Taking a tour of history's ironies

By JAN GLIDEWELL
Published June 3, 2007

An aerial photo of Lykes Pasco Inc., in Dade City.
	[Times photo: Jack Rowland | 1999]

ADVERTISEMENT [Times photo: Jack Rowland | 1994] Exterior of the Lykes-Pasco orange juice processing plant on Highway 301 in Dade City.

If you want to talk about things coming full circle, you would have loved to have been inside my head as I and a few other old-timers were ferried around Dade City a few weeks ago to help provide historical input for an upcoming tourist trolley tour of Dade City - sponsored by the people who bought the old Lykes-Pasco packing plant.

Life's greater ironies have been part of my stock-in-trade for the last 40 years or so, but sometimes its smaller ones are just as much fun.

In 1973 I had just moved to Dade City from industry-friendly Kankakee, Ill., (to which I had been temporarily transplanted after being kidnapped by carpetbaggers) and was driving south along U.S. 301 when I saw a large factorylike place on the left with some curious looking towers under construction.

In my previous job I would have already spent a week fending off industrial public relations types begging me to write about their new towers and to please, please, please put the name of their companies in the newspaper.

Being new on the job and trying to make an impression, I figured I would get the jump on them, take some pictures of the towers, make a quick call to find out what they were and everybody would go away happy. I would have impressed my employers at the Times with my enterprise, and whatever business this was would get free publicity and be in my debt forever, and we would all make beautiful journalistic music together.

Instead I got confronted by two security guards demanding to know who I was and why I was taking pictures, and that I hand over my film to them.

I told them who I was, but explained that I was legally on public right of way taking pictures of something that wasn't a prison (you can't photograph them in Florida without permission) or a defense installation and that they would have to take my film by force. The confrontation ended with me walking away and being told later by a Lykes spokesperson (which all reporters with local ties will identify as an oxymoron) that the towers were none of my business, none of anybody else's business and they weren't talking about them.

That's how I got introduced to the most secretive business or government agency of any I ever dealt with, including the CIA, FBI and a host of others.

Lykes had what could most charitably be described as an ultrasecretive, almost paranoid approach to public relations. And, to be fair, it was as much in effect when they did something good as when they did something bad. Once, when they provided an airplane to fly a prosecutor who had been critically injured in a hunting accident from Texas back to Florida and I was prepared to write about it, I was contacted by an attorney who said the trip was off if I named Lykes in a story about it. I had to negotiate to get down to something like, "a large Dade City firm which chooses to remain anonymous" or leave the prosecutor stuck in Texas for another year.

They had, in fact, a vice president named Jerry Rice who was in charge of giving "no comment" statements to the media in those instances (like lawsuits or accidents) where an effort had to be made to contact the principals.

Actually, my relationship was with his secretary, Sig Jackson, who was always cheerful and would always, on her boss' behalf, issue the required no comment. She always explained that Jerry was out of town and couldn't be reached.

So I was taken aback after a few years when I called and Rice answered his own phone.

"Gee, " I said, "I was just calling Sig to get your 'no comment.' "

"I'm not in charge of that anymore, " said Rice. "Pete Brock is."

"Can you transfer me to Brock?" I asked.

"Nope, " said Rice, barely concealing his glee, "he's out of town."

Brock was one of the other old-timers on the tour I took the other day to help flesh out the script on city history. He and his wife, Mary Louise, historian Bill Dayton and others were there to give pertinent historical and architectural facts about the city.

My role seemed to be to fill in salacious details about where particularly bloody murders had occurred and where the biggest con man in this city's history had lived. (Actually that house is directly behind mine, a fact I asked them not to mention on the tour because mine is in serious need of painting.)

But the fact that Brock and I were riding together on a trolley tour as part of an effort to tell people about the city, the citrus industry and the part that Lykes played in the history of both, was pretty unsettling to me - in a nice way.

That the tour will originate at a "welcome" station not too far from a gate where I was nearly arrested in 1975 makes it even funnier.

I thought about all of this the other day as I was approaching the old plant on U.S. 301. (The towers, by the way, were for making cattle feed out of orange pulp - a fact I learned after 10 years of asking.) There, instead of the old foreboding citrus processing plant's stark exterior, I saw a newly redesigned and decorated exterior for a business park that has been built there, and a long row of majestic royal palms planted as part of that beautification process.

I didn't stop to take pictures.

But I could have.

The tour and trolley ride debut this month, but I will be out of state and not able to take them until I return in the fall.

It will probably feel very strange.

[Last modified June 2, 2007, 21:47:04]