Fort Myers Florida Weekly

Frank Mann, 1941-2022: Advocate for the public good




“He was born and raised here, and he worked to try to protect it for so long. It’s hard to overstate how much he did and cared. He watched the not-so-slow eroding of everything, and for the majority of his time in public office he practiced this thing that has passed into history, called compromise.” — Rae Ann Wessel, former natural resources policy director of the Sanibel- Captiva Conservation Foundation

“He was born and raised here, and he worked to try to protect it for so long. It’s hard to overstate how much he did and cared. He watched the not-so-slow eroding of everything, and for the majority of his time in public office he practiced this thing that has passed into history, called compromise.” — Rae Ann Wessel, former natural resources policy director of the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation

Late in the summer of 1941, about three months shy of the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that began World War II for the United States, with recorded temperatures on Aug. 29 ranging from near 80 at night to well over 90 degrees during the daylight hours, a proverbial hurricane smacked into Lee County. The place then was populated with about 17,500 hardy citizens in a state that included roughly 1.8 million, according to the 1940 U.S. Census. None would see air conditioning or mosquito control for another two decades.

It was a storm for the good created by two young parents: mother Barbara Balch Mann, who loved the arts and established them in Fort Myers, and father George Mann, who also loved the arts and started a construction company.

The couple had met playing the leads in a community theater production in downtown Fort Myers near the end of the Great Depression, married, and named their newborn Franklin B. Mann.

When he died of pancreatic cancer 80 years and 10 months later in the early hours of June 21 at his riverfront home in Alva with his wife and confidante of 61 years, Mary Lee Mann, and his sons, Frank Jr. and Ian, beside him, he bid farewell to a county that included almost 820,000 residents in a state with nearly 22 million.

Here, he’d created a life devoted to the good of every one of them.

For almost 55 years Frank Mann was a public servant, first serving as an elected official in the Florida House and Senate during the 1970s and ’80s and later as a Lee County commissioner, most recently in District 5, from 2006 until his death last week.

At various times he served as a member of the governing board of the South Florida Water Management District, the hospital board, and as a temporary commissioner filling a vacant seat in 1993-‘94. They were gubernatorial appointments.

“Whenever he needed somebody, Lawton Chiles would appoint Frank,” Mrs. Mann recalls.

He was a one-time Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor (1986), who, as a “dark horse” candidate, saddled a dark Tennessee walking horse at the Lee Civic Center and rode about 400 miles to Tallahassee, campaigning all the way. He took a second horse for members of the media who wanted to join him at various stops.

Frank Mann lost his first-ever election in a run for the Lee County School Board, in 1968. COURTESY PHOTO

Frank Mann lost his first-ever election in a run for the Lee County School Board, in 1968. COURTESY PHOTO

With the top of the ticket, Steve Pajcic, he lost that race.

He also served for 17 years between public office careers in state and local government as a lobbyist and spokesman for ARC, a state association devoted to people with developmental disabilities.

His deep caring for those relatively defenseless people was how he finally became a Republican, Mrs. Mann acknowledges, telling a story that reveals everything about her husband’s willingness to compromise for the greater good.

“ARC had tried for 10 years to get the Legislature to outlaw executions of these mentally disabled people. Sometimes Frank would have enough votes in the Senate or sometimes in the House, but not both.”

Frank Mann campaigned for lieutenant governor in 1986 with fellow Democrat Steve Pajcic by riding horseback about 400 miles from Lee County to Tallahassee. COURTESY PHOTO

Frank Mann campaigned for lieutenant governor in 1986 with fellow Democrat Steve Pajcic by riding horseback about 400 miles from Lee County to Tallahassee. COURTESY PHOTO

Then one day, he did. Unfortunately, Mrs. Mann says, one person in Gov. Jeb Bush’s administration stiff-armed the bill, preventing legislators from voting on it.

“Franklin couldn’t get it on the special order calendar because of this person, so on the last day he went to the governor’s office and told a staff member, ‘If you can get this on the special order calendar, I’ll become a Republican.’”

The next morning, Mrs. Mann checked emails for her husband on the single account they shared, and spotted one newly arrived from the governor’s office.

She opened it.

“It said, ‘Frank, welcome to the Republican Party. Jeb Bush.’”

And the bill passed, outlawing capital punishment in Florida for the mentally disabled, a precedent the Supreme Court took up after the Florida decision.

In addition to that do-good life and the founding of his own insurance company in private life, Frank Mann frequently volunteered to help organizations and causes aimed at protecting an increasingly challenged environment in the county where he had grown up hunting, riding horseback, and celebrating earth and water.

Frank and Mary Lee Mann in their only wedding photo. The couple eloped when they were 19. COURTESY PHOTO

Frank and Mary Lee Mann in their only wedding photo. The couple eloped when they were 19. COURTESY PHOTO

“Frank was the Last of the Mohicans, in a way, trying to hold onto that bit of Southwest Florida that makes everything so precious,” says Rae Ann Wessel, former natural resources policy director of the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation.

“He was born and raised here, and he worked to try to protect it for so long. It’s hard to overstate how much he did and cared. He watched the not-so-slow eroding of everything, and for the majority of his time in public office he practiced this thing that has passed into history, called compromise.

“It mattered less what party you were than what you could do for people. Public service was about public good.”

He was instrumental in helping create strong growth management rules in Florida since eroded, say planners and environmentalists. He helped establish Cayo Costa State Park and other preserves. He persuaded the Legislature to help fund a community-defining great hall for the arts at Florida SouthWestern State College, then Edison College, and put his mother’s name on it — the Barbara B. Mann Hall. And in one celebrated moment, then as a Democrat in the Legislature and joined by the late Republican Sen. Warren Henderson, he helped stop the Cross-State Barge Canal.

The proposed canal would have been dug from the Gulf to the Atlantic across the headwaters of the Northern Everglades, a disaster for the freshwater aquifer, Ms. Wessel says.

He did it all with an amiable warmth he directed at every person — and his own willingness to have a lot of fun, qualities that sometimes veiled a steely, determined integrity, say those who knew him.

“He had an irreverent colloquialism and sense of humor that was part of his unique persona,” notes Calusa Waterkeeper John Cassani.

“As a big supporter of the environment and related Conservation groups, he’d show up to the Calusa Nature Center annual raffle as the master of ceremonies dressed in an outrageous purple tuxedo.”

Mr. Cassani has a photograph of then Rep. Mann ”sitting in a bathtub on a (Shriner’s) parade float with a sign underneath that said, ‘Conserve water — shower with a friend!’”

He was widely known as a conservationist, but not an enemy of smart development. He would listen to every side of a story, and he would read every word of every bill or proposal coming across his desk, says Holly Schwartz, who spent 11 years as assistant county manager working with Commissioner Mann.

“He was the environmental conscience of the board, and he defended rural Southwest Florida,” she notes.

Until near the end.

“Frank showed up to an Alva Inc. meeting about three months ago and people were concerned he wasn’t well because he lost so much weight. But he didn’t talk about it.

“It was super hot and the crowd was locked out of the facility, so about 40 people stood outside in the heat, and Frank stood out there with us, trying to get everybody together — developers, environmentalists, residents, you name it. He invited everybody to get together and talk about what we could be as a community.”

For Wayne Daltry, longtime head of Smart Growth in Lee County, “He was a simple man who understood the complexities (of a changing Florida). His core was family and home and home community — his principle was the ‘justice for all’ in the Pledge of Allegiance. Which is why he never took up the cause of developers. That was always a crowded field. But to take up the cause of the people — that’s a lonely hallway.”

He would support actively and energetically every cause he thought valuable, working with both Democrats and Republicans — especially the causes of people traditionally excluded or ignored by polite, comfortable society, says his son, Ian Mann.

He encouraged Gov. Chiles to appoint the first Black judge in Lee County, Isaac Anderson, for example. And in the Rotary Club where both Ian’s grandfathers, his father, and his father’s brother, Pat, were presidents at various times, he brought in the first female member, the late Ruth Messmer. He attended Martin Luther King Jr. marches, PRIDE events and others.

“His conscience was a combination of his parents’ thinking,” Ian explains. “When he first decided to run for an office in a school board race (in 1968), he lost — he was third. His own father was concerned, he didn’t want Dad to run. His father’s concern was that politics was ugly, and people who got involved in politics got dragged down by it. So his father tried to talk him out of it. But after the conversation, his father said, ‘OK, I’ll support you.’ And he wrote him a check.”

Losing elections was periodically a part of the life the whole family experienced and dealt with, Mrs. Mann says — “and we decided as a family always to move on, never to sling any mud.”

For 61 years of what Rae Ann Wessel calls “a magical union,” Mary Lee was his wife, his closest companion and his intellectual equal, as he always acknowledged.

“I live with a woman a lot smarter than I am,” he once said to a reporter, who wrote down the comment. “You may know what that’s like.”

He was right.

Her father had moved his boats to Fort Myers Beach during World War II and sent his children to school in Fort Myers.

What happened next wasn’t whirlwind, but in hindsight it was close.

Frank met Mary Lee Ferguson at Edison Park Elementary School when they were 11. They also were in Sunday School and Youth Group together at the First Presbyterian Church downtown, where Barbara B. Mann was an organist and the choir director.

Five years later they were seen holding hands in the back of an English class at Fort Myers High School by the teacher. That English teacher reported the fact 25 or so years after that to Ian, who also was in his class.

Frank and Mary Lee graduated from Fort Myers High and went off to college — different colleges — where one day they decided to elope. They were 19.

Mr. Mann drove from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he later graduated with a degree in political science, to Florida State University in Tallahassee, Mary Lee explained. He fetched his bride to be from the campus where she studied science and education — she later transferred to Nashville and finished her degree — then drove north across the Florida-Georgia State line.

They sought the first town they could find with a Presbyterian church and a minister who would marry them. They were too young to commit the act of marriage in Florida then, Mrs. Mann says, so they did the deed in Moultrie, Georgia.

In later life they moved from the First Presbyterian to Covenant Presbyterian Church in Fort Myers, where her husband played the bass horn in the church orchestra — but he also could play the piano, the guitar and the bass. A memorial will be held July 2 at Covenant.

Mary Lee Mann still remembers why she fell in love with Frank, identifying a quality that never changed, she says.

“In our high school youth group, there were a couple of guys nobody liked. They were unpopular, and everybody wanted to be with the popular kids.”

That sounds pretty typical.

“But Franklin Mann was always nice to those guys — he was always nice to Joe and Bill. Franklin was willing to help everybody. He was very inclusive, and that always included me.” ¦

4 responses to “Frank Mann, 1941-2022: Advocate for the public good”

  1. Elizabeth Masters says:

    Love this so much! Frank was that kind of man, well liked and respected and a casual chance meeting him left me impressed that he never forgot my name whenever our paths crossed. Thanks for the ARC info. I. had never heard that most important story.
    Very well done, Mr Williams!

  2. Craig P. Curtis says:

    Great writing Roger Williams Mr Frank Mann Sr was a great man and Family friend

  3. Holley D Rauen says:

    Great article. Will really miss Frank and pray that our Board of County Commissioners can find a way to honor his example and care about our precious Florida eco-systems. Such a loss.

  4. Mary Lou Mullins says:

    Dear Roger Williams:
    What a well-written article about Frank and Mary Lee Mann. Really described them to a tee. I greatly enjoyed reading this write-up, and I hope many others will too.
    Mary Lou Mullins

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