Island Hotel bunker is remnant of a past crisis

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© St. Petersburg Times,
published November 2, 2001

I have to admit I am fascinated with the story of the Cuban Missile Crisis, mostly because I missed it, which might be why some aspects of the situation are funnier to me than other people, although the tale of the bunker at the Island Hotel in Cedar Key looks less crazy in today's light than it did scant months ago.

The entire Cuban crisis occurred while I was in Marine Corps Boot Camp on Parris Island in South Carolina. There was no television and no newspapers for recruits in those days; they were seen as unnecessary distractions. Once a week the senior drill instructor would walk the length of the squad by holding up a copy of the base newspaper, The Boot, and tell us that if we were asked by anyone we were to answer that we had, indeed seen The Boot.

We did get regular lectures telling us that at any moment our training would be terminated and we would be whisked away to fight in Cuba, which seems rather unlikely from this historical perspective, but seemed very possible to us.

Because of my viewpoint, all of the pictures of rockets at Key West pointing across the Florida Straits and all of the movies and documentaries about Kennedy and Khrushchev being eyeball-to-eyeball are more a part of history than of my life.

I actually did go to Cuba in 1963, right after Castro cut off the water, and when things were still nervous there, but the real crisis had passed.

And, seeing it from a historical newsreel-like perspective, I found the emphasis on "duck-and-cover" bomb drills in schools and panic buyers cleaning out grocery shelves like the granddaddy of all hurricanes (actually back then it was, properly, the grandmama of all hurricanes) was about to arrive.

And in Cedar Key, just a chunk of road north of Crystal River, the owners of the Island Hotel and some of their regulars were definitely into the spirit, so to speak, of the moment.

The Island Hotel, with a colorful history as everything from a (rumored) brothel to a funeral home and store, has long been a central gathering place for locals and visitors to the Cedar Key community.

Its bar, complete with a bullet-pierced picture of Neptune, has long been a place where the Island's great, and sometimes not so great, ideas were hatched.

One day some of the locals, including then-owner Bessie Gibbs, decided after a drink or six and some tortuous strategic reasoning that Castro was going to invade Florida, and that the most logical place for him to do it would be at Cedar Key.

It was enough to send them scurrying to hire high school kids to fill sandbags so they could build a bunker in the hotel's basement, where they, some canned, and one assumes a substantial amount of bottled, goods stayed holed up for several days.

Three owners since than have left the bunker's remnants relatively unmolested, although I'm told they have deteriorated to near unrecognizability now. When I first saw them there was a half-buried gin bottle and a rusty old can that looked like it might once have held Spam.

We laughed when we saw that, at how people could panic over not much.

Today's war, for sure, has already made all of us feel vulnerable. Many of us are afraid to open our mail. Law enforcement agencies are deluged with calls, on the average of every five minutes in some jurisdictions, from people suspicious of innocent junk mail. Anyone who powders a baby's behind in a mall bathroom runs the risk of setting off a major panic and a state employee's woozy feeling in Dade City recently had the fire department there in full-scale hazardous materials mode.

What's making it worse is that the government has sort of gone from telling us not to panic to telling us to panic just a little, although its spokespersons can't say just how much is proper.

Maybe some day people will go into the basements and storage areas of our basements and homes and ask who stockpiled rubber gloves and surgical masks and gas masks.

Someone around, we hope, will remember.

And maybe, we hope, they will be able to smile at how needless most of it was.

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