What happens when Florida’s governor is your substitute teacher

Gary Fineout is a reporter for POLITICO based in Tallahassee, Florida. He has covered state and local government in Florida for 35 years.

The 30 or so kids who showed up at their 9th grade civics class had been told ahead of time was that there would be a special guest teaching the class that day.

They weren’t expecting the television cameras. Or the crowd gathered outside the door to greet their substitute teacher. Or the man wearing a professorial-looking cardigan sweater.

I was in that class nearly 45 years ago. And at the time, I didn’t really understand why Florida Gov. Bob Graham had chosen to spend several hours at Dowdell Junior High School just outside Tampa.

But after the doors were closed and the cameras were shooed away, he launched straight into a discussion — complete with turns at the chalkboard — about the ins and outs of how things worked in Tallahassee, an early lesson in what has wound up being an integral part of my career in journalism.

Graham — the two-term governor and three-term U.S. senator — died last week in Gainesville at the age of 87, and lies in state at the Florida Capitol Friday. He left a giant imprint on Florida’s political landscape and history, leading the charge to protect the Everglades and bolstering the state’s higher education system. And in Washington, he was best known for opposing the Iraq War and helping lead the congressional investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks.

But many Floridians knew him less for his accomplishments and more as the politician who would spend an entire day on the job with his constituents — working as a waiter or a “pooper scooper” during a horse auction, or, in my case, a teacher for the day. He would wind up doing hundreds of jobs over his extended political career — an often imitated but never quite matched piece of his legacy.

“I think the workdays made him feel a lot more like an everyman,” said John Delaney, the former Republican Jacksonville mayor and now president of Flagler College.

Delaney spent a day with Graham working on a bridge and acknowledges he “plagiarized” the workday idea and did his own when he was in office.

Graham — whose family was involved in farming and real estate and whose half-brother was once co-owner of The Washington Post — wound up doing more than 400 workdays over his career. His first one came when he was still in the Florida Legislature and a Miami teacher dared him to spend a day teaching a class. But it was after Graham launched his long-shot campaign for governor in 1977 that he decided to do 100 of them to drum up publicity. He spent more than a year doing everything from being a short order cook to a tomato picker to a plumber. And it worked. He came in second during the Democratic primary, but then won the runoff and general election.

Gwen Graham, his eldest daughter, who was a teenager when he ran for governor and now works for the Biden administration, said the workdays became valuable because they helped her father forge friendships with a vast array of people and shape his thoughts on public policy.

“It’s amazing how much people will share with you — their lives and what they are going through,” said Gwen Graham, who carried on the workdays tradition when she was in Congress and ran unsuccessfully for governor. “Dad took a lot of those personal conversations and was able to use what people were thinking about.”

One integral part of the Graham workdays was that it was a full day of work.

On the day Gov. Graham taught my civics class, he arrived at 6:30 a.m. and led three classes. He then headed to a nearby high school where he attended a faculty meeting — and then helped out as an assistant coach with the football team.

“For him, it was doing the work — and spending the day really doing the work — that made them so meaningful,” Gwen Graham said.

Added Delaney: “He wasn’t one to sit there and gab. He literally worked.”

Bill Cotterell, a long-time veteran reporter who covered Graham as governor and senator, went to several workdays over the years and said the press would usually get to talk to him — but only briefly, and then it was back to the job.

And that’s what happened when Graham decided to announce he would not run for reelection to the Senate shortly after he had ended an unsuccessful bid for president in 2003. He broke the news in the middle of a workday at a Tallahassee high school where he was doing roof repair.

“He was spreading tar on the roof, and he climbed down and went over and did his news conference,” said Cotterell. “After it was over, he climbed back up on the roof.”