KEY WEST, Fla. — On his 68th birthday, a white-bearded Wisconsin man received the Hemingway Look-Alike Contest, a spotlight of Key West’s annual Hemingway Days celebration that ends Sunday.
Gerrit Marshall, a retired tv broadcast engineer from Madison, prevailed Saturday night time at Sloppy Joe’s Bar, a frequent hangout of Ernest Hemingway when he lived in Key West throughout the Thirties.
“This is the best birthday I have ever had,” mentioned Marshall, whose birthday falls simply at some point after the July 21 anniversary of Hemingway’s beginning.
On his eleventh try, Marshall triumphed over almost 140 different entrants within the contest that featured two preliminary rounds and Saturday’s finals.
Competitors in sportsman’s apparel, most emulating the rugged “Papa” persona Hemingway adopted in his later years, paraded onstage at Sloppy Joe’s earlier than a judging panel of earlier winners.
Marshall mentioned he shares a number of traits apart from look with Hemingway, and has written each nonfiction and brief fiction.
PHOTOS: Bell tolls for Wisconsin man who wins Hemingway look-alike contest
“Like Hemingway, I have a love of the outdoors; I love fishing one heck of a lot,” he mentioned, citing catches of walleye and northern pike in Wisconsin waters, in addition to angling for tarpon within the Florida Keys.
He mentioned, nonetheless, that he can’t match the late creator’s tally of 4 marriages.
“I only have one wife, but that doesn’t matter – that’s all I need,” mentioned Marshall.
As nicely as the competition and different competition occasions, the look-alikes deal with elevating scholarship funds for Keys college students. Hemingway Look-Alike Society president David Douglas estimated that they amassed near $125,000 throughout the 2023 competition.
Hemingway Days salutes the vigorous life-style and literary legacy of the Nobel Prize-winning creator, who wrote enduring classics together with “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “To Have and Have Not” whereas residing in Key West from 1931 till late 1939.
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