Fierce voice in Florida politics: Pat Frank retires at 91. She credits the nuns
Before she was a state lawmaker, Hillsborough County commissioner and court clerk, before she fought for Black students, gay rights and a hospital for the poor, and long before recent talk of naming a courthouse after her, Pat Frank did this:
She ran for office and lost. Then she lost again. And then again.
Now 91 and an icon in Florida politics, Frank tells this story when she speaks to young people. How during desegregation, she saw disparities in Black and white schools and decided she should be on the Hillsborough County School Board. And how it took her four tries to get there, once losing by 54 votes, in case anyone thought their vote didn’t count.
“You think you’re a three-time loser? Well, you’re looking at one,” Frank tells them. “You need to get back on the horse.”
She would know. After decades in sometimes bruising state and local politics, Democrat Frank retires Tuesday from her latest gig, a 16-year stint as Hillsborough County’s clerk of the courts.
Frank is “still going strong,” said Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren. “But I think she’s earned the right to step away.”
For her political longevity, Frank in part credits the nuns. Her family lived in Fort Lauderdale during World War II, when it was “loaded with sailors.”
When she was a teenager, her father thought it prudent to send her to convent schools.
“It structured my life,” she said.
She was the first and only woman in her class at the Georgetown University law school. There, she met Richard Frank — Dick to his friends — who became a labor lawyer and an appeals court judge.
Her path would be politics.
With two of her daughters in Tampa public schools in the 1960s, Frank saw schools for Black children with no running water in the bathrooms and textbooks heavy on pictures rather than words. But when she finally got elected to the School Board, she found some colleagues stubborn about change.
“Sometimes, I wondered what they did with their sheets during the daytime,” she said, a not-so-veiled reference to the Ku Klux Klan. Frank generally did not make you guess where she stood.
She ran for the state House of Representatives and was named the most effective first-term member. Two years later, she began her decade in the state Senate, the first woman nominated most respected senator. (She lost by one vote, she said.) There, she worked to establish living wills, organ donor notifications on driver’s licenses and funding for health examinations of rape victims, among other legislation.
In 1977, she unsuccessfully fought against a bill that prohibited gay people from adopting children. A frustrated Frank offered a sarcastic amendment to the legislation, suggesting they also forbid adoption to anyone who had committed adultery. The state’s gay adoption ban stood for 33 years before an appeals court struck it down as unconstitutional in 2010.
Frank’s support for gay rights, as well as the Equal Rights Amendment, routinely got her leafleted at evangelical churches on Sundays.
When Bob Buckhorn first came to Tampa, the city that would one day elect him mayor, he met Frank working alongside her on a campaign. He became like an adopted son in the Frank household. And he learned fast that when she had a cause, “she is relentless and will pursue it forever,” he said.
Her doggedness wasn’t always for the popular position.
“Pat didn’t mind being on the outside,” said former state education commissioner and former University of South Florida president Betty Castor.
These were pioneering times for women in Florida politics.
When Castor was chairwoman of the Hillsborough County commission in
1974, she made headlines after she was turned away from a luncheon at Tampa’s elite and then all-male University Club. Once, when Frank got a bill passed in Tallahassee remarkably quickly, a reporter asked in print who Frank might be “cuddling up in bed with,” she said. Frank ignored him.
In every campaign, including Frank’s unsuccessful run for Congress in 1996, she said her husband had her back.
“As many times as I lost, and I said, ‘I want to do it again,’ he was very supportive,” she said. He called her Patsy. She would joke back that she was no one’s patsy.
He favored Brooks Brothers Oxford cloth shirts but didn’t like how dry cleaning made them stiff. So when she was home from the state capital on weekends, she ironed for him, a way of supporting him for supporting her. Still, this was not a story you told up in Tallahassee.
Over time, Frank found the power of lobbyists in the Legislature maddening.
Back home, she got appointed to the board overseeing Tampa General Hospital, where she pushed to ensure it would keep serving the poor even as it morphed into a private nonprofit.
The County Commission declined to reappoint her to the hospital board, which she took as a rebuke. She ran for a commission seat in 1998 and won.
When Hillsborough’s court clerk planned to retire in 2004 after nearly two decades, Frank decided that was next.
After her years in bareknuckle politics, some were surprised she would want an administrative job. But she liked the idea of shaping an office rather than being one voice among many on a board.
By then, Frank was part of a deep bench of powerful female politicians in Tampa that included Castor, Sandy Freedman, Helen Gordon Davis, Fran Davin, Jan Platt and Pam Iorio. Frank had a reputation as a force. She made unwavering friends and some enemies, too.
“You didn’t want Pat as an adversary,” Buckhorn said. “But you were lucky if you could call her your friend.”
Doug Belden, the 66year-old Republican Hillsborough County tax collector who is also retiring, parked near Frank in the county garage. He said they would joke about putting their respective political party’s bumper stickers on each other’s cars.
“It was a very positive relationship,” he said. “I trust her explicitly. Whatever she said to me, you could take it to the bank.”
Mark Sharpe, who won Frank’s commission seat after she left, would sometimes walk into County Center with her. Frank would be balancing the latest political hardbacks she was reading, and during the holidays, pound cake she traditionally made for colleagues.
“At least the ones she liked,” he said.
Sharpe also remembers being a kid outside the new West Gate Library in the 1970s, when he’s pretty sure Frank was there to cut the ribbon.
“She’s always been around, giving us the strong, stable leadership we needed,” he said.
Over her years as clerk, the office went paperless, created a workforce with a majority of minority employees and established a minimum wage of $15 an hour.
When gay marriage became legal in Florida, Frank donned the judge’s robes that had belonged to her late husband, who died in 2012. She married dozens of couples en masse in the park outside the courthouse, waiving the threeday waiting period because she said they had waited long enough. Church bells rang, and people threw rice.
“We love you, Pat!” spectators called.
Harry Cohen, her general counsel before he recently won a seat on the County Commission, said that because of Frank’s age, people sometimes assumed she was not engaged in the daily business of the clerk’s office, that someone else made decisions. He would sort of chuckle.
“She does not go along to get along on anything,” Cohen said. “She makes up her own mind.”
In 2015, Kevin Beckner, who had been the county’s first openly gay commissioner, filed to run against Frank for clerk.
Such elections are usually dull affairs. This one got costly and contentious,
“full of bad blood and plenty of mudslinging,” the Tampa Bay Times said then.
Beckner was 45. Frank was 86. He said she had been an absentee administrator, a charge she strongly denied. He depicted her in a cartoon sitting in a lawn chair with a tropical drink in her hand — an image some thought implied she was too old.
“And that I was a lush,”
Frank said.
In a recent emailed response to the Times, Beckner said that issues raised in the campaign “got lost when we utilized cartoon imagery that was intended as humorous, political satire, but was instead misconstrued as a personal attack on Pat’s age.”
His campaign allegations came within weeks of the death of Frank’s oldest daughter, Tampa attorney and businesswoman Stacy Frank, a non-smoker who died from lung cancer at 61. The timing rankled many Frank supporters.
“It just hurt me,” Frank said. “He could have run a decent campaign and probably would have had a decent chance.” She beat him with nearly 59 percent of the vote.
“You can forgive,” she said after the election. “But it’s difficult to forget.”
Beckner said he met with her in 2017 to apologize
“for the hurt feelings and division that our election had caused between us and many of our mutual friends.” Frank said she did not remember an apology.
When she decided to retire, she looked for someone who could run to replace her.
“Everybody kept dropping out,” she said. “I was just frantic.”
Beckner ran again. In the August primary, he was beaten by Hillsborough County School Board member Cindy Stuart, who had endorsements from a number of high-profile public officials, including Frank.
In his email, Beckner said he has always recognized Frank as a trailblazer who shattered glass ceilings.
“Pat leaves behind some very large shoes to fill,” he wrote.
Couples still come up to Frank to tell her that she married them. Once, a man asked to see her at the Clerk’s Office. She was on the School Board back when it was mulling whether to expel him, he told her. But Frank voted no, and he wanted to say thank you. It is something she will remember.
“She just never got it out of her system” Castor said of Frank’s political longevity. “She just loves it. She loves that part of public service. She is compelled from the inside.”
Former Tampa mayor and retiring Big Brothers Big Sisters of America CEO Iorio noted that female candidates were few when Frank got started. “As she retires, we’re about to inaugurate a woman vice president,” she said. “It’s been quite a journey.”
At a December County Commission meeting, Cohen brought up the possibility of naming the courthouse at 419 Pierce St. in downtown Tampa after Frank. This was the building where public meetings were held when she was on the School Board, where the local legislative delegation gathered when she was a state lawmaker and where some of the clerk’s offices are housed.
“I think it would be the highest compliment I could receive,” said Frank. “Because so much of my history and my time was spent there.”
She wishes she had finished law school. Running for governor would have been fun, she says. She dislikes that COVID-19 means she hasn’t been able to meet in person with her staff of 700 to say goodbye. A pending lawsuit with her daughter Hillary Frank Aubin over a family business is painful.
She’ll be at her place near the beach more and spend time with her daughter Courtney Frank and rescue dog Daisy. She’ll read all those political books that piled up. Right now, it’s
Bob Woodward’s Rage, with one about climate change next on the stack. Maybe she’ll write a book of her own.
Her advice: Don’t stop trying.
“Learn to endure,” she said.