relationship. Two years ago, they clashed when they supported opposing Republican candidates in a Panhandle Senate race (Bense's man won).
Hilton built a Holiday Inn, then got into a nasty dispute with a cable TV company. So he spent millions to launch Beach Cable, which he says was "insane" because he knew little about the business.
Bense helped him and later negotiated the system's sale to Knology, a technology company.
"Allan has pulled myself out of the fire a bunch of times," Hilton said. "He's fiercely honest. If he tells you something, you can rely on it."
As chairman of the Tourist Development Council, Bense forged a consensus among factions and got a stalled beach renourishment program going. "He's just able to bring people together," Hilton said.
Bense uses the same approach as speaker. He invites Democratic lawmakers to his office for discussions and says he realizes the risk of becoming too isolated. "I believe in M.B.W.A.," Bense said. "Management by walking around."
Staying close to his roots
If Hilton was Bense's business mentor, a political mentor was Dempsey Barron, the legendary power broker and former Senate president from Panama City, who died in 2001.
Bense campaigned for Barron, including his last race, which he lost to an upstart challenger in 1988. Barron was a Tallahassee fixture but lost touch with his small-town constituency.
Barron gave Bense a cherished possession, the gavel he wielded - with ruthless efficiency, some said - as Senate president. Bense, the first House speaker from Bay County, keeps the gavel in his district office in Panama City.
"I learned from him that if you want to be strong in Tallahassee you'd better be strong at home," Bense said. "I've always been good at maintaining my base at home."
A turning point in Bense's political life was when he switched from Democrat to Republican in 1989.
Democrats still ran the Legislature, but Republican Bob Martinez was governor and more North Florida Democrats were jumping ship. Bense credits his admiration for former Attorney General Jim Smith, who also switched, and to the liberal views of Steve Pajcic, who lost to Martinez in 1986.
Bense is not blindly partisan. When he was sworn in as speaker in November, he invited Hyatt Brown, a former Democratic House speaker, to ceremonially pass the gavel.
"He came here for eight years and went home," Bense said of Brown. "I love that."
Bense could not be more unlike his predecessor as speaker, Republican Johnnie Byrd, who was criticized for shutting out Democrats and turning against Republicans who challenged him.
Even a fierce partisan such as state Democratic Party chairman Scott Maddox praises Bense.
Bense says he might run for higher office when his term ends. He also might go home.
He now owns the little dairy farm his parents lost to bankruptcy decades ago.
"Those are my roots, you know," Bense said. "There's just something about it."
[Last modified March 8, 2005, 18:43:57]
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