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Jerry, a Joe? Don't bet on it

Oldsmar's mayor is leaving politics. He says it's for good. Few people believe him.

By TAMARA EL-KHOURY
Published March 18, 2007

OLDSMAR - Mayor Jerry Beverland is saying goodbye ... again.

Oh, he's not leaving Oldsmar, the town he guided as it grew from a 9-square-mile city of dirt roads to a city with restaurants and mansions and traffic congestion.

But it's time for a new generation to step forward and lead Oldsmar to whatever is next.

Starting Tuesday, a younger council will run the city. They'll complete projects that were started under the Beverland Era, a library, a redeveloped downtown, a YMCA and a water-treatment plant.

Beverland, 71, who calls Oldsmar a gem of a city, leaves because of term limits. And just last week Beverland pledged his time at City Hall is over. When a new council takes over, including incoming Mayor Jim Ronecker, 42, Beverland said he won't bother even watching proceedings on TV.

Few believe him. Something will tick him off. He'll get so irritated that he'll have to march up the microphone and tell the council what's what as he jabs his finger in the air and digresses into a historical tirade.

But he'll do it as a citizen, as a regular ol' Joe.

* * *

Beverland and the woman he refers to as "my beautiful wife, Wanda," married 51 years now, moved to Oldsmar in the mid-1960s. He started as a bagger at Winn-Dixie, became a manager and then started his own roofing and landscaping company. The couple had three sons, a daughter, and eventually four grandchildren.

He served a term on the City Council in the 1970s. In the 1990s, he served four years on the council and four years as mayor, leaving office the first time in 1999.

"In five or six months, I won't even be a good solid memory in Oldsmar and I know that," he said-in 1999.

But he was back in 2001, running and reclaiming his old job.

He's a jeans-wearing, truck-driving, history-loving man who calls the county "Pie-nellas," overuses the word "incredible," and tells residents coming before council to "be nice."

His raw, wide-open personality, cuts all ways. If he doesn't like you, he won't - he can't - hide it. He gives out his cell phone number to the public and they use it. The community policing sheriff's deputy, Don Mast, gets crime tips from Beverland.

But citizens have also watched him grieve over the 1998 death of his 41-year-old son, Robyn, from a genetic disorder. It nearly broke him.

Then, last year, another devastating punch, the death of his 16-year-old granddaughter, Ashley Philips, who died when a car hit her as she was skateboarding.

The death sent him to his den for three weeks. Alone.

* * *

In 2004, Beverland was arguing with Vice Mayor Janice Miller over something does it matter what? and Beverland slammed down his gavel, an Oldsmar antique. The head of the gavel flew off and hit Miller's hand. She threw it back at him.

At a roast of the mayor last year, she gave him a bottle of glue for the gavel.

He's a reporter's dream: a quote machine.

"If (former Oldsmar mayor Jerry Provenzano) wants to run against me, I would eat him alive," Beverland said in 1999 when both considered a run for the County Commission. "I would make him look so damned foolish. It's not that I dislike him; I just think he's a jerk. But he thinks I'm a jerk, too."

He's not long on introspection.

What made him run for office in the first place?

"Way back yonder?" Beverland asked.

Yep, way back yonder.

"Somebody asked me to run," he said.

He doesn't remember who. There was an open spot on council, no one wanted it, so he ran.

He's selling his house, the one he bought with a $98-a-month payment he couldn't afford back in the day. He's building a bigger one on the half-acre lot behind it.

His legacy?

"I love the citizens," he said. "They are the legacy."

This is it, he said, he won't be back. He'll spend his days traveling, writing a book about Oldsmar's history, painting and not doing yard work.

He said he'll still attend Memorial Day and Veteran's Day ceremonies. But he said he won't give the tear-jerking, impassioned speeches anymore.

"I'll be way in the background," he said. "In fact, you may not even see me."

Few believe him.

Jerryisms

A turn of phase

Beverland's giant-sized personality - and the language it spawns - is legendary in Oldsmar. A sampling:

- When asked to protect the Brooker Creek Preserve in December 2006:

"I want to know exactly what we're going to protect it from. We can protect it from Russia. I don't know what they're talking about."

- After learning Pinellas' cities would get less from the Penny for Pinellas sales tax in 2010-2020 because of an expensive county jail expansion in November 2006:

"I do understand that we need to have a lot of these idiot moron criminals incarcerated. We really do. A lot actually need to be hung. ... Maybe we could ship them all to Miami."

- In December 1998 about why the city can violate it's own sign ordinance to advertise city events:

"We are dictators and we can do what we want."

[Last modified March 17, 2007, 19:55:51]