March 7, 2002

Dear Dick:

A flyer from Madeira Beach City Hall announces that you will host the sixth annual Women's History Month Celebration on March 8 in Tampa Council Chambers. I find this an odd role for a man with your history in women's rights.

I recall Tampa City Council Chambers well from past appearances there when I lived in Beach Park to plead for fair treatment of women. I remember the Council's faces reflecting the conviction that a crazed constituent had materialized to ask for a resolution supporting NOW's protest of local department stores' charging women, but not men, for alterations. The Council declined. The members apparently agreed with the defense of a department store’s spokesman who said, “Women sew, and men don’t.”

I especially recall the male Council members' incredulity at the sight of a "decent" woman’s protest that the Tampa Police Department arrested female prostitutes on Dale Mabry and Nebraska but ignored the customers. Many of these clients were "upstanding" members of the community who drove through areas of prostitutional activity at night in their late-model luxury cars to troll for diversion from their burden of running the city during the day. One was the anchor on a local TV news show.

I protested the local ordinance that made it a crime to associate with a "known prostitute" and harangued so persistently that the Council finally removed it from the books. Perhaps the Council got some tardy advice on the First Amendment from a somnolent City attorney. If enforced as written, this unconstitutional ordinance would have resulted in the arrest of a passel of Tampa's "upstanding" male clients of prostitutes.

I remember your office as a place hostile to women's rights. To jog your memory, below are a picture from late 1971 from the old Tampa Times and the text of a news article in 1972 from the Tribune. The picture shows your meeting with a few of us women. I had trouble rallying this few, so exotic demanding equal opportunity for women then was. One prominent local woman said she couldn't attend because you were a friend of hers. I doubted then and continue to doubt that you are a friend of any woman.

We came to challenge your shabby record on women's employment opportunities at the City of Tampa. As chair of Tampa NOW's Employment Discrimination Committee, I had received a complaint from a young Black woman named Thelma, whose application for the Tampa Police Department Personnel Director Marshall Jesse (back to the camera) had "lost" several times.

I have scrawled the names of those present on the picture. Of these original few, Attorney Clara Britton, Representative Elaine Gordon, and Representative Gwen Cherry have since died. I recall your attitude toward our asking for an end to discrimination against women by the City as one of amused condescension. I inferred when you followed us down in the elevator to dazzle Elaine with your political charisma that your concept of women's function had little to do with equal-employment opportunity and everything to do with women as fans of your manifold gifts of mind and body.

After this meeting, as far as I could discern, you did not assist Thelma's police-department application by instructing Marshall Jesse to obey Title VII and process it. Thelma's hiring apparently came despite the City's resistance. It eventually resulted from my filing a patterns-and-practices EEOC charge of discrimination against women by the City for Tampa Now with Thelma as charging party. Tampa NOW and Thelma won that charge.

I believe that you did nothing to advance women's equal-job opportunities that the Federal government did not force you to do. Yet I understand that you now claim that you were the visionary mayor of the first large city in Florida who filed an Affirmative Action Plan. But I hear that you neglect to mention that the EEOC made you do it.

From thirty years ago in your first incumbency:

I recall how happy Thelma was when she graduated from the Police Academy with my husband and me in the audience. I did not note your presence at this landmark occasion for Tampa workingwomen. Since then, women have advanced in the police department and have proved themselves assets. I see policewomen everywhere now, a phenomenon that came about without help from you so far as I can determine.

Indeed, I know of nothing that you have done during two incumbencies to help any Thelmas get fair treatment. I submit that your history on women's equality deserve lamentation, not celebration, in Women's History Month.

We graduated from high school together, so I am loath to let a classmate leave office with such a deficient record for women's rights. History will judge you ill. So I plan a service similar to the one that I performed for a classmate over thirty years ago.

The background of this service is this: I was one of the people who asked the Judicial Ethics Committee to review whether Judge Foster's membership in the male-only Ye Mystique Krewe was coincident with its guidelines for judicial conduct. I understand that you are a member of Ye Mystique Krewe, although I recall, as you must, that the piney woods Mystique Krewe aristocrats--whose conduct during parade week leads a logical observer to infer that they have yet to master the decorum of the finger bowl--would not let an Hispanic fellow such as you into the club for a very long time and then only with ill grace. I believe this resistance catalyzed the formation of the Krewe of Sant Yago. Ye Mystique Krewe also resisted admitting even token black men until the NFL forced it to a few years ago. It still does not admit women.

A few of Tampa's young women and some of us feminist crones of yesteryear--including the famous Ward twins, stars, along with you, of the Class of '51--may turn up at your office soon to discuss your membership in Ye Mystique Krewe and the City’s subsidizing of its sponsorship of the Gasparilla parade. Our organization bears the title International Wired Witches Strike Force and Quilting Bee. We are an organization with grave goals pursued in whimsical hats. I append a photo of the group, taken the last time we broomed in to picket local sexism. I include Wired Witches’ web-page URL.

This meeting with you awaits my compiling statistics on Tampa's federal grants and the cost to taxpayers--women's being half of these--of garbage clean-up and police protection for the Gasparilla parade, sponsored by the male-only Ye Mystique Krewe. I hear that the City charges Ye Mystique Krewe a dollar a year to rent the docking spot for its pirate ship. That amount is not market level, I suspect.

I trust there will be footnotes in these Federal-grant data that provide basis for a Federal-compliance review to determine whether a city that pays for garbage and police services and which charges an under-market fee for a boat's docking privileges to an organization that discriminates against women is eligible for federal monies.

A more heroic gesture than my appealing to the Feds again--and one bound to burnish your legacy among womankind, including your two daughters--is for you, without Federal prodding, to take the sponsorship of Gasparilla away from the sexist Ye Mystique Krewe and reassign this sponsorship to one of the non-discriminatory Krewes the formation of which Ye Mystique Krewe hustled after the NFL raised Cain about Ye Mystique Krewe's racism.

You can assign the new sponsoring krewe the boatslip that the City rents now for a dollar a year to the sexist louts of Ye Mystique Krewe, who swashbuckle around parade week in a Viagra strut, popping off cap pistols and, one supposes, fortified by Jim Beam, lost in the tipsy euphoria of their conviction that they are the Lords of the Tampa Bay Area Lilliputian Universe. These buckoes can move their male-only pirate tub way off shore. There they can repine in international waters.

You can add to your egalitarian éclat by resigning from Ye Mystique Krewe with gaudy fanfare. Wear your pirate's regalia and mayor's sash as you grasp a bullhorn to proclaim from the steps of City Hall that you quit the Krewe because you have had an epiphany in the City Hall parking lot in your seventh decade of life. The vision has convinced you that you must assert belated Hispanic pride against the Krewe's anti-Hispanic history.

Your epiphany will have revealed to you as well that women must enjoy equality of opportunity with men in the job world as well as equal opportunity to stagger around with guys on faux pirate ships in Tampa Bay rituals celebrating pirate and rapist Jose Gaspar. You must end with a flourish, announcing your intent to don sackcloth and ashes, cease compulsive flirting, marry no more wives half your age, and cut out nightly applications of Just for Men, allowing what hair you have left to return to its natural color: Geezer Gray. Providentially for your conversion, Just for Men markets a rinse vetted by AARP called Decrepit Dudes' Dignity Highlights. Lay in a stock of that.

You will proclaim to your constituents who have gathered for your political swan-song that, as penance for a lifetime of sexism, you will go about preaching the gospel of equality--even unto the forlorn reaches of the fens and bogs of Plant City—and including the sylvan glades of Wimauma as well on days when you feel the revivalist spirit descend upon you in full force. What Martin Luther was to Wittenberg, you will be to Tampa when you nail your 95 Theses on the door of the Chamber of Commerce, beginning with the ukase that removes the mayoral indulgence of supporting sexism by underwriting Ye Mystique Krewe’s sponsoring the Gasparilla parade.

Failing this benign epiphany's descent upon you with a thunderclap heard all the way to Turkey Creek, we members of the weaker sex may once again have to seek succor from Washington and the non-discrimination clauses attached to grants. We trust that these lurk cozily in the footnotes and make the whole City government liable to practice non-discrimination or forfeit Washington largesse. I trust that you--in your post-epiphany state of grace--join me in these prayers.

Yours in equality for three decades and counting and with all due respect,

Lee Drury De Cesare,
Class of '51, Hillsborough High School;
crone in good standing in the
International Wired Witches Strike Force and Quilting Bee

PS: You will be pleased to learn that I shall put this letter on the Internet and send it to all our classmates on Classmates.com so that they can watch the dazzling political trajectory of one of the stars of the Hillsborough High School Class of '51. We all stand in awe of your accomplishments, although sponsorship of women's rights is not among them, alas, alack, and weladay.