The Sir Peter Anderson Story

Protecting the Conch Republic brand

Part 10

As told to Mark Howell

 

Hanging in the Office of the Secretary General of the Conch Republic is a Proclamation by Mayor Captain Tony Tarracino on the City of Key West’s proclamation form and bearing the Seal of the City appointing Peter Anderson as the Conch Republic’s first Secretary General.

As stated earlier in this series on Anderson’s life, the position was given to Anderson in recognition of his efforts to save our identity as the Conch Republic from oblivion by reinventing the defunct Conch Republic Days as the Conch Republic Independence Celebration in 1990.

Anderson says that, much to his dying Mother’s chagrin, he decided to take this position seriously and really be the Secretary General of the Conch Republic.

One of his dearest friends at the time was a lawyer named Rob Kunkle who urged Anderson to copyright and trademark the Conch Republic, since no one had. Anderson says he refused to do so, telling Kunkle, “The Conch Republic is a country, not the business of one person. It belongs to all of us and if I expect people to love and support this country — and I do — it has to be thought of as a country by its people.”

Kunkle thought Anderson was nuts.

When the Secretary General brought out the new Conch Republic Passport, he did trademark the passport book in Florida. To see what would happen, he says he did not disclaim ownership of any part of “Conch Republic Passport.”

Florida’s Secretary of State wrote Anderson a letter informing him that he must specifically disclaim ownership of “Conch Republic” and “Passport” because the Conch Republic was a place name in Florida and passport was a generic term. Anderson says he was thrilled by this experiment. It meant that the State of Florida recognized the Conch Republic as a legitimate “place” in the State.

As the newly minted Secretary General, he realized that one of the elements in the demise of Conch Republic Days resulting from what the TDC called “…not enough heads on beds” was that the name said nothing to arouse curiosity — whereas “Conch Republic Independence Celebration” at least got visitors to start asking the right questions.

With that realization, says Anderson, came the most fundamental challenge. What did the Conch Republic stand for? What were it goals? How to define this little country in ways that would intrigue the world while not pissing off the people who actually live here … a formidable challenge on an island where lively discussion of the sky’s color can arouse passions.

Over the years, Anderson went to work. The meeting with the government of the Bahamas yielded the “Mitigation of World Tension Through the Exercise of Humor.” Many seaborne meetings of the Gentlemen’s Boating Club in the harbor off the Bight yielded the desire to bring “More Humor, Warmth and Respect” to a “World in Sore Need of All Three.”

Anderson’s work also yielded “Growing Old Disgracefully,” “Last Bastion of the Overqualified,” “Camp Big Kid,” “Sovereign State of Mind” and many others. These work products of Anderson’s fertile imagination became the hallmarks of how the Conch Republic was known around the world. The professionals call it “branding.” Through such lively branding the Conch Republic became the world’s most famous and successful micro nation.

Countless television and radio stations and newspapers around the planet featured the Conch Republic and Anderson. A one-hour program on the Travel Channel alone went around the world to 72 countries in 32 languages.

All of this brought millions and millions of dollars of positive publicity (Incalculable, really) and equally millions and millions dollars of tourist revenues to Key West.

But something was missing in the Conch Republic. What was missing was the whole rest of the Keys. Even the Conch Republic flag said Key West, only. In 1994, realizing that the statute of limitations for “adverse possession between sovereigns” was about to expire under international public law, Anderson drafted and got sponsored a resolution of the Board of County Commissioners of Monroe County, Fla., stating that Dennis Wardlow had indeed spoken for all of the Florida Keys on April 23, 1982. It passed unanimously. We were finally all one country.

Howard Kolbenheyer of the bar Snappers in Key Largo had been hosting a weekend celebration of the Conch Republic annually since 1992. Anderson immediately appointed him as “Keeper of the Flame” for what the Secretary General decided to call the “Northernmost Territories.” He repeatedly traveled to the Northernmost Territories to address Rotarians, Chamber of Commerce meetings and others to try to drum up interest in creating a Keys-wide (or should that be Keys-long?) Conch Republic Independence Celebration.

And so it was thrilling to Anderson when Kolbenheyer invited him to a meeting of a new business organization called the Upper Keys Business Group (UKBG) in early December of 2007. This group had realized that events drove tourism and had decided to put together a Key Largo schedule of events. They had decided to put on a full-scale Conch Republic Independence Celebration in April 2008.

Brimming over with enthusiasm for this idea, Anderson told them it was possible to accomplish it on such short notice because he’d developed a formula for putting on a major festival in mere months by utilizing the resources of the tourist business community. Advising them that they had not a moment of waste, he offered to share his formula with them on the spot, stating that he trusted them to come to an equitable agreement over the next few weeks. They happily accepted the offer and over the next hour, Anderson told them exactly how to put on a Conch Republic Independence Celebration in the Northernmost Territories.

He came home to Key West on a high and called Andy Newman of the county TDC’s public relations firm and announced that his dream of involving the whole of the Keys was being, at least in part, realized.

Anderson sat down and put together a draft (emphasize “draft” he says) of an agreement between the UKBG and the Conch Republic Independence Celebration to put on the festival. But December flowed into January and Anderson still had received no feedback of any kind on the draft agreement. Calls to Kolbenheyer produced no results as January wore on. The Secretary General was getting worried.

By February, he says, he was at his wit’s end. He’d given these guys the store in December and they were not forthcoming with an agreement. Troubling.

In the second week of February, Anderson was informed that the UKGB had put together a schedule of events involving a number of properties and businesses. They even had a website.

Going to the website, Anderson was appalled. They had taken unique Key West events and duplicated them in the Upper Keys without permission of any kind. Anderson says that building a web of events that could sustain itself year in and year out is an arduous and critical process. He had urged the UKBG at their meeting back in December to develop events unique to the Upper Keys. But here they were just completely knocking off Key West’s events.

Out of simple courtesy, Anderson called the properties the UKBG had involved in their plan in order to inform them that these events were proprietary in nature. They might wish to “govern themselves accordingly.”

Worse, Anderson discovered that this same group, while sitting as the District 5 Advisory Board to the TDC, had awarded themselves thousands of public tax dollars. Officers of the UKBG recused themselves from voting but did not recuse themselves from influence.

Anderson complained to the Board of County Commissioners. The Commission decided not to fund the UKBG. In fact, one Commissioner chided them to develop their own schedule rather than taking Key West’s. “Be original…,” he said.

Anderson says that is when the UKBG decided to sue him and the Conch Republic Independence Celebration, a DBA of his for 18 years. They hired a lawyer and filed suit in Plantation Key.

Anderson has never sued anyone.

Anderson says this is where things got really strange.

 

Next week, just how strange they got…

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