It does sound like he had a lot of energy and curiosity.

"Graham would be the first to acknowledge his privilege: His older brother, Philip, became the publisher and owner of the Washington Post as well as a confidant of John F. Kennedy; Philip’s wife, Katharine, oversaw the paper when it broke the Watergate stories; his other brother, Bill, helmed the Graham Cos., which built Miami Lakes, Florida’s first “new town.”

Yet he was fascinated by lives very different from his own. Maybe this was the impetus behind his famous “workdays” — that and first-rate campaign instincts. Graham bussed tables, picked tomatoes, hefted garbage cans, bellhopped, cleared brush, taught school, packed fish, cut hair, flew planes, and set up rigging and camera equipment as a grip on the 1983 Burt Reynolds movie 'Stick.'

He understood regular people because he talked to them all the time; he understood regular jobs because he did them — more than 400 of them.

In 2010, five years after he’d retired from the Senate, he decided he wanted to see my office at FSU before we went to lunch. God knows why: The Williams Building is not exactly an architectural masterpiece.

I met him in the university guest parking lot, and what should have been a two-minute walk to my office took more like 45 minutes. He stopped every student and professor we encountered. Some of them knew who he was; some (undergraduates who weren’t born when he served as governor) hadn’t a clue. He didn’t care: He interviewed each one. Where are you from? What are you majoring in? What are you teaching? Why did you choose FSU? What are you reading?"

~ Diane Roberts

https://floridaphoenix.com/2024/04/22/when-human-beings-led-our-state/