Bob Graham’s legacy in Tampa Bay, from the Skyway to ‘work days’

After a cargo ship crash brought down the Sunshine Skyway bridge in 1980, some Florida legislators and transportation officials wanted the state to repair or rebuild it more or less as it was, with a design that prioritized cost efficiency.

Not Bob Graham.

Graham had been governor of Florida less than a year and a half when the Skyway went down, killing 35. He wanted an all-new bridge, something he would later call “a landmark in the nation, spanning the entrance to Tampa Bay.”

In particular, Graham pushed for a striking cable-stayed design modeled after a bridge across the Seine in northern France, surrounded with security measures that would prevent such an incident from happening again.

It took seven years and nearly $250 million, and didn’t open until after he’d left the governor’s mansion and was elected a U.S. senator. But Graham got the bridge he wanted. In 2005, it was officially renamed in his honor: The Bob Graham Sunshine Skyway Bridge.

And in March, when the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge drew instant comparisons to the Skyway disaster, Graham’s bridge was held up as an example of reconstruction done right.

“He insisted on the design; he was very much involved in it,” said former University of South Florida President Betty Castor, who served with him in the Florida Senate. “We in the Tampa Bay area benefitted from that leadership.”

Graham, who died Tuesday at 87, left a legacy of legislative accomplishment across Florida during his nearly 40-year career in state and national politics. Some of it can still be seen in Tampa Bay.

As a state senator in 1972, Graham authored a bill empowering the state to purchase environmentally sensitive land for managed growth and conservation. A decade later, he was governor when the state completed its years-long acquisition of more than 400 acres on Honeymoon Island in Dunedin, allowing for the creation of Honeymoon Island State Park. He personally accepted the final deed from the city in a ceremony highlighted by a pipe and drum corps.

Legislation on managed growth and planning that Graham backed in the ‘70s and ‘80s proved prescient given the development on the horizon across Florida, former Pinellas County Commissioner Steve Seibert said. Whether it was his background as a developer or his formative years in fast-growing Miami, Graham had an idea of what might be coming to areas like Pasco and east Hillsborough counties, and pushed for more state oversight of how Florida evolved.

“There was something in him, I think, that looked at Florida in the long view,” said Seibert, a Republican who served as the secretary of community affairs for Gov. Jeb Bush. “Something that is often lacking in all of America, but certainly in politics, is thinking really down the road, and what are the impacts of our decisions today. And I do believe that was in his DNA.”

Graham was also an advocate for public education, and the state’s university system in particular. On one occasion, his veto pen may have helped preserve the University of South Florida as we know it.

In 1980, legislators sent him a higher education bill that would have altered the state’s board of regents and merged several universities around the state ― for example, folding the University of North Florida into the University of Florida. The bill provided funding to study the possibility of merging USF and the University of Central Florida. Graham vetoed it. Hours later, at a speaking engagement in Hillsborough County, he received kudos from local legislators and the key to Brandon.

“That was a time when the University of South Florida was just getting going,” said U.S. Rep. Kathy Castor, Betty Castor’s daughter. “He took pride in raising the level of ambition among the Legislature to invest in public schools, K-12, but especially higher education. He really envisioned Florida being one of the top states for students to study, graduate and research.”

Graham spurred growth at USF in another big way. For years, he questioned the need for a dedicated cancer center on campus, vetoing funds that would have been used to study the cost and potential benefits. But after much convincing from Tampa state Rep. H. Lee Moffitt, Graham eventually signed off on state funding. In 1983, flanked by two pediatric cancer patients, he helped break ground on the Moffitt Cancer Center.

Graham was an advocate for luring Major League Baseball to Florida, and predicted in the 1980s that the state could support not one team, but two. He applauded efforts to build stadiums in both Hillsborough and Pinellas counties, though he refrained from throwing his weight behind either side.

“All the numbers and the promise should be so obvious,” Graham told the Tampa Bay Times in 1982, more than a decade before the Marlins and Rays joined the league. “If two areas — Tampa Bay and Dade-Broward — can manage to construct stadiums, I see no way Major League Baseball cannot be enthused.”

Days before the Tampa Bay Rays played their inaugural game in 1998, Graham worked a shift with the grounds crew at Tropicana Field — one of his many “work day” campaign stunts designed to put him in the shoes of the state’s working class.

Graham’s work days regularly brought him to Tampa Bay. He taught classes at Plant and St. Petersburg high schools. He filmed man-on-the-street interviews for WTVT-Ch. 13. He helped roof a home in Palm Harbor. He shoveled elephant dung at Busch Gardens. He pulled an eight-hour shift with the construction crew rebuilding the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, arguably his signature local accomplishment.

“Even if he was carrying out bags at a Publix market, you could relate to that, because people used to do that,” Betty Castor said. “Even though some of this stuff sounded routine, to have a candidate running for governor that’s doing that is pretty unique. People could laugh about it, but then they’d talk about it. And then his name would resonate.”

Just before Christmas in 1981, he donned an apron and paper hat to serve meals at a St. Petersburg senior center, and visited an elderly woman’s house to dust, clean and check on her supplies.

“Bless you,” the woman told Graham. “You’ve been so kind. I hope you get to be president.”