- This is a production of WEDU PBS.

Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

(light music fading) - How do we measure a life Well-lived?

Over the years, the Suncoast Business Forum has profiled hundreds of entrepreneurs and business leaders, who've had extraordinary success.

Sadly, some of them have passed on, but their impact still remains.

In this special program, We've dug deep into our Suncoast Business Forum archive to bring you the stories of three exceptional leaders who left lasting legacies on our community.

A lawyer who led one of Florida's most prominent law firms while fighting injustice and discrimination.

A communications expert who broke numerous glass ceilings as a leader of the business community.

And a legendary journalist who spoke truth to power and help grow a local newspaper into an award-winning national success.

We share their legacies in their own words.

Next on the Suncoast Business Forum.

- [Narrator] Suncoast Business Forum brought to you by the financial services firm of Raymond James, offering personalized wealth management advice and banking and capital markets expertise.

All with the commitment to putting client's financial wellbeing first.

More information is available at raymondjames.com.

(light gentle music) - Things change as time moves on, that's progress.

And the fast growing metro area like Tampa Bay, memories can fade of those who made a big difference years ago.

That's why we're revisiting the memories of three business and community leaders who passed away but whose impact, enrich the lives of countless people in Tampa Bay and far beyond.

First, meet William Reece Smith, who grew up in Plant City, Florida, in the 1930s.

- I can remember when I was in maybe high school, junior high perhaps, going to the poolroom in Plant City, which was verboten because they sold beer.

But I slipped down the back alley 'cause I liked to be with the boys and shoot pool.

I told my father about that some years later when I was grown, married, and I left home.

And he smiled and said, "Oh, I knew you were there, bud.

The man who runs the poolroom, called me every time you got there, and said, 'Mr.

Smith, Reece is here.

Don't worry, I'll look after him.'"

And that was what growing up in Plant City was like, in that era.

- [Geoffrey] Deanne Roberts was raised in a working class home in Tampa, Florida.

- My brother and I were the first generation in our family to have a college education, so I didn't have parents who necessarily were lawyers and knew how to guide you.

But I had parents who were very supportive of education and they absolutely were committed to my brother and I.

We went to private school, which was a stretch for them.

And they never gave us any choice about going to college, we were going to college.

So we as a family, you know I didn't quite know what I was gonna do, but I knew that I was gonna get an education that I'd have to figure it out.

And that my mother was gonna really get on me, if I didn't.

- [Geoffrey] Eugene Patterson grew up during the depression, and so a hardship firsthand.

- In 1929, my father was a bank cashier in Douglas, Georgia, thriving little city.

The bank went busted, he lost his job, and he never again had steady employment for the rest of his life.

That's what a great depression does.

My mother went back to school teaching, and luckily, her father had left her a little piece of ground, and so the family moved to a little farm near Adel, Georgia.

And we made our living out of the ground off the land.

But the only thing that we bought in those days was salt and pepper, coffee, everything else we raised, everything else.

Meat, and eggs from the chicken, milk from the cows, butter from the cream, all of it we produced on the land.

And we were thought to be well-off because we owned our little plot of land.

- [Geoffrey] William Reece Smith, finished law school and became a lawyer at Carlton Fields in Tampa, where he worked with colleagues, Mitch Emmanuel and Ed Cutler.

- Mitch was a tax lawyer.

Cutler was very able, a sophisticated practitioner.

I had trial experience.

And so the three of us with our particular specialties started working together to try to build a law firm that would be more dependent on the overall talent in the firm, rather than upon two or three people who might be prominent in one way or another.

I did run for president the Oldsburg County Bar and was successful.

It was there that I had my first introductions to legal aid and the legal needs of the poor.

I got involved in committee activity that addressed some of the issues that were there and for something that I embraced and pursued the rest of my career.

I ultimately decided no, that I should run for the presidency of the American Bar Association.

- If you took on the challenge of becoming elected to the president of the ABA, which was a nationwide campaign, you were successful there.

The top agenda of your presidency was also aid and legal services for the indigent.

- I was committed to a legal aid pro bono publico activity.

We had gotten the federally funded programs and the volunteer programs and the workers working together.

We were gained an awful lot of strength and momentum, and we didn't wanna lose that.

- [Geoffrey] Deanne Roberts finished college at USF and started a career in public relations.

- I did hospital public relations.

I did public relations for a real estate development company.

And then after doing job hopping like this, it was pretty clear that I needed to probably get in the business where I could have a lot of variety.

And thus an agency environment seemed the right place for me.

- So, how old were you when you started your own agency?

- I was 25.

- Pretty ambitious, huh.

- Yeah, but you know, if you're looking at the fact that you're gonna be a notorious job hopper.

And frankly, I wasn't making all that much money, and so it wasn't a big opportunity costs back at 25.

So I started as public relations, but I quickly realized that if you wanna get a message out, you better use every possible way to do it, so that includes advertising, these days includes social media, so you have to use all those tools.

So, while I specialize in public relations, I try to surround myself by people who are complimentary.

Now, being a woman entrepreneur back in the 70s in Tampa was interesting.

I mean, these were, we were still in those days, where we remember that women couldn't go to the university club without being invited, we couldn't be members of Palma Ceia, so it was a little different environment.

But I was probably on the, there were a lot of women who paved the way for my age group.

So I felt as though, while it might be a little more difficult to be a woman back in the 70s and business in Tampa, you could still make your way if you worked hard and if you delivered good service.

And so I've endured all these years, I think it was tough back then because our economy was so limited.

It was real estate, and tourism, and agriculture, and a little bit of healthcare, and so there weren't a lot of great clients out there.

And so it's nicer now where we have much more diversified economy.

- [Geoffrey] After serving in World War II, Gene Patterson became a reporter at small newspapers in Texas and Georgia, and was offered an opportunity to work for a news service.

- Newspapers were in their heyday and the wire service UP and along with AP, they were competitive, supplied the newspapers with most of their national, international news, and so we had big staffs at that point.

And I went immediately to New York because that's where the action was, as far as I was concern.

Became night bureau manager of the old United Press in New York, then went to England as London bureau chief and loved it.

It involved me on the world instead of some provincial area.

And for the eight years that I spent in the United Press, I developed a national and international view that helped me in all the local papers that I worked for after that.

- Because it was after you left the United Press that you went to the Atlanta Constitution.

That's right, I left the United Press on London and went home to Atlanta, my native Georgia, as executive editor of the Journal Constitution.

And then later editor of the Constitution.

My role then, as I saw it, was that to not only run the editorial page boldly and say what you think needs to be the policy of the paper, but you write a personal column.

I wrote seven days a week, eight years, a column a day, and with my picture on it, my name on it, and took responsibility for it, so that people out there knew who was talking to 'em, who the editor was, and what he thinks.

And they kinda liked it, I think, whether it was to know me and liked what I said or to hate what I said and to cuss me, but still they knew me.

And I felt that personal journalism was so important in that period.

I think it still is.

- And the late 1960s, you left the Constitution, you went to The Washington Post, one of the leading daily newspapers in the United States.

Again, this was a turbulent time.

You were in Washington, the Vietnam War is raging.

What was your role there?

- Terribly difficult time.

Streets of Washington were full of hundreds of thousands of anti-war protestors.

Lyndon Johnson of course, was about to be drummed out of the White House.

And Richard Nixon was about to come in, and of course the war would continue under him.

- After leaving The Post, you taught for a year at Duke, and then you came to the Tampa Bay area.

- Yeah.

- To the St. Petersburg Times.

And what brought you here?

- Nelson Poynter.

Nelson Poynter was a diminutive, hard-headed, business-like editor from Indiana, who had gone to Indiana University and Yale for his master's in economics.

And he came down and bought the Times from his father and ran it.

And he was a man of enormously high standards, the values on the standards of that man attracted me.

He was the first southern publisher, I knew for instance, who came out for obedience to the 1954 Supreme Court decision desegregating the schools.

Most other southern publishers were saying, "No, we'll never do it."

- [Geoffrey] Success can give us the resources and opportunity to have social impact.

For Reece Smith, it was providing free legal services to the poor and disadvantaged.

- And there was a time when the federal government got into the area of providing legal services for indigence, and there was created something called, the Legal Services Corporation.

There were a lot of us, including me, who were not too excited about the Legal Services Corporation.

We didn't think lawyers ought to be paid for rendering services to the poor.

We thought lawyers ought to do that pro bono publico.

The more I got into the experience, the more it became apparent to me that the voluntary bar by itself could not meet all the legal needs of the poor.

Hillary Rodham Clinton, was interested in the subject as the chair of the Legal Services Corporation.

And she was saying at the time, the amount of money, which the government was providing was sufficient to serve no more than 15% of the poverty population.

(Williams clears throat) What'll you would do under those circumstances?

Try to get more money, yes, but also try to provide closer cooperation between the federal agency and the voluntary bar.

I devoted a good deal of my time later on in the American bar to addressing that problem and getting the federally funded programs and the voluntary programs working together.

And we ultimately were quite successful in that regard.

- [Geoffrey] Deanne Roberts brought a new vision of innovation and collaboration when she became chair of the Greater Tampa Chamber of Commerce.

- Back in 2003, we were just seeing some of the economic opportunities in life sciences, what some markets called biotech.

But the assets that we have at Moffitt Cancer Center at USF, and the med school, and the engineering school, at the medical device industry over in Pinellas County, all these opportunities, we were starting to say, "Okay, how do we form this cluster and start marketing some of this to outsiders?"

I cared about redevelopment.

To me, cities, vital cities drive economies.

And so we had been sprawling and still are a very sprawling community.

And I felt the Chamber needed to refocus us back into redeveloping some of the city core, and so we focused on that.

And then thirdly, I really believe and we still have yet to achieve this, that we need a really strong mass transit system in order for this community to thrive over time.

And that means great bus service.

And it means moving people by rail.

And it means having trails, and bike trails, walking trails, we got a ways to go on that, but it was on my agenda back in '03.

Still on the agenda.

- Now, during your term as chair of the Chamber, you developed and we're actively involved in a couple of programs that have endured, Creative Tampa Bay emerged.

These were radical changes from what had been.

- If you are a place that people who think for living wanna live, they're gonna create economic opportunity for everyone.

So, thus Creative Tampa Bay was born.

I was one of six founders of that.

We had a vision that if we would be, if we could in gender and environment, that people really wanted to live here, it means good arts and good museum and historical opportunities, good design, good architecture, things to do, ways to get around, all this is important to people who could live anywhere.

And if you want those talented people to live in your market, you better provide them opportunity.

And then the companies follow.

- [Geoffrey] As the editor of The Atlanta Constitution in the mid 1960s, Eugene Patterson faced the challenges of the civil rights movement in the south.

- I was editor of The Atlanta Constitution for eight years, from 1960 to 68.

When Martin Luther king Junior was marching all over the south.

When southern politicians led by George Wallace, Ross Barnett in Mississippi, were urging southern white people not to obey the Supreme Court.

Not to believe they had to desegregate their schools.

Not to go along with what was occurring in history.

And newspapers really had a duty at that time to say the politicians aren't telling you the truth, and here is what we really ought to do, and what we should do, and what we gotta do.

And that's all we did at The Atlanta Constitution in that period.

It didn't won us in a popularity contest, but it was what a newspaper has to do.

- [Geoffrey] Our skills and abilities are often tested when we go outside our comfort zone.

For Reece Smith, that test came when he argued before the US Supreme Court.

- Well, if you're not scared to death, which is easy to do, if you're not there frequently, it's a very easy court to argue before because they're all so well-prepared, and they've read the briefs.

You don't have to tell them very much about what this case is about and what had issue.

The big problem you have in arguing, I think, before the United States Supreme Court is to get a word in edgewise because the questions are coming from the bench, on this corner, of that corner, or the other corner.

So that sometimes you simply have to say, "Well, wait a minute, you're taking all my time.

And now give me a little bit of time to make my argument."

Fortunately, by that time I had tried enough lawsuits and argued enough appeals.

I really wasn't scared absolutely to death.

Although, I was certainly respectful of the court and the atmosphere in which I was arguing.

- [Geoffrey] After joining The Washington Post, Gene Patterson found himself in a history making standoff between The Post and the Pentagon.

- While I was there, the biggest decision was the Pentagon Papers.

The New York Times beat us on that story.

They got those papers first.

They were leaked to them first.

But we found out who had them and we went and got them.

And so two days late, we were prepared to publish the papers.

But by then, there was a standing federal court order against The New York Times that they could no longer print the papers.

Well, the first amendment says, the constitution prevents anybody from a bridging freedom of the press yet it was done, and that was then a great test.

Does the first amendment mean what it says or not?

So we printed them, and the first day, boom, they stopped the presses.

And we went directly into the United States Supreme Court and argued the case, and won it, six to three, and printed the Pentagon Papers.

And in that period, the press sort of came of age in Washington.

Katharine Graham, was the new publisher of The Washington Post.

Her husband had committed suicide and she was brand new at running a paper.

And she had to make that decision, whether that might destroy her paper.

And we said, "Kay, we must do it.

The immortal soul of this paper is involved."

And she said, "Print 'em."

And that was the first great decision that my magnificent woman made.

She went on to become one of the great publishers of all time.

- [Geoffrey] After leading the Tampa Chamber, Deanne Roberts was elected chair of Leadership Florida.

- You know, I was so flattered, to be asked to chair Leadership Florida, which is a network of leaders throughout the state who care about the whole state.

So, people like me who are born and raised in Tampa Bay, my main clientele is here in Tampa Bay.

You know, we have to come together with people from Miami, and Jacksonville, and Orlando, and Tallahassee, because a lot of things are not about your community, it's about the state.

So, important things like the state university system, that's run from a state perspective, so you need leaders throughout the state who kinda get educated on some of these issues, like higher ed or growth management.

'Cause a lot of these laws, are state laws.

A lot of funding, is state funding.

And then we have to come together and not be so parochial, and decide we want Florida to do better.

And so Leadership Florida was a great opportunity for me to sort of get out of my comfort zone and work with people from around the state on some different issues.

- [Geoffrey] Taking on leadership roles in one's career can bring out the best in us.

For Reece Smith, it sparked a lifelong commitment, to fighting civil injustice.

- I became sensitive to the way that the native Americans had been treated by some of us.

I became sensitive and more thoughtful about difficulties, to say the least, that the blacks had encountered.

And I think just some of my values, my intuition, I think, more than anything else, prompted me to want to do something, to help improve the conditions of society.

I think all of us as citizens owe something to the support of the common cause.

And we ought to work in activities like that, to the extent that we can under the circumstances.

And I like to, I guess I like to be involved, so that helped a good deal in terms of motivation.

- [Geoffrey] Community leadership often presents the challenge of balancing work and family life.

- You gotta love what you're doing because it's hard work.

I mean, being an entrepreneur is a huge commitment.

Being involved in the community is a huge commitment.

Being a mother is a huge commitment, but I wanted to do all those.

And so I made a choice that I was gonna do what I wanted to do.

And I would just say, if I didn't like going to those Chamber dinners, then I probably wouldn't have done it.

And I would advise people, "Don't go do these things because you feel like I have to."

Find something you really wanna do.

Maybe it's being involved in some nonprofit.

Maybe it's being involved in your church or your kid's sports team, but do what you really wanna do.

And I also think it's really nice.

If you can mesh some of your personal and professional life together, I was very fortunate to be able to do that.

Some of my dearest friends now, are people I've met doing community service or that I've worked with.

- [Geoffrey] For Eugene Patterson, being a journalist editor and publisher, carry the great responsibility of uncovering the facts and sharing the truth.

- The three newspapers I worked for, The Atlanta Constitution, The Washington Post, and the St. Petersburg Times, were very seldom in agreement editorially with a majority of their audiences.

Just occurred to me that that's one of the elements that makes a great newspaper.

You have to say what you think is soul, even if it's not popular, even if it costs you a little popularity among your readers, and little revenue among your advertisers, you have to lay it out exactly as you see it.

And above that, you have to care about your community and you have to dare to get out there and tell them exactly what's going on.

- [Geoffrey] Going above and beyond is a rare quality.

Often, there are people who are an important influence on each of us.

- But I had the great good fortune to serve as a platoon leader in a armored company in Patton's army.

Patton had an approach to warfare that infected all of us, audacity.

He believed in never defending when you can attack, always surprise the other man, strike him where he's weak.

Above all, run the battlefield yourself, don't wait for him to run it.

And it occurred to me that, the great lesson of the army in that period.

- My mother, when she was young, she had unbelievable drive.

And I think I got my tenacity from my mother.

I mean, there was no excuses for not getting things done.

My dad, who is much more laid back, I think he was all about honesty and integrity.

And if somebody made change at the grocery store and they gave you a nickel too much, you had to give that nickel back.

And so, I think he instilled in my brother and I, just this sense of doing the right thing and we kinda got a compass from him.

- I don't know, maybe that's my maternal grandmother, talking to me again, and say, "If you're gonna do it, do it the best you can."

She taught me that, "A good name is rather to be had, than great riches."

And I have never forgotten that.

And I guess more I work for a good name than I did for great riches.

- The Tampa Bay region continues getting national recognition for its outstanding growth and quality of life.

Although, Reece Smith, Deanne Robertson, and Eugene Patterson, are no longer with us.

There's little doubt, they'd be pleased with the success of the community, They helped build years ago.

If you'd like to see this program again, or any of the CEO profiles in our Suncoast Business Forum archive, you can find them on the web at wedu.org/sbf.

Thanks for joining us for the Suncoast Business Forum.

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