The unquiet passing of Uncle Pop

MELONE E-mail: Click here Archive

By MARY JO MELONE

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 23, 2000

Ed Kirkland used to be on his phone so much that a couple of months back, he had another line installed so his sister could get through to check on him.

That's what I recall. Ed and his phone.

Every time I visited his small house in St. Petersburg's Palmetto Park, he'd holler to come on in -- the door was never locked -- and then go back to hectoring the person on the other end of the phone.

The last time, in late June, Ed was in his big chair by the door when I entered, and he was yelling into the phone at a Republican in the Legislature. This Republican was a friend of his, which was why Ed could get away with yelling. When yelling did not suffice, Ed swore. It was effing this and effing that, and in between, much laughter, as he ranted about whatever in government had him worked up that day.

Next to his big feet on the floor, a radio played the Carpenters and Nat King Cole. The light in the room glowed in the low, uneven way it does in sick rooms. Ed Kirkland was very sick. It was not enough to be mostly blind from glaucoma as he had been for 20 years. He had cirrhosis, and it was going to kill him. Nevertheless, next to the radio was a cardboard box lined with a plastic bag into which he tossed his empty Colt 45 cans.

He was the best friend Doug Jamerson ever had. They integrated what is now called St. Petersburg Catholic High together. Ed Kirkland was with Jamerson in every campaign he ever ran. That's Jamerson, the former education commissioner, the legislative candidate again, who now and then finds himself driving toward Ed's little house and has to pull over to remind himself that Ed is dead.

"They gave him four months to live in 1996," Jamerson said last week, "and he turned it into four years."

Ed Kirkland was a big man, with dark eyes magnified by thick glasses, and his stomach distended and misshapen by the cirrhosis. But he carried his broken body with more dignity than any 10 men in suits. He spoke as dramatically as -- here's a word you don't hear any more -- an orator. He was a few weeks shy of 55 when his body gave out on July 13.

He was cremated. What his family will do with his beige phone, I don't know. Enshrining it in City Hall or the offices of the Pinellas County Commission to remind those guys who they answer to would be appropriate, in my book.

For Ed Kirkland used that phone to poke, prod and get results for people who are too afraid to speak or who scare the politicians.

"If you needed housing, he would know people he could call, to get them the help that they needed. So many people would cry on his shoulder, I named him the president of the Lonely Hearts Club," remembered his friend Olivia Flemmings.

On the streets below Central Avenue, he also was known as Pop, Uncle Pop, or the Chairman of the Board.

To a young kid he watched grow up into a city aide, Devron Gibbons, Kirkland compared the problems that resulted from racism and inequality to water passing over a rock. Eventually, the current was going to wear the rock down and make it smooth. When Gibbons complained that meant change would come too slowly, the man he knew as Uncle Pop replied, almost Zen-like, that "it depended on how fast the water was moving."

The last time I saw Ed Kirkland, he was complaining about being on the Pinellas County Workforce Development Board, one of those agencies charged with getting people off welfare and into jobs. He was the only "grass-roots person," as he called himself, on the panel. What sense did that make?

He was also on the board of the People of Color AIDS Coalition, and at our last meeting, with July Fourth approaching, he had a blue bowl of red and white condoms in his living room. He wanted me, too, to take a couple.

"Never know," he winked. "You might need 'em."

We were planning that afternoon to drive around to some of the drug holes that also agitated him, but it began to rain and we decided to do it some evening. As I left, he pulled himself out of that chair and threw out his huge arms to hug me. He ordered me -- Ed was like that -- to come back again soon.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.