KEY WEST, Florida Reuters By Laura Myers - A hair salon owner crediting his own redone hairstyle as giving him an edge has won Key West's 2002 Ernest Hemingway Look-Alike contest among 154 white-bearded men claiming resemblance to the U.S. writer.
The yearly competition attracted a standing-room-only crowd of more than 450 late on Saturday night to Sloppy Joe's, Hemingway's favorite bar in this island city at Florida's southern tip.
Drawing predominately portly men clad in beige cableknit sweaters, brown fishing vests and a variety of Hemingway-style headgear, the contest came amid the 22nd annual Hemingway Days festival celebrating the July 21 birthday of the Nobel Prize-winning author born 103 years ago.
Renowned for short stories such as "A Clean, Well-lighted Place" and novels such as "The Sun Also Rises," Hemingway lived in Key West for 19 years from 1931, and met his third wife, writer and journalist Martha Gellhorn, at Sloppy Joe's in 1936.
Winning on his sixth try, Ron Thomas, 61, of Phoenix, Arizona, attributed his triumph to a wool sweater from Ireland and a new hairstyle. The victory entitled Thomas, who is also a sports cartoonist and artist, to a free resort stay in Key West and a $100 bar tab.
"I like the competitive camaraderie," Thomas said, adding his favorite Hemingway book is the bullfighting-classic "Death in the Afternoon."
"I enjoy Hemingway's free spirit," Thomas said.
Other memorable competitors in the three-night contest included Chris Storm of Texas, who addressed the crowd in Swahili as a tribute to Hemingway's African safaris and said, "Boys, this has been a great party. Let's have another drink".
CUSTOM DESIGN
Neurosurgeon John Clifford of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had his sweater custom-designed after the one Hemingway wore in a famous photograph taken by the late Yousuf Karsh.
And New York City policeman Dennis Sullivan, in his pitch for the title, said, "It would lift the spirits of every New Yorker."
At nearby Rick's & Durty Harry's bar complex, eight competitors vied in the second "Young Papa Look-Alike Contest." Oregon resident Michael Hall, judged to be in his 20s, took that prize.
For the literary minded, the Hemingway Fest included events for fans of Hemingway's much-imitated, much-lampooned writing which was described as a "powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of narration" when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
Hemingway's granddaughter, Seattle resident Lorian Hemingway, awarded the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition first-prize of $1,000 to Susan Jackson Rodgers of Manhattan, Kansas, from 754 entries. Rodgers' story "Bodies" centred on an eight-year-old girl's version of the drowning death of a neighbour child.
Earlier in the week, the Key West Bait & Tackle shop commemorated the 50th anniversary of the 1952 publication of Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea," about an aged fisherman's battle alone at sea with the greatest catch of his life.
The Southernmost House, soon to open as a bed and breakfast, unveiled a Hemingway literary room with memorabilia such as a letter the author wrote shortly before killing himself in 1961. The house takes its name from Key West's claim to be being the southernmost city on the U.S. mainland.
Click Here For More News
