After earning a law degree from Harvard University in 1962, Graham entered politics. He was elected to the Florida House of Representatives in 1966 at the age of 29, and reelected in 1968 before jumping to the Florida Senate in 1970. He served three terms in the upper chamber, representing District 33, which included portions of southwest Broward County and northwest Miami-Dade.

As a lawmaker with pedigree — assisted by the connections his older brother made while advising President John F. Kennedy and publishing The Post — Graham authored legislation requiring testing for competency and progress in schools, and began passing legislation to clean up Florida’s environment, which until then had not been a priority for the Florida Legislature.

Graham was something of an ideologue, and part of a group known as the “Doghouse Democrats,” a more progressive clique at odds with the Florida Panhandle establishment. He also placed himself under pressure to succeed. Jack Gordon, a Miami Beach banker who served in the Senate with Graham, told the Orlando Sentinel in 2003 that, when Graham told him on a flight home from Tallahassee that he would run for governor, he put it like this: “I’ll be 40 next year, and I really have to do something.”

Work Days

In 1974, when Graham was chairman of the Senate Education Committee, a group of high school students altered his life and political trajectory when they came to a hearing in Jacksonville to complain about the food at school.

“What I was surprised about was that they had come to the state Senate to try to seek relief,” Graham recalled during a 2009 interview with the Miami Herald. “I asked them if we were the first people they’d talked to, and they said no, they’d also talked to the mayor of Jacksonville and the sheriff of Duval County, and neither of them said they could give them any help.”

Graham shared the story with a group of civics teachers a few weeks later, calling it “an indication that something was wrong with our teaching of civics if high school seniors thought that the mayor and the sheriff and the state Legislature controlled the greasy pizzas in their cafeteria.” As the story goes, his take grated on one of the teachers, a friend of Graham’s, who got up and angrily told Graham she was tired of clueless politicians “telling teachers how to do their work.”

“I ended up teaching 18 weeks of civics at Carol City Senior High School” in Miami-Dade County, Graham later told the Herald. “It was a life-transforming event. I learned about the reality of a big high school, the students, teachers, parents, administrators. I also, maybe more importantly, learned the value and the importance of learning by doing, as opposed to learning by reading about it or of having someone give you a lecture.”

The experiment became a staple of Graham’s political persona, as he kicked off a series of “work days” that included stints chopping down home-grown marijuana plants with a machete, hanging 600-pound glass panels at a Duval County construction site, working as a “grip” on the set of a Burt Reynolds movie, and even bringing delight to children as a mall Santa Claus. During one 1978 campaign workday as a bellhop at Orlando’s Sheraton Twin Towers, he ended up delivering a bag to the penthouse suite of his opponent, the Democratic primary front-runner for governor, then-Attorney General Bob Shevin.

Graham, a multimillionaire, would do 100 work days during his first campaign for governor, and 408 total over 30 years.

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