His name you may not know; his deeds you do

By MARTIN DYCKMAN, Other Views
Published August 4, 2007

The people of Florida lost one of the best friends they ever had when Kenneth M. Myers, a former legislator, died Sunday of injuries suffered in a fall at his Miami home. Yet the news made few if any newspapers elsewhere. It has been 27 years since he left politics, the population has more than doubled, and like most Floridians, you may never have heard of him.

But if you or a friend or a family member ever needed and got the state's help with alcohol, mental illness or some other overwhelming human problem, you had Kenny Myers to thank. Before the Myers Act, police threw intoxicated people into jail. Now, they take them to treatment centers. That was one of more than 150 major enactments, most of them pertaining to public health and welfare, which he sponsored or co-sponsored during four years in the Florida House of Representatives and 12 years in the Senate.

We were introduced in 1966 by the late Rep. John Savage of Pinellas County, a genial conservative who referred fondly to Ken as "the most liberal member of the House." The last of the Pork Chop legislatures had gifted outgoing Senate President Nick Connor of then-rural Hernando County with a proposed huge mental hospital the press dubbed "Hernando's Hideaway." Florida needed community mental health centers instead; the first bill filed for the postreapportionment 1967 session was Myers's HB 1 to repeal Hernando's Hideaway. It passed.

Other causes - not all of them successful - included judicial reform, consumer protection, prison reform, the Equal Rights Amendment, open government, reorganization of the executive branch, and fairness in the redistribution of state tax revenue. None was too daunting. Over intense opposition, he passed Florida's first therapeutic abortion law, soon pre-empted by the more permissive Roe vs. Wade decision. He bucked one Senate president over public housing and another over Gov. Reubin Askew's renomination of O.J. Keller as secretary of health and rehabilitative services in 1975. Senate President Dempsey Barron, bent on a power struggle with the governor, was so intent on defeating Keller that he threatened to dismiss Myers and other committee chairmen who would vote for Keller. Myers did so anyway, expecting to be fired, but Barron, having won the vote, relented on the threat.

Ken was the most accomplished senator who never attained the presidency. Conservatives combined to block him at one opportunity. At another, he said, he thought he had enough Democratic pledges to win but decided that 12 years in the Senate had been enough. He retired to his law practice and served on the University of Miami's Board of Trustees for 25 years. He never sought another elected office.

In a 2004 oral history for the Florida Legislative Research Center and Museum, Ken told interviewer Mike Vasilinda that it had been John F. Kennedy who inspired him to public service. He never waited to be told what he could do for his country.

But as he looked back, he said wistfully, "I see now that politics in Florida, as well as around the country nationally, is getting very confrontational and very bitter, with a lot of rancor that I don't like." He feared it was undermining self-government.

"I remember reading Cicero in school," he said, "and he said the public life is one of the highest goods a man can endeavor to perform. It doesn't seem like it's that way now. At least that's the way I felt about it."

"I'd like to be remembered," he said then, "as the guy who changed a lot of things for the better."

When we last talked, several weeks ago, Ken was - typically - trying to do a favor for someone else. Now he is dead, much too soon, at 74.

Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times.

[Last modified August 4, 2007, 01:06:05]