By Nancy Klingener
I was a 23-year-old newspaper reporter when I moved to the Keys in 1991. I didn’t know much about the place except that it was pretty close to Cuba and its biggest city had elected a beloved barkeeper as its mayor. As a fairly recent English major, my approach to learning about the Keys was through reading. Most of the books were by and about guys — Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Russell Banks, Carl Hiaasen, Tom McGuane. Same for the prominent figures in local history. When Key West placed a memorial sculpture garden on city property near Mallory Square in 1997, only five out of the 36 busts were of women.
When I got off the page and into real life, though, it was women who taught me about this place. They were the best of mentors, though I don’t think they saw this as their role. They were just living their lives, and generously sharing their hard-earned knowledge and experience with a newcomer. If I had my own memorial sculpture garden (which I wouldn’t, because honestly I find those heads a bit creepy), this is who I would nominate:
Fran Ford was a force of nature. She was also a force FOR nature, as a longtime stalwart of the Florida Keys Audubon Society as well as the Key West Garden Club. She was one of those people who seemed to have an extra gear and boundless energy — even though she was decades closer to my grandmother’s age than mine. I always remember her striding through the cemetery in her khaki skirt with her dog running alongside (yes, I know you are not supposed to have dogs in the cemetery, but I don’t know if any sexton tried to tell Fran that). If you came within Fran’s orbit, you would be gathered in and potentially deployed and I was for it. She was always up to something interesting — organizing a hawk watch, or putting a marker on the grave of a local fisherman named Richard Kemp who came across a weird-looking sea turtle and sent it off to Harvard (it’s now called the Kemp’s Ridley), rounding up the troops for an Audubon potluck. There is a memorial of sorts for her — the Fran Ford White-crowned Pigeon Preserve on Government Road in Key West. But I mostly appreciate Fran as a sort of proto-social media — she was a connector and a collector, saving and distributing bits of knowledge through newspaper clips, scientific documents and personal networks.
Dianne Zolotow was about the same age as my mom, but from the time I met her, she treated me as a junior colleague. She had been a reporter for the local Key West paper as a young woman and an editor in her later career, before coming back to Key West and running Lucky Street Gallery, which was her occupation when I met her. Lucky Street was off Duval but at the center of the local art scene. She and her husband David were effortlessly cool without trying to be hip. Like me, she loved books and baseball (specifically the Red Sox) and she loved the island where she’d grown up and then returned – without getting bitter about the many ways it had changed.
I met Alice Allen when I was putting together a series of oral histories for the Miami Herald in the mid-’90s. She had come to the Keys as a kid when her father, Robert Porter Allen, was sent by the Audubon Society to see what was happening to the birds in Florida Bay. He made his name studying roseate spoonbills, sandhill cranes, flamingos and other beautiful birds. Alice, like her mom before her, taught piano to generations of Keys kids and fought for the preservation of her historic Tavernier neighborhood. Like Dianne, she still loved her island home even as it was unrecognizable from the place she first knew. And she was a living link to some of the first people to recognize and fight for the importance of Florida Bay as habitat for magnificent birds and the endpoint of the Everglades ecosystem.
I probably gravitated toward learning from these women because I grew up in an all-female household, including my grandmother, a retired library director.
I’ve always felt at home in libraries, whether it’s in a school, a public library – or, now, my workplace. In the 1990s, when the Monroe County Commission met in Key Largo, we all crammed into the Key Largo library’s community room. I was covering those meetings – using a TRS-80 powered by AA batteries.
Norma Kula was the Key Largo library branch manager and she allowed me to use one of the phone lines in the library break room to connect to Miami and file my stories for the Herald. The alternative would have been using acoustic couplers (ask your grandparents, kids!) in a grimy phone booth (again, ask your grandparents!) in a (usually stinking hot) Key Largo parking lot. It’s hard to describe in our currently hyperconnected world how much Norma’s kindness improved my life. Later, she brought much-needed stability to our county’s library system, stepping up as the director after a lot of turmoil and turnover. In 2009, as I was exploring whether libraries were part of my future career path, she hired me. She was a kind woman of the librarian old school, and her work improved the lives of countless people who probably never realized it.
I did realize it – but I wish I had let her know.
