Rosanne Dunkelberger
Adam Putnam: Campaign Cupid?
If there is such a thing as the Multiverse, it might explain why Julie Fazekas and Jack Rogers lived their entire lives in Lakeland, yet didn’t manage to meet each other until 2018 when they both worked on Adam Putnam’s (ultimately unsuccessful) campaign for Florida Governor.
Then again, a less theoretical explanation might work. “I went to private school. He went to public school,” says Julie. “We didn’t meet until after college, which I always joke is like a good thing. It’s the best time to meet your significant other.”
While they worked in separate silos in the campaign — she was a fundraiser, he was Putnam’s travel aide — “I was so focused on wanting to support the team and being a team player and being professional. I was worried that dating Jack … would get me in trouble for starting a new relationship,” she shares. “It turned out the whole campaign … they’re all secretly cheering us on — or rather telling Jack, ‘You can’t miss out on this opportunity.’ … Everyone was encouraging us to pursue a relationship and here we are ending up married.”
There would be nearly four years of long-distance dating before the couple tied the knot in May 2023 in North Carolina, where Jack’s family often vacations.
The Tar Heel State is also where Jack proposed, and Julie truly didn’t have a clue it was coming. She had baked a birthday cake for a friend, and they traveled to Clayton, Georgia, to find the “perfect candles.”
The cake and a power outage proved to be the perfect distraction for Jack’s proposal plan.
“I made up this elaborate story. We’re going to go to dinner. But first, we’re going to hike up and see the sunset,” he says. “We hike all the way up there and I was like, surely she knows at this point, it’s a bit obvious.” It wasn’t. She noticed her boyfriend acting like a teenager who’s awkward around girls and asked him, “What is wrong with you? What is going on?
Julie continues the tale: “The closer we got, I started to pick up something, but I couldn’t tell what. Was he just annoyed that he’s hiking up in his dinner clothes?” He dropped to his knee on top of Sunset Rock and proposed.
Today, they live in Tallahassee where Jack is Legislative Affairs director for the Florida Department of Transportation. Julie puts her marketing degree from the University of Florida to work as a Director at Red Hills Strategies.
Julie didn’t envision a career in politics after college, but at a tender age, Jack was introduced to the world of influence as a teenager through the late Randy Roberts, a neighbor and family friend who lobbied for Publix.
“I always got to hear the trips he went on or Gator games and saw some pictures of him with George W. Bush, and I was like, ‘This is a cool job. What is this job?’ So, I started looking into it and pursuing it as a career, and I’m here now,” he says. Despite all the Gator influence, Jack was lured to Ole Miss to earn his degree in political science.
The newlyweds are finding that working in the same milieu makes Session time an easier relationship lift. “There’s a lot of grace on her part, especially this time of year,” says Jack. “Flexibility is a big thing, especially in this time period. But in a way, it’s a blessing that we’re in the same industry because, you know, it’s an ebb and flow of who has more on their plate any given week and the other person is there to pick up the slack and support one another, whether they’re getting home late or they’re traveling.”
It’s fun to talk shop at home after hours, he says, “but other times it’s just a reminder to just, root ourselves in our own personal lives and enjoy time off and make the most of it with our loved ones and family and friends.”
