Blue Heaven
Key West FL
2010

https://fla-keys.com/keysvoices/the-unforgettable-shine/

https://www.keysnews.com/news/local/key-west-resolution-aims-to-honor-local-boxer-befriended-by-hemingway/article_fa255a1a-cacc-11eb-858e-cff2edbd0469.html

The towering Spanish lime tree with a trunk as wide as a sequoia and the enormous banyan tree were there that night in 1936, the only remaining witnesses to the legendary confrontation between Ernest Hemingway and Kermit “Shine” Forbes.

In those days, a boxing ring was set up near the up-and-coming trees behind the Blue Heaven Bar at the corner of Thomas and Petronia streets, just a short walk from the well-known author’s coral rock mansion. It was dimly lit back there, and the burly, deeply-tanned Hemingway, his black hair longer than usual, was wearing khaki shorts held up by a rope while refereeing a boxing match between Alfred “Black Pie” Colebrooks and Joe Mills, who ironically had taught “Shine” how to box.
Shine, given that nickname everyone knew him by from a childhood friend for reasons he could not remember later in life, was the corner man for “Black Pie,” who was getting pounded but refusing to quit. Shine had seen enough and literally threw in the towel for his fighter.

The referee threw it back.

Shine immediately once again threw in the towel — the universal sign that a fighter’s corner is calling the bout.

The referee threw it back.

This time, the towel hit Shine flush in the face. He had no idea the referee was writing future classics and would become a Nobel Prize winner in literature, saying he thought the referee “was a bum trying to earn money for a drink.” And Shine wasn’t having this referee’s unmitigated gall.

“Who is this chump letting my man get beat to a pulp?” Shine had to be asking himself.
So, the 5-foot-6, 135-pounder who would be a lightweight prize fighter while in the U.S. Army during World War II, went through the ropes and stormed Hemingway — all 6-foot, 200-plus pounds of him.

So, the 5-foot-6, 135-pounder who would be a lightweight prize fighter while in the U.S. Army during World War II, went through the ropes and stormed Hemingway — all 6-foot, 200-plus pounds of him.

Wiry little Shine hauled off and “took a poke” at Hemingway.

Roosevelt Sands Jr., a Key West Housing Authority board member who is now 90, remembered hearing that story from Shine, who taught him and other boys in the segregated Bahama Village neighborhood how to box. But Sands injected one important point that usually gets left out of this legendary tale.
“He shared stories about that with me,” said Sands. “He said that towel went back two or three times. Yes, yes, he took a swing at Hemingway, but fortunately didn’t connect.”

So, Shine missed?

“Exactly,” said Sands, chuckling. “Oh, yes.”
The only one of over a dozen articles Googled or read about Shine in the file supplied by Key West Library historian Tom Hambright that noted as much was one by Frank Rabey of The Citizen, who quoted Shine from the point of his swing:

“But he saw me comin’. He blocked it, and he held me, and everybody jumped in the ring.”
Shine, noting this overly-protective reaction to the ref, thought: “Who the hell is he?”
Police were among those jumping in and were eager to run him in. However, Hemingway wouldn’t have it. He reportedly said, “Anyone with that nerve doesn’t need to go to jail.”
Shine was quoted in that story in October 1999, four months before succumbing to pancreatic cancer and a bad liver at the age of 84.


STEEPED IN HISTORY

Clayton Lopez, a long-time Key West commissioner who was another one of the youngsters taught boxing by Shine, was asked if Shine had the kind of temper to explode like that.

“He was slow to anger,” said Lopez, 67. “But you didn’t want to get him there.

“What I like about that story is that it made me think about Mike Tyson (5-10, 240 pounds) because if you think of the people Mike Tyson fought, all of them were bigger than him. I can only imagine Mr. Shine (laughter) fighting. The Mr. Shine I knew was this nice guy who took care of me. He was friends of the family, brought us candy.”

Lopez, Sands, Hambright, Carmen Turner, Corey Malcom and Jeffrey Stotts formed an informal committee that first helped name streets in the Bahama Village development and dedicated memorials to military heroes before drafting a resolution Lopez proposed to the Key West City Commission to name the nearly-completed former Police Athletic League gym at the Truman Annex as the Kermit "Shine" Forbes Building.

“We worked it out with the city engineering (department),” said Lopez, a recently-retired health department consultant, “and then I brought forth a resolution to make it official.

“In my youth, he was always there. I don’t think he was family, but there was some familial relationship with him over the years.

There were a lot of gentlemen and ladies in my growing-up years that Mr. Shine was a lookout or protector for. He was one of those people you didn’t let catch you smoking before you were old enough or doing anything wrong because they would get you, and then your parents would get you.

“It wasn’t until years later that I learned of his long association with Mr. Hemingway, and how steeped he was in our history.”


Sands added, “He was a community-minded and wonderful individual. I have nothing but good things to say about that man. He volunteered with PAL and did quite a bit of volunteering. I can remember him teaching us to box at (Frederick) Douglass High School, free of charge. He was instructing me and wanted me to hit him like any other opponent, and I said, ‘Do you really mean that?’ He said, ‘Yes, yes. Do it.’ So, we boxed and I noticed he was holding quite a bit. But I didn’t tell him that. It’s just that he wasn’t catching any of my punches other than in the wrong places.

“When we finished, he said, ‘You know, I had to hold on just a while ago. I’m scheduled to fight tonight, and it would look awful if they got word that I let this little high school boy knock me out.’ I said, ‘Yeah, that would be exactly right. That’d be awful, man.’ But he told me I had a good right, and that was quite a compliment. He would tell you what you needed to know: ‘Jab him. Use that left.’ ”

Sands had his own Hemingway experience, having driven “Papa” from the airport in the author’s Buick convertible to rendezvous with Toby Bruce, the Hemingway friend and confidant whom Sands worked for at Home Appliance Company.

A STORIED PAST

There is this mystical quality to those Hemingway stories old-timers in town lived, and Shine’s is one of the best.

The story might have ended with the brief skirmish between them being broken up. No harm done. However, everyone encouraged Shine to apologize, and he later went to Hemingway’s house with his friends, Earke Sweetan and “Iron Baby” Roberts.

Hemingway accepted the apology and invited them back to train with him. Shine became a regular sparring partner.

“When we sparred, he’d pull punches,” Shine once told Dick Wagner of The Citizen. “He would knock you down but nothin’ to hurt you.”

Shine shared with Rabey: “We used to work out in his yard, right by the swimming pool.”

They’d tip a few drinks together, too.

“He used to drink a lot!” Shine once shared with Wendy Tucker of The Citizen.

Shine and Colebrooks wandered over to Hemingway’s house one Christmas Eve night, and Shine recalled former heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney, who beat Jack Dempsey twice in storied bouts, being among the out-of-towners there. Shine asked Hemingway if they could put on a boxing show, and he did just that with Colebrooks, “Iron Baby” and Joseph Russell. A hat was passed around and the group collected about $200, with Shine adding years later: “And we hadn’t had nothin’, not change for a quarter.”

Life was never easy for Shine.

He “hoboed” his way on trains when he was 13 or 14 to Charleston, South Carolina, and picked pecans and snap beans, washed dishes and also worked a still for a bootlegger. Shine took a bus home after a few years, eventually served in the U.S. Army at the end of World War II in Guam and the South Pacific, where he recalled seeing “burnt-up coconut trees” from strafing during battles that came before him. He soon settled into 32 years as a U.S. Navy cook in Key West, and got by on the retirement checks after that.

He fancied hats — Panama and what Lopez described as “Sluggo” hats actually made of wicker — and preferred sleeveless shirts or tank tops to show off his physique.

The “Ponderosa,” his long-time home, “was once the location of the Nilo Lopez Dairy,” according to Clayton Lopez, whose cousins owned the dairy. “I used to milk cows in here,” Shine once told a visitor. Shine loved playing checkers in the backyard and listening to Muddy Waters’ blues riffs pl