The St. Petersburg Times has an interesting profile on Tampa’s favorite (confederate) son, Marion Lambert. The South Tampa beekeeper has been a media darlin’ the last week, ever since a massive confederate flag flew on his property at the intersection of I-4 and I-75.The Times article painted the man generally as a gentle Southern enthusiast, who snookered the county officials when he applied for the proper flag permits. But when I interviewed Lambert on Friday, I saw an angry, almost bitter man.
True, Lambert is a gentleman. Before he arrived at his house from a late bee removal job, his family showed me some true Southern hospitality. Then he gave me a nice tour of his five-acre farm.”I’m a very liberal person in my heart,” he told me during our first few minutes together. “I’m a very conservative person in my brain.”
He even used to be a hippie. Well, I’ll be …
But don’t let Lambert fool you: he knows full well that this stunt is divisive, even if he doesn’t believe in the flag’s links to slavery. In one of the most unusual analogies I’ve ever heard, he compares the flag going up to “childbirth,” in that the act will cause a lot of pain and agony, but in the end a more perfect truth will be born.
Did I mention the guy is a born-again Christian?
“We found ourselves marginalized, put on the back table of the community,” he said, railing against the decision to remove the confederate flag from the county seal and other slights. “The only way we could get their attention is to slap them in the face, and slap the community in the face.”
He knows the power he has over the commissioners, especially after they practically begged him to not fly the flag at last week’s commission meeting. This is how he describes county commissioner Rose Ferlita:
“I saw Rose Ferlita look at me like a puppy instead of an angry dog.”
An edited version of the interview will hit the streets and Web site on Wednesday, but for now, here’s the full version (after the jump):
This article appears in Jun 4-10, 2008.
