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Coffee Talk (Tampa edition)
Attorneys not as trustworthy as clerks?
St. Petersburg Bar Association President David J. Abbey raised an interesting question in the most recent edition of the group's monthly magazine, the Paraclete. Why are Pinellas County's lawyers required to go through courthouse security checkpoints when others such as judges, clerks, court reporters and judicial assistants aren't? Are attorneys not as trustworthy?
In Polk County, at least, lawyers must be more trustworthy: They don't have to pass through courthouse security. But in Pinellas County, Abbey points out, lawyers are even sometimes required to remove their shoes before they can pass through a security checkpoint.
Abbey, the outgoing president who'll be replaced by Bill Walker next month, wonders if it's time for Pinellas' lawyers to be deemed safe like the deputy clerks, court reporters and JAs.
Pinellas County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Marianne Pasha says it has been "an on again, off again discussion for years." But in the past, a couple lawyers have been caught with firearms in briefcases - a definite taboo, she says. Only employees have computerized keycards.
Creative contrast
There was a Richard Florida moment in Tampa on May 17.
On the same day that homosexual couples began getting legally hitched in Massachusetts, six gay and lesbian couples were turned away at the Hillsborough County courthouse when they came courting a marriage license.
Hmmm. They allow gays to marry in an oasis of technological innovation. They don't in the middle of back-office backwater. What could that mean?
Florida is a best-selling author who has inspired a new economic-development movement. The Carnegie-Mellon University professor prescribes tolerance and livability over tax subsidies for cities struggling to be the next Silicon Something.
One barometer used by Florida to gauge the probability of his favorite demographic, highly educated 25- to 34-year-olds he calls "the creative class," putting down roots is how receptive a community is to gays.
Oh-oh. As the local same-sex couples found out, the Tampa Bay area has a ways to climb on Florida's creative-class scale.
That was never more obvious than two days after the courthouse snub. A year-old group called Creative Tampa Bay unveiled a study entitled: "The Young and the Restless: How Tampa Bay Competes for Talent."
The Bay area, despite the sand and the surf, is not a destination for the next generation of American entrepreneurs. For those who've been paying attention, the study presented a familiar litany of negatives from focus-group interviews.
Lifeless, pedestrian-unfriendly downtowns. (Or, in the case of Sarasota, city centers that are hostile to the entertainment diversions of young people.) A lack of ethnic and racial diversity. Suspicion of newcomers and new ideas.
Bad things happen as a consequence. Nine out of 10 graduates from Sarasota's Ringling School of Art and Design, which helped fund the study, flee the Bay area with their diplomas and their cutting-edge ideas after commencement.
Creative Tampa Bay co-founder Deanne Roberts, a former chamber of commerce chairwoman, exhorted a May 19 luncheon gathering to stop the regional brain drain. Among her suggestions: revitalize urban cores, improve public transportation and market the area to college graduates as well as retirees.
One older questioner was brave enough to declare her cluelessness by asking: What is cool about riding a dirty subway system?
A 30-something sitting at Coffee Talk's table later explained that practicality, not coolness, was the issue. She and her friends just think it's better for the economy and the environment in the long run if they took a streetcar to work instead of a Hummer.
Oyster coup
Clearwater attorney Connie Stephens and her gang, better known in the local food world as the Wild Turkeys, took the Clearwater Bar Association's coveted 2004 Oyster Roast Cup for their fried turkey extravaganza at the recent Oyster Roast celebration.
Stephens, Rebecca Graham, Dean Hoolihan, LeAnne Letize and Kathy Ramers beat the other attorney groups, including P.I.G.S. People Intensely Gobbling Sustenance, BJ's Oyster Bar, Bayou Bill's Maker's Mark, Coffee & Liqueurs by Pinellas County Trial Lawyers, Felony Chili by West Pasco Bar, Shrimp Inn by the Barney Masterson Inn of Court.
It's the Wild Turkeys second time winning the award. The trophy is theirs until next March, unless they win again.
Vinoy takes a pitch
The Tampa Bay Devil Rays are mired in another slump, one of the worst in the team's six-year history - which, come to think of it, could be viewed as one big, long slump.
Though the Rays aren't frightening many opponents again this season, there's something else in St. Petersburg that may be.
The hotel where visiting teams stay when playing at Tropicana Field is gaining an unsettling reputation around Major League Baseball. Players think the place is haunted.
Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy, an expert on the unexplainable, wrote in the paper's May 17 edition that Red Sox players are wary of the hotel. Shaughnessy coined the term "Curse of the Bambino" to describe his hometown club's inability to win the World Series since trading Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees after the 1919 season.
The writer didn't name the hotel, describing it only as "an old St. Petersburg joint where Babe Ruth stayed back in the days when the Yankees trained in Tampa." But the Renaissance Vinoy Resort & Golf Club is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is where most foes of the Rays bed down in St. Pete.
Sox manager Terry Francona warned his team's beat writers to "watch for the haunted rooms," before they flew to the Bay area for a recent three-game series with the Rays.
Scott Williamson, a Sox relief pitcher, swears a ghost at the Vinoy woke him from a sound sleep last season. "I was laying on my stomach and, all of a sudden, I couldn't breathe," Williamson told Shaughnessy. "There was this guy dressed in a 1920s, '30s-style staring at me." Phantom sightings at the Vinoy have attracted scant publicity hereabouts. Local newspapers have recounted ghost stories from two other grand dames of Pinellas County lodging, the Don CeSar Beach Resort and Spa on St. Pete Beach and the Belleview Biltmore Resort and Spa in Clearwater.
The Vinoy's public relations office, passing on a chance to scare up some interest in the hotel for the slow summer months, referred questions about apparitions to an outside publicist, who didn't get back to Coffee Talk before deadline.
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