Mica’s memories go on display at Winter Park Library, shovels and all

WINTER PARK — John Mica, in his 24 years as a Republican member of Congress from Central Florida, worked alongside presidents, helped build roads, bridges and airports, and developed close relationships across the aisle.

Along the way, he collected more groundbreaking shovels than he knew what to do with.

“I’ve had probably 50 or 60 of them,” Mica said, holding a particularly shiny shovel on display at the Winter Park Library used at the U.S. Veterans Affairs nursing home in Orlando in 2016. “I’ve been giving them away.”

Mica’s documents, letters and assorted mementos from his 12 terms in office and nearly four decades in public life are now part of the Winter Park Library archives, alongside those of his former boss, U.S. Sen. Paula Hawkins, Florida’s only woman U.S. senator.

“There are between 150 and 170 of these crates for us to process,” said archivist Rachel Simmons “… But archival work just takes a really long time, especially with a collection like this that spans about 40 years.”

“She’s got a good career ahead of her to sort through them all,” Mica said.

In addition to the dozens of bins of papers that include records of almost every 1990s GOP investigation of President Bill Clinton from Whitewater to Travelgate is an award made up of two metal railroad spikes, a signed sketch of Richard Nixon, a ticket to George W. Bush’s second inauguration, and hard hats worn at construction projects, all of which will be accessible to researchers.

For now, parts of the collection make up an exhibit on Mica and Hawkins can be seen by visitors behind glass. At least a few people walking by did a double take, noticing that the large portrait and the man standing in front of it were identical.

There are a few special things he still wants to find among all the boxes for display. One was an office nameplate that was one of the first in the Capitol to include Braille, a change he pushed for in 1994. Another was a nameplate from the Capitol visitors center, which at 580,000 square feet was the largest-ever addition to the building when it opened in 2008.

“It wasn’t just my project, but I championed it,” he said. “And then it went slightly over budget, like all federal projects, from $100 million to $620 million. But now they couldn’t build it for three times that.”

‘We want you to run’

Mica, now 80. was a 20-something fresh out of the University of Florida when he began his career in politics, including working on the Richard Nixon campaign in 1968.

After a stint in the state House and as Hawkins’ chief of staff in Washington, he was well into a career as a Winter Park developer before Republican higher-ups told him he would make a great candidate for Congress in 1992 — only not in Winter Park.

“The Chairman of Seminole County, Jim Stelling, who died last week, he came down, sat in my living room and said, ‘We want you to run,’” Mica said. “I lived five blocks from the county line, but a congressman doesn’t have to live in his district, just in the state. So I ran.”

Throughout his 24 years in Congress, he still thought of himself as a builder more than anything else.

“I’m not an attorney, I was a developer,” Mica said. “And I love to build and construct things. The attorneys go up and they fight the philosophical wars and spend a lot of time chattering at each other, but I liked to come away with projects I thought would make a difference.”

Getting those projects passed, however, was another matter. He told one story of how an amendment to rebuild the Interstate 4 bridge over the St. Johns River, “the most deadly stretch of interstate in the United States,” didn’t get into a transportation bill as expected.

“‘Where’s my amendment?’” a shocked Mica asked his staff. “‘‘I can’t go home! What the hell?’ So I freaked out, of course. But you always have to find a way.”

Democratic Minority Leader Dick Gephardt also had one of his pet projects left out of the bill too. So as chair of the House Civil Service Subcommittee, Mica struck a deal.

“So I said, ‘Hey, Dick … I need this bridge. And you need this. So, quietly, we put them in. And the bridge was authorized at the end of a civic reform bill.”

Some of his biggest fights were over the Orlando International Airport, he said, going back to his days in Tallahassee in the 1970s.

“‘I can’t believe you’re going to give Mica $20 million for the overpass to a cow pasture,’” he recalled one legislator telling state officials about a planned road to a remote part of the airfield.

He was walking through the new, state-of-the-art Terminal C earlier this month when he spotted an image that took him back to where it all began.

“They’ve got these massive screens, and they put pictures of different scenes,” Mica said. “We’re walking there and I look over, and son of a bitch! There’s a cow pasture.”

Working with Democrats

While in Congress, Mica served during three presidential administrations and saw Republicans gain the congressional majority, lose it, and gain it back again. So working with Democrats was a must.

“Even Corrine and I got along sometimes,” he said of Democrat Corrine Brown, who later served time in prison for fraud. “Some of my best friends are on the other side of the aisle.”

Of course, he added, “I could name a half a dozen I wouldn’t want to spend any time with.”

Two Florida Democrats particularly close to his heart are his brothers Daniel, a former Democratic congressman, and David, a top aide to Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles.

“Here’s one of the Democratic family members now,” Mica said when Daniel’s number popped up on his phone.

Sometimes being bipartisan could backfire, he said, like when he was at a transportation bill signing with President Barack Obama.

“I had a tough Republican primary, and I was trying to avoid getting too close to Obama and in pictures,” he said. “… So I’m trying to position myself so I don’t get in the picture. Obama comes out and he says, ‘First, I want to thank Congressman Mica.’ [The photo] was just him pointing to me. So that didn’t work.”

Mica wasn’t surprised by the seeming chaos in the current Congress, which deposed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and replaced him with Mike Johnson after three other candidates went down in flames. Johnson now must avoid a potential shutdown when the House returns in January.

“It hasn’t changed, if you read history,” Mica said. “… Johnson set up this next-year catastrophe-to-be. But it’s a brinkmanship game. Everybody’s trying to get what they can.”

An aide to Hawkins

Hawkins, who died in 2009, had donated her papers to her hometown library in the late 1990s. So when it came time to donate his archives, “I thought this the ideal place where everybody could have access,” Mica said.

Hawkins started out in Republican politics as “the Housewife from Maitland” before moving to Winter Park. She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1980.

Mica was in the next room when Hawkins suffered a freak accident at a Winter Park TV studio in 1982, when a wall on the set fell on her back.

“I came running in there when it hit her,” Mica said. “For the rest of her term, she was in constant pain. … We’d take her to events, she’d be in the back seat, laying down.”

She was able to use Sen. Strom Thurmond’s “hideaway” office while the Senate was in session, which included a hospital bed.

The injury played a role in her loss to then-Democratic Gov. Bob Graham after one term in 1986, he said. “Graham’s running around the state in a jet, announcing good things everywhere. And she’s the hellhole of Washington, getting beat up.”

Mica himself ended his long career with a loss to Democrat Stephanie Murphy in 2016. Unlike some politicians who can’t seem to stop, Mica and his wife, Patricia, are finally taking it easy.

“I don’t represent anybody, I don’t want to be anything,” Mica said. “We totally retired last year. My wife and I travel quite a bit. I collect Italian old master drawings. I had an exhibit at Rollins Museum. That’s it. Enjoying life.”

Meanwhile, there’s still at least one shovel he still possesses.

It was a shiny, golden one given to him by Donald Trump, before he became president, after the Obama administration awarded him the contract to renovate the Old Post Office in D.C. into a hotel.

“It’s quite the shovel,” said Mica. “I’ve given some away. But not all of them.”