Insider's Notebook

Schools chief nears heroic proportions

By Times staff writers

© St. Petersburg Times, published June 5, 2000

Members of the Suncoast Tiger Bay Club are known for asking guest speakers tough questions. Jade Moore, executive director of the Pinellas Classroom Teachers Association, threw out a juicy one Thursday.

Enrique Escarraz, lead local attorney for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, was the speaker. Escarraz has negotiated with the school district to end 30 years of court-ordered busing for desegregation.

In the 30 years you've had the case, Moore asked Escarraz, who were the heroes and villains to your cause?

Escarraz began slowly, saying the lawyer who filed the initial lawsuit in 1964 was a civil rights hero. So, too, are the Legal Defense Fund lawyers he has worked with.

As for modern participants in the historic lawsuit, well, that's harder to say. Escarraz, a thoughtful, quiet man, turned slowly to Superintendent Howard Hinesley sitting in the front row of the packed ballroom.

"I'm still waiting to see," Escarraz said of Hinesley, as the room erupted in laughter. "He's done a lot to push himself to the hero side, but we're not finished yet."

THERE HE GOES AGAIN REDUX: In 1998, the Insider ran an item pointing out that U.S. Rep. C.W. Bill Young stood under the huge oaks that line the Bay Pines National Cemetery on Memorial Day morning and uttered the same sentimental one-liner he had used at least since 1995.

"In our hearts, every day should be Memorial Day," Young said then. (Some years, he had varied it slightly to "Really, in our hearts, every day is Memorial Day" and "Every day, in our hearts, we should honor Memorial Day.")

Guess what?

For Memorial Day 2000, Young stuck with the tried and true. "In our hearts," Young said, "every day should be Memorial Day."

TO FLUSH OR NOT TO FLUSH? THAT IS THE QUESTION: Last week, we told you of Largo resident Ray Aden's Save A Flush A Day, or SFD, idea. Using some basic mathematical principles, Aden theorized that if each of Pinellas County's 480,000 households cut one toilet flush each day from its schedule, residents could save about 2.3-million gallons of water each day, or 832.2-million gallons each year.

An anonymous caller inspired by Aden's brainstorm -- which also included using T-shirts, bumper stickers, lapel pins and songs to further the SFD cause -- left this friendly little reminder at Insider headquarters:

"If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down."

Shakespeare would be proud.

WISH YOU WERE HERE: There are advantages to being the spouse of a highly involved politician.

Seminole Mayor Dottie Reeder, who seldom takes a vacation, went to Alaska last month for a conference on insurance risk pools. She took a couple of days before the conference to tour a glacier and the Denali National Park with her husband, Larry.

Then, she headed off to three days of meetings on insurance trusts. Reeder is chairwoman of the Florida League of Cities' insurance trust.

And Larry? He rode horses in the snow, panned for gold and fished for salmon.

At the end of each day, the mayor said, "He loved telling me all about it."

HANG UP AND DRIVE: Louis Claudio of Safety Harbor was hoping the Legislature would adopt a law this year banning drivers from using cell phones while their cars are moving. When lawmakers let him down, he appealed to the County Commission in an e-mail.

"I have almost been (wrecked) by a driver on a phone laughing away at some conversation the whole time he crossed over three lanes oblivious to the cars he almost wiped out in the process," Claudio explained. "More recently, a 17-year-old friend of mine riding his bike on the Pinellas Trail was hit by a driver who ran a stop sign -- while he was yakking on the phone. Good thing the kid was more aware of what was going on around him than the driver was, or he might have been killed rather than "just' badly bruised."

County attorney Susan Churuti said she sympathized with Claudio's concerns. But the county does not have the authority to pass an ordinance banning the practice of yakking and driving. That is up to the state, she said.

So call your legislator -- preferably from home.

- Times staff writers Kelly Ryan, Wilma Norton and Edie Gross contributed to this report.

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