Good Morning Key West

What to me was a most interesting division developed at Mayor Morgan McPherson’s economic summit a couple of weeks ago. I saw this division in the speakers’ presentations. I saw it in the discussion at the table where I sat with Mayor McPerhson, the market research director of the TDC, the Commander of the Navy Base, an Assistant Key West City manager, and two Key West business women. And I saw it in the reports from the individual tables. The division, quite simply, is that many people understand that Key West’s economy is tourist driven, and many people do not understand this, or want it to be that way.

One speaker explained a survey that had been sent to businesses which had applied for business licenses in Key West. He said thirty-five percent of the businesses that responded said their revenues came from tourism. Many people in the room assumed this meant sixty-five percent of the businesses’ revenues came from non-tourism. So I raised my hand and when I got the nod I said the thirty-five percent of the businesses which rely on tourism probably make up seventy percent of all business revenues. The speaker said that probably was true, and even the businesses that did not report reliance on tourism depended on it, because many of those businesses’ customers depended on tourist dollars.

When I made the same point at our table discussion, the Assistant City Manager said Key West’s economy definitely is tourist driven. The Navy Commander seemed to agree. The Assistant City Manager and the Navy Commander did not argue with me when I mentioned the survey that had been done (by Lou Harris) last year, in which the number one reason given by people surveyed for coming to Key West was the night life. The Assistant City Manager and the Navy Commander did not take issue with my saying Key West is known as a place that is very different, where people can come and let their hair down and be who they really are, which they cannot do where they live. Key West is a zoo, I said. We need to keep hammering that home. The Assistant City Manager and the Navy Commander did not disagree. Mayor McPerhson and three women did disagree.

When the table discussions concluded, each table had a person speak for that table’s “conclusions.” One table recommended that Key West come up with a unified message that got people’s attention, and get that message out, and keep getting it out. I later would learn that this was Onett Johnson’s suggestion. Onnet and his wife, Penny, own Sippin’ Internet Café on Eaton Street, just off Duval Street. I know them well, because Sippin’ is my office. I’ve seen three different owners there, since my arrival in Key West in late 2000. Onett and Penny have done wonders with Sippin’. They are personable. They hire personable people to help them run the café’. One is from Slovakia. The others are Americans.

Onett is a pro with computers and he teaches business management at Florida Keys Community College. He knows, as do I, from when I was marketing and advertising director of my father’s company, that you come up with a unified message that gets people’s attention, and you hammer away with it. Onett and I know that you come up with something that fits the product you are selling. You do not come up with something that you want to use to make the product into something it isn’t, something you want it to be instead of what it is. That is precisely what the three women at my table and Mayor McPerhson seemed to want to do, though, with Key West.

Except for Onett Johnson’s unified message suggestion, the only other table suggestion that hit home with me was Capt. Andy Griffith’s suggestion that we need to come up with a Walt Disneyesuqe vision for Key West, for the city to become. For me, the city is already there, but many Key Westers don’t see or want to see it. Key West really is a zoo, a human zoo. Not only that, it is an international human zoo. As I told the Key West Business Guild at a candidate forum earlier this year, it’s a wonderful zoo. I was the first candidate who got to answer the question put to all county commission candidates: Do you think we need a nude beach? You betcha. The Europeans will love it, as will many Americans, and plenty of Key Westers, too. The other candidates chimed in favor, too. The Guild members and candidates were rolling in the aisles.

Key West is a place where I can play chess for several hours, like yesterday afternoon, with a man from Romania now living in Miami. A place where Mayor McPherson, a church minister and Realtor, can drink all afternoon and into the evening with Louie La Torre and other buddies, and then testify in court that, no, Louie didn’t seem drunk when he left the watering hole and drove his car cross the median on US 1 and rammed a Slovakian woman head-on and caused her permanent body and brain damage. A place where the main street is as well known as any street in the world, including New Orleans. A place where Capt. Tony, a notorious bar owner, boozer, lover of women and producer of mucho bambinos out of wedlock, became our most beloved mayor.

I learned yesterday from the doggie memorabilia vendor, Roger Schaal, who sets up on the corner of Duval and Eaton most days, across from St. Paul’s Church, that Capt. Tony got the national morning television shows to come to Key West and do their shows live, here. Roger said it jacked up the Key West tourist trade for five years. He said we need to get those shows back down here again. I said, yeah, that would really help. I said  I had been on some of those shows myself in another life. The Today Show, with Jane Pauley, the most memorable, over my first book, HOME BUYERS: Lambs to the slaughter? Realtors loved it.

Roger said we need to get Jimmy Buffet back down here, to do it up for Key West, where Jimmy got his start, in Capt Tony’s bar, as I recalled in the back roads of the recesses of the memories of my mind. Yeah, I said, and bring in other name singers. Maybe one a month. Maybe one a week. Roger mentioned Jerry Jeff Walker, whom I had heard in Birmingham several lifetimes ago. He was terrific, brought the house down with “up against the wall redneck mother!” When I asked if Jerry Jeff is still doing his thing, Roger said yep, every year he goes down to Costa Rica and draws people from all over for a week. Can you imagine Duval Street closed for the likes of Jimmy Buffet and Jerry Jeff Walker? Can you imagine the people who will come for that?

I have lived in other funky cities: Santa Fe, New Mexico and Boulder, Colorado. I have lived on Maui. I have traveled a good bit abroad: Nepal, Australia, New Zeland, Jamaica, the British Virgin Islands, Antigua, Dominica and the lower Windward Islands of the Caribbean, Costa Rica, Mexico, Europe, South Africa, Mauritus, India, Kuai and the Big Island in Hawaii. I have spent serious time in New York City and southern and northern California. I have done Sedona and Las Vegas. I tell you, my friends and not so friends: there is no place on this planet like Key West. It is an anomaly. As such, it is precious.

But holy wild chicken, it’s still in its infancy! Capt. Tony’s vision is only just starting to bloom. I betcha Jimmy Buffet would tell anyone who cares to listen that Capt. Toney’s s spirit and Key West’s spirit are one. We need to keep that ever in mind when we tell people about Key West. We need to remember Tony Terrancino is our ship’s captain. Read about him in “The Last Mango in Paris,” by Crickett Desmarais, with illustrations by Letty Novak, starting on page 48 of The Secret of Salt: AN INDIGENOUS JOURNAL (thesecretofsalt.com). Read about Capt. Tony, and many, many other anomalies; a small number of the anomalies who are the city that is anomaly.

Our city. Key West. Where people accused of being weirdos some place else else can come mingle with real weirdos.

Sloan Bashinsky, 23 December 2008