Phil Noel, 41, beams as he finishes addressing the General Assembly on the night of his first day in office in January 1973. During his tenure, the governor had to deal with Navy cutbacks, a prison riot and tough economic times.

Journal file photo

ESTERO, Fla. — To find former Rhode Island Gov. Phil Noel, you sprint down Route 75 from Fort Myers and loop around past the tony Miromar outlet stores.

Turn into the Wildcat Run Golf & Country Club gated community and glide by handsome tan masonry homes with red roofs reminiscent of Italy.

Look for a three-bedroom house near a cypress preserve and a swath of lake across from the fourth hole of an Arnold Palmer-designed course. Here, where a lone grapefruit tree accents a medley of palms, is the residence of Noel and his wife, Joyce, a former Miss Rhode Island.

And don’t be shocked if an alligator strays onto the property.

When Democrat Noel, a former Warwick mayor, was sworn in as governor on Jan. 2, 1973, he was 41. Now 76, he is semi-retired. On this Florida morning he is slightly hunched over, in bare feet, a purplish blue collared jersey and gray Bermuda shorts.

Noel shows me the lay of the land, excuses himself to join a conference call, and leaves me by the pool with The Wall Street Journal, the local Bonita Daily News, and a book on Brown football that has a photo of this Class of 1954 defensive standout.

When he settles in for the interview, I say that he may be rusty and I want to apprise him of his rights — a reminder that everything is on the record….

“Oh come on!” he chides. “You never worried about my rights when you were writing bad things about me before!”

Of all the politicians I’ve known, Noel may be the champion talker — a great raconteur, freewheeling, blunt. Alas, after two two-year terms as governor, he lost a 1976 U.S. Senate primary.

He went back to practicing law and flourished in business ventures, and he marvels at where he finds himself today.

His late French-Canadian father, Joe, was an auto mechanic. His late mother, the former Emma Crudeli, of Italian heritage, was a jewelry worker.

Noel himself worked as a quahogger and fisherman. He started clamming for money in high school. “Then I went into the bait business, in the summer. Minnows. They’re a favorite bait for catching summer flounder or fluke. So the boat shops down around Narragansett and down that way, they needed these minnows, and I know how to catch them. So I hired another guy, a dear friend of mine, and we’d get up 3, 4 o’clock in the morning, and we’d catch thousands of them and truck them down to Narragansett. We’d stop at the bait shops and sell them on the way down.”

He quahogged and fished during college and around law school at Georgetown. He quahogged even as he began practicing law. His first office was in the rear of a Warwick bait shop. A window sign said, “Philip W. Noel, lawyer.” He says, “The people would sit on outboard motors waiting to come in the back room.”

In Florida, he still catches fish, but usually releases them.

Sometimes he golfs.

Occasionally, he gets to a Red Sox game in Fort Myers.

Much of the time he busies himself with business; he often is over in Louisiana, where he and his son, Joe, have a fleet of enterprises that service the oil industry. They’re also into oil-drilling themselves.

And real estate. “You take the profits from those companies and you buy an office building, or build an office building, and then you rent that out. Now you’ve got to manage that. So I’ve got a few buildings [in Louisiana] that we own, and I’m in the process of buying another one as we speak, down here.”

He and Joe and another man also own a Louisiana rice farm and hunting camp.

The former governor now votes in Florida. He and Joyce, who have eight grandchildren, spend up to five months a year in Warwick Neck, where he owns the Harbor Light Marina and where they have a condo at Anglesea, the waterfront community he helped develop. Then there’s the family’s Cranston plant that makes cold-packs his son Tommy devised for sore muscles, tendinitis and so on.

The former governor says he is too restless to retire fully. “How much golf can you play? How many times can you go fishing and put the fish back? You’re not making a dime. So I tried that and I almost felt guilty … like I’m not contributing.”

You couldn’t ask for a more picturesque setting than the Noel home in Estero. He reflects:

“Charlie, I sit right here. The sun sets right there in the west, and I sit right here and I might have a little splash — I like to drink a little Scotch — and sometimes I think of picking those quahogs out of the bullrake one at a time and putting them in a basket....

“I think about my father, you know, working — never missed a day’s work in his life — making $80, $90 a week as a mechanic.”

He remembers being a kid and washing parts and otherwise helping out his father, who brought work home to earn some extra dollars. “He’d be out there laying on his back on the cement [in a cold garage], and I’d be in the cellar rebuilding a carburetor. … I think of those days and I think of where I am now and it’s astounding.”

He “very, very seldom” thinks of having been governor. He says he was in Florida for six or eight years before anyone knew he’d been one. Now, if it’s election season, say, folks assume he has some expertise and ask what he thinks.

“There are mostly Midwestern conservative Republicans here. … I had a terrific debate with the guys that I play golf with when Bush was getting ready to go into Iraq, which I thought was the greatest mistake in my memory.”

He is a Barack Obama fan.

Noel’s 100-vote loss to the late Richard Lorber in a 1976 U.S. Senate primary field that included state Senate Majority Leader John Hawkins was a Rhode Island landmark. The free-spending Lorber, an automobile dealer, largely financed his own campaign and hammered away at Noel as a cozy insider. Noel did little to return the fire.

Looking back, Noel says part of the reason he lost was that a court ruling had invalidated the old party registration law; Republicans were free to stream into the September Democratic primary and vote for Lorber on the theory he’d be easier for John Chafee to defeat in November. Noel says he still should have been able to win the Democratic nod.

The legendary Democratic Sen. John O. Pastore disclosed in October 1975 that he would not run again, but Noel didn’t announce his candidacy to succeed him until late January 1976.

He says he realized fairly early on that he’d have been smarter to just finish his term and head for the private sector.

As he was running for Senate, a state helicopter he was in plunged into the woods on May 22. “I’m laying on my back in the hospital and I realize I’ve made a dreadful mistake, that I shouldn’t be going to the United States Senate…. I cost the Democratic Party that seat.” He explains, “I didn’t have the fire in the belly.”

He says he was concerned that, as a senator, he wouldn’t make enough money, especially having to live in Washington while keeping his young family — including daughters Linda, Lori and Joanne — in Rhode Island. And he worried about being away so much.

He hadn’t planned on a political career at all.

He went to law school intending to be an FBI agent. To help make his way through Georgetown, someone advised him to see Pastore for a Senate job.

Noel says his hand was callused, “like iron,” from quahogging. “When I shake hands with the senator, he pulls his hand back and it cuts him. The calluses cut his hand…. I’m very embarrassed. His aides come in, they bandage up his hand, and he says, ‘Well, what’s wrong with your hand?’ ” — Noel is laughing — “and I said, ‘Those are calluses.’ ‘How did you get those?’ I told him what I did.”

Eventually, Pastore put him to work in the Senate post office.

When Noel was finishing law school, he thanked Pastore. The senator urged him to run for office in Warwick. Noel tried for City Council in 1958 and barely lost. He won in 1960 and was elected mayor in 1966 and governor in 1972.

In the State House, he had to deal with Navy cutbacks, a prison riot and tough economic times. He recruited Electric Boat to Quonset and, he says, left it up to the company to decide how much rent to pay. “I put 7,000 people to work there in one shot at high-paying jobs,” he boasts. “You think I was concerned about how much rent they paid?”

He had a big mouth. Some dicey comments he made about black ghetto life cost him the chairmanship of the 1976 Democratic National Convention platform committee. You may also remember, in his post-gubernatorial days, his involvement in Section 8 housing projects and his famous comment that he’d laugh all the way to the bank.

Even so, the old firebrand suggests that Governor Carcieri is too combative. Noel says he personally loves Carcieri, another Brown footballer, and isn’t fazed by his ideology.

“But he’s a conservative Republican in a state where he has to work with unions and he has to work with an overwhelmingly Democratic General Assembly and, instead of forging working relationships, he gets into these hostile exchanges which do nothing but defeat his ability to get his program into place, and it astounds me. I can’t understand it. Then he goes on the talk shows. The talk shows are berating the General Assembly, berating politicians in general. He goes on the talk shows. I mean, give me a break.”

Of course, Noel himself engaged in several spectacular feuds and sometimes clashed with Assembly figures, including tensions with Hawkins.

So now we’re back to talking about that U.S. Senate primary, where Hawkins first seemed to be Noel’s chief rival but where Lorber emerged triumphant. Noel has more to offer on his reluctance to run, and why he made the plunge.

When Pastore disclosed he was stepping down, he talked up Noel as a successor. But Noel says he had already told Pastore no, and that when several Democratic bigwigs, including the national chairman, jawboned him, he again said no, that he had to get out of politics and make money.

But then a senator he won’t identify called and said Senate Democrats had agreed to ease the burden by channeling lucrative speaking engagements (and fees) his way.

Now Noel, telling me that politics is a big ego business, says he asked the senator, “Why me?”

“He said, ‘Because we think you could make a difference down here.’ ”

Noel would be low in seniority. But, “This guy said, ‘We think you’re strong enough to even make a difference without having seniority in the United States Senate.’ And you know what? I thought I was strong enough, and that’s when I decided to run.”

He says he’d like to be remembered as a successful athlete, student, lawyer and businessman who worked hard, paid attention to his family, and provided 16 years of honest public service.

And I will remember those things — but also his gift for gab. He’s talking now about his early days as governor, when he was invited to the second inauguration of President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew, an experience he wanted his parents to share.

His mother was afraid to fly. “I sent them down in the state limousine.… My mother and father are sitting in the back, a state trooper driving.” The father never smoked cigars, but now he bought one and lit up and waved at people.

Then, in Washington, “We get in a reception line and I introduced my mother to Agnew.… He was bigger than I was. He was like 6’4”. My mother was 5’1”. And I said, ‘Mom, I want to introduce you to the vice president of the United States.’ And he reaches down and he says, ‘We think a lot of your son,’ you know, some compliment, he probably never knew me, all right? My mother looks up at him and she says, ‘He’s a very honest boy.”

Noel chuckles and notes that before the year was out, the corrupt Agnew had to leave office. “It broke my mother’s heart. She couldn’t believe that the vice president, you know, stole something or did something wrong.”

As I’m about to leave, Noel pauses by the grapefruit tree, picks two white grapefruits and hands me one. As for the other, he says, “I’m going to take this in, slice it up, and eat it right now.”

He sounds very content.

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com