The Late Great Shirley Freeman

By Rick Boettger

A terrible loss for us all, but particularly sad for me.  Of my four great mentors and inspirations in Key West, only one remains, and I haven’t spoken with him for years.  Two men, two women, and Shirley was the most important to me.

She got me into both local politics and investigative journalism.  The first time I met her was at a meeting at her house fighting the development of the old Jabour’s Campground at the Bight for violating the height ordinances.  The legal case had suffered a setback, and the litigants were, they felt, being singled out by Code Enforcement for their trouble making.  It was decided to file one last suit.  But nobody stepped up to the plate to be lead litigant.  Wanting to impress my new friends, I volunteered, and soon eight others joined in. And we won.  Poetically, that ruling was the common law basis for my winning my 2011 case against the City to keep the cemetery open to bikes.

From this meeting, one of the other litigants got me an interview with a political weekly paper, for which I wrote for 12 years.  I continued to meet with Shirley to pick her brain on political issues, sitting for hours in her drawing room.  I never mentioned her when she was alive because of my very provocative stances on so many issues.  While I don’t mind taking flak, it is not in my personal interest to have my most influential friends suffer that flak for their links to me.  Only now, posthumously, am I writing about my relationship with her.

Entirely by chance I ended up doing her various corporate and personal taxes for 15 years.  She is the only client whose name I drop, with her specific permission to discuss the large Historic Renovations federal tax credit. I set it up for her, and she wanted to encourage others to do the same.  It was an honor, and I visited her home to pick up her yearly numbers and then deliver the finished returns.  The more you knew about her, the greater a lady she was.

Like hundreds of others, I enjoyed her sensational parties, like her 80th, when Cynthia and I went as Melinda and Bill Gates, passing out phony million dollar donation checks.  She honored me by giving me one of four singing spots at the party.  Not my biggest audience, but the coolest.  We both sang in chorale before I went lounge lizard, and I did a duet with her of Theme from Titanic at my church when I surprise-proposed to Cynthia while I was conducting the service.  Shirley was the only one there who knew my secret, as I didn’t want her to be in shock—like Cynthia—for our duet, which immediately followed the proposal.  Shirley treated us to a celebratory luncheon afterwards, at which her 90+-year-old mother regaled us with her romantic adventures at her nursing home.

I am so grateful that I managed to introduce her to newcomer Jordan Sommer, having him give us a play-along on her concert grand piano while Shirley and I sang together and apart.  This was barely a month before she left us.

Now that I’ve run most of you off with my bragging, I can come to the reason I’m writing this, unburying the lede, so to speak.  Wisteria seems to have been finally granted to the government after 13 years of lawsuits by the supposed owners, FEB Corporation.  Thirteen years ago, I was part of a complex plan to develop the island, and they blew it. Shirley was an integral part of the plan.

I’d been approached by the late Jim Hendrick and a fellow well-known mover-and-shaker (who is still alive, and thus remains anonymous in this writing, like the owners of FEB).  They proposed a benign development of the island and thought I could help them pull it off.  In brief, instead of 200 units, there would be just 24, all with bird-sanctuary landscaping.  Also, there would be free access to a beach that fronted a mooring field they would install around the sunken Wisteria ship, for whom the island was named.  Further, they would deed a small portion of a hardwood hummock on the end nearest Sunset Key.

Why approach me?  I had cavalierly written in one of my long weekly columns that “I don’t care if they put a 17-story hotel on the island.  I care about preserving the architecture of Old Town.”

This provoked an enraged Fran Ford, also late and great, doyenne of not only the local Audubon Society but also the Garden Club.  She commissioned and sent me a 40 page study of the importance of Wisteria to local bird life, especially the White-crowned Pigeon.  I read it, we met, I apologized, swayed by the need for birds nesting west towards the Tortugas to have a rest stop on their way to feast on the foliage of Key West.

Knowing this, Jim and Mr X thought I could intercede between businessmen and the local ecologists.  Their clever plan was to convince me of the value of the development, and have me sway the ecological community.  I also knew my third mentor, Nils Meunch, former HARC chairman, as well as the eminent Shirley.  Jim and X spent a wonderful 3 hours walking me around Wisteria, imagining the lots and foliage, perusing the beach fronting the future mooring field, and enjoying the hardwood hummock.  Jim showed off his incredibly ripped body with a quick swim.

A key part of the agreement was having the Garden Club take ownership of the hummock, and with me specifically in charge of enforcing that ownership on behalf of the Garden Club (for years I did their long 990 tax return).  Jim had brokered the original agreement that granted Sunset Key to the same major owner of FEB.  Jim was outraged that good deals he had brokered had been ignored.  For example, access to the beach was supposed to be free, but Sunset Key actually charged $20 apiece to use it.  Also, 17 rooms in the TAMPOA office building at 201 Front Street were supposed to be preserved for use by local artists but never were. Jim said, no one was empowered to enforce the agreements.  The City Commission and staff were simply not interested, and the benefits evaporated.  So that’s why they named an Enforcer, me.

Fran Ford was an easy sell.  She knew the plan would be great for the birds.  I in fact lived right next door to another local birder and Garden Club President, Rosi Ware, whose backyard had the kind of bird-friendly foliage they would have been required to put in the yards of Wisteria, and it was a flock-full aviary.  Nils Meunch* was excited about the mooring field, something he himself had proposed.  The Garden Club would have loved to preserve the hummock as long as I did the work.

Getting Shirley on board would have made it hard for the community to resist.  She knew and respected Fran and Nils, and put up with my cajoling by signing on herself.  A heart-stopping glitch in the agreement was when my sweet Cynthia, coming with me to Shirley’s, said, “Jim just dropped off the latest plans tonight.”  Shirley was taken aback, raised her head imperiously, and said in her strong soprano, “Jim?? JIM??!!?? You don’t mean Jim HENDRICK, do you?”

Jim had treated Shirley like an idiot when he was County Attorney and she was Mayor.  Pure disrespect.  She hated him, and must have loved seeing him disbarred for taking a bribe.  Cynthia somehow got her down off the walls, for the greater good, Fran and Nils, please Shirley.

So, I was sold, and I had my three eminences lined up to help sell it to the public and the city planners.  I’d have to do a lot of personal work with my many eco-friends, especially Last Stand, where Elliot Baron and Bill Verge had installed me as Treasurer for a while. The then-president was my then-Publisher.  I loved her, and she’d be pissed.  But I’m used to pissing off my friends, and I’m pretty sure I could have handled the heat and pulled off the plan.

However….  Though FEB planned to make a $20 million profit on the deal, and the local multi-millionaire partner liked it, the national billionaire partner wanted to hold out for another Sunset Key triumph.  Pffft.  A year later, plans were moot as, following  Naja Girard’s relentless investigation, the Government decided to take it back.  I doubt they would have, had there been a harmonious development deal in progress.

Until now, no one knew about it but us chickens, and I’m not even sure about the FEB end, as I never met them, and I only have the word of a disbarred dead lawyer for much of it.  The plans looked real, and I surely have them somewhere.  That’s thirteen years of millions of dollars in tax revenue for the City, happy landowners, well-fed White-crowned Pigeons, Wisteria snorkelers, and beachgoers.  

But let’s pray for the new owners, the Bureau of Land Management.  My government at all levels has a terrible record of using its immense landholdings for the good of We the People.  They tend to fence it off and sit on it.  But do something, please.  If only for the beachgoers and birds.

Footnote*–Nils got me involved in the SUFA case, leading me after 8 years to nail all five county commissioners who destroyed SUFA on a total of 19 Florida Ethics Commission violations, arguably my biggest hit in my Keys career of hell raising. Four of the five did not serve their next term, but even the four who should thank me for their positions regard me as the enemy. To me, an honor.

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