With Phenix City's Bobby Gaylor, what you saw and what you heard was what you got

Not long into Bobby Gaylor’s six-year stint as city manager of Phenix City, a now-former Ledger-Enquirer reporter had reached the point of exasperation with trying to get official information relevant to an ongoing story from a Phenix City official.

The reporter, at the end of the proverbial rope, finally called the city manager’s office. Gaylor was incredulous — not about the reporter’s call, but about the official’s recalcitrance: “That information’s public record,” he said. It was; and it was in the reporter’s hands that afternoon.

“Bobby Gaylor didn’t break any rules,” former Phenix City Mayor Sammy Howard said of his longtime friend and colleague, who died Sunday at 83. “There was no gray area when it came to Bobby. He was totally honest and the straightest arrow you have ever seen.”

Wallace Hunter, whom Gaylor promoted to fire chief in 2001, and who now occupies the office Gaylor once held, recalled both the no-nonsense and the compassionate sides of his predecessor: “He walked up on this backhoe operator who was asleep,” Hunter told Ledger-Enquirer senior writer Chuck Williams. “He woke him up to fire him. But you know what he did later? He worked to help the man get a job somewhere else. That tells you a lot about Mr. Gaylor.”

Gaylor was a larger-than-life presence literally and figuratively, in both public and private life. Most of his professional career was spent as an executive with United Cities Gas Co., but he served in many other realms as well. Retired Columbus Water Works President Billy Turner, in a 2015 Sunday interview, named Gaylor among the people who had made a difference in his life when Turner first came to Columbus: “Bobby kind of took me by the collar and said, ‘Billy, you need to get involved with this and this,’ and so he put me on the Red Cross board to start with. Then United Way he got me involved in.”

Gaylor served under mayors Howard and Peggy Martin; when Martin was defeated for reelection by former mayor Sonny Coulter in 2001, in an election in which the city manager’s style had become an issue, Gaylor said he was stepping down: The new mayor and council, he said, “deserve the right to choose their city manager.”

That no-nonsense demeanor might have rubbed some the wrong way, but certainly not all.

“Mr. Gaylor was tough as nails and he did it his way, but a lot of what he did needed to be done,” recalled City Manager Hunter. “He was fair and I really liked his style.”

This story was originally published January 9, 2018 at 4:34 PM with the headline "With Phenix City's Bobby Gaylor, what you saw and what you heard was what you got."