A Life Lived to the Brim: Remembering Bob Floyd
& #x2018;Cheerful whistling” began the president’s profile of Robert L. Floyd in the June 1978 Florida Bar Journal, and while many of us will remember this distinctive announcement that a friendly, outgoing man was coming our way, there is so much more to the legacy of Bob Floyd, who passed away on May 14.
His career is an impressive one: special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, mayor of Miami, Dade County representative to the Florida House of Representatives, circuit court judge, North Miami city attorney, and for 37 days in 1966, Dade County sheriff. He was also a senior law partner with Frates, Floyd, Pearson, Stewart, Richman and Greer, P.A., and a graduate of the Washington College of Law, now The American University.
So why, at 60 years old, did he want to be president of The Florida Bar? “When you become older and the list becomes narrower, you evaluate the circumstances and the timing. I had devoted 33 years of my life as a member of the Bar, so one of my goals was to serve as its president.”
“He never gets angry, and he never makes anyone else angry,” said C. Harris Dittmar of Jacksonville, who served on the Board of Governors during Floyd’s presidency. “He brings about a cooperative effort. Bob is able to see a need for change and work for it, but he wants to know where we are going before he acts.”
Floyd did not approach his term “to proliferate programs” that would “be nothing more than bigness for its own sake.” His “reassessments,” as he labeled them, for his term were addressing delays in attorney discipline that he considered to be unfair to the lawyer and the public; enhancing Bar communication/internal relations with its membership; and improving the quality of its CLE programs.
Floyd oversaw a substantial augmentation of the disciplinary program with the opening and expansion of branch offices to handle complaints and the hiring additional full-time staff attorneys. “The ultimate result” of the expanded program, Floyd believed, would be when “we have convinced the public that the lawyers of Florida meant what they said when they pledged to police our own ranks without the use of public funds.”
Because of the adversary nature of the legal profession, Floyd believed that “lawyers will never be free of criticism, will never be loved, but hopefully will be respected.”
Floyd held seminars and conferences throughout the state to hear members’ concerns about their Florida Bar. As he left his presidency, he hoped communication and understanding had been developed. He said, “The complaints ranged from not doing enough to doing too much. Somewhere we hope we reached a median.. . . The experience [of traveling the state] reinforced my belief that professional people can solve any problem given the opportunity for discussion.”
He married Rose Marie Norcross in 1946, and they had three sons, Robert II, Edward, and James, and one daughter, Rosemarie. Mrs. Floyd passed away in 1985.
One of the first comments from people who knew Bob Floyd was his special relationship with his family. “You live for your children,” Floyd said. In 1969, when Floyd had part ownership of the Miami Dolphins football team, the whole family traveled together to every out-of-town game.
An obituary wrote that Bob Floyd helped “establish Miami as one of America’s premiere cities. With his demise, part of Old Miami passes into history.”
I prefer to conclude this testimony to Robert L. Floyd by quoting his remarks in a commencement address to Florida State University’s law graduates in December 1978 in which he spoke of the future: “In my lifetime I have seen milestones in legal doctrines, social upheavals throughout the world, conquest of many physical diseases, but you, who in two decades will see the turn of the century, should perceive with me, ‘This is only the beginning, Folks.’ I envy you the life’s adventure you will soon engage in; let the record show you lived it to the brim.”
Those of us who knew Bob Floyd would agree — he lived life “to the brim.”
