Episode 76 - Hillsboro Inlet Lighthouse Restoration with Ralph Krugler

0:00 Hi, everybody. I'm Emily. And I'm Vince. And this is The Lighthouse Lowdown. This is a fun episode. If you didn't read our title, we are doing an interview with Ralph Kugler today, and we're going to hear all about his life and the Hillsborough Inlet Lighthouse, where he is the historian. And also about the restoration that's coming up. And we need all of you to listen in and to donate your hard -earned cash. Okay? Yep. We had a lot of fun with Ralph. Yeah. Let's get into it. It's a really good one. It's long and it's worth it. So you're welcome and enjoy. Hey, can you hear us? I can hear you now. Great. Hey, what's up, Ralph? How you doing? Good. How are you? Doing good. Thanks. Trying to get our audio all set up. We don't often do interviews. Usually we just sit here and stare at each other. So this is better. Well, how's your week been so far? Don't ask. Oh, no. Lighthouse related? Oh, yeah. Oh, man. Something's good. Something's not so good. Yeah. Well, I guess we can hear all about it during the recording. Some of the stuff I can't talk about, but there's other stuff I can. Okay. Yeah, just divulge what you're able

1:31 to and we'll count those good enough. That's an extra cool factor in the Lighthouse world. Yeah. Covert operations. Yeah. It was pretty funny. I'm listening to the episode. I'm walking into my office and I go, oh, cool. It was so weird because I'm walking around and you're talking about different things. I'm like, this is so weird. That's awesome. Have you been discussed or had interviews with other Lighthouse folks recently? I talked to a bunch of people. I figured as much. Emily's more plugged in than I am. I'm the talent that sits across the table. Well, I guess we can start off, if you just want to introduce yourself to our listeners and kind of tell us how you got involved with Hillsboro Inlet and the USLHS as well. Okay. Hi, my name is Ralph Krugler. I'm the historian for the Hillsboro Lighthouse Preservation Society, and I work for the Coast Guard as technically what's called a, I can't even think of my job title, lodge host. Because we are an MWR facility, which is morale, well -being, and recreation. So if you're a certain level in the military, you can be active or retired. Our cottages are available for rental.

2:41 And so I help take care of the cottages, grounds, and things like that. I'm there pretty much all the time. Nice. That sounds like a full -time gig for sure. Yeah. So what's your history first getting involved with Hillsborough Inlet Lighthouse? What was the first contact and then the growth of that? So I moved down here in 2000. I can't even remember. I own history. It sucks. 2002 or three. I can't, I can't remember. And I had no clue when I first moved to this location that there was a lighthouse seven miles away. And as soon as I did, like everybody else, I want to go there, but it's. on private property behind a club, so there's no direct access. So it took a while to figure out how to get over there.

3:28 So my first tour there was in 2008, but I was working a lot of Saturdays, so I couldn't help on tours at the time. As soon as I got a different job in 2014, I went right there and started volunteering. So what's your standing with Hillsborough Inlet? I know that you're kind of spearheading. Bad. The red list. You're like spearheading this restoration process or at least posting about it on Instagram and everything. So what, how are you involved with the lighthouse for our listeners? Okay, so I'm part of the historian for the Hillsborough Lighthouse Preservation Society. We have the contract and have had the contract for quite a while with District 7 of the Coast Guard to actually maintain the lighthouse, keep it running.

4:12 We do all the fundraising for it. Coast Guard doesn't put any money into the lighthouse except for the light itself. The last money they put in was when we switched to LED a few years ago. That was it. We raised the funds for everything else. ed dietrich who's our vice president is former coast guard so he's got we've been lucky since the inception we've had all the right people that we needed in locally here that want to be part of the organization that helped us get things going from the very start and ed like i said he's former coast guard he's His family are pioneers to the area. They've been here forever. And so he knows all the technical jargon. He knows who to call at CEU. He knows how to present things.

4:56 And so, like, we just got the clearance from Coast Guard CEU this week, civil engineering, that our plans to restore the lighthouse are a full go. Now we just have to raise the funds for it. Okay. So the Coast Guard, I think that's typical of what we had heard. The Coast Guard will maintain the beacon itself. And then anything surrounding that typically is not Coast Guard, right? True. That's very true. But what's funny is they used to be very strict with that here. But over time, Ken Herman, who's our president, he lives literally a stone's throw across the inlet from the lighthouse. I'm just down the road. And with our webcam. Before we switched to LED, it's like you just turn on the webcam at night just to make sure the light's on. If not, drive down there, switch the bulb out, put it in. Report to District 7, hey, we were discrepancy for this amount of time. Light went back on them.

5:53 If you have any questions, just let us know. We'll answer everything. And it got to the point where they're just like, you know what? You guys just take care of it. So when we clean the lens now, we invite... District 7 guys to come up here who are in the ACE navigation, and we actually teach them how to clean the lens. Oh, wow. Yeah, so when we switched to LED, Ray Coleman, who was in charge of the ACE navigation team there, was the point person for the Coast Guard, and they had subcontracted a company to come in and actually do the install. And they're looking at Ray, and Ray's like, talk to these guys. Talk to these guys. Yes. I want to know, but it was like, if anything happens, they're going to beat me to it. So, and these guys refused to talk to us until about maybe half hour before they were finished. And it was like, yeah. And it was like running down. We were just almost at sunset and they just got it done in time. Oh my goodness. Yeah. They're waiting for the civilians and the retirees to get trained last, huh? Pretty much. So what is that? You said district seven.

6:59 What does that district look like? Because I'm not familiar with the area too much. And your involvement with the local Coast Guard and really the community. Okay. Well, the Coast Guard splits the country into districts. We're District 7. And I think we run from Virginia to Alabama, maybe. Okay. I think so. Just along the coastline there. And then we also have Puerto Rico and I'm not sure, Virgin Islands and a couple of places like that. So that's District 7. And each district has its own rear admiral, and they swap out every three years. Just like everybody in the Coast Guard pretty much swaps out every three years. So it's like you just get a good relationship going. You hope it's going great. All of a sudden they leave and just like. You know, a good note for us, you know, going with the next people.

8:00 And we've been very fortunate that every time they do a change of watch, they pump us up. So it's like, thank you. That's awesome. Yeah. Sounds like a load of good people. We are very, very lucky. Yes. You know, you notice in the Lighthouse community, most of the people are very nice, very friendly, very helpful. Every now and then you'll get that one person who's got an ego. Either they're like on the way out because they're like the old timers or they don't last very long because it's like nobody wants you around if you're going to have an ego and think you're running the show because not one person is running the show anywhere. You have to have other people.

8:40 You have to work with each other and you have to keep a good morale. Otherwise, see you later. There they go. Challenging to, I mean, I was thinking about history, about the different, mostly men's names that we've heard come and go. from engineers that have worked with lighthouses to USLHE personnel to people that have been named after or claimed different inventions. It's funny that any one individual kind of can get locked in, and it's not necessarily the good stories that have one name tied to them. Usually it's the groups of folks that work together. So interesting to see that still working today. Pretty much.

9:24 So tell us, you're saying right before we started today that your week has been tough. What would you prefer to talk about or not? Well, OK, so the things I can't talk about is. Just OK, so here's a little sidebar. Ken, our president, he's also he's the most world famous martial artist that you've never heard of. He likes it that way. He's a guy who climbed Kilimanjaro. He's cycled across India. Right now, he's cycling across America. Certified badass. Without him here, a lot of stuff falls in my lap. It's like, Ken, get back here now. The ship is sinking.

10:13 Yeah, unfortunately, one of our people, our good people, is retiring this week. So our museum gift shop area is under changing. We have had a couple incidents at our last tour that I had to take care of. There's just a whole lot of stuff. It's just like, he's like, Ken, come on back. Come on. This is too much. It's not too much. He's like, I just don't want to do it. Yeah. You can take care of it. Does he have a... Is he heading somewhere specific or is this just like a bucket list item that he's... Every year he does something crazy like this. Whether it's taking a canoe down the Whitewater Rapids through the Rockies or he cycled from Canada to Mexico through the Rockies. Oh my gosh. Yeah. Anything he can do to push himself. He did something in Alaska a year or two ago and I can't remember.

11:09 That's wild. And we're just trying to visit a lighthouse once a year. I can't even imagine. Left behind in the dust. Oh, yeah. I wouldn't make it a mile. So you mentioned that you listened to some of the episode, our last episode. Oh, yeah. Number 75. Talked about. Yeah, I listened to the whole thing. Yep. All right. What did we miss? I mean, I'm sure there's a ton that we didn't cover. Or is there anything that we just got horribly wrong that you were like, oh, my gosh, these people. Well, to answer your question about why Thomas Knight was gone for a year, it was actually only six months. Okay. So what happened was they had four children and they wanted to get a good education for the kids.

11:54 So the keeper at Jupiter was retiring. So he put in for a transfer. They moved up there. Found out the grass wasn't greener. They weren't getting a better education. So he came back down and met with Charles Seabrook, who replaced him and who also had kids and said, hey, you want to swap? We want to come back. So he went up there, looked, thought it was great. They did a swap. Seabrook stayed there for this entire career. He was there for a long time through World War Two. I mean, he was I can't remember, but like he's one of the mainstays in Jupiter. So if you ever interviewed Josh Liller, who was the historian for Jupiter, he can tell you tons and tons of stories about him. So Knight came back and there was Barrier Island. There was no bridges. The only school was in the village of Pompano, which they could have got to, you know, the old. saying your parents said, you know, we had to go to school, you know, uphill. Yes. Point two miles.

12:52 Well, these guys actually would have to go quite a ways in order to go to school. So what he did as soon as he got back, he converted part of his storehouse into a one room schoolhouse. Oh, yeah. He put some more windows in, built the tables, built benches. And then he went to Fort Lauderdale to the Department of Education superintendent there and said. He had to have nine children. He goes, between us, other keepers, and there's a transient fishing community right inside the inlet, we've got more than nine kids. By state law, you had to provide a teacher. So he sent a teacher. So imagine this. You go to school in your backyard. You come back inside, and your teacher follows you because she's living with you for the entire term. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. So she lived with them. The terms were, what, five months, I think? Between four and six months, what the school terms were. And then she would depart and they would get in somebody else. Now, one of the teachers that they brought in was a woman named Lola Saunders. And I can't imagine what she was like as a teacher because, you remember, Cap Knight, he wound up marrying her. He was like 40 years older than her. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, and she was as mean as a rattlesnake. So I can't imagine what she must have been like as a teacher.

14:15 It must have been crazy. Very, very strict. But Cap and Lola, they ran casino games out of Cap's place for a while. He called it the Club Unique. He's the only person that called it that. Everybody else called it Cap's place, and that's the name that stuck. So they ran, they had a Wheel of Fortune. They ran card games. They had table games there. In order to keep doing it, he had to pay off the mob. So I don't know if you know the name Meyer Lansky. Meyer Lansky would come through every so often to get his pay. And they never had any trouble with the mob because they, here's your cut. Cap never paid taxes because he said, I'm not paying taxes to the government.

14:56 Screw that. The other mob. Yeah, so he paid off the mob, didn't pay off the government taxes. So after he passed away, it created some problems. The place almost closed down. Oh, yikes. Yeah, so. And they kept those table games behind curtains for years and years, hoping that gambling would be allowed again, but it never was. I can't remember. Estes Keefe Hoffer, when he shut down gambling, it's like they had to put everything away. It was just like, let's keep it there just in case. Yeah, so there was that. What else was there? There was something else that you had a question on. I can't think of it right now. Okay. Yeah, there's so many instances where I'm like, he asks a good question and I'm like, I don't know.

15:42 Why do you ask me when I don't know? It's so hard to find accurate resources that, you know, a lot of our content, we don't state that it's education, but we try to learn and we try to teach some other people who might be listening. Right. But there's so many good stories. There's so many almost unbelievable. happenstances here and there so did you do you think of one that we might have missed uh that that tickles your brain okay one i didn't share it with you guys uh 1960 hurricane donna hits and the it was obviously coast guard run at that time uh the guy who was in charge was john evil kim on kim i can't even pronounce the name evo kim'd off his stepson tim was in school he was only 10 years old at the time and the bus comes back and it there to get across the island there's a drawbridge and the old drawbridge went halfway down and then they made him jump over and his dad caught him and mom was away visiting people so it's just tim and his stepfather on the entire island for this hurricane so at the time there was a weather station at the top of the lighthouse And they fed all the information down to Miami.

17:07 And what they did was from the back door of the cottage to the radio building where I work out of, they tied a rope and then from that door all the way to the lighthouse. And there was from the ocean to the grounds, there was like now we have sea grape to help with erosion and block winds. There was nothing like that then. So at some point, John looks at Tim and goes, you know what? I think this cottage is going to blow down. Let's go to the building. So they did. And then the phone call comes from Miami. Hey, we need you to go in the lighthouse because the weather station is down. We need you to fix it. Oh, my gosh. During a hurricane. Now? Yeah.

17:48 So John was fearless. He wasn't a people person. He wanted to be on boats. And from his stepson, he said, all the guys who ran the boats that he was on. They loved him because he was so quick, so smart that he could pretty much create anything, fix anything, get you out of any trouble. So they always delayed coming back to port when his term was up so that he had to stand for another term until they finally said, you know, they found out you have to come in. He has to go to the next station. So this guy didn't care. I mean, he was totally fearless. Like he was on the icebreakers working off the edge of boats, you know, doing stuff. Wow. Fearless. So. They go outside the radio room. They grab the rope.

18:33 And Tim said, you know, I got completely sandblasted because my shirt got ripped up. I was bleeding because just the wind's coming up off. We just got pelted with sand the entire walk up to the lighthouse. We got in, secured the door, walked to the top. And fortunately, the wind was coming off the ocean at the time. So the door to the observation deck is on the western side. So they open the door. turn right, you go north a little bit, there's a little ladder that goes up to the upper observation deck, which is right where the glass is. And then if you go around that to the south, that's where the weather station was. So they were protected by the winds somewhat.

19:17 So John went up there. He would get what he needed. figure out what he needed, go back, yell down, and Tim would climb halfway up the ladder, hand him tools, climb back down, and then huddle inside until he came back. No, I need this. No, I need this. And they just kept doing that until they fixed the thing, and they stayed inside there for the rest of the hurricane. Now, they had built some houses right across the inlet. They were supposed to be hurricane -proof. Oh, no. Those things, they just blew right away. But the 1906 houses that his stepfather thought were going to blow down, Did just fine. The testament to old construction. Yeah. It's like I heard like a lot of the houses in Key West, the reason why they fare so well, they're made by shipbuilders who knew how to put all this stuff together.

20:04 Is that true? I don't know. But that's what I've heard from several people. And that would be a good reason why they've stood the test of time so long. Yeah, this lighthouse went through a lot of notable hurricanes in its lifetime. We talked about just the ones, 1920s. We talked about those. Yeah, 26, 28. Yeah, but I'm sure there's a lot of other ones that we didn't end up talking about. But it's held the test of time, so pretty cool. Oh, yeah. I can't imagine being in that environment. Okay, now I remember what you asked. Oh, good. How did they know the coral was underneath? Oh, yes. Okay, so. Before they picked the site, they went to four different sites and they had this long iron rod. They would do boring tests to see how far down it was until they got an actual hard substrate. So this was picked because there actually was coral. So when they put the footers in, they dug down to the coral. They made the forms around that, and then they put three super long iron pegs that were threaded at the end. So when they actually put the footers on top of there, they actually screwed into those, into the concrete, which is on top of the foundation, the coral. Okay. So that's why they picked that, and that's why they knew there was something underneath there. Okay, that makes sense. Clearly it worked. Yeah. Yeah. It worked really well. Yeah. We've had erosion on our southern side so bad. couple times that you could actually walk between the footers you know the concrete base oh yeah oh no it's pretty bad

21:36 with hurricanes depending on what side of the state if they go on the west side of the state because they're counterclockwise we get hit because it comes right up the inlet there so we constantly lose that but then if they go the other way that the inlet side is fine but we lose our Atlantic side a bit so okay but I've actually found some pretty cool machinery down there. They left some stuff down there after they got done. You can't tell what it is because it's so corroded and it's so heavy. We just leave it. I'll just bury it in under sand. Saltwater and sand will do hell to the metal. That's cool. I forgot what I was going to say. You mentioned there's some vegetation that's planted around to help with erosion. What does that effort look like? It's called sea grape. grow in the sand it's loves the ocean and it's basically like a bush that grows into a giant tree the more you let it go out and you can't really kill the things you can trim them off anywhere and they'll just keep shooting out all over the place so we got to keep them you know trimmed down a bit but it does wonders for blocking the wind and it does the root system is so strong it really holds the beach Very, very well. Interesting. I've never had that before. I hadn't either. Yeah.

23:02 And they, they do actually make little grapes that you can turn into a sea grape jelly, which used to be a delicacy down here. Yeah. Are they, do they just taste like regular grapes or are they kind of. No, no, they're a little more sour, but you, you take them and you really don't eat the berries. You boil them down and you make a jelly out of them. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Throw some sugar in. I bet it helps. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. I'm sure you do. Well, you also told us about, I haven't told Vince any of the extra stories that you sent over email. So you could tell him maybe the one with the barefoot mailman was an interesting story. And I know that you guys have like a statue and everything that we didn't get to cover. So if you want to tell us about the history of that one. Okay, so this is pre -Lighthouse. So in 18, well, okay, let's put it this way. And again, there was nothing here. The Everglades hadn't been shut down yet, so a lot of the area was still marshland. There was no trains. There was no roads. There was no telephone, no telegraph, no nothing at the time. So if you lived in Palm Beach, which is to the north of us, and you had a friend who lived in Fort Dallas, which is now Miami, to the south of us, you would write a letter. Put it in either a train or stagecoach and go up to Titusville. From there, it would go up to New York, get on a boat, go to the Bahamas, go to Havana, Cuba, go to Key West, then over to Miami. What? So it could take anywhere from six

24:35 weeks to several months, depending on hurricanes, shipping problems, things like that. So people said, you know what? We want some faster communication. think about now i want now now now well imagine waiting that long for a letter so the people petitioned the government well they petitioned the post office um this side of the state and the opposite side of the state and they said we want a mail route and the post office said that's fine we will hire somebody be like but you got to create your own kind of subcontracting business So somebody did and they opened up a couple of different routes on both sides of the state. So this one actually went from Lake Worth to the north of us. So imagine you're hired.

25:22 These people who did it did it maybe for a year or so and often did it like with a son or a brother. And you kind of trade off because Monday morning you went to the post postmaster in Lake Worth, got your mail. You would either walk or. When you got to water row or if you have wind you would sail But you would go all the way down to what was called the Orange Grove House of Refuge Which is now Delray, which is a suburb to the north of us You would spend the night in the House of Refuge. It was run by a keeper and his family and What these were these were for shipwrecked sailors and in the southern states where you're on the coast Where you think shipwrecked victims might actually survive and make it to shore. They set these things up And so, like, imagine you're on a ship. You get shipwrecked.

26:10 You make this shore. All you know is I have to go either one way or the other. I'm going to run into one of these things. And you knew which way it was because there were signs. It would tell you how far it was, like how many miles. But if you couldn't read, well, they made them in the shape. The sign was a long shape of an arm with a finger pointing. So you knew which way to go. So it's like, hey, I'm going the right way. Or, oh, crap, I'm going to go this way. So. um they were all the same keeper and stand living in the first floor they had a kitchen second floor was just like 25 or 30 cots just for shipwreck setups and they had enough provisions for a couple weeks so they made they worked out an agreement so that they were going to get paid and all that for the for the mail route so you would walk to that on monday or yeah monday spend the night there tuesday you would leave there Get to Fort Lauderdale House of Refuge, spend the night there. Wednesday, you would make it to Miami. Thursday, you would start the trip back. Oh, my God. Sunday was your day off. So I can't remember how many miles you would walk or row, but it was ridiculous. So there was a guy named Ed Hamilton. From my research, I found out that he and his buddies moved down from Trick County, Kentucky. They settled on the opposite side of the state to become farmers. Didn't really work for them, so they moved to this side of the state, brought three Jason plots on Lake Worth to farm, built one shack for the three

27:42 of them. And Ed was six foot two, very strong, very athletic, and typically very healthy. But this October morning, he wakes up and he's... very very sick and it was his buddies were like you know don't go he's like no i got a job to do nobody else wanted to do it so he actually did it so he gets to orange grove first night sick comes down to hillsborough inlet second day nobody hears from him again oh no so his buddies go to on friday sorry saturday they go to uh the orange grove house of refuge because they want to meet with him and walk him back to see if he's still sick maybe they can carry the mail for him or you know help him back one way or the other keeper like him he never came you're like what are you talking about he hadn't showed up so they went back home told the postmaster what it that never got there so they went to go look for him so They get to Hillsboro Inlet.

28:54 Now, remember, I said it was on the higher ground where the lighthouse is. And so where you walk. OK, so let me let me back up a little bit here. They're called barefoot mailmen because. You're the the post office issued them a machete, a hat and a mailbag. You supply your own rifle gun. whatever else. And the machete was to hack out a path. Well, the first guy who did is like, why should I do that? I can just take off my shoes, roll up my pants, walk in the hard pack of the beach, make it nice and easy. There were caves there in case it rained. You could hop in there and just, it was a much easier path. Plus the house of refuge is right on the beach.

29:35 Okay. Why hack a path? Yeah. So, so when his buddies got down to Hillsboro, The closer they got, it had been raining for the past couple of weeks. Water level was high. The Everglades were overflowing. What's in the Everglades? Alligators. What's in saltwater? Crocodiles. The inlet was ringed by mangroves at the time. And so the closer they got, they actually started seeing gators up on the high ground sunning themselves. They saw crocs on the beach. you know saw tracks everywhere they get to the mangroves they look they see the boat is on the opposite side of the inlet they see all the beds closed mailbag hat machete rifle everything hanging in the mangroves oh no so obviously they figured out somebody had took the boat gone the opposite side he tried to swim across and he was eaten alive so what they did was They would clear the mangroves.

30:40 One guy would shoot them, and they gutted them. I thought he was a bachelor. Well, a couple years ago, I got an email. Hi, I am Tony blah, blah, blah. I am Ed Hamilton's great, great, great, great, great grandson. Oh, my gosh. Exactly. I'm like, wait a minute, what? He was married? He had a kid? I'm like, okay, so. He had never been on site before, so I let him on site and met with him and everything. So he told me that through family lore that they gutted around 30 crocs and gators trying to find his remains, and they didn't find him. But the Hamilton family kept all of his stuff, and what survived was the hat, the mailbag, the machete, which the family had donated to the Smithsonian. He still had the rifle, but the wood had rotted away and it was in two pieces. And he's like, you know, I think I'm going to get it restored and put in the Smithsonian. So end of last year, he shows up one day and I'm at work and I get a call from the guard gate. I'm like, yeah, let him in. And so he brought his wife with this time. So telling some stories. And I'm like, so did you ever get that rifle restored? He's like, no. I swear I'm going to do it this time, and I'm going to donate it to a Smithsonian, too. Okay, cool. So now back to the saga of Ed. In the Old West, what

32:11 happened if you stole cattle? What happened if you stole a horse? They would hang you. Yeah, not good. Same thing with these boats. If you steal one of these, they could hang you. So on the Tuesday when Ed was supposed to show up in Fort Lauderdale, the Keeper of the House of Refuge... saw somebody wandering around. There's nobody here. And anybody that is here, I know. So he went up and approached them. And he was acting very jittery and didn't want to answer questions. And he said, oh, no, no, I got across the inlet with some fishermen. So he's like, well, I had no reason to keep them, so let them go. They actually found him, arrested him, took him up to Tallahassee to put him on trial. Excuse me.

32:58 Unfortunately, they had... Not enough evidence to convict him. He got off with it. Yeah, so that's the story of Ed. So the pioneers of Lake Worth put a monument up to him, just a small one. And it's funny because one of the guys who put it there wound up being the husband of one of the lighthouse keeper's daughters, who has a son who is still one of our volunteers. Oh, my gosh. That's incredible. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And so the Barefoot Mailman. was never actually called that until there was a guy named edward pratt who wrote a book and became a movie called the barefoot mailman so he's the one who coined the phrase but then there was a barefoot mailman hotel down here and all barefoot mailman everything blah blah caught on so yeah so they had a commissioned a statue for the hotel made out of stone that went from the ground to the roof back to the ground to the roof there's a fire in the building they took it down Moved it to, when the hotel shut down, they moved it to Hillsborough Beach Town Hall. The woman who was the mayor of Hillsborough Beach at the time was also president of the Hillsborough Lighthouse Preservation Society. When they wanted to move that out and put a brass one there, or bronze, sorry, a bronze one there, she spearheaded the effort to move it to Hillsborough Lighthouse.

34:24 Got it passed. And then we just kept updating it until it just, it fell apart. We sold it to a dive company for a dollar. They went out and sunk it as an artificial reef. We got a bronze one, replace it. So that's the picture that you see that I sent you. Very cool. It's so funny. The stuff that happens around a lighthouse. Like we talk a lot about like even caps place, how it's related, but not like directly to the lighthouse. So many very interesting stories that happen. Oh, okay. Here's another one. In 1941, I think, or 1940, January 1940, our keeper was Warren Bennett. Right before he got the position, he was in the hospital. He was recovering from some illnesses. One of the vice admirals asked him, because he knew him, came to visit him and goes, hey, how would you like an easy duty? Lighthouse duty. He's like, I can live with my family on site. Easy recovery place, blah, blah. Great.

35:31 Well, shortly thereafter, World War II breaks out. Easiest job in the world becomes the hardest eight years of his life. So right before we entered the war, though, or was it right after? Whatever. He had to run security detail. There was no Secret Service yet. Churchill flew from England to D .C., from D .C. down to Palm Beach. Palm Beach got in a car, drove down to the Hillsborough Mile to stay in the Secretary of State's house. He had a house on the Hillsborough Mile. There he met up with FDR, Bull Halsey, and a couple other important people. So Warren Bennett had actually met FDR years before. He remembered him, asked him to run security because he owns Coast Garden. So he actually ran security detail for the week that they were down there, which was just, you know, a stone's throw from the lighthouse. And so Caps Place provided all the food for those guys. So they had the courier going over. And to get to Caps Place at the time, there was a road which is now A1A. You would park across, you'd flash your lights, and somebody would throw a boat over, get you, and take you back. So this one day, this little kid who's rowing the boat is told, hey, okay, we got some VIPs coming today. Take the boat, stay on the

37:02 other side. Don't come back over unless you see me waving to you and flashing. And the kid didn't know who these people were. Turns out it's, you know, FDR, Churchill and all those guys. So he rows them over, rows them back. That kid. was the grandson of Thomas Knight. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. So his father, Burnham, was actually one of the first charter fishing captains in our area. He took his first charter out at 12 years old. Oh, my. His father went with him, of course. But he knew how to boat. He knew where all the fishing spots were. Of course, fish were abundant at the time. And he became a charter fisherman.

37:46 And so, yeah, his son actually kind of took over. that so yeah wow that's so interesting and cap's place is still there it's yes it is how would you describe it today awesome really yeah if you want rustic old pretty much all original other than you know air conditioning sure that's the place to go they've expanded on it over the years but the original section is still there on the barge but you really can't tell it's on the barge because you know they they filled landing around it and everything but yeah it's all still there that's super cool you know tons of old photographs in there which are really really awesome they have them like hung up on the walls yeah all over the place yeah that's neat and and you know it really you know kind of like cheesy you know walmart kind of frames it's like they didn't put any money it's like they wanted to keep the rustic feel because so they just whatever they got because they put it in a little cheesy frame and put it up yeah perfect but you know like wood frames but you know the glass isn't very clean anymore so authentic yeah it's very a real experience not an apple yes no no and the people who run it are it's the daughter of cap's partner so cap Met a guy named Al Hasse.

39:05 Depending on who you talk to, it's either Hase or Hasse. Okay. You know, he named his daughter Tally, like Tallahassee. She hates her name. I'm sure she'll love that. Yeah. And so she still runs it along with some other siblings and that. Yeah. Okay, cool. That's incredible. So we've never, at least I've never been down there. No. Hillsborough area. What's it like generally? Expensive. very expensive or everything um everything's gone off yeah since i moved down here at least um the hillborough mile it's called millionaire's mile for a reason um and so that's going north right across the inlet is now called lighthouse point very affluent then you have pompano or pompano beach And there you have sections from very low class to multimillion dollar homes.

40:07 And, you know, obviously closer to the water, you get the multimillion dollar homes. Safe area, clean area. Unfortunately, you get a lot of people who feel entitled to do whatever they want. Sure. So we have a lot of that in the area because, you know, well, daddy's got money. Shut up. Of course. But the funniest thing is, this happens a lot at tours. So in 1930, off the base of the lighthouse, the district inspector got a granite jetty built out from the base of the lighthouse. They had tried some wood ones out along the shoreline to help prevent erosion. They just kept breaking apart. the district inspector always wanted this granite one and so he finally got his way and everybody's saying it's never going to work never going to work let's work perfectly and then it goes out to the dead reef and then in the 60s they added more of the the gravel or the gravel the granite blocks out at the end of the reef so now they control the flow of water so now it's a nice straight shot coming in because beforehand sand would go wherever it wanted to and it would either shut down the entire operation or the only navigable water was a little ring around the opposite side of the inlet so now there's this what we call a weir which is where the dead reef is exposed especially at low tide But at

41:40 high tide, sometimes you can make it over with your boat. Oh, no. Sometimes you can't. So the channel is clearly marked. And you should know what you're doing just like you drive a car. Most people, if you can afford a boat, if you're under 18 or 20, you don't have to take a class. Really? Boating safety. No. If you have enough money to buy a boat, here's the key. Don't blow yourself up. Oh, no. Yeah. Seriously. It's just like. Before you turn it on, vent out the fuel area because otherwise you're going to blow yourself up. That's pretty much all they tell you. Gosh. So if you don't know what you're doing, like a lot of these kids take daddy's boat out to show off their kids, their friends. Bam, they hit that weir and now they're stuck there. No.

42:31 And what's beautiful is like if you wait till high tide, you'll probably just float off. But we have what's called sea tow. There's Tow Boat U .S. and there's one other company. And they pretty much have a boat that anchors right off there. Oh, my gosh. And they just wait for people and wait for calls from boat users in distress. Because if you buy a boat and you buy a contract with one of these companies, they'll come out and tell you for free. If you don't have a contract with them and they come out and offer assistance, you have to pay them before they do anything. Because if they throw you a line. and you grab onto it and tie it to your boat, legally, maritime salvage laws, they own your boat. Oh. And a lot of people don't know that. And they'd say, you know, you have to pay us beforehand because otherwise we can confiscate your boat from you because of maritime salvage. Well, some people just don't.

43:22 They're in such a panic. They don't listen. Oh, whatever. Okay, I'll do it. Then they don't want to pay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, guess what? The cops don't mess around. Did you sign it? Did you pay? No. It's all right. Now we can do. Oh, shoot. That sounds like an expensive hobby. Yes, it is. I can see if you're not educated in it, then it's bound to happen at some point. They go inside the swim buoys all the time. Swim buoys for swimmers, not for boaters. You get it all the time. You get all sorts of people everywhere, I'm sure. The same type of people everywhere you go. So speaking of expensive, let's talk about the restoration a little. What made you decide to start doing the restoration process? Or like what kind of did you find out about the lighthouse that required the start of a restoration idea? So this is actually something that's been ongoing for at least five years now. Oh, wow. Yeah, so the last time the lighthouse got painted, it was done incorrectly.

44:32 Oh, no. It looked beautiful for about a month. And then the rust started showing through. And then the quote -unquote contract we had with the painter, they never honored because they were supposed to come back and do touch -ups. They never did. Yeah. So the horizontal struts, they're iron bars. They're probably 8 to 10 inches across in diameter. And they go from all the footers and then from the footer to the base of the actual center cylinder. Those are buried under sand from probably early 60s till 1997, 98. So all that sand shortened the lifespan and it just rubbing under the friction, the salt and everything. And so instead of being nice and... cylinder cylindrical they've broken down some some of them have to be completely replaced some of them can be salvaged so we we also um incorrectly well i can't say incorrectly but we got a bunch of the turnbuckles and sway bars replaced in 2017 right before we painted and were encoded properly And so a bunch of them

46:04 have to be replaced again. Plus a bunch of them at the bottom were never replaced. They have to be replaced. So functionally, it's still fine. Everything still has enough on it. But you have to stop it at some point because at some point something's going to fail. So we've been trying to come up with different ideas what to do. So we've had a bunch of different companies come in and give us bids. International Chimney Corporation, the ones who moved Cape Hatteras. They're pretty much the industry leader right now in doing lighthouse restoration. They came out and they gave us different quotes and everything. And they gave us a solution, the most low -cost solution, to fix or replace the bottom struts. So the Coast Guard Civil Engineering, like I told you earlier, gave us approval this week to do the restoration. We decided we don't have $2 million. Yeah. We just had our annual fundraising gala. We cleared $64 ,000, which is our best fundraising gala ever. We got a grant from Florida Lighthouse Association. I can't remember how much that's for. We do have money in the bank. So it looks like we are going to get close to, by the end of this year, getting enough money to redo just the base. Okay. And get that. And what we're hoping is that. And people who like to donate, they like to see what their donations are going to. So we can go say,

47:35 hey, here's a before, here's an after. You can see we're actually trying to do this. And we're hoping that it's going to help us generate more funds. So everybody's always talking about doing the external. When I had ICC here, I said, OK, you know, that's great. Let's go internal. There's some things I want to show you. And so I showed them and it's going to come nowhere near two million to. to fix a couple of things inside. He goes, yeah, but you know, I can see at some points it's going to be critical. I'd see, you know, you had water leakage through the old windows. One of the windows, I'm not kidding. It's just the bottom part that moves up and down. You put it down, you can actually take your fingers and go outside. Oh no. And it's like, gee, I wonder why we're getting water coming in here when the wind is blowing from the south, you know, straight on, it's coming up and over through. Art McKinnon, who, He headed HLPS for a number of years, and he was the chief liaison to the Coast Guard during the initial restoration back in the early 98s, that era when the lens broke down. He at one point replaced not all of the windows in the Lantern, but all the ones that weren't. Because over years, people shot at them or, of course, birds hit them and broke. Yeah, exactly. I hate that. You love that. Oh, I know. It drives me nuts. So they just used whatever they had. Some were plexiglass. Some actually had chicken wire

49:06 in them. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Some of them just weren't the right thickness. So he went around and figured out which ones needed replaced and did it. Unfortunately, what they used to glaze it and secure it is broken down. before it's time so we were getting a lot of water intrusion there so that was causing a lot of water at the top and of course water is going to run down so damage here damage here damage here all the way on down the line so like i said it's going on at least for five years and it's just like you know what we have to act now because if we don't it's not going to be around for another 100 years so yeah to answer your question it just needs to be done yeah for sure yeah So you guys are kind of focusing on like the things that could be a catastrophic failure before you start branching out and okay. Yeah. So we want to get the base done and then we're going to work from our top down. Okay. And then if you look at, you know, if you look at the picture behind me, you can see half and half, half black, half white. In 1969, it used to be a different.

50:19 what's called a day mark. So top two thirds of it was black. The bottom one third was white to show off the background versus the sky. So the white would show off trees. The black would show off sky. Well, we had Australian pines had grown up and obliterated the entire white section. So in 69, they switched the middle black section to a white section. So we were hosting our Admiral at the time, we were Admiral McPherson and he, He's very interested in preserving history. He's very proactive with, you know, Coast Guard things. And he's a huge friend of ours. His wife actually became a lifetime member of our society. You would never know that this guy, most of the rear admirals, you would never know that they're that high up in the Coast Guard because they're the most normal down -to -earth people. They don't show off. They don't talk about themselves. Tell me about you. What do you do for a living? are you married do you have kids tell me about that they don't talk about themselves yeah these are the nicest people and so when we had him in he goes you know you're the historian you know tell me some things that you would like to do and so i said well i'd like to actually go back to the original day mark now the australian pines are gone he goes well he goes it can be done but uh we have to change all the legal descriptions and you know it's all electronic now so it's not that big of a deal but it's going to take some doing Well, it was a week or so later, he reaches out to us. He goes, hey, I'm looking

51:49 at the legal description. Because they never change it. So technically, you're fixing a mistake. No paperwork. Have at it. There you go. Oh, my gosh. That's amazing. Yeah. So when we actually do repaint, it's going back to the original day mark. That's so great. Yeah. That's so fun. I actually didn't even know that it had changed to half and half. Most people don't. Yeah. It's such a subtle change. It's so subtle that most people don't pick it up. Yeah. Back to two -thirds. That's exciting. I wanted to ask, the base repairs are based on corrosion in the sand, with the saltwater, and of course with time. What does that look like? Do they physically replace members one at a time? Do they do coatings? Do they do epoxies, casting? One of the ideas was to sleeve it, fill it with, you know, sandblast it down to... base metal sleeve it put an inert substance in there that's one of the options but the option we're going to go with is that they're at the ends where they go into the footers they still have keys on them so you can actually hammer those out and jostle them out so what we're going to the ones that can be salvaged we haven't completely come up with the idea but we know we are going to do something with an inert substance to surround them and we'll get them sanded and they'll look brand new But the ones that have to be replaced will hammer the keys out, cut them, slide them out, put a new one in, probably in two sections, and then weld it into place. So like a center

53:21 weld, and then you won't be able to tell. It's going to be one at a time. With anchors, and the anchors are still good to use. Yes. Oh, the footers are just perfect. Yeah. Not a problem. Nice. Yeah. You can see the concrete has been restored several times over the years, but the footers, I mean, they're rock solid. They have huge nuts on the ends of these things. I mean, it's like the threading on these things was just monstrous. And so to hold these things in place, you obviously figure. The crazy thing is those have held up. If you look really close at some of the. turnbuckles if they're rounded they're original and a lot of those are still there they look fantastic if you look at the ones that have squared section squared off sections those are falling apart it's like original is holding up the ones that we replaced are already falling apart it's like what is going on here So the ICC guys actually said, you know, if they had stainless steel back then, they probably would have built these completely out of stainless steel and never had an issue with any of that stuff. So when we redo it, we might be doing parts in stainless steel. Okay. Yeah. But the only problem is now you have to coat them in a certain way because metals can't touch other metals because it'll enhance the corrosion and, you know, break things down faster. But they

54:52 have a way to do all that stuff. Yeah, for sure. We even do that in piping systems. Not quite as cool, but same concept. So you mentioned over email too that maybe the oil house would need a restoration. Did you say something like? Yeah, so we were electrified in 32. By 37, it needed repairs. So the lighthouse service just told the keeper, Ben Stone, just tear it apart. So him and the assistant, Joe Gisler, who's another character, Alfred Bregel, our first keeper, Thomas Knight, our second keeper, Judge Isler, Ben Stone, you could do a full -length feature movie on their lives, each one of them separately, and you wouldn't have to embellish any of them. Oh, my goodness. And you'd be like, oh, my God, these people are crazy. These people are such crazy lives. But one of the things that these guys had to do is they dismantled the oil house. So what did they do? They just broke it apart, took it in wheelbarrows, dumped it in the inlet. Oh, my gosh. So when we get the sand erosion, we find bricks, and I'll just pull them up. We have a little brick wall. Earlier this year, we had so much erosion that entire sections of the lower parts of the wall had been exposed. So we have a dredge that's permanently anchored inside our inlet. They rent the property from the Coast Guard for like a dollar for 100 years. It's a great system. And what they did was they had

56:24 this huge cranes. And I went to the guy in charge. I'm like, hey, Woody, you think you can help us out? He's like, what do you want? I go, well, we'd like to get these sections of brick wall taken off the beach, which is going to be covered up with sand, put back on the grounds. No problem. So they did it. They put it right in place for us. And the guy is a wizard. Knew how to lift these brick walls sections up without having them break in two. I mean, he just had it down perfect. Yeah, the guy was a genius. And what I didn't realize. The walls along the sides, they were four bricks thick. Okay. Back to another question that you brought up. Oh, good. About the fire. The lighthouse would have survived. The houses, storehouses would have burned down.

57:05 The oil house probably would have blown up. Oh, gosh. Yeah. Because there were 100 -gallon butts of kerosene in there. So, yeah, that thing would have blown up. So, don't know what happened. They obviously just got rid of the oil butts, unfortunately. They're awesome. I would love to have them. So after we get the restoration done, I have to go through a process of petitioning the Coast Guard and SHPO, which is the State Historic Preservation Association, because we are the National Trust of Historic Places or Landmarks. So we're going to petition them. This is where the oil house was. We want to rebuild it, not in the same place, but in a more... advantageous spot with as much original material as we can because uh we have granite from the gables that we can reuse tons of bricks there's more bricks buried underneath there that we can still use we just have to get a new foundation and then find there we actually found a company that does historical brick work and uh and not necessarily they're gonna do it for free but at a much reduced price because of what it is yeah yeah so we want to get that rebuilt all original as much as we can and then turn it into a little miniature museum so we'll get actual museum placards because i've got i got more photos of the place from throughout the years that we can do a timeline with keepers photos and just i want to do a timeline

58:36 throughout the whole thing that would be so and then so it'll be storage for like our tents and stuff that we use for tours pull that stuff out and then have another amenity for people coming on tour days That's a great idea. That's a great idea. And how cool that it survived all that time. Just big chunks. Discarded and refused to go away. So what's interesting is we got those pulled out end of last year. Maybe October or last year. I can't remember now. And just the other day I noticed the bricks are starting to leach salt out of them. Oh, yeah. So I'm like, I didn't put. Didn't take that into consideration that the bricks are porous and they were salt.

59:18 So now you'd go out there and wash them off to get, make sure as much salt comes out of them as they possibly can. Yeah. So like the individual bricks, they're fine. I haven't seen any salt, but the actual sections of a wall, if you sit on them, you'll get up here all chalky. That's so interesting. Yeah. That's really cool. I would not have thought of that. Well, cool. So I guess another big question. I don't know if you'd have an answer to this at this point, but. When do you think, if you were able to do all of the restoration projects you want on the lighthouse, how long do you think that it would take you guys? I'm going to say probably five years. Okay. Wow. Yeah, because you can't work during hurricane season. You have to raise the funds. And once you have the funds, the actual work part of it won't take that long to do. It's just you have to juggle hurricane season with us. I never considered that. Is that like a rule or is it just like people won't? set up scaffolding and do all this work if it's hurricanes. Well, they will, but now it's going to cost you more because they have to take it down if they know a hurricane's coming. So now you just double your cost. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. We're in the middle of Kansas, so we don't have that problem. Hey, tornadoes, though. That's true. We sure do. Oh, you forget about those. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, Ralph, you're the historian. We've talked to a couple of historians, and it's always a pleasure because you're such good storytellers. You know, it's fun that you have the story in mind and then also the passion behind it, right? You can go press play on your

1:00:50 YouTube video and it's usually not that way, but good people usually have those stories with them. What was your life like before getting involved with the Lighthouse? I mean, is this just you and then here you are at the Lighthouse or did you kind of fall into this all at once? I'm going to say divine intervention because there's no way I could have planned this. I went to my first Lighthouse. I grew up in Chicago. And first lighthouse I went to was Chicago Harbor. I can't remember if it was Boy Scouts. I can't remember if it was a school. All that stuff escapes me. But I remember being on the boat. We actually pulled up to the Harbor Lighthouse, got out. I think they just recently, not didn't commission, but they sent everybody out. So it was automated.

1:01:37 So there was still kitchen stuff in there. There were still bedrooms in there. And I'd walk in there and I'm like, oh my God, you can live in this place? And there's a kitchen? You can fish off? I'm like, can you have a dog here? Because I'm going to live here. And then you walk up and you see the light. I'm like, oh my God. Whoever was in charge of our group heading in with somebody to get us in there, I remember he was fascinated. I wish I could remember who it was, though. He was fascinated. I was fascinated with it. Everybody else was wanting to go out and throw rocks into the water. Yeah. And I'm like. I could live here. This is so cool. But growing up in the Midwest, not a whole lot of lighthouses. Went to school for athletic training at Eastern Illinois. Went to grad school at Syracuse as a graduate assistant athletic trainer. More access to lighthouses out there in New York. Got my first job working in minor pro hockey right in town. The plan was to try and work up to the NHL. Almost got there a couple of times, but I could also see things were happening where it wasn't going to happen within a certain time period. And I was going to lose my job because I could see contracts were changing. And the farm team I was working for, you know, they're franchises. Most of the parent clubs don't own the franchise. Whoever they sign a contract with is who goes. Like I originally started working there for Vancouver.

1:03:06 They left. I wound up working for Columbus. Could see things weren't working out. Knew that they were going to leave. Kind of had a feeling Tampa was going to come in. They actually did. And when they did, they gassed everybody. The equipment guy, he'd been with them since they moved from Hamilton to Syracuse. Had over a thousand games. Didn't care. See you later. Oh, man. Yeah. Fortunately. Syracuse just started a women's hockey team, so he's one right there. Shorter season, less work. Yeah. Made in the shade. So he got very, very lucky. My parents still lived in Chicago. They spent the winters down here in Stewart, which is north of us. My sister. was in miami then she moved over to the naples area on the west coast she already had one kid another kid was coming on the way and i didn't want to be the uncle that nobody knew so i'm like you know i'm out came down here you know finding a job wasn't great uh wound up working in physical therapy centers stayed in medical became fascinated with south florida history there's a book that my wife gave me uh of course now i can't think of the name of it A Pioneer's Tale or something like that. It's fiction, but it's all based on South Florida history. Florida, I'll never remember.

1:04:30 That's it. People who read it say it's one of the best books they've ever written. Wow. They've ever read. This guy wrote a bunch of books, but this is the best one by far. And I got hooked on Florida history. And I just started reading up everything I could. I was trying to find anything about Hillsborough's history. And anything you find online, what I eventually found out, most of it's wrong. Most of the information is completely wrong. And so when I started volunteering, there was a historian, Hib Castleberry. He's a pioneer in Florida lighthouse preservation. He was already up in his upper 80s. And I said, Hib, you know, if I'm working these tours, I'd like to be able to talk to people and give them the real answers.

1:05:16 So he gave me this little. sheet of stuff i'm like well this is great but it doesn't answer a lot of questions because well you know at one point i went to the national archives and made some photocopies they're in our storage i'm like we have a storage facility yeah here's the combination going so i spent hours in there going through stuff and and i'm like finding some really cool documents and then i found some two that were legal size and i was like it was it was copies of handwritten writing i'm like I haven't read cursive writing in 20 years. I'm like, I'm trying to make head or tails out of it. All of a sudden, it comes back to me and I'm reading, oh, these go together. I'm like, oh, I'm reading across a book here. And it's the first two pages of the very first log book. Oh my gosh. And it's signed by Alpha Brigel at the bottom. So I call Hib up. I'm like, Hib, where's the rest of this?

1:06:09 He goes, I only had a couple, you know, a handful of quarters. I only made, I'm like. Oh my. So, I contacted U .S. Lighthouse Society. They gave me Candace Clifford's information. She's like, I would love to do research for you here at the National Archives because I'm going to work for U .S. Lighthouse Society as a historian. I'm like, here's somebody that actually you can hire her to. So I started hiring this lady and she got me copies of everything from the archives. Cool. So then I was like, well, this is expensive. So yeah, so I contacted the Coast Guard. I read a museum that I could find that had stuff and they would send you stuff, no problem. Went to Miami, to Jupiter, and every spot in between that had historical society, museum, or a library that had old records, made copies of everything.

1:07:06 And I just, once I started reading that logbook, it's like, the addiction just took hold and like this is what i'm gonna do now i don't know how i'm gonna do it but i'm somehow gonna do this for a living and when i got out of medical you know which is a long story i'm just so happy i'm out of that nonsense it's like now i have the opportunity here because i was they shut down our office and i had pay coming for six months i think it was so i can actually kind of create my own career now yeah so i started volunteering at pompano beach historical and then they started paying me i got on more with u .s lighthouse society they started paying me and with all the information that i had gathered i wrote a book about the lighthouse and because i did that uh the guy who actually hired me for the coast guard he knew about me for a couple years and he goes The job is getting too much for the one person that's working there. We want to hire a second person on there. Do you have any interest? Heck yeah. I'm like, well, I was actually going to say, you know, if she retires, can I get her job? He's like, well, no, we're trying to. And so it took a year and a half, two years for them to government, you know, to approve it. But I want somebody who knows the history, preserves the history, loves the history, can share that with our guests. And so it's not just, you know, we don't know. Yeah. I want somebody

1:08:38 who knows. So by writing the book, by doing all this, I didn't plan this. Somebody else planned it for me. Yeah. And I just followed the steps. So that's how I got into the whole thing. That's awesome. Just walking into that lighthouse for the first time. Yeah. Kept that for a couple of years. Yeah. And back to it. Totally lucked out. That's incredible. It's also having to be really like tenacious that you're like, I'm going to go, I'm going to, Check every single place from here to there. Try and figure out all the information, especially like a lot of people would be like, oh, there's not more information. OK, I'll like I'll just let that die. But it's commendable that you're like, that's not good enough for me and I'm going to figure it out.

1:09:21 But when you find things that are wrong, it's like you want to fix them. And so it's an addiction every time. It's like Christmas every time I find something new. Like I got. some of the personnel files from the National Archives in St. Louis. And I actually had, I reached out to him and I said, these are the files I want pulled. I'm going to be here these dates. And I'm, you know, got my flight, got my hotel, got my car, all ready to go. COVID hits. Oh. I'm like, son. So now we're the U .S. Lighthouse Society, Craig Anderson, who runs the... A lot of the keepers. If you think I'm a lighthouse nerd with Hillsborough, he is the ultimate lighthouse nerd when it comes to keepers and lists. He's got everything. Oh, my gosh. He sent me a PDF of stuff in Excel.

1:10:17 And I'm looking through all these names like, oh, my gosh. And I'm just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. And then I realized it's only one tab. That's for the first district. So he's got every, I'm like, Oh my, he is phenomenal. And he is, he's a honey badger when it comes to finding out stuff with that. And so he's got somebody down there and he's, it's his goal to get every single lighthouse keepers personnel file into our archives. And so it's like, so I don't have to go. Thanks, Greg. A man with a spreadsheet. Yeah. And he's phenomenal at keeping that thing up. I don't know how he finds some of the stuff he does. He finds photographs and he is tenacious. He's awesome with that stuff.

1:11:01 That's so cool. Yeah. That's awesome. We keep meeting people in the community and I keep hearing all these awesome, resounding things. And it's a little off track, but I was in a men's group last week. We were talking about different challenges. And one of the things. that came out of me i was talking to another young guy was he's talking about doing something new i was like doing something new is is brave because i feel like you don't have to you know maybe you go to high school maybe you go to college maybe you're you know through some process and now you're new into something but most people will never do anything new again they'll they'll stay this is what i am this is what i do or maybe this is what i used to do but you know a lot of folks like yourself where you took a risk with those six months of pay instead of just sticking with what you were doing and maybe being, I won't speak for your experience, but in a new experience that wouldn't be that new, you know, here you are these years later telling the stories. It's really, it's incredible. And enjoying it. Yes. That's awesome.

1:12:05 The most important part. Are you, it sounds like you're involved with giving the tours as well. Yeah, we don't. You know, tours is kind of a misnomer. We don't do guided tours because we don't, we really don't have the staff and we don't really have that kind of a setup for it. So if you come to one of our tours, you become a member and you can become, most people do it for a year. So you pay one time. It's like 35 or like 50 for one person. But if you do a family of four, it's much less. But you pay once, you get 12 tours out of it. Oh, wow. And what you do is you hop on the boat. So we have to charter a boat, a dive boat. And they bring you to the grounds. And then you've got the lighthouse.

1:12:54 We have the brick thing, the brick patio. We have people who tell the story of the Barefoot Mailman. We have people floating around who give other stories. We let you see the cottages, but you can't go in because they are rented out by military people. I mean, if I had my way, we'd push the sea grape out, rebuild the original keeper's cottage, and turn that into a museum, too, and a storehouse. But I don't get everything I want, unfortunately. We tried doing guided tours, but people really weren't paying that much attention. It's kind of a waste of time.

1:13:39 when we can really kind of pinpoint and you're like, what do you want to hear? What do you want to know about? And then like, we'll have people at the top of the lighthouse. I used to be perched up there all the time and just tell story after story. Unfortunately, you can only live out some people up at one time and it got a little long winded. It's like, you get the radio, send people down, please. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. So now like I'll be at the bottom and, and if I'm not doing actual work, I'll be, you know, try to tell people different stories about things that had happened there. Yeah. Okay. That's cool. That's a unique experience. There's some, we've been trying to travel and see more lighthouses. There's some that it's a, it's a wide variety of what you're going to be able to get. Of course, everybody's great, but it just depends on the facilities, the staff. And then of course, whatever history, like there was one we went to where Martha's Vineyard. It was really great. There was a really nice lady there who talked to us. We're going to go to the top of the lighthouse. We're going to take a picture and we're going to come back.

1:14:44 We had a wonderful time. We did our own research and learning about the lighthouse. Physically visiting, you really wouldn't learn anything. You could ask questions, but most people were probably waiting in line just to climb the stairs. There's so much more to it when you find the right people. Absolutely. A little call to action for our listeners, because you guys are now, you're fundraising for this restoration. Is that, they can donate on the. Right on our webpage. Okay. Hillsboroughlighthouse .org. Okay, great. Yep. Yeah. So you mentioned, is it a yearly, an annual, is it a gala you mentioned? Yes. We, we, we first started doing them because it was 115 or 110th anniversary and we needed to start fundraising. And so one of the ladies in our organization said, why don't we try a gala? And we got to get Coast Guard approval, get things shut down. And what she created is phenomenal.

1:15:47 Well, we also do weddings on site. And there's a company called Tents and Events. And they have this huge tent that covers, I don't know how many yards, but it's clear. So at night, things lit up, you can see the lighthouse through the roof. So yeah, a lot of people who do the weddings, they'll rent from them too. So we have that. We have tables, eight or 10 seaters. People get brought over by the boat. We'll have food stations around. We'll have a band that plays. And actually the bassist and sometimes singer is... Sheldon, who is the grandson of Thomas Knight. He's been in music his whole life. He's a Beatle maniac.

1:16:36 He does that for free. We pay the band, but he's like, I'm a legacy here. This is such an honor to be able to do this. You have the grandkeeper of one of the longest serving lighthouse keepers here. That's pretty cool. But most people don't even realize that. I'll broadcast that around. We'll have a silent auction. We'll have a live auction. In the Pompano Air Park, we have a blimp, a Goodyear blimp station. And you have to put in four tickets and we get to, they've been very good with us and they give us two tickets and we auction those off. And if you, they say the past two years, if you get $5 ,000 for one, we'll give you a second set. tickets so this year we nailed we still got 10 grand just for blimp auction yeah it was pretty cool and unfortunately inside our lighthouse in the lantern room you have the false ceiling inside there which used to track the heat and funnel it up well unfortunately i guess my better wish is years ago right around this time the first gala They were removed and replaced because they needed to take them out to get to... There's a ring that goes around the exterior of the lighthouse, and an iron ladder actually hung on that, and you could run it all

1:18:06 the way around the top. That's how they accessed the upper part to clean the windows, access the roof to make repairs, paint, whatever. Those pegs go through the double walls, and some of them had completely corroded out, and it was in danger of completely falling down, so they all had to be removed. And when they removed them, they didn't do a very good job of it. So the guy who was in charge of the project said, well, let's just throw them away. So no. So we actually kept them. And now what we do with those is we give them to a local artist. And they do a mural or they do a painting of the lighthouse. Whatever their interpretation is, it's a pie shape. And so we auction all those off. So we have a few more of those to go as well. Cool.

1:18:51 that's so yeah so that brings in a lot of money um this year we had a jeweler make up a one -of -a -kind necklace and then with diamonds and all sorts oh my gosh and then she made smaller versions with different rocks in it that they actually sell now uh so that brought in a good number of dollars for us as well but like all that goes right you know paying off all expenses everything else goes into bank account which is trying to create as much money as we can to go into a restoration fund yeah of course so we do that every year that's the only time of year we actually open the lantern room i'll sit at the top next to the lens and let people come up one at a time up the stairs they get face to face with the lens oh my gosh so i sent you a picture that one night of where i was and that that was the night of the gala yeah I was riddled with jealousy. Oh, those people don't know what they have. When is the gala? Is it? It's in March.

1:19:53 March. Yeah. The weekend changes like March 8th, 1907 was our first day of service. So we try and get as close to that date as possible. Yet the first year we did gala and then public tour the next day. And the next day, nobody wanted to get out of bed. We're not going to do it on the same weekend anymore. So we're going to list. One week in between at least. And it's nice. The boat kind of adds like that. It's an exclusive like event and like really cool. Is that you have to take a boat to get there every day? Yes. No, no. We get to drive through the Hillsborough club because we have a nice working relationship with them, but our guests that come for tours and things like that, they have to come on the boat. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. Part of the fun.

1:20:38 Yeah. It is good, but it also isn't good. You know, It's good because the Coast Guard gets to maintain it as a recreation facility for military people and secluded, blah, blah, blah. But from a lighthouse restoration and everything, it stinks because we don't have daily access for guests. You know, it's like my cousin came down and I took him to Jupiter. He's like, the day after being in Hillsborough, he's like, this place is so much cleaner when we're on the observation deck and no bird poop. I'm like, well, because there's people here every single day. We don't. We have to fight off the birds. Yeah. It's like, oh, I didn't think of that. Yeah. That makes it a little tougher for us. Easier to maintain, easier to get to for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

1:21:25 So if you can just drive in, it's great. We don't have that luxury. Yeah. Well, good luck with raising funds. I know that's a huge challenge. We hear it time to time. Hopefully we can help spread the word a little bit. Yeah. Appreciate it. We have a small reach, but we have a very consistent reach. I'm one of those people you're reaching. Awesome. Glad to have you. It's funny because I'll be listening at times and I'll be like, no, it's this. I'm talking to myself. You're not the only person yelling at the screen. It just depends on the content. That's so funny. One of the things I covered a while ago, it's kind of... it's really too broad, but like lighthouse tourism was the name I think of the, of the episode.

1:22:13 And we were talking about our first trip we took was to the outer banks. I love that place. It was great. It was amazing. It's a long story, but the people first were awesome. And then of course the lighthouses, the, I lost a bunch of golf balls. It was a great trip. And that was our first, our first lighthouse visit together. And then, did we climb there? Did you get to climb? No, because I had broken my foot. Yeah, she had a broken foot. She was on a scooter. Two weeks before our trip, I had broken my foot. And I was like, the first thing I thought, I was like, I'm not going to get to climb any lighthouses. Terrible timing. So it was a big adventure. But I like to ask whenever we get an opportunity, if we were to visit Hillsboro, the area in general, what would you recommend going to see? Lighthouse -wise? Yeah. Well, lighthouse and elsewhere.

1:23:02 Okay, so within driving distance is Jupiter inlet to the north of us. To the south of us in Miami, you have Cape Florida. And then you can hop on a little tourism boat, and they'll take you through a place called Stiltsville, which is houses that were in the water on stilts. It used to be party central. My brother -in -law, when he first moved to Miami, he goes, this place is the best. The best parties ever. The state's trying to shut the whole thing down. If you don't own it, they're not selling them anymore. But out that way is Fowey Rocks Lighthouse, which is the lighthouse that replaced Cape Florida. So I'd recommend those places to go. Absolutely. You have to go to dinner at Cap's place at least once. It really depends on what you're looking to do. no matter where you go, it's the kind of thing. There are different historical homes throughout, you know, the area, which, you know, depending on if you're into historical architecture and the people that were like that, that lived in the times. So there are some of those cool things going on. There's, you know, again, it really depends on what you want to, for you golfing, not a problem. Golf courses everywhere. Yeah. everywhere so yeah it's not an issue a little bit of something for everybody oh yeah it sounds like if you have kids like when i tell people they're staying

1:24:33 in the cottages who have kids they want to see turtles well just go right up the road about six seven miles there's a turtle sanctuary and rehab center and they have these huge fish tanks you walk around i mean it's not like indoors it's this whole outdoor thing that's covered and they have a navy area out there so the tower you can climb to go up above the canopy to see the birds and everything. So it's a whole thing. And when they have turtle hatchlings, they have eggs of them. So kids love the place. So that's another thing you can do. But there's a lot of like wildlife sanctuary things along the area too. Cool. Florida's on the list. There's lots of parts of Florida on the list actually. Well, if you come down and I'm still working there, give me a call. You get the special tour. Oh yeah. Wouldn't miss it. No chance. That's why we do this podcast. Absolutely. That's why I do them too. So much fun. Well, thanks for chatting with us. It's my pleasure. Telling our listeners more about the lighthouse. It's important that one, we get all the information right, which is not very often because we're reliant on the internet and also getting the word out there when there's a need for a lighthouse to be, you know, funded or whatever else. So glad that we could chat with you and hear some more about it. Appreciate it. Like you have no idea. Because we don't get a lot of publicity. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, there's so many lighthouses and each one is like trying to do its own outreach. So it's hard to cover them all, but it's fun when we find one that we're like, this one's really fun. And it's, it's important that we get more

1:26:05 the word out about it. Yeah. Yeah. We love to connect with people. We don't do very many interviews. This has been a really nice, you have a very good presence. And again, I love the storytelling. If you just think of something you want to tell us. I could keep on going, but I won't. I mean, anytime, really. If you want to have another call or if you want to put together one or two stories, you can do it. I'm a nerd. I will just talk and talk and talk and talk. This is our unpaid second job, so we have fun. All right. Well, thanks again, and hopefully we get some more people headed your way. Appreciate it. Absolutely. Thanks, guys. All right. Thank you. All right.

1:26:45 Bye. See you. Thanks for listening. And we'll catch you next time. Wait. On. The lighthouse. Lowdown.