"One of the more stunning and unusual features of the Hemingway Home property is the in-ground swimming pool, an extraordinary luxury for a residential home in 1930s Key West. The final cost of construction in 1938 dollars was $20,000. Even more mind-boggling is the sheer labor of digging, in solid coral, a massive hole 24 feet wide, 60 feet long, 10 feet deep at the south end, and 5 feet deep at the north end. The Hemingway pool—the only one within 100 miles in the 1930s—was truly an architectural feat".
That is SO awesome, and I bet that it was amazing to swim in that pool ! I really love it on the days when we go to the fitness center and I swim in the pool there. We have the little backyard pool set up for the summer, and today, I was happily out back paddling around in the pool. Since I do my actual swimming at the fitness center, we decided that all we need out back is just something that we can float around in and suntan, or dun in and cool off after being out in the heat (like today). It is one of the short ones, 12’X30” , so not very deep, but I don’t need a ladder to get in and out like the deeper one we had last year, and it is perfect for just cooling off and floating. I think that I would like to live close enough to the ocean to go there and swim, or at least wade around. When Robin and I were coming back home from Orlando, we went up the West Coast of Florida, and there are some really beautiful small towns long the southern coastline of that state, and probably some in southern alabama, too.
Note: "It was once the largest pool in all of Florida and had cost more than the mansion itself. Hemingway’s wife, Pauline, commissioned the pool without Hem’s permission when she found out he was sleeping with the journalist Martha Gellhorn while reporting the Civil War in Spain. When he came home, he found the swimming pool in the courtyard where he liked to host neighborhood boxing matches. He had a little temper tantrum".
After Lovers Hemingway and Gellhorn Faced Off on D-Day, They Filed for Divorce It turns out battling for journalistic scoops during wartime is not great for a marriage. Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, a married couple in China. (Photo: John F Kennedy Library/Public domain)
Ernest passed away peacefully in Ketchum, Idaho in 1961, with a shotgun barrel in the mouth. "For Whom The Bell Tolls" Hal