{"id":383513,"date":"2026-08-28T12:44:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T12:44:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/383513\/"},"modified":"2026-08-28T12:44:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T12:44:10","slug":"orlando-sentinel-150-friday-flashback-to-bob-grahams-workdays-orlando-sentinel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/383513\/","title":{"rendered":"Orlando Sentinel 150: Friday Flashback to Bob Graham\u2019s \u2018workdays\u2019 \u2013 Orlando Sentinel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Former Florida governor and U.S. Senator Bob Graham was famous for his \u201cworkdays,\u201d when he would spend a day working an ordinary or not-so-ordinary job as an average Floridian.<\/p>\n

Yes, it was a gimmick and brought Graham a lot of free publicity, but he maintained the workdays gave him a chance to see and hear firsthand the concerns of people.<\/p>\n

Graham discovered the power of workdays early on, soon after he pledged to work 100 jobs in his 1978 campaign for governor.<\/p>\n

In the summer of 1977 he took a job for a day as a bellhop at the Sheraton Twin Towers in Orlando. An awkward moment came when he found himself delivering bags to the suite of his primary opponent, then-Florida Attorney General Bob Shevin.<\/p>\n

\u201cI brought the bags in and this voice came out of one of the rooms saying, \u2018Please be quiet, the general is sleeping,\u2019 \u201d Graham says. \u201cWell, a reporter just happened to be with me and the headline the next morning was \u2018Graham Works While General Sleeps.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Graham wrote a book about his campaign workday experience called \u201cWorkdays, Finding Florida on the Job.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bob Graham works as bellhop in Orlando<\/a><\/p>\n

Article from Jul 16, 1977 The Orlando Sentinel (Orlando, Florida) <\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

He continued the workdays by doing a dozen jobs each year. but became more sophisticated in their selection, often using them to highlight an issue he was pushing at the moment.<\/p>\n

\u201cI found that he got the most from them if he was sweaty and gritty,\u201d said Steve Hull, Graham\u2019s former press secretary, in a 1986 interview. \u201cMost of the people he deals with in the workdays know nothing about government, but they do know their son can\u2019t get a job.\u201d<\/p>\n

Throughout the years, Graham was sprayed by grout on a construction site and splattered with oil while cutting timber. He jumped on sponges with his bare feet, shoveled manure and cleaned fish. Other workdays he did in Central Florida included being a customs inspector at Orlando International Airport, being a member of Orlando Police\u2019s SWAT team and coaching football at Leesburg High School.<\/p>\n

For Workday No. 7, when just beginning his first campaign for governor, he took the job of a mechanic at a Toyota dealership in Homestead.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was this one Datsun that had been unused for awhile,\u201d Graham recalled. \u201cIt had been to the inspection station and had a brand new inspection sticker, so we figured it ought to be in pretty good shape. Well, the hood-closing equipment had frozen. There were no brakes. The brake cylinder fluid had congealed to the consistency of sand. This gave me additional evidence that the auto inspection system wasn\u2019t accomplishing what it was expected to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

For those who doubt that Graham used lessons from his workdays in his real job as Florida\u2019s governor, consider that because of his intense lobbying on the issue, annual state-run auto inspections were eliminated in Florida.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former Florida governor and U.S. Senator Bob Graham was famous for his \u201cworkdays,\u201d when he would spend a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":383514,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[53370,114,266,115,139,141,140,53371,109],"class_list":["post-383513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-orlando","tag-flashbacks","tag-latest-headlines","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-orlando","tag-orlando-headlines","tag-orlando-news","tag-orlando-sentinel-150","tag-social"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383513\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/383514"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}