Willis McCall died in 1994, but if he were alive today, the sheriff known around Lake County, Florida as “The Big Hat Man” would no doubt be reveling in the fact that he plays a prominent role in not one but two works of nonfiction on bookstore shelves around the country.  In Isabel Wilkerson’s, The Warmth of Other Suns, citrus picker and union organizer George Starling is practically forced out of Lake County through fear of violence at the hands of Sheriff McCall.  Starling, in fact, later runs into McCall at a Florida train station and the notorious sheriff asks when he’s coming back from New York.  “I ain’t,” Starling says under his breath. “Not as long as you still living.”

McCall was a voracious scrapbooker who clipped and saved any articles that mentioned his name--even from African-American newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender. Late in life, he imagined himself the subject of a movie, where his no-nonsense “lawanorder” attitude made him a tough but beloved advocate for American values.  In November of 1963 following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, all government buildings in the country lowered their flags to half staff. McCall refused, stating that the flag at his county jail might get torn, costing good money to taxpayers in Lake County.  A decade later during the Nixon administration, it took a federal court order for McCall to remove the “Colored” and “White” signs over waiting rooms in the sheriff’s office lobby. 

His reign of terror ended in 1972 after seven terms as Lake County sheriff, when McCall was suspended from office after kicking to death a black, mentally retarded man who had been held in jail for failing to have an inspection sticker on his car. The Big Hat Man managed to avoid conviction, but the time spent defending himself in court prevented him from effectively campaigning for an eighth consecutive term as sheriff, and he was narrowly defeated. 

“I never hurt anyone...or killed anyone who didn’t deserve killing,” McCall said not long before his death in 1994.