By LUCY MORGAN
© St. Petersburg Times, published July 9, 2001
Former Senate President Dempsey Barron spent a lot of time sparring with editorial writers and reporters during his 32-year political career. He routinely called one of the St. Petersburg Times' editorial writers "a social misfit creep" and once described a Daytona Beach News-Journal writer as "a journalistic pygmy."
He opposed financial disclosure for public officials and Gov. Reubin Askew's successful 1976 campaign to get it in the Florida Constitution. He always said his problems with the editorial boards grew out of their love for Askew and his opposition to the popular governor.
Despite all the bluster and rhetoric, I grew to like Barron, who died Saturday at the age of 79. No politician was as fascinating to watch and no politician was as savvy about knowing when to go public.
During his final years in the Senate, in the days before cell phones, Barron would often call my office and ask me to stop by. Inevitably I would find his office filled with lobbyists, some he liked and some he didn't like.
He knew that my arrival in his inner sanctum would send the ones he didn't like scattering. And it did. Call me a lobbyist extermination service: There's nothing like having the bureau chief of the St. Petersburg Times stop by to run out the roaches.
There was always bourbon and Coke, supplied by lobbyists who knew what he liked. In later years he added wine for those of us who had given up the hard stuff. And yes, I paid for it when I drank it.
Barron ate and drank freely from the largess of the lobbyists, saying he couldn't be bought by the price of food or drink. One morning in 1987 when he knew I was writing stories about legislators who took gifts from lobbyists, he phoned to tell me I was right to criticize.
The night before, he'd been out eating and drinking way too much with lobbyists, he confessed.
"And this morning I feel like a bouquet of dog a----," he added.
It was typical Barron.
In the closing weeks of legislative sessions, late-night budget negotiations often found their way into his office, and no one got to be president of the Senate without spending some time there.
Two signs on his desk gave you a measure of the man: "Assume Nothing" and "Lead, follow or get the hell out of the way."
In late 1986, as Barron plotted to steal the Senate presidency away from Sen. Ken Jenne, D-Fort Lauderdale, and give it to John Vogt, a Merritt Island Democrat, we spent a lot of time on the telephone.
Late in the afternoon as Barron answered my last round of questions, he mentioned that he was going to Tallahassee's Silver Slipper restaurant for dinner. Only later did I realize he must have been trying to tell me something. It was not normal for him to tell me where he was eating dinner.
And so when we finished writing for the night, Laurie Hollman, my colleague at the Times, and I went to the Slipper. There we found Barron and Vogt holed up with Sens. W.D. Childers, Bob Crawford and George Kirkpatrick. Until that very moment Kirkpatrick and Crawford had been in the Jenne-for-president camp. After being caught with Barron and the others, there was no going back.
Barron could have told us he was meeting with them but merely relied on our antenna for news and let the rest happen. A day later it was over. Jenne never became Senate president.
A few weeks later, I made the trip across the Panhandle to visit Barron at his beloved D-Bar Ranch. I was working on a profile of him for the Sunday paper and he wanted me to see him in his element and ride a horse.
I think he expected me to turn down the horseback ride, but I accepted.
After riding around his 2,000-acre ranch, we pulled back up to his old shotgun-style, wooden ranch house and dismounted. He took the reins of my horse, tied him up and continued to brag about Dial, the best horse there ever was.
"I'll show you how good he is," Barron told me as he opened the front door and led Dial inside, saddle and all. Together they walked through the living room and into the kitchen, rounding a table before he stopped Dial and let him poke his nose in the sink.
"See how good he is," Barron boasted.
"He better be good because you are going to have to hold him there while I get my camera out of the car," I said as I dashed for the door.
The picture was worth any number of words and was ample proof of Barron's ability to make animals and people do his bidding. The members of the Senate were equally well trained.
Barron was most at home on his ranch, surrounded by horses and cows and dogs, always dogs. They loved him. It was fascinating to watch a man so feared and disliked by his enemies and so loved by the animals that surrounded him.
In his final years, he sold most of the ranch, keeping the sprawling stone house he and wife Terri Jo built in the late 1980s. For the final year or so, they moved into Tallahassee to get him closer to the medical care he needed for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and heart disease.
Terri Jo was his nurse, his keeper, everything. She bought the house without telling him once she realized he needed to be living closer to the doctors.
"He couldn't believe it," she recalled last week. "He kept saying, 'You mean you bought a house without telling me?' "
But he grew to like it. Terri Jo always did know what was best.
She met him in the early 1970s while she worked for the Cabinet, and began working for him in 1974. She became one of the smartest and best of the Senate aides but was never paid well or recognized for it, in part because of her relationship with Barron.
Barron zealously shielded his private life and Terri Jo from public view during his years in the Legislature. Only after leaving office did he publicly praise her and tell people he planned on spending the rest of his life with her.
Barron and his first wife, Louverne, divorced in 1986, but their marriage had really been over for years. He and Terri Jo married in 1990 at the D-Bar Ranch, surrounded by friends from across a lifetime.
Barron was never replaced in the Legislature. The guy who beat him in 1988, Vince Bruner of Fort Walton Beach, lasted only four years in the Senate. No one ever achieved Barron's knowledge of the process and people.
Some people said we were well rid of him. Many disagreed with him and didn't like the direction he wanted to lead in. But there are days now, when legislators get bogged down in stupid things, when almost everyone wishes he were back.
Barron survived three different lightning strikes, the latest in 1993 as he and a friend attempted to unload a wayward calf from a pickup truck.
Barron and the friend were knocked out. The calf was killed instantly.
"Knowing Dempsey, he was probably just trying to cook the calf," joked former House Speaker T.K. Wetherell when he heard about it.
That's the kind of guy Barron was. Always living dangerously.
Family members have scheduled visitation from 6 to 8 p.m. today at the conference center on the Panama City campus of Florida State University. A memorial service is scheduled for 2 p.m. Tuesday in the Amy Tapper auditorium at Gulf Coast Community College in Panama City.
In lieu of flowers the family has requested contributions to Big Bend Hospice or the Florida State University Foundation.