TALLAHASSEE, FLA. (WSVN) - Florida is remembering former Governor and U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, as constituents, loved ones and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle came to the state capital to say a heartfelt goodbye and express their gratitude for his decades of public service.
Graham was laid in state at the Old State Capitol building in Tallahassee, Friday.
7News cameras captured Graham’s body being brought in to the Capitol building.
Several mourners gathered the Old State Capitol building to pay their respects.
“What an amazing gentleman, who truly defined statesmanship,” said Doug Cook, a former official with the Lawton Chiles administration.
“He made himself available to every constituency,” said Wendy Walker, president of Leadership Florida.
Graham served as a two-term governor, taking the job as the state finally outgrew the 1845 Capitol building. After years in Washington and in the private sector, on Friday, he returned.
The former governor served not all that many years ago, yet in a very different era in American political life.
Graham first ran for statewide office. It was 1978, and he had a new idea: to take on the jobs of everyday Floridians.
“It really changed me, doing all those hundred jobs. I came out, I think, a genuine person, but a different person,” said Graham during an interview with 7News.
He fished marijuana out of the ocean with the U.S. Coast Guard, helped catch speeders with the Florida Highway Patrol, baked bread and shoveled manure.
“It was something that caught on,” said Graham.
All day long Friday, mourners queued up to pay their respects. Everyone, it seemed, had a Bob Graham story.
Wearing the cracker pin that symbolized Graham’s first gubernatorial campaign, Miami Lakes resident Anna Gray said he taught her Miami Carol City High School class back in the 1970s.
“He just was always very much like a father figure,” she said.
Gray said Graham surprised everyone by attending her class reunion in 2015.
“He stayed the entire evening, just like no time had passed,” she said.
“I’ve walked with him across parking lots where the parking attendant would run up and grab him, and just tell him how much it had meant to him, and he would stay there talking to him for as long as the person wanted to,” said Walker.
“He was the smartest, wittiest, quickest politician I’ve ever met,” said Cook.
Even residents remembered meeting the former governor.
“Oh, I did, absolutely,” said Chauncy Haynes, a Leon County resident. “And saw the little book that he would always take notes in, and acting like he knew everybody. It’s just an honor for me to be here today. It’s the least that I can do to be here to show my respect to the former governor.”
Among the mourners was former Florida Gov. Bob Martinez.
“He was a wonderful person to work with. Wonderful person, period, not just to work with, just a really great guy,” he said.
Gov. Ron DeSantis and his wife Casey also came to pay their respects.
Graham wrote several books, many of them on national intelligence, including one for children, “Rhoda the Alligator,” about a distinctly colored reptile.
Even among party fights, friends and supporters hope his message might still resonate.
“The building of a sense of empathy, and figuring out, ‘How do we do the most good for the most people, and how do we understand people where they are and value them for who they are?'” said Dr. Matthew Jacobs with the University of Florida’s Graham Center for Public Service. “That sort of embodied his approach to trying to know his fellow humans and to serve them in some way.”
Following the ceremony, he will be buried during a private family service. He will be laid to rest in a cemetery near the Florida Governor’s Mansion.
Graham passed away last week. He was 87 years old.
A more public memorial will be held in Miami Lakes sometime in May.
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