Sunday, October 11, 2009

Let's get the families straight, for a start. Craig Cates, the new mayor of Key West, is one of three children of Emma Cates, a second-generation Conch and a city commissioner between 1983 and 1987. Craig has uncles who served on the Utility Board and as sheriff.

Another Cates family in Key West (no relation that we know of) was most recently in the public eye when Paul Cates, who headed code enforcement a couple of decades ago, tried unsuccessfully to become city manager.

That family name has the bigger collection of Cates; among Paul's numerous siblings was the late Michael Cates, chief counsel for Historic Tours of America who served time following the Bubba Bust of 1985, and a sister, Antoinette, who married Frank McPherson and birthed Morgan, the departing mayor.

The Emma Cates clan is quite different from that tribe and the McPherson tribe as well. At Craig's victory party Tuesday night at the Conch Town Lounge (owned by Craig's son), there was much less testosterone flying around than at McPherson's victory party at Dante's downtown two years ago. Craig's party was dominated by delighted women.

McPherson, along with those other Cates and the Acevedos and the Swifts, tend to see themselves as úber-Conchs (from the Old High German for over and beyond). Swift's Historic Tours of America has historically been a good spot for them, for example the above-mentioned Antoinette McPherson, formerly the company's chief bean counter, and her son Ben, its chief counter today, and most recently, Randy Acevedo working on an HTA computer project.

The renewed ascendancy of the Emma clan and the newest Conch line-up of Cates, Weekley and Wardlow, as delivered by the election last week, gives us reason to anticipate a change in politics at City Hall. We anticipate a clean machine rather than a dream machine or a mean machine.

Here's how it happened for Solares Hill on Tuesday night. At the Conch Town Lounge, just along the boulevard from Wendy's, we awaited the arrival of the victorious candidate for mayor. The movie-like atmosphere was as bright as "La Dolce Vita" and about as exclusive -- those cries of "We won! "We did it!" were not necessarily employing "we" in the all-inclusive sense.

Solares Hill was the first to meet Craig Cates as he stepped from the car. Campaigner Mike Gallagher had cell-phoned him to make sure that would happen. Mike's account of his day since dawn, on the phone with campaign manager Bob Morgan and praying for a sweep while preparing for a run-off, had become especially entertaining now that the silver-haired victor himself was here at last, to be greeted by a mob of family and friends.

"Did you know all along you'd win by 50.5 percent?" was the first thing I asked Cates.

"Yes," he said. "I did. We turned the corner when you started saying nice things in Solares Hill."

We did not ask him the question of the hour, which is what he felt his mother might have been thinking right then. The late Emma Cates, with her Cuban heritage, was by all accounts a fascinating character. Instinctively conservative, she was also a passionate astrologer and had a health-food store on Duval Street. As a commissioner (during the mayoral terms of Richard Heyman and Tom Sawyer) she was pro-development; one of the restaurants at the controversial Reach Resort, developed by Austin Laber, was called Emma's.

She was a person who tempered love with discipline and in the early 1980s she told Solares Hill concerning her two sons and her daughter, "I tried to make each one feel special and important. You should never give your children guilt or put them down. They need a lot of reassurance and love."

Our guess is that Emma, who died at the age of 76 in August, 2001, is as happy as she can be about her boy's popular win.

Things change so fast. Wednesday's city commission meeting was a big goodbye to the mayor, to retiring Commissioner Bill Verge and to the interim commissioner, Joe Pais.

How the dais will look now is that each commissioner gets to move in toward the center from either side; the new commissioners, Weekley and Wardlow, will get the wing seats.

McPherson's family was present on Wednesday and his daughter led the pledge of allegiance very well.

His campaign slogan had been "from start to finish," but is Morgan finished? His wife Christina walked to the podium and spoke, with a catch in her throat, "as a citizen and the wife of someone truly committed, truly engaged. The heart of this man is public service ... The heart of this man is love...."

"For that," murmured the mayor, "you might just get lucky tonight."

We feel that Morgan and his friends have, all along, been positioning him for some bigger-paying role in Tallahassee, and who knows but this kind of remark in public about his wife may be just the kind of thing to keep him in the running. It's a likeable kind of crazy.

Public-service sentiments poured from City Manager Jim Scholl and from City Attorney Shawn Smith, who told the mayor, "Most people don't realize the sacrifice, the level of responsibility required on a day-by-day basis. Morgan, you were there every day."

Smith said farewell to Commissioner Verge with a slide show starring a cutout of Verge in a variety of preposterous positions (Truman Annex guard; lurking at Parking Collections; hanging out at Lopez headquarters).

Al Sullivan of Last Stand, a regular attendee at commission meetings, was also funny at Verge's expense. "Mr. Verge once served on the Last Stand board as a troublemaker," he said. "As a commissioner, it was all chickens and ships. What happened?" Sullivan concluded that Verge was "a wise older voice" who's done "a lot of good work sitting in that chair," where "it's not easy and you take a lot of abuse."

Said Commissioner Mark Rossi, calling Verge Bill Vandy: "You sunk a ship. You took the chickens on. Arm and arm with us you crashed a gate. When tempers are tight, you were always there, man." To the mayor, Rossi said: "Morgan, my brother! Man, I love you! Thank you, brother."

Commissioner Gibson commended the mayor for always giving everyone ample time to speak, sometimes too much time. Commissioner Teri Johnston praised McPherson for his skill. "One would be hard-pressed," she said, "to find a gentleman who can run a meeting better than Morgan." Verge she praised for bringing common sense to city government.

McPherson himself called Verge "one wise guy" of "tremendous heart and spirit" who "speaks so well, so soft, so sweet."

McPherson's young daughter listened intently in the audience, enthralled by all this.

Another regular attendee at meetings, Christine Russell, told the mayor, "We're going green because of you!" She invited him to "come on around to this side and take shots at the people in the big brown chairs."

All the commissioners and the mayor thanked Joe Pais for serving in District 3 following the departure of Commissioner Dan Kolhage for the mainland. Verge put it this way: "This man really understands grammar and he corrected me so many times."

McPherson kept it snappy. "A good long story is a better short story," he said. He was "truly grateful" for the experience of being mayor and recalled that, "When I started, I literally had no idea what I was getting into."

Commissioner Clayton Lopez, returning with a big majority to his District 6 seat, actually sang his farewell to McPherson from where he sat.

Solo and unaccompanied, Lopez sang in a gospel-like chant, "I'll always remember..."

It was a kind of psalm, personal and provocative, deeply blue.

"How do I say goodbye to what I have?"

mhowell@keysnews.com