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For Lucy, a source's call was the beginning, not the end

By HOWARD TROXLER
Published November 10, 2005

This has happened to me a bunch of times over the years. I am working alone at night in the newspaper's office in Tallahassee when the phone rings.

The voices on the other end of the line have ranged from gravelly to smooth, bass gruff to high pitched, amused to scared. But they all wanted the same thing:

"Is Lucy there?"

"I'm sorry, she isn't. Can I take a message for her?"

Long pause.

"No. I'll call back."

The "Lucy" they wanted was Lucy Morgan, chief of this newspaper's state capital bureau, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who nearly went to jail to protect a source almost three decades ago, long before it was all the rage.

And the callers? They were frustrated bureaucrats and law enforcement officers, senators and spin doctors, troopers and deputies, whistle-blowers and gossipers, vengeful wives, spurned lovers, or just somebody who had something hot.

They knew that two things were true. First, if there was something really rotten going on in the state of Florida, something that was getting covered up and that the public ought to know, then Lucy would know how to get at it.

Second, they knew she would never rat out a source. Never. That was the one secret she was guaranteed not to print. So they trusted her, more and more of them as time passed.

Now, when I use the word "source" in connection to Lucy, I am not talking about your cheap, run-of-the-mill source in Washington who is trying to spin the truth while hiding behind anonymity. The Washington source game is out of hand.

I am talking about the old-fashioned kind of source, who says: "If you look in this spot, and do your homework, you might be able to prove X. Just remember, you didn't get it from me." The phone call was the beginning, not the end.

Just spending a day walking around the Capitol with Lucy is a year's worth of lessons for a young reporter. You always learn a lot more in the hallway than you do in the meeting room. Lucy knows everybody, knows the names of their spouses, their kids. Probably even their cats, as she is partial to the species.

I do not know if this is any solace to those who have been on the receiving end of Lucy's exposes over the years. But speaking as her co-worker, I can tell you that she does it to us too. She cannot turn it off. This is both endearing and disconcerting. In my younger days I once walked into her office bright and early on a Monday morning, all business, only to have her pounce: "So, how was your weekend with Miss So-and-So?"

Having no tact whatsoever, except when she needs to, Lucy thus taught me the virtue of directness. People like directness. They like not having to guess whether somebody is trying to lead them on or fool them into something.

One time I walked into the office of a government press secretary who was shaking her head and laughing at her last two phone calls. The first call had been from a fiery young reporter who demanded hundreds of pages of government documents about her boss, while refusing to say what he was looking for and threatening to sue if he didn't get it.

The second call, the press secretary told me, was from Lucy. In typical Lucy fashion, she barked joyfully into the phone: "HEY! There's a rumor flying around that your boss billed the state for his vacation. Did he?" Lucky for him, he hadn't.

Over the years I have heard her called every name in the book, some of them unprintable. People on all sides of the aisle have been certain she was a Liberal Media hack doing dirty work for the Democrats, or a Jeb-loving Republican. But she had exactly one agenda, and that was to keep an eye on power, and to ferret out its abuse.

Lucy is retiring. At least, she is putting the position of bureau chief into the capable hands of Steve Bousquet, but she is still going to work on "special projects." For a while longer, therefore, there will still be politicians, bureaucrats and lobbyists getting that odd feeling in the gut when their secretary says: "Lucy Morgan is on the phone and wants to talk to you."

Good.

[Last modified November 10, 2005, 01:20:16]