By Katlynn Mullins
Of the 50 authors who spoke at Saturday’s Tampa Bay Times Festival of Reading, Art Levy guessed that he would be the least known.
He’s been a print journalist since 1984. He’s a former writer for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and is now an associate editor at the business magazine Florida Trend.
At the Herald-Tribune, Levy wrote profiles and feature stories involving several interviews. Over time, he said, he realized that he wasn’t writing about the person, but his perception of the person.
Levy’s book, “Made in Florida: Artists, Celebrities, Activists, Educators and Other Icons in the Sunshine State,” is written in the icons’ own words. It features 90 people from the state.
He didn’t have to do any writing, but he did conduct the interviews and do much of the research beforehand.
“Iconic is hard to define,” Levy said.
But he looked for people who were successful in what they did.
During his presentation on Saturday, Levy read excerpts from interviews he did for the book. One subject was Lucy Morgan, an investigative journalist at the Tampa Bay Times who won a Pulitzer Prize.
Early in her career, she said, she would sometimes take her small children when there was a breaking story and no one was around to babysit.
“I had people call me and ask me to meet them in Steinhatchee on the bridge at midnight,” Morgan told Levy. “And I’d say, ‘How about the courthouse steps at noon?’”
Some “good old boys” presumed that women had no brain, Morgan said. In her case, they’d presume it until it was too late.
At one point, she was in Tallahassee and growing weary of covering state government.
She got a call from a law enforcement official who said the sheriff in Gulf County in the Florida Panhandle was sexually abusing female prisoners, and a prosecutor didn’t want to prosecute him.
Morgan went to Gulf County, conducted interviews and wrote stories. The sheriff was eventually charged, convicted and sentenced to more than four years in prison.
In the end, 22 women testified they had been mistreated.
Back in her office in Tallahassee, Morgan received a dozen roses with a card that read, “From the women you believed.”
Levy also talked to Nan-Yao Su, an entomologist and inventor of the Sentricon termite bait system.
He studied insects instead of biology, he said, because “you don’t see blood.”
“Children are very sensitive,” Su said.
They pay attention to the same things as their parents. “If you really want your children to pay attention to STEM and science, the parents have to as well,” he said.
A crowd favorite from Saturday was “Alligator Ron” Bergeron, a flamboyant alligator wrestler.
He has a resort in the Big Cypress swamp, and he lets charities conduct auctions for the opportunity to spend the weekend with him.
“I introduce them to the beautiful Everglades,” Bergeron said. “I always tell them, ‘If you want me to rassle an alligator, I’ll rassle one.’”
One group took him up on it.
During the fight, Bergeron said, he was bitten by the alligator. The tour group, thinking it was part of the show, began cheering and clapping.
Bergeron won the fight and put the alligator on the shoreline.
“Come on, let’s take a few pictures,” Bergeron said. “Then I’m going to go to the hospital to get my fingers sewed back on.”
“Made in Florida” is Levy’s first book. Altogether, he interviewed about 110 people and included 90 in the book. He had 95,000 words to tell Florida’s history and said he couldn’t feature everyone he spoke to.
“These are stories of the people,” Levy said. “But they’re also stories of Florida.”
