- Tampa Bay lost one of its great ones in February, 2021.

Andrew Hines was 98 years old when he died.

He did more to shape the growth of the Tampa Bay region and particularly St. Petersburg than most people will ever know.

Andy Hines was a retired CEO of Florida Progress which is now electric utility company, Duke Energy.

He was also a member of the greatest generation who grew up during the great depression, fought in World War II, survived a POW camp and returned home to become a game-changing business and community leader.

The Suncoast business forum interviewed Andy Hines in 2008 at age 85.

We are proud to revisit this profile of Andy Hines in his own words.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] This special presentation was produced in high-definition by WEDU Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] There's no one exactly like you.

No one has the same financial goals or cares about the same people.

That's why Raymond James Financial Advisors have the independence to offer unbiased advice that's right for you.

And it's why we pioneered the idea of financial planning.

You might say we're just as unique as you are.

Raymond James, individual solutions from independent advisors.

- Life moves fast.

And very often we forget the pioneers and visionaries who set the stage for the quality of life we all take for granted.

Take downtown St. Petersburg, a waterfront jewel experiencing an extraordinary renaissance.

Who remembers the business leaders who put their energy and resources to work to turn that sleepy overlooked, urban core into the gem it is today?

Well, you're gonna meet one of those folks.

A former utility company CEO who leveraged corporate goodwill to leave a lasting legacy for our entire community.

(upbeat music) In the early 1950's, as a young engineer was watching a sailboat on the horizon at sunset on a business trip in Tampa Bay, that image stuck in his head and convinced him it was time to move back to Florida.

The engineer was Andy Hines.

He took a job at Florida Power now called Progress Energy and he settled in St. Petersburg with his young family.

Over the next 40 years he rose to become CEO of Florida Power, Florida Progress.

His leadership had a profound impact on the company and the community.

Andy, welcome to the Suncoast Business Forum.

- Thank you.

- Now, when you were involved with Florida Power, or what we now know as Progress Energy, you played a pretty important role and championed revitalization of downtown St. Petersburg.

What was your vision back then?

- My vision was that there was a blend, a possible blend, between natural beauty and a vigorous commercial atmosphere.

Hadn't seen it in a lot of places, but the, certainly the natural beauty was there.

And if the community developed from its late 1920s office buildings into something fresh they could blend together.

- It was pretty sleepy back in downtown St. Pete back then.

The 1970s, 1980s, right.

- That you're right.

(chuckles) That's true.

- Yeah, now what role did Florida Progress, the company that that you were President CEO, what role did Florida Progress play in getting this off the ground?

- Florida power had been based in downtown St. Petersburg from the 1920s on up into the early 1970s.

We sought to lead a development for a hotel, an apartment building and two office buildings but that fell through because of timing in the financial markets and interest rates and so on.

So we then were required by the burgeoning growth to move to where we had more elbow room.

So we located on the outskirts of the community.

Later, in the 1980s, as we developed a holding company Florida Progress, we saw an opportunity to move it into the downtown area and perhaps trigger some further growth.

So that's what we did.

- Well, let's go back even earlier than that.

Let's talk about your youth.

You grew up in North Florida, North central Florida.

Am I right?

- That's correct.

- Tell us about your family.

- My family is a Florida based.

My parents and grandparents were born in Florida.

I was born in the hospital in Lake City, Florida.

That was the nearest hospital.

My parents were living on a turpentine still outside Perry at that time.

This is in the early twenties.

The first Florida boom was underway in the early twenties, collapsed in 1926.

At that time, the state entered into a deep depression, which lasted until 1940.

So I grew up in a depressed economic condition in Florida.

- Let's talk about you and your youth.

Were you a good student?

Did you work when you were a kid and tell us about your family?

- I was the smallest and lightest kid in our class and hence I was the one that couldn't run fast enough to get away from the neighborhood bullies and so on and so forth.

So I guess I turned to books as a offset to that.

I did enjoy reading and studying was a by-product.

Reading was what I really enjoyed.

I had an interesting experience in the ninth grade.

First year, algebra, my grade dropped to 65.

My mother confiscated my library card and I got it up 20 points the next report card and climbed after that.

But I did devour books.

- Well, after high school you went to the University of Florida, am I right?

- Right.

- What'd you study there?

- Studied mechanical engineering.

- Do you also work when you're at the University of Florida?

- Yes, well, during the summers from, gee from sixth grade on I worked, on my uncle's farm up in Swanee County and later in the saw mill cutting tobacco sticks and working on farms and things like that.

I had a newspaper route.

I delivered the Tampa Tribune in a small town and.

Yes, I did quite a bit of work.

- Now, after two years of college you enlisted in the military.

- Right.

- As during World War II.

- During World War II.

- Tell us about that.

- I would not choose to be born any other time, Jeff because I was able to come of age at a time of great national unity, enormous conviction about the rightness of a cause, dedication to pursuing victory and a united patriotic nation.

And I was a part of that nation like about 150 million other Americans.

And so I joined up.

- And during the war, you were an aviator.

Am I right?

You were flying bombing runs in Germany.

- I was a navigator with the 15th Air Force flying on B-17 bombers, 301st Bomb Group.

- Let's talk about that because you saw some serious action during the war.

- Looked pretty serious to me.

(chuckles) - Yes.

- Well, what happened during during that period in the war?

- By the time I got overseas, August 10th, well early August, 1944, we had broken out of Normandy and the sweep across France had begun.

A lot of us thought the war was just about over.

I was one of those that thought it was just about over.

But we were engaged in serious bombing operations against oil refineries, against railroad communications, against airfields, against missile fuel plants and so on.

And I suffered the loss of three members of my crew killed in the first week that we were there.

And four of us were later in a separate flight shot down and captured.

So it was pretty heavy casualties inflicted then.

But we did the job of bombing and it was part of a continued pressure on the Third Reich that I was proud to have a part in it.

- So your plane was shot down on a bombing run.

You parachuted to safety?

- Yes, we attacked an oil refinery, the Lobau refinery across the Danube from Vienna.

I did jump and landed on an island in the Danube river.

Took a couple of days to explore the island.

I had visions of getting back to Italy a la Errol Flynn.

You know, doing something of a heroic nature.

I was picked up by three fellas with rifles that were out hunting and that resulted in one nights residence in the local jail.

And then we were sent on down to Budapest to the penitentiary and into the German prison system.

- So you were in a POW camp.

And during your time in the POW camp, you kept a rather unique journal, am I right?

- Yes, yes.

- Tell us about that.

- Well, I felt this period of my life is something that I would want to have a good, strong memory of because events change rapidly and your memories blur.

So I kept a little journal that I wrote on the back of cigarette packages and I swapped some cigarettes out of a red cross package for someone who made a little cover for it out of tin cans.

And to that I confided some of the history of my imprisonment.

- Over the years, since then you've kept journals and you've written poetry.

- Yes.

- Tell me about writing poetry and your desire and.

- Well, poetry is a very personal thing in that the poet writes for his or her own satisfaction or fulfillment actually.

And I started doing this in high school.

And I still do occasionally write poems.

I've given a collection of them to friends and I enjoy it.

And some of them are enjoyed by others also.

- What does it do for you personally?

- What does it do for me personally?

Well, it vents for one thing.

You don't have to break dishes.

You can write poetry.

(chuckles) And it also enables me to capture memories, to capture emotions, to express those to other people.

It's a good way of communicating to others.

- After the war you went back to the University of Florida.

Do you think that your time in the military changed you much?

- Well, it made me more conscious of the passing of time and the fragile nature of life.

You better grab it while you're here.

And we were, that generation, had lost time in the military and we all felt driven to make it up.

So we were all sort of in a hurry to get on through school and get going with life.

- What was the spirit that you found in the country though when you came back to Florida?

What was the mood on the home front?

- Very supportive and confident.

This was a victorious nation.

It had suffered a lot of sacrifice but it seemed to know where it was going.

- While you were finishing your degree at the University of Florida, you met Ann Groover.

- Right.

- Tell us about Ann.

- Right.

- Tell us about Ann.

- This is the gal I married.

She had friends in my class from, she lived in Jacksonville and she came down one weekend to visit them.

I was the weekend entertainment.

After three and a half months we got married and began living happily ever after.

- How long were you married?

- 60 years.

- How many kids?

- Four children.

- How many grandkids?

- 14 grandchildren.

- Wonderful.

Now you graduated from University of Florida with an engineering degree, newly married.

And you decided at that point to join General Electric.

Am I right?

- Right, mm-hm.

- Tell us about that.

- I wanted to see how the industrial Northeast lived.

Where the workshops of America are north of the Ohio river rather than down in the South.

A lot more down South now, but there was very little then.

And so I wanted to get up there and work in factories and work in large, successful, corporate enterprises that used engineers and get sort of a feel for that.

And I did.

GE was a good employer.

I was with them for four years.

- What did you take away from that experience?

- General Electric was a great believer in training and they had a program to train inventors, to develop creativity.

So they had a course in creative engineering and the selection for this was rather difficult but I was fortunate I was selected for it.

It lasted two years.

We were taught the processes of creative thinking, the application of creativity to problem solving and that provided some tools that have been with me ever since.

Been very helpful ever since.

- After leaving GE in 1951 you returned to the Tampa Bay area, St. Petersburg.

Why did you come back?

What drove you back here and?

- Well, we had both Ann and I had sand in our shoes and we wanted our parents to see their grandchildren while they were growing up.

St. Petersburg was really, for two reasons.

One of them was the attractive area.

The second was that's where the job was.

There were a couple of other job possibilities.

One in Jacksonville, one over on the Cape, but St. Pete looked like a better deal for the long haul.

And it turned out to be that way.

- Then over the next 20 years you rose through the ranks of Florida Power.

One of the largest companies in Florida.

Certainly one of the largest in the Tampa Bay area.

How did you make your mark and work your way through the hierarchy of this pretty big company?

- Well, I was fortunate, never discount fortunate.

I worked hard.

I listened, I listened a lot and asked questions.

I was never too reluctant to ask a question if I didn't know.

And once you start listening and people understand you're willing to listen you find out all sorts of things.

You can broaden your knowledge and get a greater depth of understanding.

I was given various assignments.

I discovered quite early that it was easier to get forgiveness than it was to get permission.

That if someone points you in a certain direction and says, "Here's a job that needs to be done."

Go do it.

- Now in 1972, you became president of Florida Power just in time for a major oil embargo that hit the entire United States.

Of course, Florida Power used plenty of oil.

- Yes.

- Serious challenge.

How did you face that one?

- We almost bled to death financially.

We were able to get enough awareness of the problem on the part of everyone that they really saw.

It's we're talking about survival here.

Really saw the critical nature of everything that was getting done.

And we got splendid cooperation out of the employees.

We had our first lay off since the great depression which was a bitter pill to swallow but most of them came back within a year and we got back on the right track.

Came out of the hole.

- When it was over, you really had to find a new balance, really, of diversified sources of energy which is something the country is dealing with right now, as a matter of fact.

How did you address that?

And how do you see the country perhaps looking at this situation now?

- Well, I addressed it by saying we've got to have greater diversity in our fuel sources.

We burned oil, we burned gas, we had nuclear under construction and we retrofitted two units to burn coal.

They had burned coal and then switched to oil.

And we went back to coal.

We then had nuclear, coal, oil and natural gas, four fuels.

It was my belief we would always be in trouble on something but we would not be in trouble on all four of them at the same time.

So diversity in sources was the key to our success.

- Now, here we are more than 30 years after you addressed it the first time.

What do you think the answer is for our country today to get over the same problem?

- Diversity in our sources is the key to success.

We have, I think a key problem for our society today is a realistic understanding of the true nature of pollution, its costs and the cost of eliminating it.

Can you eliminate it entirely?

Probably never.

Can you eliminate it quite substantially?

Definitely, yes.

But it's one of those things where you can go perhaps a mile for this cost and then a hundred yards at a somewhat larger cost and then 10 yards at a much greater cost.

And we are now doing the five, 10 and one inch progression.

- How would you characterize your management style?

How did you nurture talent within a big company like Florida Power?

- I tended to be an instinctual manager.

I am a great believer in scientific analysis, but remember that training in creativity, which you cannot quantify.

And I tried to look for relationships and do conceptual thinking.

As to the development of others, I was very successful that the company had some and does now have, some outstanding individuals working for it.

There is in the utility field, a service ethic.

A motivation to let's get the lights on.

Let's keep the lights on.

That drummed in you from the time you start.

And that tends to build a willingness to work hard and to throw yourself into what ever it is you're doing.

And so that's the kind of pool that I was drawing from for leadership development.

We had a lot of different types of assignments.

I frankly looked for problem solvers.

And if a man is a problem solver in the real estate department, there's some possibility he'll be a problem solver over in the marketing department.

And it's the nature of their thinking.

- Now you led a large company in a highly regulated industry.

It was going through a period of deregulation but how do you view regulation of key industries then, and now, which is a big issue again?

- I think regulation worked pretty well then.

There was an awareness on the part of the regulators that a reliable, reasonably priced supply of electricity is critical to the development of an area.

If you don't have it, you don't have civilization.

And so regulators would take that into consideration.

They would not give you everything you asked for.

And should not.

On the other hand, they would give you enough to stay alive and reward you a little bit if you improve situation.

Nowadays I think there is an overemphasis on detail and regulation.

The regulator then would say, "It's all right for you to drive "from Tampa to Jacksonville."

The regulator today would tend to say, "If you go to Jacksonville by way of going up I-75 "and you will go past State Road 50 "and then you will go on up to Wildwood "and then you will go north of Ocala "and you will turn off such and such a place."

Map out what they think you have to do.

I think you achieve a lot more progress if you let the people who are gonna do the work go do it.

- What challenges do you see facing the electric utility industry and economic growth and and building infrastructure, which is so vital?

- A realistic balance between the costs of environmental improvement and a benefits to be gained.

I am a profound skeptic on anthropogenic climate change.

Nature makes man out to be a piker and we are getting ready to enter into huge costs, huge costs.

The public has no awareness of how big these costs are going to be to control carbon dioxide emissions.

I think it's a big mistake and I can produce a lot of scientific justification for my belief but I'm not on that particular soap box today.

- You played a very big role in the local and statewide business community.

How did you see your responsibility in terms of civic involvement and philanthropy?

- Well, civic involvement involved a motto Georgia power company used many years.

Citizens where we serve.

And I felt that way about Florida Power Corporation.

We were citizens where we served.

What was good for the community in the broad sense was good for us because we were linked inextricably to the wellbeing of the community.

What was bad for us in turn was bad for the community in the long haul.

It might be short term attractive but in the long haul, not that way.

As it relates to philanthropy, I think that we are directed from a spiritual standpoint to give as we are able to give from each, according to his ability.

If you have the ability then you should give and it should be compulsory.

- Andy, what's one of your favorite poems?

- Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem "Renaissance".

- What is it about that poem?

- She wrote it when she was quite young.

I don't think I can remember exactly the last lines of it but it goes something like this.

"The East and West will pinch the heart "that cannot keep them pushed apart.

"And he whose soul is flat, the sky will fall down "on him by and by."

Marvelous writer.

- Well, thank you for sharing that with us and I wanna thank you for being our guest today.

- I was honored to be here.

- If you'd like to learn more about the Suncoast Business Forum or see this and other programs online you can visit our website at wedu.org.

Thanks for joining us.

(upbeat music)