Anne L. Rice, assistant director of support services for Monroe County Public Library, will miss the way Tom Hambright delicately handled historical papers, such as the tattered love letters from a soldier. Michael Nelson, the library’s assistant director of public services, will miss his very presence — the way he came into the library every day during COVID, even during the closures, wearing a tie along with his mask.
“There will be a void in the Florida History Room without doubt,” Key West author and ghost hunter David Sloan said. “But Tom earned his retirement a thousand times over. Tom’s retirement marks the end of an era.”
The Board of County Commissioners agrees. Hambright will be retiring on Wednesday, Feb. 23 — his 84th birthday — after 36 years with the county as a historian. So in his honor, the board decreed that he is now Historian Emeritus in a ceremony at their Feb. 16 meeting.
Hambright spoke to Keys Weekly after the ceremony.
“It’s satisfying, but it’s going to be boring,” he confided with a laugh. “But I’m turning 84.”
He said his favorite part of the job was “when you find something new.” As an example, he excitedly talked about new documents that he discovered recently while researching the 200th anniversary of Key West. He was reading papers that described the events of March 25, 1822, when U.S. Navy Lt. Matthew Perry planted the American flag on island soil.
Hambright learned from a document that Key West founding father John W. C. Fleming attended this flag raising and sang a song.
“And we didn’t know this before,” he said, thrilled, with a gleam in his eye.
The fact that he still digs through documents jives with his passion for history, according to Alex Vega. Vega founded the Key West Firehouse Museum in 1991 and received a lot of help from Hambright with research. The two became friends.
“His passion for history rubs off on you,” Vega said. “He used to go on vacation and go to the National Archives in D.C., just researching things about Key West. Who has that time to do that? But I found myself on a few similar trips, all because of him.”
“Tom’s legacy is so huge it’s hard to capture, but I’d say it’s one of tirelessly preserving and incredibly generous sharing the history of the Keys in so many different ways,” said Nancy Klingener, reporter for WLRN and a former coworker of his at the library. She complimented his archiving of local history.
“The newsletters of the Key West Maritime Historical Society are our local historical journal,” she continued. “And more recently the publicly accessible image archive on Flickr has brought the history of the Keys to the world — way more people than could ever make it to the little library on Fleming Street.”
And Sloan credits Hambright with changing his life.
“When I moved to Key West in 1996 to start the original ghost tour, no one was talking about ghosts,” Sloan said. “No books in the library, no one telling stories on the streets. I packed up my car and was ready to leave town when something told me to go back to the Florida History Room. Tom Hambright was there. I told him I was looking for a book on ghosts, and without looking up, he said, ‘There are none.’ As I turned to leave, he looked up and said, ‘No ghost books, but we have plenty of ghosts.’ Tom disappeared into the vault and returned with a folder full of newspaper clippings related to Key West’s haunted history. That moment changed the course of my life. I can’t imagine where I might have ended up were it not for Tom.”
