On the State of the Secretary General
Peter Anderson, 67, is fighting a battle against cancer.
The Secretary General of the Conch Republic recently returned from the MD Anderson clinic at the University of Texas where he was treated with advanced proton radiation therapy for stage-three lung cancer.
Taking care of Peter at his Key West home are Judith Anderson and their daughter Mikaela.
Peter Anderson was in at the beginning of the Conch Republic Independence Celebration in 1990 that has brought millions of dollars to our town with its annual parade and great sea battle and other events. Always a champion of the Conch Republic, Peter is also renowned for his Conch Republic passports and tireless efforts to preserve the spirit and integrity of the entire Florida Keys as the Conch Republic.
It was in April 1982 when Border Patrol set up a roadblock on U.S. 1 to search vehicles for narcotics and illegal immigrants. Responding to the roadblock, then-Mayor Dennis Wardlow and his cohorts announced the Keys’ secession from the mainland.
Our identity as the Conch Republic was the first thing Anderson fell in love with when he arrived on the island in 1984. It was Wardlow’s and the Founders’ courage that was celebrated with Conch Republic Days from 1983 to 1989.
When the tourism industry decided not to celebrate the Conch Republic in 1990, Anderson began the biggest chapter in his already remarkable life.
It was Anderson who came up with the slogans and policies that identified the Conch Republic as a “Sovereign State of Mind” seeking only to bring more “humor, warmth and respect to a world in sore need of all three.”
Since the mock-secession and thanks largely to the efforts of the Secretary General, Conch Republic officials have actually been invited to the Summit of the Americas in Miami in 1994 and the1995 Florida Jubilee. And most dramatically that year, when the 478th Civil Affairs Battalion of the U.S. Army attempted to simulate an invasion of a foreign island by advancing a convoy down U.S. 1 and into Key West. The Conch Republic was mobilized and succeeded in dive-bombing the convoy with stale Cuban bread until the 478th issued an apology submitted at a surrender ceremony.
With the Conch Republic Celebration this year from April 18 to 27, Peter Anderson has been sharing his life’s adventures with Konk Life in a series of interviews that we begin this week.
Peter Anderson: My Life
As told to Mark Howell
Day of the Scorpion
On a fine October morning — the 3rd, 2013 — I put the coffee on to brew and go to open the front door at the office, located in front of my home on Simonton Street in old town Key West.
Right there in the middle of the doorway strolls an 8-inch scorpion like he owns the place or maybe wants to buy a Conch Republic passport.
I look down at this scorpion and the old Indian in me tells me it’s going to be a very strange day.
So I dispatch the scorpion before it can hide under the furniture, which cannot be permitted, and get to work on my fourth novel, “In the Key of West (Erin’s Tale).”
The front door bell rings. By all appearances it is a bill collector, wants to know if I’m Peter Anderson. I ask him under what obligation does he think I’m under to answer that question. Who are you to ask? He has no answer, just keeps repeating himself until I send him on his way. That was the second scorpion of the day.
Two hours later the doorbell rings again. It’s the UPS guy with the author’s proof of my first novel, “In the Key of West (A Smuggler’s Tale)” (available on Amazon.com). I cannot tell you the feeling that came over me to hold my first book in my hands: A seminal experience.
At four in the afternoon, the phone rings. It’s my doctor, Ray McKnight, who wants to know if I’m in the Emergency Room.
“No, why? Should I be?”
“Well, the chest X-ray from yesterday shows you have a collapsed left lung. You need to go to the ER immediately, you should hang up the phone and go to the hospital immediately because you’re at serious risk of sudden death.”
Needless to say, being me, I do not go to the ER. Now I’m in a cold panic, knowing I’d been suffering from breathlessness for some time and had reached the point where lights danced before my eyes when I stood up. So I spend the rest of the day and the next day researching my condition and its causes and do not go to the ER because panic is overwhelming me and I need to rally.
Finally, on the second day, Saturday, I go in at 10 a.m.
Eight days later I come out of that hospital having received a diagnosis of stage three lung cancer and was given three months to live by Dr. Towne. The day of the scorpion is the day that changed my life. I changed my diet. No more beers for Petie. No more carbohydrates. No more sugar. Instead, power green drinks, herbs, the best advice that my ring of friends can offer. I need to get strong enough to endure treatment.
But this is what I really have to say after my day of the scorpion. One hopes, you know, that loving a community like I love this one, and giving of oneself to it, to Habitat for Humanity, to Reef Relief, to the Conch Republic foster children’s fund, to the Conch Republic itself and its annual celebration that brings in millions of dollars, you kind of hope that after 30 years of service people will have some appreciation.
But that’s not why you do it. You do it because the Conch Republic’s form of governance means caring. You see a job that needs to be done and you just go and do it.
The support, the prayers, the pledges and the love that have flowed to me since the diagnosis have humbled me to the core of my soul. There are no words really, although I do have two:
Thank you.
2. In the Beginning
I was born the 12th of January 1947, in Gaylord Hospital, Washington, D.C., which later burned down (the two events probably unrelated).
My father was the first president of Atlantic Aviation after the war. My mother raised four children, of whom I was the oldest; my sister, Hannah, died in 1993; my brother Jack lives in New York City; my sister, Tish, lives in Maryland.
I went to grade school in Maryland and attended boarding school at St. Andrews in Delaware. I bombed out of there and went to Chevy Chase High School in Bethesda and flunked out of that. Finally, I went to West Nottingham Academy, the oldest boarding school in the United States and, at 16, I discovered the joy of learning for the first time.
During my sophomore year at Fairleigh Dickinson University, my father died. There was no support for me to continue there and in 1968 we moved to Big Sur near Carmel, California.
Perfect! There I discovered the infinity of the 1960s. And it was there that I became a builder, designing, constructing and furnishing houses all over the place for the next 25 years. I built David (“Kung Fu”) Carradine’s home in Laurel Canyon.
My first wife was my childhood sweetheart. I met her when she was16 and I was 20. We fell madly in love. Deanie’s family was from Old Greenwich, Connecticut. We were together for four years until we separated.
My second wife, Sweet Sue, was from an old family in Orange County, California. We met in Carmel in the late 1960s. For eight years I had helped her raise her son Tony. He was with me when I was building houses in Jamaica. Today he lives in Homosassa Springs.
I divorced Sue in 1980 and set out to create a different life for myself. I became a converter of old industrial white-elephant buildings into residential condos in Philadelphia.
But to me the world increasingly seemed a place where people were choosing to live by conflict and domination rather than abundance and sustainability. So here’s this guy in Philadelphia whose ex-wife is screwing him over and he decides — he’s not the first, nor the last — to change the world for a more meaningful life.
In 1980, between President Carter and President Reagan, no one was talking about space. Meanwhile here on Earth, in an era of a dwindling pie (resources), and more and more people wanting a slice of pie on a planet that is already poisoned, raped, plundered beyond recognition, unable to sustain the demand put upon it.
This was on the eve of the first shuttle launch, at a time when we knew that the only place possessing more aluminum than the Earth was the Moon. So I decided to convince each presidential campaign to make space development an issue and priority.
I had access to Ben Bova, the editor of Omni magazine, and he convinced his publisher Bob Guccione to frame all three presidential campaigns in a forum (not debate) on space development at the National Air and Space Museum on the eve of the1980 election. NASA offered to be involved.
Jimmy Carter said yes. Anderson said yes. Reagan kept us hanging until two days before the election. His campaign was waiting to see if Carter got the hostages released by Iran. So the forum did not come off, despite my best efforts.
Chapter 3
So I found myself sitting on the Big Sur coast in early December, meditating. Who is Reagan? He is an actor. Actors need scripts; without them they have nothing to do. So let’s write an actor a script for his role in history…
I went back to Ben Bova and Omni magazine. Ben Bova agreed with me that we had the potential to live in an era of unlimited abundance for all the world. I told Ben my idea to write the new President Reagan a script for his role in history by creating a Prospectus for Space Development. We would involve all organizations involved in space research, advocacy, or development to create the Prospectus. Ben enthusiastically agreed and so did Bob Guccione and Kathy Keaton, publisher of Omni.
They gave me an office at Penthouse/Omni headquarters in New York City that had once been a changing room for Penthouse models. You could smell it.
They gave me two phones and a fax machine. I had three months before the first shuttle launch to convince the space community to help me change the world. More than 100 individuals and organizations, everybody from Arthur C. Clarke to the L5 Society, a society promoting space colonization pitched in.
Our next challenge was how to present the Prospectus to President Reagan. We decided to assemble a blue-ribbon presentation committee to present the Prospectus to the President immediately following the safe return of Columbia from its first voyage into space… Columbia “Earth’s first space ship”. Luminaries such as Bob Hope, Carol Burnett, Barry Goldwater and Sen. Harrison Schmidt (who had been to the Moon) agreed to join.
Just before the launch, Guccione’s wife Kathy Keaton received a call that I must fly to the West Coast in order to attend a Rand Institute meeting to discuss the Prospectus at the home of Jerry Pournell, a science/science-fiction writer in Los Angeles.
I walked into this room that was the most “wired” room I had ever even dreamed of. They could monitor my heart rate through the walls. They informed me under no uncertain terms that the Prospectus posed a grave threat to national security.
They informed me that the Pentagon and the defense establishment had developed a plan to build space defenses and the idea of commercializing space development would potentially dilute that effort.
Seething inside, but maintaining my cool, I told them that a nation’s security was not dependent on weapons systems alone and that creating a world of abundance would increase our nation’s security just as well. Why not do it all?
Here I was, Peter Anderson, in the very heart of the beast, being told that I was putting national security at risk. I tried to convince them that our security also depended on our economic strength and how the world viewed us. This was the quintessential point at the center of the notion of abundance for all.
For example, I told them, a solar-powered satellite over the bauxite deposits in Nigeria could end up providing washing machines for all in that part of Africa. So, at least I got to tell those people, in the most wired room in the world in terms of surveillance, how screwed up they were.
I reported all this to Ben Bova, Bob Guccione, and Kathy Keaton; and they courageously decided that we’d go ahead with the presentation of the Prospectus. But one week before the shuttle flew, another “crazed lone assassin” put a bullet in President Reagan and he was no longer available to receive the Prospectus following Columbia’s first flight.
He did get to see it in November, but with little fanfare. And it was a grim experience for me, one year later, to hear Reagan quote two whole sentences verbatim from it, even as Congress was busy justifying the Star Wars program, the very thing I abhorred.
But my philosophy is that if one receives or comes up with a good idea, the only sin is not to act on it. You may succeed in it or you may fail with it. I sum up my life with that statement. One must have the courage to act on one’s good ideas. And it was during this experience that I met Joanna Leary, Timothy Leary’s former wife, whom I would marry, but that’s another story.
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