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Art Levy
Made in Florida: Artists, Celebrities, Activists, Educators, and Other Icons in the Sunshine State
Florida Trend associate editor Art Levy has, for many years, been penning one of the magazine's most popular features, our Florida Icon series. Now, nearly 100 of his Icon profiles have been collected in a new book: Made in Florida: Artists, Celebrities, Activists, Educators, and Other Icons in the Sunshine State.
Florida Trend online editor Will Gorham spoke with Levy about the new book, the process of crafting the profiles, and his impressions from specific encounters with Florida Icons.
Can you describe the process of choosing Icons? Some choices seem obvious (famous entertainers like Burt Reynolds or athletes like Doug Williams or politicians like Bob Martinez and Alex Sink) but how do you land on someone like rodeo star Tater Porter or sponge diver George Billiris?
I read a lot of newspapers and consume other media, so when I notice someone interesting, someone I think might make a good interview, I’ll write the name down and do some research. Apart from having an interesting story, the interviewees should be accomplished and prominent in whatever field they’re in. If they’re recognizable by most folks, all the better, but many times these really excellent people are not widely known. But if you’re Florida’s top bull rider, like Tater Porter was, then I’ll want to interview you. I’ve lived in Florida for a long time and reported from many places, so that’s how I learn about people like George Billiris and Blue Fulford, a fisherman from Cortez. Fulford was obscure outside of the world of commercial fishing, but he turned out to be a terrific Icon.
When the Icon series started, did you expect it to last as long as it has?
For most of my career, I was a newspaper feature writer who specialized in people profiles, soft ones, not the sort of hard, newsy ones you’ll read in Florida Trend. So, when I got a chance to do an Icon interview – my first Icon was physician and boxing broadcaster Ferdie Pacheco in 2007 – it felt wonderful. It was like I was back home journalistically. So, it’s certainly in my interest to keep the feature going and I think it will as long as the interviews are good and people want to read them. I know I’ll never run out of people to interview.
Are there any potential Icons you were unable to interview, either because they were no longer living or because they refused to participate?
The book includes 90 Icon interviews, but I’m currently working on Icon 106, so that’s a lot of people I’ve approached. I had to work for years to get some of them – Burt Reynolds, for example, and Bill Haast, the snake handler and former owner of the Miami Serpentarium. But most of the people were happy to do it. Of course, some were not. Despite many attempts, through direct and back-door contacts, Jimmy Buffet won’t talk to me. Tony Dungy won’t, either. Peggy Quince, the former Florida Supreme Court justice, also declined. I get asked frequently about Gloria Estefan. Yes, I tried, but I didn’t hear back from her. Remember television pitchman Billy Mays? We had an interview set up in Tampa for June 24, 2009, but he called a few days before to postpone the session to mid-July. Sadly, he died June 28. My dad was a salesman and I really wanted to interview Mays.
The book is divided into more than a dozen sections, categorizing the Icons [Advocates, Educators, Entrepreneurs, Politicos, etc.]. Were these categories devised specifically for the book or is this, a balance of “types” of Icons, something you think about in the process of selecting them?
The categories were a request by the publisher, the University Press of Florida. I initially thought the interviews should just be presented chronologically, but I can see how breaking them up makes sense. To your question, though, balance really is important, as is diversity. For a time, I was just really happy if someone said yes, but I’m learning that I have to consider balance and diversity more when deciding who to ask.
The largest category in the book is athletes, and there were even a few athletes that were put in separate categories for other work they've done. Any thoughts on why?
I think the number of athletes reflects a bias on my part. I’ve always been interested in sports, so I guess I gravitate towards people I’m aware of, but the stories still have to be good. The athletes I’ve interviewed, I think, have had some compelling stories, from Artis Gilmore picking cotton as a child and stuffing cardboard in his worn-out basketball sneakers to Warrick Dunn coping with the murder of his mother. When an interview with an athlete works, it’ll be less about the glory of winning and competition and more about the path to get there.
Is there a particular type of Icon (not necessarily based on the categories outlined in the book) that tends to be particularly fun or frustrating to interview?
Honestly, it’s not as much fun to interview people who are used to being interviewed. They tend to have talking points, which is not good for what ends up in print. So, for them, I ask a lot of questions. I just keep on asking question after question and wear them down and wait for the good stuff.
Were there any particularly difficult or problematic Icons to interview?
You were sitting next to me during the worst – the Harry Crews interview in 2012. We drove to Gainesville to meet him at his house, which was a departure for me because I prefer to interview people one-on-one with no distractions. The only other time I voluntarily went against that preference was in 2013 when I took my two sons along to interview Patrick Smith at his home in Merritt Island. Coincidentally, both of those interviews were with very ill writers. Smith, who wrote the iconic Florida novel “A Land Remembered,” spoke to me from a hospital bed set up in his living room. He was dying, but he was so kind. His wife gave the boys Coke and cookies as they listened to the interview. That’s a nice memory, but back to Crews. He was having a really bad day. He was dying, too, and he lived only a couple of months after our visit. Crews was cantankerous, confused and in pain. We gave up after 40 minutes after asking many questions, but not getting very many coherent answers. I guess my most persistent memory of the interview is that Crews didn’t wear pants. No underpants, either. I’ve been a journalist for 35 years and that was the only time I’ve interviewed someone who was nude from the waist down. It seems like kind of a funny story now, but it was ghastly then.
I noticed that many of the Icons, while praising Florida, are also fairly blunt in their criticism of the state. Carl Hiaasen told you, “Mostly we produce construction jobs in Florida – construction for the sake of construction. That's basically the same mechanism as a cancer cell.” Burt Reynolds says, “I think it's a tragedy what's happening to our beaches, that we're not taking better care of them.” A lot of them seem to perceive Florida as inherently dichotomous, a sort of corrupt paradise. Do you think that's true about the state or is there something particular about those people?
As a journalist, I’m not comfortable sharing my opinion publicly on anything that might show bias, which could compromise my ability to report on something later, but what the heck! I agree with Carl Hiaasen and Burt Reynolds and many of the other interviewees who have questioned our state’s priorities. The fact is nearly every one of the Icons I’ve interviewed has problems with how Florida treats its public school teachers. They worry about the natural environment, especially water quality. They’re unhappy with Tallahassee politics, unchecked development and overcrowded roads. But the thread through them all is they seem to love the state, so the criticism is constructive. They just want what all of us should want – for Florida to be better.
Dave Barry told you, in 2013: “Anybody with completely, wildly out of control ambition and no particular views or ethics has a good shot of going far in this state – and that’s always been the way. I contend, if he wanted to, Donald Trump, in three years, could be elected governor of Florida.” At the time it was a great comment because it highlighted a truth about Florida with a prediction that seemed absurd on its face. Barry was making a point but doing so, as he does, by making a joke. Six years later, the statement is just as interesting, but in a different way because the truth behind the joke has been magnified by real life events after the fact (Donald Trump was not elected governor of Florida but was elected President of the United States and claimed all of Florida's electoral college votes). Can you think of any other Icons that you look back on and think, “Wow, they were really onto something back then?”
It would be hard to top Dave Barry's clairvoyance. We should speak to him more often! Speaking to Meg Lowman in 2008 was an education, too. When I interviewed her, she was a professor at New College of Florida and one of the world’s foremost forest canopy researchers. She was also the first person I interviewed who used the term “climate change.” I didn’t understand what it meant, honestly, but she explained it to me and spoke about its potential impact on the Everglades, native plants and animals, the Florida coast and the rainforests. I wonder what she’d say about climate change now, 11 years later. Lowman was a very gracious, polite person, so she probably wouldn’t say “I told you so,” although I wouldn’t blame her if she did.
The book is called “Made in Florida.” What's the Florida through-line with all of these Icons? Do you think there's something particular about this state that goes into the making of these people?
The qualities that many of the Icons attribute to their success – working hard, persevering through adversity, being ethical and fair, having a passion for what they do – are, I think, universal and not unique to Florida. Still, some seem to gather motivation from the “idea” of Florida. You know, that Florida is a place to start over, get a second chance, a place that accepts everybody for who they are. I hear that a lot. Is that true? I don’t know. I do know that Florida has endured a parade of superficial perceptions over the years. Like, for example, Florida is only noteworthy because of Disney World, the beaches and tourism. Or Florida is a land of crooks and conmen, which I guess started years ago with that whole selling-swampland thing. The most recent rage is Florida is somehow “weirder” than other states, which I guess allows some of us to feel superior and laugh at the misery of the desperate among us. Are there a lot of troubled people in Florida? Yes. We’ve got more than 21 million people here, plus pretty good public record laws that allow us to uncover and report on various foibles that might go unnoticed in some other places. I grew up in Pennsylvania and lived for a time in North Carolina. I saw plenty of messed up people in those states, too. Sure, Florida is weird, but so is the whole world.
