In Key West, He Finds the Importance of Being Ernest

Most fans would say that Ernest Hemingway was one of a kind. But judges at the seventh annual Hemingway Days Festival in Key West, Fla., where the author lived for many years, thought Jack Waterbury, a 57-year-old sail charter operator, could pass as the Nobel Prize winner’s double. Waterbury beat out 31 other men to become the first Key West resident to win the Hemingway look-alike title. The anniversary of Hemingway’s birth on July 21, 1899, also stirred memories in Ketchum, Ida., where he built a home. Resident Pat Pidgeon remembers the time in 1960 he first met the writer. Pidgeon had become a spur-of-the-moment bartender when the bar’s owner left town for a few weeks. Hemingway walked in and “asked for a Rob Roy, and I told him I didn’t know how to make one,” Pidgeon said. “So he taught me how and said, ‘Fix one for yourself so you know what it tastes like.’ Anyway, I wound up getting drunk, Hemingway left and he thought that was a lot of fun.” Jim Terra, who worked at another bar, remembers that Hemingway came in often with his hunting and fishing guide, Taylor Williams, and Gary Cooper. “I just have a feeling about when he wrote ‘The Old Man and the Sea,’ I have an idea that book was about Taylor Williams,” Terra said.

--The Watsons have struck gold--right where family legend said it would be. Mark Watson of Cambridge, Ohio, said his late father, William, used to tell of buried gold. “It was just a thing in the back of his mind that he had always known, that there was a Mason jar of gold buried out there,” said Watson, who believes the gold was buried by his great-grandfather, Jefferson Watson. Recently, a backhoe operator who was removing the remains of an old house on the family property uncovered the jar containing 22 $5 coins and five $10 coins from the 1890s and the early 1900s and worth $4,500 to $20,000. “If it’s worth $10 or $10,000, that’s not what’s important,” Watson said. “They will be considered family heirlooms.”

--Eating haggis is easy for John Kenmuir, it’s criticism that the 29-year-old Scot finds hard to swallow. Kenmuir, who formerly held the record as the world’s fastest haggis eater, is pulling out of this year’s finals because of what he called a hate campaign waged against him by supporters of Peter McPhee, the current record-holder. Five-time winner Kenmuir said opponents wore “Kenmuir Hater” T-shirts. “If there was a competition for eating sour grapes, they’d win hands down,” he said. Haggis, a Scottish dish, is a compote of sheep’s liver, heart, lungs and oats wrapped in a sheep’s stomach.