Former Pinellas commissioner vowed to ‘take every minute out of life’

Suffering from rheumatic fever, Sallie Parks spent months of her childhood confined to her bed.

Later, Parks will almost never mention this period, even to his family. But once, during a long drive with her daughter-in-law, she suggested that those homebound months set the scene for the rest of her life:

“She said she swore at that time, she said she was going to enjoy every minute of life,” Parks’ son Steve Parks said.

The parks were never short of something to do.

As Pinellas County Commissioner for two terms, his efforts ranged from making the council more accessible to navigation in the “water wars” of the day. She was the founding director of the Pinellas County Arts Council and chaired the Pinellas Community Foundation, 211 Tampa Bay Cares and many other groups — her son estimated she sat on as many as 30 boards at once. She pushed to bring the Silver Alert program to Florida.

She has also visited 70 countries. She taught English to adults in Japan. In her later years, she rented out part of her house in Palm Harbor through Airbnb, not because she needed the money, but because she loved meeting new people.

Sallie Parks died on November 9. She was 86 years old. The cause was cancer, her son said. A public celebration of life is scheduled for 2 p.m. on December 11 at the Dunedin Fine Arts Center.

Parks grew up in Detroit and came to Florida after earning a master’s degree in English from Michigan State University.

Steve Parks described a childhood in which his mother was omnipresent: she went to every baseball game, cooked dinner every night, volunteered at the children’s school. When Steve and his sister were in second and third grade, their parents took them on a six-month trip across the country, with stops in 35 states.

As the children grew older, Parks moved into public service. When the Arts Council was established in 1976, as another volunteer wrote in a 2010 letter to the St. Petersburg Times, Parks “led the first council and worked without pay until she learned the grant process.

In the early 1990s, she had been thinking about public service for 20 years. She once recalled considering running for the school board in the 1970s.

“It was a time when the (Republican) Party wasn’t as inclusive of women as it is now,” she told a reporter. “They said, ‘Girly, go home and take care of your house.'”

Parks ran for the county commission in 1992, against John Chestnut Jr., a commissioner who had served for 16 years. The commission was widely seen as stagnant, hostile to outsiders, and inaccessible to residents. Parks, a Republican, won the endorsement of unions and newspapers. When Chestnut mailed attack announcements, Parks responded by hand-delivering 8,000 copies of his own campaign materials.

Privately, Parks was shaken. “I don’t know if I can do this,” she told her son – not that she couldn’t, but that she couldn’t win. It’s the only time he remembers her not feeling in control of a situation.

Publicly, the triumphant campaign exposed Parks as she would become known: curious and stubbornly kind, and firm as a schoolteacher.

“She was nice, but if she called you and said, ‘Steve, I really would like you to do a blank,'” said Steve Seibert, another county commissioner, “it was like, ‘Yeah, ma’am. , I certainly will.’ No one would say no to him. »

During her first appointment, she noticed both the private bathrooms reserved for the so-called “male” commissioners. She told Chuck Rainey, the commission’s powerful chairman, that he had to fix it, Seibert recalled.

“The next day she said, ‘Commissioner Rainey, thank you for doing this so quickly. Now let’s talk about the wallpaper,” Seibert said.

Parks took citizen feedback seriously. She also got the commissioners to agree to televise all of their meetings, Seibert said, not just the monthly one they used to broadcast.

Seibert was credited as a key negotiator in the “water wars” of the time, a years-long battle over Pinellas’ reliance on pumping groundwater from other counties. But he said Parks “was there every step of the way, and she may have gotten there before me. She was very involved in the negotiation of the Tampa Bay Water Agreement” which ended the dispute by creating a new regional water service.

Parks had promised that she would only serve eight years on the commission. However, she could not sit still. She spent three years as a lobbyist for St. Petersburg College. She has served on the boards of charities such as the Pinellas Community Foundation, which distributes millions of dollars to local nonprofits, and entities such as the Southwest Florida Water Management District.

In 2008, a Largo woman with dementia left her assisted living facility and drowned after driving down the Intracoastal Waterway. A group of locals sought to set up a pilot Silver Alert program, in which the public is notified of missing seniors, and Parks approached the government of the day. Charlie Crist, who signed an executive order establishing the program statewide. More than 3,000 alerts were issued in the 14 years since, according to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and have been directly responsible for the search for nearly 300 missing seniors.

“When she found out she had cancer five years ago, I thought, oh my god, we have to be by my mum’s side,” Steve Parks said. “She said, ‘I’m not going to let this get to me.’ She signed up for other boards. She traveled more. She wasn’t going to bed.

A few months before his death, Parks made one last trip, to Switzerland. She described it to friends who visited her in palliative care: how she had a great day after befriending a group of strangers on a boat on Lake Geneva, how fulfilling she found traveling alone.

“She said, ‘I kinda like myself,'” said Karen Seel, another curator-turned-friend. same, respect me and love me.'”

She dictated her own obituary and set the program for her celebration of life. She made sure her beloved cat, Sophia Loren, was in good hands. In the end, her family filled her room for pizza night, to say goodbye, “and after that it was almost like she was forcing herself to pass,” Steve Parks said. “She really came out on her own terms.”

One last story. The last time Seibert saw Parks, she told him she had to apologize.

“I laughed at your white papers,” she told him.

It was a habit Seibert had during those years at the County Commission. When he wanted to influence someone, he wrote a few pages explaining his thinking.

“I never thought you really wrote your articles to convince anyone but yourself,” Parks continued.

Seibert was surprised. Not because he was offended, on the contrary. He had only realized in the past few months, returning to writing, that the purpose of all these articles had really been to clarify his own thoughts. But she had seen it 30 years ago, something even he didn’t know about himself, and had kept it all this time, and she wanted to give it back to him before she had to leave.

“I think she was still thinking about other people,” Seibert said. “My experience was that in the end, she was always trying to teach me something that she felt was important to tell me.”