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From Grove to Atom. Roy Collins, a middle-of-the-road Democrat who presides over this most active and restless of states, is one of the most interesting and effective governors in the U.S. today. He has his roots deep in the restful Old South. Although he is only 46, he grew up in a Florida as different from today's as the pinewoods around his native Tallahassee are from the palmy patios of the Miami Beach hotels. The Florida he remembers meant the jolt of a single-barreled shotgun on his shoulder and a bobwhite dropping through the yellow winter sunlight at the edge of a slash-pine grove. Or a 15-lb. turkey gobbler hurtling into a charge of No. 6 shot, and then falling through the Spanish moss on the oaks onto the dry palmettos below. Or the catfish, at his grandfather Brandon's farm, that stole his bait, sneaking off to its lair. Or how hot it was picking corn in the August sun.
Neither he nor Florida has left all that behind. The new Florida exists around, inside, over and under the old. Roy Collins these days walks to the governor's office from a stately old Tallahassee home, "The Grove," that has been in his wife's family for five generations; it was built in the 18205 by Governor Richard Keith Call, twice the territorial governor of Florida, the great-grandfather of the present governor's lady, Mary Call Darby Collins.
On the way, Roy Collins usually stops, as he did as a young lawyer 20 years ago, at a drugstore for coffee and a chat with the same friends he found there then. Once at his desk, Collins has to deal not only with today's Florida but with tomorrow's. He may have to attend a meeting of an agency that he sponsored, the Florida Development Credit Corp., to encourage the state's 234 banks to pool credit for new industries. Or he may hear, as he did recently, a report that a certain national corporate giant, deeply involved in atomic-energy development, is looking for a plant site in a town with a university atmosphere. That report sent Collins, an indefatigable salesman of his state boom, off to New York in a hurry.
Day after day, he deals calmly and skillfully with Florida politics, which carries into the atomic age the miasmic mist and the alligator snap of the deepest Florida swamp. The job keeps him busy. The other day, his 13-year-old daughter Mary Call asked him, "What's a lieutenant governor?" (the office does not exist in
Florida). When her father explained, she remarked: "Since you've been governor, what we've needed is a lieutenant daddy." A Matching Program. Thomas Le-Roy Collins' grandfather, a circuit-riding Methodist minister, came to Florida from Texas around 1870, died in a pulpit near Tallahassee. The governor's father ran a small grocery, later a wholesale grocery business. He did not have enough money to send his children to college, but he promised to match, dollar for dollar, whatever they earned and saved. "He was years ahead of Roosevelt," says Governor Collins, who deals these days with federal-state-aid fund-matching programs.