Florida’s Capitol Press Corps has lost a legend.
Retired Tallahassee Democrat reporter and columnist Bill Cotterell died Nov. 24 at a care facility in the state capital. He was 82.
The Florida Newspaper Hall of Famer recently posted on Facebook that he’d been recovering from a bout of norovirus and a bleeding ulcer after a trip to France. He was recuperating in the rehab center of Westminster Oaks Retirement Community in Tallahassee.
“He loved his family and his son and his seven grandchildren, and they made his life very busy and very complete,” his wife, Cynthia Fuller, told the USA TODAY NETWORK – Florida. “I’m gonna miss him. He was a journalist who believed in the facts, not the alternative facts. He was very strong and believed in the ethics of true journalism. And if he had opinions they were in his opinion column.”
Cotterell spent 45 years as a full-time newspaper reporter, including 27 years with the Democrat. Though he officially retired in 2012, he continued to write a column about political issues, most recently for the News Service of Florida. That column, which began in the Democrat, was called “Capital Curmudgeon.”
Around the old Democrat building, co-workers knew when Cotterell entered the newsroom when they heard his unmistakable hoarse voice he had since he was a teenager – which added to his reputation as a raconteur.
A reporter for 18 years with the United Press International wire service, Cotterell spent much of his career covering Florida government. He covered 10 Florida governors and 44 sessions of the Florida Legislature. For more than 25 years, he wrote a weekly column about state workers for the Democrat.
In 1974, he was assigned to cover the fledgling U.S. presidential campaign of a Georgia governor that UPI didn’t expect to make a serious bid: Jimmy Carter. With Cotterell in tow, Carter toured the nation for two years and posted an improbable victory in the 1976 election.
The experience catapulted the young reporter to a memorable career, which included coverage of political conventions, civil rights events, space shots, hurricanes, the business world and Florida government.
‘An absolute news machine’
Cotterell was inducted into the Florida Journalism Hall of Fame in 2017. On that occasion, legendary Democrat columnist and journalist Gerald Ensley wrote a 2,000 word tribute to his life and career. We excerpt it here.
Cotterell joined the Democrat in June 1985, when the venerable UPI folded in the first wave of changes in the newspaper world. Dave Bruns, the Democrat’s capital bureau chief, was delighted to hire Cotterell, whose nearly two decades with the wire service had stamped him as “an absolute news machine.”
Bruns gave him a special assignment: Cover state workers. The Democrat had long covered state government, but had never dedicated a reporter to focusing on the issues that affect the nearly 100,000 state employees, most of whom are based in Tallahassee.
Cotterell soon became the expert on state worker issues, from pay and benefits to unfair treatment to unrecognized successes to occasional scandals. State workers learned to call him whenever they had concerns or tips, and they turned eagerly to his weekly column on state workers, which ran from 1985 until his retirement in 2012.
“Bill jumped on that assignment and made it his own,” Bruns said. “For more than two decades, if you wanted to know what was going on in the world of state workers, you had to read Bill Cotterell.”
Cotterell paired his expertise on state workers with an equal focus on Florida politics, covering the legislature, governors, state agencies and Florida courts. In a day when all the major Florida papers had capital bureaus in Tallahassee, Cotterell helped the Democrat to go toe-to-toe with the Miami Herald, the then-St. Petersburg Times and Orlando Sentinel.
Experience in Marines, appreciation for hard work
William Richard Cotterell was born in Philadelphia and raised in Miami, the youngest of three children. His father, a British immigrant, was a representative of a printing company; his mother worked as a secretary for Pan Am airlines. The couple divorced when Cotterell was a young teenager.
After graduation from Miami Edison High School in 1961, Cotterell enlisted in the Marines, emulating his older brother, Tony, a career Marine officer. He spent four years in the Marines, rising to lance corporal, an experience that gave him a taste of leadership and an appreciation for hard work.
He earned an associate degree from Miami Dade Community College, and after graduation in 1966 landed a job as a copy clerk with the Miami Herald. His desire to be a reporter was born the day he applied: As he waited for his interview, a rewrite man was on the phone getting details of a two-car crash from a reporter.
“It looked like the most exciting work in the world,” he once recalled. “I wanted to be that reporter on the other end of the phone line.”
A year later, in 1967, UPI hired him as a reporter and assigned him to cover the state Capitol in Columbia, South Carolina – landing such a plum first reporting job at age 24 because the wire service needed someone who was exempt from the Vietnam war draft.
Cotterell worked for UPI in Raleigh, N.C., Birmingham, Alabama, and Miami along with his first sojourn in Tallahassee from 1969 to 1974. After covering Carter’s campaign, he remained in Atlanta until 1984, when he returned to Tallahassee with the UPI.
In Atlanta he fell in love with Fuller, a first-term Georgia legislator. They were married in 1984, after she was redistricted out of her seat, lost a special election for another district seat and then spearheaded a successful bond referendum for a new Fulton County Jail.
She wasn’t eager to leave her political career and move to Tallahassee, even though Florida Treasurer and Insurance Commissioner Bill Gunter was recruiting her for his agency. But she was charmed by her husband’s dedication to his career, and she accepted a top official’s post with the Department of Insurance, where she worked until retiring in 2014.
Cotterell’s dedication to journalism extended to his colleagues. He mentored dozens of reporters who passed through the Democrat newsroom and Capitol halls, sharing writing advice and teaching them the ropes of covering state government.
The Cotterells have one child, Christopher, a senior chief petty officer in the U.S. Navy. Chris and wife Meagan have seven children.
Bill, ever the cutup, was joking on Facebook in the past few days about his health problems: “Being in a hospital makes me think of Leslie Nielsen, my kind of humor, in the Airplane and Naked Gun movies.
“‘ There’s no time to waste, we have to get this man to a hospital.’
” ‘A hospital? What is it?’
” ‘A big white building with doctors and ambulances running in and out, but that’s not what’s important now ….’ “
Cotterell did what he loved to the last. After submitting his final News Service column, he sent an editor an email Thursday at 3:52 a.m. alerting him to a small typo.
His trademark wit was on display in his final Democrat column in 2022 announcing his re-retirement from the paper. Reflecting on his almost 60 years in the business, he wrote, “It’s been a good career. Journalism sure beats working.”
Funeral information is pending. Culley’s MeadowWood Funeral Home is handling arrangements.
Share your memories of Bill Cotterell with us and the community
Bill Cotterell touched many lives, and we want to share those memories. Send an email with your favorite anecdote or photo to news@tallahassee.com. Please include your name, city of residence and occupation.
This news obituary is based on previous reporting by Gerald Ensley, a retired Democrat reporter who died in 2018. Additional reporting was provided by Jim Rosica.
This article originally appeared on Tallahassee Democrat: Florida mourns journalism legend Bill Cotterell