Frank Gibson, TCOG’s first executive director who had the idea to create an open government coalition in Tennessee, passed away Sunday morning in Florida.
Frank served as TCOG’s executive director for TCOG from 2003 until 2011 when the Tennessee Press Association recruited him to be its public policy director. However, he remained active on the TCOG board through the rest of his life, contributing day-to-day guidance and strategy. In 2014 and 2015, he wrote “Keys to Open Government,” a guide to Tennessee’s open records and open meetings law.
Frank was a journalist for more than four decades. From the small West Tennessee town of Gleason, Frank got his first job as a copy boy in Nashville at The Tennessean while still a teenager. He left for a stint in the Armed Services during the Vietnam War and later went to the University of Tennessee, where he graduated and served as editor of The Daily Beacon. He came back to The Tennessean, working as a reporter, city editor and political editor.
Frank’s idea for a statewide coalition that could advocate and educate on the state’s open government laws arose from his work as a journalist and his time on the FOI committee for the Society of Professional Journalists. While still working at The Tennessean, and with the encouragement of his bosses, including John Seigenthaler and Frank Sutherland, Frank answered calls from journalists throughout the state who were dealing with government officials who would not share public records or who tried to hold governing body meetings in private.
Through this period, Frank created relationships with key media lawyers throughout the state, a small group of lawyers that he referred to as the brain trust.
When it came time to create a nonprofit corporation that could be a lasting coalition for open government, it would not be about helping only journalists though. Its scope was to include citizens and Frank sought to have good government groups and other individuals represented on the board. We hang together, or we hang separately, Frank would say to me.
One of the first things Frank and the new board did was to coordinate a statewide audit in all 95 counties in which volunteers and journalists made the same requests for what should be commonly available public records of three different government entities on the same day. They reported the results back. Some government entities complied. Others ignored the requests or refused to supply the records. The results were published statewide in all the newspapers.
This gave TCOG the momentum to grow. In 2006, after the arrests of corrupt lawmakers in Operation Tennessee Waltz, there was interest in pushing for better government. The Legislature created an ad hoc committee to study Tennessee’s open government laws. The recommendations of committee were put into the forms of bills — one for improvements in the Open Meetings law and one for the Tennessee Public Records Act. The bill for open meetings ran into trouble when local politicians wanted to gut it to allow more closed meetings. But changes did get implemented in the public records law in 2008 in a bill carried by Sen. Randy McNally. That bill included a new time requirement for responding to requests and a requirement that government officials cite the basis of the law for denying public records. If they didn’t follow these steps, their responses (or non-response) constituted a denial and they could be taken to court.
Frank, who by then had retired from The Tennessean, continued as TCOG’s executive director, spending time helping people throughout the state — journalists and citizens. He fielded about 250 calls a year through TCOG’s help line. And during the legislative session, he tracked bills and advocated to preserve our laws against constant efforts to turn them back.
In 2011, when TPA recruited Frank to be its public policy director, Kent Flanagan, a board member, took over as executive director for about year and a half. I was hired in November 2013 as executive director.
Frank, still working at TPA, trained me how to track bills and talk to lawmakers. He introduced me to how committees work. We would sit in the back row in the Legislative Plaza committee rooms so he could see everything and everybody and give me running commentary on who was who, including the lobbyists. He had an incredible memory.
Frank told me that he sometimes felt he was holding his finger in the dike at the Legislature. People want open government and lawmakers like to tout “transparency.” But those in power get comfortable with secrecy. And every year, bills would arise that would chip away at that. Always find out why the lawmaker is running the bill — the story behind it, who asked for it, he said.
Frank eventually retired from TPA. He had moved to Florida with his wife to be near their daughter and son-in-law, and, importantly, his two grandkids. When I would call for advice, he often was at a baseball game or in a school pickup line for one of his grandkids.
TCOG honored Frank at TCOG’s 20th Anniversary in 2023. (See the video of Frank and pictures from the event at https://tcog.info/contact/tcog-20th-anniversary/) We had a full house at the Fat Bottom Brewery event room, which he thought was quite an appropriate venue, considering all the journalists who came.
The last call I had with Frank — and I was lucky to have so many over the years — was a week before he died. He asked that I and a few others put together a Celebration of Life in Nashville. We’re going to do that.
I also got a funny Frank story, as I often did on my calls to him. He reached back to a time long ago and told me how he got the job to be police reporter at The Tennessean, still fresh out of high school. The editor that night asked him to do a ridealong with the cops reporter to see if he could be ready to do it himself. A kid, he climbed in the reporter’s car. Their first stop was a market for some, well, “refreshments.” No story was written that night. They stopped at two crime scenes but didn’t get out. When he got back to the newsroom, the editor asked if the thought he could do the job. Uh, yeah.
An inauspicious start to a career that spanned decades and truly left a legacy. His stories, his wisdom will remain in my head and heart for life.
