Tampa Tribune: 1970 meeting with Mayor Dick Greco--with whom I graduated from HHS-- to discuss equal opportunity for women in the city's employ. We emphasized jobs such as police officer that women were shut out of. NOW, under my committee of equal-employment-opportunity, filed charges with the US Justice Department and the EEOC that opened the police and sheriff's departments to women.

Women who now serve in those positions are so young that they don't know how a few women opened those doors for them in the '70's. Dick Greco takes credit, of course. He was a jerk in high school and is still a jerk. lee

'Hooper@sptimes.com'; 'Tom Gonzalez'

'stein@sptimes.com'; 'tobin@sptimes.com'; 'Howard'; 'helenhuntley@sptimes.com'; 'billmaxwell@sptimes.com'; 'ptash@sptimes.com'; 'brown@tampatribune.com'; 'steveotto@tampatribune.com'; 'danruth@tampatribune.com'; 'Msbornwriter@aol.com'; 'jhill@sptimes.com'; 'palmer@tampatribune.com'; 'William Birdsall'; 'amanteiga@lagacetanewspaper.com'; 'pmanteiga@lagacetanewspaper.com'; 'president@hcbar.com'; 'doretha.edgecomb@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; 'candy.olson@sdhc.k12.fl.us'; april griffin; 'susan.valdes@sdhc.k12.fl.us'

Hooper, imagine my surprise to run across your Times bio and discover you are a black guy.

I have been sending all my spare money to the black guy running for president. He's prettier than you, has great teeth, a wonderful wife, and two enchanting little girls.

but I see you are big. That's a plus. It beats pretty and shiny teeth in moments of peril.

A big guy like you could face down the Hillsborough board attorney, Tom Gonzalez, who got the job 14 years ago without competition from that ass Earl the Pearl Lennard. I want you to ask Tom how he has the nerve to refuse to send me the public information I have requested from him repeatedly about his relationship with the board. The sunshine law says he should. Tom thinks he does not have to because he passed the bar exam, however ingloriously.

I bet every lawyer in HIllsborough County is mad at Tom and his greedy firm for snatching that cushy board job without competition that the equal-opportunity laws demand. Tom knows about the equal-opportunity laws. His firm of Sizemore etc. is labor lawyers the specialty of which is ripping off workers for Simon-Legree employers.

I see you are married. Don't think I am not capable of enlightening Mrs. Hooper about the seductions of La Belle Dame sans Merci Board Chair Faliero whom you wrote a gushing puff piece about. Never underestimate the power of wives and mothers to straighten out the world. Our heads up probably saved you from ending up on the slag heap of La Belle Dame Faleiro's discarded admirers. We would have found you in the wilds of Lutz or Seffner bewildered and palely loitering in some sedge patch like the ones such as Keats describes for us.

I once wrote the CEO of Xerox's wife to tell her about the local Xerox satyrs' demanding sex from the female reps the company hired to coincide with Title's VII's requirements. I told Mrs. CEO Xerox what was going on down here in Tampa. All of a sudden, a team of Xerox headquarters lawyers descended on the local inflamed Xerox sexist louts, fired half dozen, and sent as many to Coventry.

We women don't follow the rules the fellows devised. Why should we? We had nothing to do with making the rules, so we feel no compunction in evading them. Not long ago, I met the mother of one of these Xerox young women relieved of solicitation for sex from the office louts who thanked me on her daughter's behalf. She said the young woman had gone on and made a successful career in the company. I told her if her daughter had any more guff from the local Xerox sexists to write Mrs. CEO Xerox for help. The sisterhood is powerful and exists in odd milieus.

I do not try to blackmail you with the following request, Hooper. I merely point out for your information the breadth and height of my ethical confines. If I didn't sign off on it, I don't have any allegiance to it. I feel the same way about the Council of Trent. We need to renegotiate it with at least half women at the table to balance the liturgical sexists.

Big as you are, you can without fear approach Tom Rip-off-Workers Gonzalez and ask him how he justifies defying the public-records law. Also ask board members. I asked them all to tell their employee Tom to obey the law. They pretended they didn't hear me. In particular, ask Ms. Edgecomb why she ignores the equal-opportunity laws that aim to give women and minorities a level playing field in employment and the public-record law that makes possible citizens' knowing what is going on behind closed doors in their government so that they can holler about political skullduggery.

Ms. Edgecomb is black. She is the board token Aunt Tom. I thought, by the way, that Mr. Maxwell was the token black at the SPTimes until I saw your picture. I had inferred that a token black was all the SPTimes would tolerate under its venerable Affirmative Action Plan for dumb white men.

Write an above-the-fold ditty on Tom's disobeying both the equal-opportunity laws and the public-records laws. You will delight every lawyer in the area--all of whom are too gutless to challenge Tom on his lack of ethics while they simmer about its results of shutting them out from applying for the cushy job of school-board attorney. What contemptible legal puppies they are.

As well as I can tell without the financial data about which I have asked Tom and about which he has stonewalled, his firm of Sizemore and the legal cormorants that comprise the firm have made--with adding in the court-room crucifixion of Doug Erwin for whistle-blowing waste of money in the school-building department--about ten million dollars in their fourteen years at the public trough. That's enough feeding there for those rapacious Sizemore et al greedy guts. I have repeatedly told the board that it should fire Tom et al, advertise the job, and give other attorneys a whack at applying for it.

lee drury de cesare leedrurydecesarescasting-roomcouch.blogspot.com