Look-alikes with silver-white beards wearing khaki shorts flocked to town as they have each July for years, to drink, carouse and see who looks most like "Papa" Ernest Hemingway.
They would have come no matter what. Still, the festival they love so much almost didn't happen this year.Eager to cash in on the annual Hemingway Days festival, three sons of the late Nobel Prize-winning novelist demanded 10 percent of the profits, telling organizers they were using the family name without paying any licensing fee.
They also said they were tired of rowdy Key West and wanted to make the event more dignified.
Fearing a costly legal battle, the original founder called this year's festival off, but the owner of the local Hemingway house later bought rights to the festival name and promised to carry on regardless.
So for the 17th year, the festival celebrating Ernest Hemingway went on largely as planned this weekend. It didn't matter that the legal dispute with the three Hemingway sons - Jack, Patrick and Gregory - remained unsettled.
"We were worried about it," said Fred Johnson, the president of the newly formed Hemingway Look-alike Society. "We decided we were coming anyway, festival or no festival."
"Papa liked it here," said Richard "Bart" Barton, this year's Hemingway look-alike winner. "This is where it should be."
Hemingway descendants held another festival a week ago on Sanibel Island about 150 miles away, an island Hemingway never visited, creating a family event to contrast with Key West's wild party atmosphere.
In Key West, visitors gathered Saturday in front of the two-story, Spanish-style house shaded by banyan trees and palms where the writer once lived.
With cats roaming the grounds just like when Hemingway lived there, they heard Lee Deigaard of Wildwood, Ga., read her winning entry in the festival's short-story writing contest. It was nicely written, but unlike Hemingway, her sentences were very long.
Granddaughter Lorian Hemingway read from her new autobiographical book. Her writing was clear and crisp, just what you would expect from a Hemingway.
She stayed with the Key West festival this year against the wishes of her cousins because she wanted to keep her short story contest alive and because she loves colorful, energized Key West as much as her grandfather did.