by Fred Seely
Editorial Director
Almost 60 years ago, Lou Ritter went to Tallahassee. He’s still there.
Just two years shy of 80, the former Jacksonville mayor continues to walk the capitol halls to make sure whatever legislation is passed doesn’t hit his clients. He leads the life of a lobbyist, and these days his concerns are about caskets, condemnation proceedings and dry cleaning chemicals.
“I thought about quitting at 80,” he said last week, reclining on a sofa at the Governor’s Inn hotel a few blocks from the Capitol. “The last guy of my generation doing this, Harry Landrum, died last year. I’m the only dinosaur left. It may be time for the young guys.”
One of the young guys, former Jacksonville representative and now lobbyist Joe Arnall, doesn’t believe it.
“Ritter is the man over here,” he said. “He knows everything and knows everyone. You have to be pretty alert to keep up with him.”
On this spring day, Ritter is enjoying some free time. He has poured over the legislative calendars and there’s nothing to follow. The legislature is in mid-session and the business is humdrum. The worrisome days are ahead as the legislators try to cram everything into a small period in order to end on time.
“I guess I’m here 3-4 days a week right now,” said Ritter. “Near the end, I’ll stay here. You have to keep on top of things at the end.
“Here’s what can happen. I was in a committee meeting and they were discussing a tax on dry cleaning. The committee chairman was Carl Ogden from Jacksonville and he looked out and said, ‘Anyone here from the dry cleaning industry?’ No one said a thing. They didn’t have a lobbyist. Bang. Tax.
“When I got home, I got a call from a guy in the industry. What happened? I told him. What can they do? I told him I’d try.”
He was hired. But getting rid of a Tallahassee tax is about as hard as getting rid of a blue Tallahassee springtime sky.
“I asked the dry cleaners to collect donations from their employees,” said Ritter. “Didn’t care what . . . just something from everyone. I got two Winn-Dixie bags full of money, mostly coins. Pennies, nickels, dimes. The employees each gave a little.
“I went to Sen. Dempsey Barron (then the most powerful person in the legislature) and asked his help and he agreed, but he said it would be tough. I gave him the bags of money and suggested he do something with that.
“He got on the floor of the Senate and gave a great speech about how the little people had been hurt, how a tax would lose business from their industry and they may lose their jobs. And then he dumped those bags of money right there. ‘This is all they can afford to help change this bill,’ he said. ‘This is the only voice these little people have!’ ”
Ritter smiles at the memory. Legislative victories are always remembered and the stories flow:
• How he overcame a requirement that would have had all Merle Norman and Mary Kay salespeople get cosmetology licenses.
“They’re just patting some goo on another woman’s face to show her what it is,” he said. “That shouldn’t require a license.”
• How he got a law changed that put a 6 percent tax on yachts being fitted in the state. “Malcolm Forbes’s wife liked the work a Miami yard did and wanted their new Highlander to have the teak work done there,” recalled Ritter. “It would have cost Forbes $900,000 in taxes — $900,000! — for a half-million job! Forbes was going to take the yacht to another state for the work. It clearly was bad for Florida business.”
Ritter worked the halls and his friends at the Department of Revenue. The law was changed.
• How he influenced the Florida cabinet to help Jacksonville’s Offshore Power Systems.
“They thought they could get what they wanted,” said Ritter of the company, which proposed to build nuclear power plants in the ocean. “They got what they wanted in Jacksonville but, in Tallahassee, they were just a local company. They didn’t do anything and got beat 4-3 when they asked for approval.
“I got a call. Can you come meet with the guys who run OPS and see what you can do? I did. We turned that 4-3 vote against into 5-2 for.”
(OPS should have been so lucky. Its complex dream failed to find customers except for the City of Jacksonville.)
• • •
Lou Ritter was a child prodigy by anyone’s rating system. He was a brilliant high school student at Jackson High and rose to the top of his class at the University of Florida, a top student and president of the student body. His first trip to Tallahassee was to serve as a legislative intern while he researched his senior paper for the School of Public Administration.
That paper was on the structure of Jacksonville’s then-unwieldy City government. Ritter’s recommendations mirror what we have today.
He came home and got a job at the local shipyard but his future was in politics. He was elected to the City Council in 1951. He was 25 years old.
“That was a record for a long time,” he said. “Not until (Reggie) Fullwood.” Fullwood, now on the Council, was 24 when he won a seat.
Ritter got interested in Tallahassee’s workings.
“I realized there were a lot of bills going through that process which could affect Jacksonville and no one here knew about it,” he said. “There was a legislative service — run by a lady named Nellie Bostwick, mother of the Bostwick boys here (Ritter seems to remember every name) — and she would send all bills to me.
“I found a bill that was filed by a legislator who lived near Lake Okeechobee. It said that nothing could be discharged into a body of water,” said Ritter. “At the time, there was massive discharging going on here into the St. Johns. We got working to stop that.”
His efforts were recognized by his fellow Council members. He served as president and, at age 27, was even acting mayor. “Haydon Burns took a trip to Italy and got some sort of disease,” said Ritter. “He had to stay in bed and turned over the city. I was acting mayor for 8-10 weeks.”
Ritter stayed put on the Council and got his chance to get into national politics when he emceed a Florida League of Cities meeting in Daytona Beach in 1958. The speaker: Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kennedy.
“It was really tough to get a flight out of Daytona so Kennedy was stuck for a while, and I suggested he go back and fly out of Jacksonville,” said Ritter. ‘ “C’mon, I’ll drive you’ I said, and we had a nice visit on the way up. I told him that I knew he was looking to be president and that I’d like to help.
“Early the next year, I got a call from Robert Kennedy. He wanted to get Florida organized and he wanted me to be one of four state co-chairmen. We met in Tampa and got together.
“I came home and got a call from (Sen. George) Smathers. ‘What in hell are you doing?’ he asked. “Lyndon Johnson is going to be the nominee. Maybe Kennedy will be the VP.”
Ritter risked Smathers’ wrath and stayed with JFK. And the ticket turned out to be Kennedy on top, Johnson next.
Ritter was asked to come to Washington and serve with the new administration but his future, he felt, was at home. When Burns won the governor’s race in 1964, Ritter was in the right place — his peers elected him to serve out the remaining years of Burns’ term.
He was Mayor Lou Ritter.
“I worked hard for the people but I could see problems,” he said. “The mayor was the leader and he would take the blame, even if it wasn’t his fault.”
The Council, alas, had its dark side. An aggressive Ch. 4 brought up problems and finally a Grand Jury was convened. Indictments followed.
Then Ritter got caught up in a bizarre issue that pointed fingers at him.
“I was riding around Boston and saw a great playground,” he said. “There were wonderful concrete animals. I stopped the car, looked it over and found the name of the company that built it.”
He came home and started the process, and a local company jumped in with a better deal . . . or so it was thought. A playground was built, but far over the expected price. Kickbacks were suspected.
The Jacksonville Journal turned the matter into a daily news story. The playground with the concrete frogs was brought forth as an indication that Ritter, too, was a candidate for the Grand Jury. He wasn’t, and nothing ever was proved or even alleged except by the newspaper and the television station, but it fueled the building movement to consolidate the City and County governments into a smoother operation with more checks and balances.
The city was unsettled. There were race riots to go with the indictments and it was difficult not to hope for change.
A popular judge, Hans Tanzler was selected to run against Ritter.
“I wasn’t, by then, most popular SOB in town,” said Ritter. “I was being judged by what others did.”
The campaign was nasty, pitting the business community (Tanzler) against the Democratic machine (Ritter.) Tanzler was elected and you know it’s burned into Ritter‘s mind when he states the margin: “793 votes,” he says with his voice changing to a stern tone. “Seven ninety three.”
He was out of work but the Democrats came through. He went to Washington for a job in the Johnson Administration, then came home for a position in Florida’s government, running what’s now the Department of Business and Professional Regulation.
“That was 1974,” he said. “I had been in government for almost 25 years and had nothing to show for it. No pension. I needed a full-time job that wouldn’t go away when the administration changed.”
That led him to lobbying.
His first major client was the state’s funeral industry; he had regulated them and had made contacts. Others followed. A lobbyist’s skills are in getting things done (and undone) in government, and Ritter knows as much about embalming as he does about teaching golf (he once represented the state’s golf professionals) or putting a drainage system on a swimming pool (ditto the pool industry.)
Today he chugs along. Heart bypass surgery in 2000 left him stronger and he admits that he can go as hard as he did in the past.
Even the long, boring drive from Tallahassee doesn’t get old, he says, and he can spend plenty of time with wife Judi at their Palm Valley home, where she raises horses.
“The one thing I’d like to do is write a book about Jacksonville government between the 1930s and into the 1960s,” he said. “Pretty much is known about the consolidated city (which came shortly after Tanzler beat Ritter.) But there’s a fascinating time here which is largely unrecorded. The poll tax, the way politicians manipulated the poor, the way government was set up.
“I have the time. Tallahassee is dead except for the session and football season. There aren’t three people in Clyde’s (a popular watering hole.) I’d like to leave something behind that people would appreciate knowing about.”