The Road to Lucy Morgan
How I connected with my Pulitzer Prize-winning childhood shero 40 years later and what she means to me, my town and the dwindling universe of local investigative journalism.
For forty years I have been toting around a yellowed collection of newspaper stories by Lucy Morgan.
The stories came with me in the one suitcase I packed when leaving the town where I had spent my formative years and never looked back. The stories were with me when I graduated journalism school at the University of Florida. The stories came along with me to my first $14K a year copyediting job at a Florida newspaper, and they were with me when I graduated Harvard Business School. When I had 3 kids in 4 years working at a Silicon Valley startup, and … well you get the idea. It wasn’t until the life slowed to a crawl during the pandemic that I came across them, once again.
The universe, it seems, planned it that way.
Forty years later, I found my way back to my childhood shero. Back then she was a middle-aged Florida newspaper reporter and mother of 3 whose relentless pursuit of truth took down the largest U.S. drug-smuggling operation in history at that time. The Tampa Bay/St. Pete Times articles catapulted her infamous Southern journalism…
