Cathy McCann
Interviewed by Greg Bush July 24, 1999
Greg Bush: I’d like to start with a couple of general questions and go back in your life a little bit. Could you describe why you continue to live in South Miami and what you feel about preserving its past?
Cathy McCann: Well that is kind of a hard question. Living in Florida was not my number one choice in the world. However, I married and we moved here and raised our family. I think wherever you live you have room to care about what happens. I have thoroughly enjoyed living in South Miami. It is a very unique place. You have all the pleasures of a small town; to go to the bank on a Friday afternoon its takes you two hours because you meet everybody you know. And yet you have all the advantages of a big city. You are so close to everything. I think we all want to leave for our children what we like best about Miami. What we found to be the best way to raise our children we hope that our children will do the same.
GB: Let’s go back in time if we can. I gather you come from Maine, a bit different from here.
CM: A whole lot different from here and it took some time getting used to for me. The heat particularly because when we came down here in 1961 AC was not as prevalent as it is now. I can remember going to restaurants in the Gables with no air. You had to ask please turn on the air.
GB: What town did you grow up in Maine?
CM: Portland, which is a seaport. It’s the largest city in Maine. The population was around 80,000. I think it had more people than Miami did at the time.
GB: What can you tell us about your parents?
CM: My mother was from Canada and my Father from Massachusetts. He was a carpenter. I was the middle child of 9 children. So I had plenty of company growing up. We lived near a gorgeous park that just so happened to be given to the city by James Deering, the founder of Viscaya. So I kind of felt that I had come from one of his contributions to another. This is one of the reasons that I liked where I live now by Dante Fascell Park. It has been a great way to grow up and my children have enjoyed it. Interestingly enough my children have looked for places near parks. I guess parks and open spaces have played a big part in our family’s lives.
GB: What about your father’s background? Did his family come over to this country?
CM: My mother’s family came from Ireland and Scotland and my husband’s family came from England and they are both first generation. My father’s family has been here for quite a while. I don’t know too much about my father’s family because my grandmother and grandfather separated when my father was young and she took the children and moved to Canada. I think my father’s family was mostly city people. My mother was from a farm. In fact we went back to Canada to visit the farm where she was raised which was 500 acres with beautiful trees but they don’t farm it any more.
GB: Could you tell us a little about your education?
CM: I spent time in schools in Portland where I went to high school. And I went to college in Kalamazoo Michigan. I went to the Baptist connected college. It was a Liberal Arts College. I graduated from there and took some graduated classes at Michigan State and Western Michigan and taught school in Michigan for four years. I taught US history and government and one course in Michigan history, which I thought was very interesting. I went back to Portland and taught at Southport high school for about two years. Until I was married and then we came down here. My husband graduated from the University of Miami. He does not like cold weather. So after having experienced UM he decided he was going to come live down in South Florida.
GB: Where was he from originally?
CM: He was from Maine. So it was a big change for him. I never really worked outside the home after I was married. We had three children and were originally married in 1960. We lived first in West Miami and we wanted a bigger house. My husband worked in the gables so we drew a little circle and he said this is how far I’ll drive. So we had friends that happened to live two houses down from where we lived so we were familiar with the area and liked it. So when this house became available we were ready to move and very happily. That was 1970. At that time Florida had passed what we called the Planners Relief Act which said that all municipalities had to have a comprehensive plan. When the city of South Miami was publishing their first plan, I immediately went to get a copy because I wanted to know what was planned to go around my area. I read about the plan in the newspaper. I looked and saw that they didn’t seem to be doing any great damage to the neighborhood. That is how I first became interested in city government. There was a proposed zoning change in the neighbor, which I felt would not be beneficial to the neighborhood so this is how I first became interested. I think everyone should be interested because you need to know not only what government is going to do for you but what they are going to do to you. So then I served on the environmental review board and then the commercial development board and some other committees. I never thought that I would run for office. That was the furthest thing from my mind. Then an opportunity came up. Someone had resigned his or her seat on the commission and I thought why not. I would do it because I thought I could do as good a job as anyone else.
GB: What did that mean in terms of raising campaign funds?
CM: I never really raised too much money. I ran a grass roots campaign. I’m no good at asking people for money for a campaign because it carries a certain obligation. And I’ve never been one to think that I was obligated to any one person. In fact, one person on the first campaign I ran said, “she thinks she is going to win this race with her sewing circle. And that is basically what we did. I had a lot of people that were willing to work for me.
GB: Do you think that the question of the influence is a real problem in our culture generally?
CM: I think it is. I think the cost of campaigns has gotten way out of hand. When I ran for mayor I didn’t raise that much. But when you win, it’s very easy to raise money because people you don’t know are willingly to contribute money. There is a certain expense, mailing and so forth, which has gotten to be higher than it was. But it used to be that you could run a campaign for less than $5,000, which or course was a sizable amount of money at that time to. I ran and served a two-year term and I was twice mayor. After that I decided that I didn’t want to run again. I didn’t particularity like what was happening in the city and was mad that I was the one person keeping the balance and thought maybe it was time for me to not run and just keep interested from the side. Which I did.
GB: Could you assess the political culture when you first came in?
CM: Well we were not partisan and fortunately it kept that way. I was disappointed in the last election to see parties come in. Parties are really irrelevant in a city this size. South Miami is only 10,000 people. What I have observed in the last 20 years is the fact that Republicans are extremely tight on the city level with money and so are Democrats so there is no real difference with parties when your at the municipal level. You would really have a hard time knowing what party some is in on the city level from their actions. I am a registered Republican and have been all my life. I often don’t vote that way and yet if you were to look at my voting record you would swear that I was a Democrat. I’ve just always been interested in social issues and human issues. The important thing to me is a person’s quality of life. If you can enjoy your life and you have the things that you need to have an enjoyable life which is a house, money you do have to have enough to feed your family and live. This is why I’m so interested in habitat for humanity. Those are the things that are important to me.
GB: Do your Republican roots go back to Maine?
CM: I think so because Maine was a Republican state. You just keep those things that you grew up with.
GB: Did you meet Margaret Chase Smith?
CM: Yes I had the honor of having lunch in the Senate lunchroom with her. I was a senior and chosen as the outstanding girl from the state of Maine and went to Washington and meet with Harry S. Truman who I was most impressed with. I’ve been very fortunate to have met Truman and JFK, Nixon. One of the people I have the greatest respect for is President Carter. I met with because I’ve been active with Habitat for Humanity. So Margaret Smith was quite a woman. I remember her very fondly.
GB: Would you say she was sort of a role model for you?
CM: I never thought of going into politics but the thing is my mother always taught us we could do whatever you want to do. But we had an obligation that when we left this world you had better leave it a better place than when you came.
GB: Who were some of the most significant leaders in Miami when you first started in politics?
CM: I think Jack Block was mayor for a number of years and did a lot of wonderful things. He was a person that people had strong emotions about. You either thought he was great or terrible. But Jack did an awful lot in the city particularly in the black areas. He worked very hard as mayor and he was a judge before hand. There were many times we didn’t agree but I always respected and appreciated what he had done for the community. Jean Willis was there. She had been a commissioner for 20 years. She was very strong. Ed Corley, who also was a commissioner for 20 years, I never served with because he had retired before I was elected. Somebody whom I learned a great deal from was Bill Hampton. He served as assistant county manager when Ray Goode was mayor during the golden age of Dade County. I always believed that this is the time when the county had the best government anybody had seen here. These were wonderful people who were well-trained professionals. This was the time when they were redoing things at Metro, like planning and zoning, and they did some wonderful things.
GB: Did you make friends with these people and have you kept them up?
CM: I didn’t socialize with many of them. Bill Hampton I still talk to but I certainly would not define them as friends but certainly friendly. Sometimes John Fletcher would come to the office and I always had a great deal of respect for him.
GB: Could you tell us a little about first meeting Sylva Martin?
CM: I don’t remember when I first met her. I met her through the city and I valued her because of her knowledge. Sylva had a wonderful mind. She had been city clerk for a long time. She and her family came here in the early 1900’s and she still lived in the same place. I just knew her through the years. I became a friend of Sylva’s. We developed a good friendship. I along with a couple of other people was instrumental in getting her into a good nursing home. On her 90th birthday we had a wonderful surprise party for her which she didn’t want. So I told her we weren’t going to do anything but I said how about we have a pioneer day. So she looked up all these people in South Miami that were here when she first came here. She invited to them to this wonderful pioneer day that we were having but she didn’t know it was for her birthday celebration. I had to learn all these names and what they did way back when. All these stories I had to memorize so she really believed that we were going to have a pioneer day. This is where I learned everything I know about South Miami was from Sylva. She was such a well grounded person in the city that even the commission couldn’t fire her. She took a sabbatical to Switzerland and was on a ship returning to the US when they fired her. They couldn’t do it with her here. She never went back into city hall until Jack Block invited her to come. She used to come to every commission meeting and made sure that they did things correctly. She was wonderful.
GB: Do you thing she is as responsible as anybody else for deepening the sense of community history in South Miami.
CM: Definitely and she did it with such fascinating stories about women chewing tobacco and all these little stories. When we first came here in 1960 the government had an office for Indians of Sunset Drive. It was not unusual to see Indians from the Everglades coming in for various things. They used to in the earlier part of the South Miami history; they would come into the grocery store and trade their alligator hides for food and so on. But when we first moved to South Miami, downtown South Miami was entirely different. We as a city tried to develop something in the city to allow the neighborhoods to live with the development. And this is difficult to do. Also we have a problem with traffic and circulation. The city, if it was to become a Dadeland mall, would not be a pleasant place to live. We had to look at the city and see what we could do to keep a good balance of taxes and yet not jeopardize the quality of life for the residents. So we went to a hometown plan. Where it would be pedestrian friendly and people would be encouraged to go from one store to another rather than destination shopping. I personally am very disappointed in the Shops at Sunset because I believe it is a destination. People go to the shops and don’t go the shops around it. It doesn’t feed the hometown plan. It doesn’t encourage people to get out and walk. Part of the plan was that you would have arcades and therefore be shaded from the sun. Which is the big thing down here. People come here for the sun but don’t want to be out in it. It is a very ironic thing. Unfortunately the shops are very uninviting. The signs are too large, the place is too difficult to get into, the parking and getting out is a difficult thing particularly for those of us who live here. Maybe others find it pleasant, if they want a destination type thing. When we first became acquainted with Sunset the shopping area truly was a hometown. You had dry cleaners, barber shops, appliance stores, beauty shops. South Miami has always had a lot of beauty shops. I’m not sure if we have a lot of ugly people or if it’s just convenient for others to get here, but we’ve always had a large amount of beauty shops. You could go to the bookstore or Oscar’s, Joe’s News. You wouldn’t have to go any place else. Now our shopping has become quite high end and I believe that is because of the economics that surrounds us. Now I believe there is more of a specially type of store, which is odd. We used to have a ten-cent store. I don’t see the future of downtown South Miami as very positive. If you were to say that everyone was going to have a parking lot on his or her store then no one is going to go from point A to B. You just park your car at the business you want to go to and don’t walk around.
GB: Did you go to the charette and the whole process and do you remember about first hearing about the charette and your first reaction to it?
CM: My first reaction to it was negative. I still don’t think it is as productive as people say it is. Zoning and planning is the most important thing that a city can do. If it is done correctly it guarantees your economic base, the quality of life, solves traffic problems and puts your parking in place. If you don’t have good planning and zoning you don’t have a good city. People say well you need development for money but there is a balance. If you have too much development and the city uses all of its resources to maintain that development, they single family whether they are renting or buying and the apartment dweller can’t afford to live. You can’t run a city without any development but there has to be a very careful balance. People who say they need development for taxes, all they have to do is look at cities that are over developed and most of them have money problems. Unfortunately people aren’t interested in zoning until it is too late. They don’t want to know about planning until the gas station is built across the street from them. Then they blame the elected officials. Instead they should have been looking at the plan for the station. Once something’s built you can’t it off the books. I was disappointed in the charette because there were too many realtors, developers, speculators, and too many people who had large economic stakes. I don’t thing there were enough everyday citizens. Sometimes you get carried away at a charette talking about pie in the sky. I think that there are good things about charettes and bad things and I think that the elected officials have to recognize that. You need time to stop and take time and look at plans and decisions sometimes. Like any instrument of planning you have to use it wisely.
GB: What was your relationship with some of the planners like Victor Dover and Liz Plater-Zyberk?
CM: I had the good fortune to meet with Liz on one occasion, dealing with the Bakery Center. The Bakery Center was doomed to failure because of the way it was planned. I was not there at the beginning. What happened was there was this wonderful ambitious project that was going to get done and then it kept changing. It didn’t come out like it was supposed to. It wanted to be open to the public and it wasn’t. There were just too many people offering changes and the developer, to accommodate, kept going along with the changes. And poor Victor Dover. I know him; he goes to the same church I go to. He is getting a lot of credit for things he didn’t do, and they are all negative. The Shops at Sunset, in no way conforms to the hometown plan. Which has been bastardized along the way. The commission that was in office screwed it up. First of all I don’t think they knew what the hometown plan was. One of the difficult things about being an elected official is that there is no time to do your homework. The people that are making these decisions have no idea what the planning and zoning codes and master plans are. You just want to say how can you just not excuse yourself from voting because you just don’t know what you are talking about. Yet at the same time it is difficult for a newly elected official to know everything. These are part time jobs. And these developers bring their high powered attorneys and their traffic researchers and swear up and down there will be no traffic problems. You have 20 well-paid professional and the cards are really stacked against you. You don’t have the resources they have. You don’t have the specialized knowledge and your being told they’re truthful and honest and sometimes you just have to say your wrong. I think sometimes these master plans are screwed up sometimes when there are too many architects. Because architects are wonderful people who look at things and just ask what is the best thing I can build. A developed comes in and says what is the most that I can build. When I looked at zoning I would always ask what is the worst that someone can do with these criteria. Because that is usually what you get.
GB: When were you elected mayor what do you remember of the election and the process?
CM: 1990. There was no incumbent. Bill Cordy had left the country. The city was not in a particularly good state. I had been on the commission for four years prior. Unfortunately we didn’t have a professional city manager in South Miami at that stage. We did finally choose Bill Hampton who was a wonderful manager and he stayed there the whole time I was there as mayor. We were just beginning to get back. About 5 years before I became mayor the city was in bad financial shape. We had to borrow money to meet the payroll. We had gone through a number of city managers. The city was on its way back. The other person running for mayor was Dan Brown, who I had served on the commission with. From my point of view it was a relatively clean election. I don’t recall any particular animosity between Dan and myself. It was always questions of black and white and man and woman. I always felt that those questions were unimportant. The key issue was growth and control. I think people felt I would control development. I just always thought what kind of place I would like to live in. I think that South Miami is a relatively good place to campaign. I ran unopposed in the 1992 election. And the 1994 election, which I lost, was a dirty election.
There were a lot of lies and stories and things that weren’t true that were spread. It was a matter of development and the degree that we would allow it to happen. Neil Carter was my opponent. He was committed to 8 story buildings and I was committed to 4. It seemed that more developers supported him. The ones in the Sunset and 62 avenue area and the hospital. The hospital has always been a problem in the city of South Miami. It almost ruined the area until we stood firm on it one year and said; this is it you’re not getting any bigger. And I guess hospitals are an animal that must expand or they fail. IF you happen to be around a hospital then you are in trouble. Baptist had a lot of land around their hospital and they are still having trouble. South Miami hospital has always been active in South Miami politics. They will tell you different but they have always been pro-development. They must get bigger or else they will fall by the wayside. To this day it is still a problem and continue to be.
GB: In what way does UM figure into local politics?
CM: We have been fortunate that UM is there. Some of the people who wrote our charter were UM people. We have a lot of UM people who live in South Miami and have always been kind about offering their expertise to the city. I would say for the most part the city and the university have been good friends over the years. But the university has always been kind to the city.
GB: Talk about the changing political role of the African-American community in South Miami.
CM: I have never paid any issue to the black-white issue. I have many friends in the black community that supported me. And there were some that didn’t. On two occasions I was in a race against a black candidate and in neither did I feel that race was an issue. I think that some people try to make it an issue but it is more manufactured than it is real. I’m currently serving on the public relations board for the city because I believe some people make that an issue. As there are some that like to make an issue out of the Hispanic-black-white conflict. I was the first woman mayor, but so what. I served with women on the commission. As far as I’ve know there have always been women in South Miami government. I don’t care what the numbers of blacks and Hispanics are on the commission. I think it is a very devious and very ugly thing when people try to make race an issue. I have found that the overwhelming majority of people in South Miami don’t care. There are real social problems in the black area and Jack Block was the first to address that issue. One thing that I am very proud of is the health center that I helped open while I was mayor. I also introduced habitat for Humanity to the city of South Miami about ten years ago. And if you were to look at that area the houses we built there look as good today as they did back then. It helps the person who lives in the house and it upgrades the community. It gives the people who worked on those houses because we have not only put money into it but also our sweat. You put a personal interest into it. You want that house to stay painted. I see a very positive change in the community. I think unfortunately politicians have used the blacks over the years for their own gain. I have great fear of the new CRA which has been developed strictly for developers and not for the quality of life for the people that live there. That area is one of the geographic best areas around. First of all it doesn’t flood. During Andrew they didn’t even lose electricity. That area is the highest point around. Wonderful location, close to metrorail and just a really unique place. If you were to go to Murray park on the hottest day of the year, you’d feel a breeze. I can remember that around the park there used to be rows of shotgun shacks. Now you’re hard pressed to find one. You will find houses that aren’t well kept. But most people that own their houses, and there are a lot, they keep their houses very nice. They may not be expensive home but they are well kept. It is a very nice area.
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