Notable Residents
Ernest Hemingway lived on Bimini from 1935 to 1937, staying at the Compleat Angler Hotel. He worked on To Have and Have Not and wrote a few articles, but mostly he fished aboard his boat Pilar, trolling the deep blue offshore waters for marlin, tuna and swordfish. Hemingway was attracted to Bimini by tales of the incredible fishing available in the Gulf Stream, the legendary “river” of warm water that rushes north past the Bahamas. An Atlantic blue marlin with a mass of 500 pounds (230 kg) caught off Bimini allegedly inspired Hemingway to write The Old Man and the Sea and Islands in The Stream.
The Duke of Windsor, as governor of The Bahamas during World War II, visited Bimini.
South Bimini was home to Colonel Joseph C. Mackey, the founder of Mackey Airlines, which was later bought by Eastern Airlines. He built a home on the southern tip of South Bimini. This structure would become the Sunshine Inn and is currently a bar and restaurant, though the hotel was damaged by a hurricane and was subsequently demolished.
Among Port Royale's other notable residents was Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., who was excluded from the U.S. House of Representatives because of allegations that he misappropriated committee funds for personal use. He stayed in Bimini from January 1967 to April 1969 in self-imposed exile until the Supreme Court ruled that the House had acted unconstitutionally when it excluded Powell, a duly elected member. In 1972 Powell died of cancer in Miami. Following his funeral in New York his ashes were brought to Bimini and scattered in the waters surrounding the island.
In May 1987, Colorado Senator Gary Hart's presidential bid was derailed after media reports exposed an affair with model Donna Rice. Photos taken of the Senator on an overnight trip to Bimini on the yacht Monkey Business fed the media frenzy. An intimate photo of Rice sitting on the lap of Hart on one of Bimini's docks was the nail in the coffin for Hart's campaign for the presidency.
Jody Weech, Miss Commonwealth Bahamas 1992, was from Bimini. She made the Top 10 in the Miss World contest in Sun City South Africa. She received the title Miss World Caribbean.
Singer Jimmy Buffett also spent some time on South Bimini while writing one of his books.
While not a resident of the island, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr visited in 1964 and worked on his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech while there.
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Famous quotes containing the words notable and/or residents:
“a notable prince that was called King John;
And he ruled England with main and with might,
For he did great wrong, and maintained little right.”
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“In most nineteenth-century cities, both large and small, more than 50 percent—and often up to 75 percent—of the residents in any given year were no longer there ten years later. People born in the twentieth century are much more likely to live near their birthplace than were people born in the nineteenth century.”
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