THE CAN-DO CONSERVATIVE

Interview by Gary McKechnie
and Nancy Howell

My mother had passed away when I was six years old, so my dad and I lived in my granddad’s home in Brooksville. My dad was a postmaster and my grandfather was an attorney and they were also partners in the ranching operation. That’s the family setting in which I grew up.

I think a lot of my education and early tutoring came from my grandfather. He had a personal library that was rather extensive: encyclopedias and reference books and history books and a lot of educational schoolbooks and college books—things that were perhaps not available to every youngster. I read those books. I read English literature, American literature, poetry, science and math. My granddad always thought that I would get a better education if I supplemented what I had in school.

In Brooksville I lived one block from City Hall, two blocks from the county courthouse, and my grandfather’s law office was three blocks away. I could walk to town, walk to the grocery store, walk to the movie theater. That’s the kind of community I grew up in. It was the ’50s, an era of transition.

After school you’d get together with other kids and do something like get your wagon and run it down the hill and have a nice wreck or play cowboys and Indians or put a towel around your neck and pretend you were Superman. You could swing from potato vines and pretend you were Tarzan and we’d climb trees or play football or baseball in the yard. That’s what you did for fun. There were board games and checkers and card games like War. I played War for years. You’d flip a card and the higher card wins. Now you wouldn’t think that’d be exciting, but for kids that’s a big deal.

When I was in the tenth grade at Hernando High School, I went to a Key Club convention in Hollywood, Florida. The larger schools had been dominating the lieutenant governor positions so—and I had nothing to do with this by the way—the presidents of the small schools got together and made a deal to rotate lieutenant governors among the smaller schools to give them all a chance. They happened to pick my school first, and since I was a sophomore, my high school president picked me because he thought I’d have a chance later to do something else in Key Club. That was a very defining moment for me because then I had to speak before Kiwanis groups and Key Clubs and that was something I had never done before.

Later I ran for district governor, which is governor for the whole state of Florida. I lost by one vote. I didn’t vote for myself. At the time I didn’t think it was the right thing to do. I’ll never make that mistake again. I had a right to vote for myself, and if I had it would have been a tie and my friend who was the then-governor would have voted for me. So I learned a little lesson in humility and a little lesson in politics at the same time.

I stayed really active in school. I was president of the senior class and as president of our Key Club I did a radio show that I wrote up and delivered about what went on at the school during that week.

After high school, my dad paid the cost of college for me, and my granddad had given me an old ’55 Lincoln that cost $500. The first year in Gainesville was difficult getting used to, but one thing that stands out happened at the very beginning of my freshman year.

There was a drive to join the National Student Association which I thought was a liberal organization. The student body had endorsed it and it was a given it’d be adopted in fall election of our freshman year.

Since childhood Bill McCollum has been active and engaged—and has never wavered from his conservative philosophy. He displayed it as an undergrad at the University of Florida, as an officer in the U.S. Navy, and as a U.S. congressman from 1981 to 2001. Today the Longwood resident is Florida’s Attorney General—an impressive achievement for someone who grew up in rural Brooksville, Florida, an inland community 50 miles north of Tampa, in the 1950s.

Growing up I had several horses and I learned to saddle ‘em, and ride ‘em, and do all of those things myself, so after getting my undergraduate degree and starting law school I was foreman and ran my granddad’s ranch outside Brooksville. I dug postholes and built fence and branded cattle and rounded up strays. I knew how to do all of that. I still do. I bet if I had to run a ranch today, I’d do a pretty good job of it. I never could rope calves, though. My granddad tried to teach me to rope stumps, which is how cowboys learn, but I never did get it right. He was a great teacher. A mentor and a teacher and someone who encouraged me from the standpoint of reading and studying.

Additional articles along with the remainder of this excerpt ?can be found in the current issue of Orlando Magazine.