1916 – Wealthy U.S. industrialist Andrew Carnegie, accompanied by his wife and friends, was on the houseboat Everglades out of Marathon and captained by A.C. Wallace. The group was traveling through the Middle and Lower Keys on a fishing cruise.
1923 – Crews with the Clark Dredging Company were blasting in the inner harbor of Key West as they worked to widen it.
1933 – Eight Cuban refugees landed at Key West after crossing the Florida Straits in a small boat. They claimed to be escaping persecution by Cuban President Machado and his cohorts. The group, composed of students and professionals, was released on their own recognizance pending a later hearing.
1937 – One coffin and six skeletons were unearthed by WPA crews digging a trench for a sewer main at the western end of Eaton Street. It was thought they were from the first Key West cemetery.
1953 – The Key West City Commission passed an ordinance outlawing soliciting the sale of alcoholic beverages in the city bars and nightclubs. Scores of local “B-Girls,” who worked for bars and enticed customers into buying drinks at inflated prices, were thrown out of work by the new law.
1954 – Tourists complained to the Key West Citizen that multiple Duval Street bars were engaged in “drink pushing” by employing alluring B-Girls to tempt visitors into buying overpriced drinks.
1955 – Key West police located a car stolen from West Hempstead, N.Y., after it had been parked at the local airport 114 days earlier. Authorities were not pleased with the attentiveness of the lot attendant.
1961 – Movie star and night club entertainer Stepin Fetchit, born Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry in Key West in 1893, appeared at Raul’s Club on South Roosevelt Boulevard.
1964 – Four Cuban fishing vessels caught within U.S. Territorial waters near the Dry Tortugas were brought in by the Coast Guard.
1998 – A major winter storm crossed the Keys, causing widespread damage and leaving one man dead. Tornados were reported in the Middle and Upper Keys. By midnight the Coast Guard had had more than 300 calls.
Information compiled by Tom Hambright, Historian Emeritus, and Dr. Corey Malcom, Lead Historian, Monroe County Public Library, Florida Keys History Center.
Image: ‘Cigarette girls’ in a nightclub. Wright Langley Collection. Monroe County Public Library, Florida Keys History Center.