I feel like a piece of my history is gone. Hans Tanzler, Consolidated Jacksonville’s first Mayor has died on Thursday following several years of illness. I last saw Hans about a year ago and remarked to a friend that the day would come soon when I’d get a call to let me know he has passed away. The call came today. When I first came to town in 1969 as a reporter for The Florida Times Union, Tanzler was the newly installed Mayor and I was assigned to cover him as well as the City Council. Ours often was an adversarial relationship and I relished getting under his skin. In 1971, his great friend, the late attorney Lacy Mahon, purchased a small weekly tabloid to help Hans get re-elected and Mahon hired me as its editor. I used that newspaper to boost Hans with his political ambition, but I still enjoyed riling him. Then, in 1975 when Tanzler was seeking another term, I ended up taking over his faltering campaign. As a reward, the Mayor put me on his staff, and at one point my office was right next to his on the 14th floor of the old City Hall. It was only natural that we became pretty close friends. I traveled with Hans constantly, both in his role as President of the National League of Cities, and when he went from place to place speaking to groups large and small in his new life as a born again Christian. I can remember that he would sometimes point me out to the audience as an example of not being able to convert every soul. The Friday night Tanzler was indicted by the Duval County grand jury, he called me at home and asked me to come down to his office at City Hall. I was devastated. When I arrived his friend Mahon was on the speaker phone from North Carolina, and local labor leader John Bowden was in the office with the Mayor. Outside in the halls and filling the conference room was an army of reporters. It was one of those nights you never forget. As I recall, the issue of the indictment was about wedding gifts Hans and his wife Mercedes received that were not reported, something for which he finally pleaded no contest. He continued being the Mayor and resigned in 1978 to run for Governor. I suppose it was a Saturday in August of 1977 for which both of us will be remembered. Tanzler had led the cleanup of the St. Johns River in downtown. It was a massive undertaking. There were 77 outfalls in downtown pumping raw sewage at the rate of 20 million gallons a day right into the river. The project took seven years to complete, and when it was about done, Hans came into my office one day and said he wanted me to start writing a press release for the big announcement. That just didn’t sound like enough to me after seven years of work and a cost of $150 million. So I proposed that we hold a big festival and invite the entire town to come downtown to the river to celebrate. The festival would be paid for, I suggested, by the contractors who had done all of the work. Tanzler agreed. It was a big day. I brought in the Cypress Garden ski team to perform on the river between the Main Street and Acosta Bridges, and to Tanzler’s great surprise, I set it up for him to ski with them. Tanzler was an athlete, but said he had not skied in years. He complained he would fall in front of all of those people. That’s when I said I wanted him to fall because if he fell into the river and didn’t catch a disease, people would begin to believe the river was really clean. He skied. He fell. He lived. Later in life he would tell people that he only skied because that was one of his options. The other was jumping off the Main Street Bridge.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Jul 2013 12:21:15 +0000
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