Sunshine hero

Way back up in a bayfront house on the northeastern lip of Fort Myers Beach where the young Lee Melsek once romped — not far from the place his mother offered lemonade to a chain gang of criminals she took for solid citizens, about 200 yards from the hotel where he met the famous American novelist James Jones, just down a dead-end lane from The Beached Whale, a bar where Mr. Melsek still appears regularly at cocktail hour — sits an empty rocking chair.

The chair is his, given to him on the occasion

of his retirement from The News-Press

in 2005 after a 32-year career as the most revered and feared investigative reporter in the region ever to insist that the business of government is public business.

Now 66, a cancer survivor undiminished by the experience, he lives in the comfortable home that surrounds the chair with his long-time companion, Sandy Suter. But he spends little time sitting around rocking.

Instead, Mr. Melsek is putting out the

monthly community newspaper Tidelines,

under the auspices of the Fort Myers Beach Civic Association (see www.FMBcivic.org). And that means his readers are going to get real news, not chamber-of-commerce-speak from the prickly Mr. Melsek, whose reporting roots spring from the soil of the toughest and most honest in American journalism.

“My dad and mom were big newspaper readers — there were always newspapers around our house,” he recalls. “I grew up reading Jimmy Breslin out of New York, and Mike Royko who started as an investigative reporter and became a columnist in Chicago.”

Mr. Melsek’s philosophy about journalism is neither quaint nor facile, but it might be considered romantic — and it also comes from Chicago, the city where he was born before his parents immigrated to the Beach in the 1940s.

“An old Chicago Daily News editor once said, ‘The purpose of newspapers is to tell the truth and raise hell,’ he recalls. “I’ve always believed that.’”

Since he’s now the “chief,” as he used to call his own editors, he’s still doing news the old-fashioned way — by asking officials to open everything they do to public scrutiny, and then questioning their actions.

It’s hell-raising and involvement all in one.

“I try to be involved. This is my home town, this is where I grew up. I care about it,” he admits.

He and the Civic Association Board on which he serves have helped clean up numerous open-dumpster and ugly-sign code violations on the Beach, and they were adamant in resisting what was arguably a 5-mile-long boondoggle that he describes as “Commissioner Ray Judah’s ridiculous Rolls Royce renourishment program.”

It’s all in the blood, and Mr. Melsek’s probably doesn’t run red. More likely, it runs sunshine.

“I don’t know if you ever retire completely from writing or journalism,” he says. “It was something I knew I would have to do from the time I was a boy, and I did it. I worked pretty hard at it.”

Pretty hard was hard enough to change the face of public records laws not only in Southwest Florida, but throughout the state.

Although the Florida legislature created landmark open records statutes in 1967, establishing the Sunshine State as a national leader in making government accountable to people, it wasn’t quite that easy on the front lines.

“By the early to mid-1970s you still had a big fight — there were thousands of records officials didn’t want to open to anybody,” Mr. Melsek recalls.

After the Gannett Company bought The News-Press in 1971, however, three aggressive editors arrived who were determined to make public the business of government.

With Mr. Melsek and his colleagues leading the charge in news stories, they hired two young lawyers, Steve Carta and Wilbur Smith (who later served as mayor of the City of Palms) to take on the powers that be.

Among the most noteworthy legal fights was Wisher v. News-Press Publishing Co., in 1975. County Administrator Lavon Wisher sought to keep personnel records of employees out of the sunshine and away from the eyes of the public.

“We got the courts of Florida to rule that those are public records,” Mr. Melsek says. And that changed everything.

There were other cases too, which reflected Mr. Melsek’s ideas about the profession of journalism, and the larger right of every citizen to know what government is doing.

“The government created the sunshine and public records law because, it said, the business of government is the public’s business,” he insists.

“The public owns that government. Everything that government does should be open — transparent.”

Mr. Melsek isn’t making such pronouncements from his rocking chair. But it remains a silent testament to his authority as a Sunshine hero.

Painted obsidian black, the chair is inscribed with hundreds of names and words written in gold paint across the high back and broad seat. The words, a rough mix of story titles and quotations, stretch out along the arms and runners of the chair, crowding even the undersides of the wood. They’re cramped and huddled like big-party celebrants massed in a small room, filling any space that offers itself, no matter how pinched.

The words celebrate stories Mr. Melsek wrote as an investigative reporter and fierce defender of government in the sunshine — stories that changed the face of Lee County and Southwest Florida.

Inscriptions recall politicians who went to jail, or public policies that were changed or discarded because of his stories. They recall people he rescued from unjust imprisonment, or from the abuse of tyrants hired as wards of mental patients, or from the chicanery of con-artists disguised as upstanding business men, or from the mistreatment of corrupt police officers.

Written somewhere on the chair are five short words that Mr. Melsek sometimes trotted out for less experienced reporters — those who showed even a flicker of interest, or who displayed even a hint of the quixotic and thick-skinned temperament required of men and women who make a life as watchdogs of the powerful and the influential in officialdom.

“Remember this,” Mr. Melsek would intone quietly, his eyes as blue as cool flame, his lean form dressed in a long-sleeved black shirt and black trousers: “Officials lie. Public records don’t.”

And the sun will shine on. 