Senate surprise honors retiring journalist

The Senate press gallery will bear the name of Lucy Morgan, who kept lawmakers on their toes.

By ALISA ULFERTS
Published May 6, 2005

	[AP photo]
	Senate President Tom Lee, R-Brandon, presents Times bureau chief Lucy Morgan with a picture of herself that will hang in the Senate press gallery.

TALLAHASSEE - After 20 years at the state Capitol, little gets past St. Petersburg Times Tallahassee bureau chief Lucy Morgan.

But senators got the scoop on her Thursday, keeping Morgan in the dark about their plans to name the Senate press gallery in her honor.

A stunned Morgan was escorted by Senate sergeant at arms Donald Severance to the Senate floor, where senators applauded her decades in journalism.

"I don't think there has ever been anybody who hasn't said she wasn't fair," Sen. Jim King, R-Jacksonville, told fellow senators. "But goodness help you if she was on your trail."

"I think you will agree there wasn't a time when what she wrote, you didn't say, when what she accused you of, you didn't do," King told fellow senators.

Morgan, 64, retires in November after almost 40 years with the Times. A journalist who never took a journalism class, Morgan and colleague Jack Reed won a Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for a series of stories that led to the ouster of the Pasco County sheriff. She also was a runner-up for a 1982 Pulitzer for stories about drug smuggling and corruption in Dixie and Taylor counties.

In 1973, Morgan was sentenced to eight months in jail for refusing to identify a confidential source. But the Florida Supreme Court ultimately overturned her sentence and granted reporters a limited right to protect their sources.

She suggested retirement won't keep her away. "Maybe I'll come back every now and then and sort of throw a grenade in the door or something," she said.

[Last modified May 6, 2005, 00:37:10]