Linda Grist Cunningham | Columns and news analysis
Linda Grist Cunningham | Columns and news analysisKey West Island News editor Linda Grist Cunningham has written more than 4,000 columns — in print and on the web — since 1968. She hates writing and is compelled to do it anyway.
Key West jobs openings go begging; would $30 an hour fill them?
Here's a math word problem for you: If the median price of a house is $799,000, how much does the minimum hourly rate of pay need to be to live in Key West? Let me save you the trouble of finding a calculator. You and your partner both need to make $26.90 an hour,...
Key West is never going to be “post-Covid-19,” so let’s figure out our “next life”
Clueless Key West girl. I did it again. Hopped on an elevator in Miami Tuesday sans mask. Oblivious of naked face until a mom and her little ones, all masked, even the toddlers, stopped and looked at me funny. I did that goofy thing of pulling up my shirt, got off and...
Can a million bucks buy control of Key West’s voters and the cruise ship business?
Darn it. I wish I had friends like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. The kind with a million bucks in spare change handed over for whatever cool things I wanted to do (like run for president). The kind who with an apparently straight face would say "hey, no strings...
Two weeks off the rock | Lessons learned, tales to tell
As my dad would say back in olden times, "Lord willing and the creek don't rise," by the time you're reading this I'll be sitting on my front porch behind the picket fence and telling tall tales about what it's like out there in the big...
Leaving the island for the first time since Covid? It’ll be OK. I promise
Flying out of Key West last week was a bit like crawling out of a cave, blinking in the sunshine and wishing I could scurry to safety. The last time I left the island (other than three, day trips to Miami for health care stuff and a couple junkets to Stock Island) was...
Living in Key West | Three places to get your happy back
For someone born smiling, I sure have been grumpy the past couple weeks. Grumpy can mean swearing aloud, smashing a coffee cup with extra oomph on the table, closing a cabinet door with particular firmness or stomping around while posting vague social media memes in...
Dear Connor
Dear Connor is a collection of columns Linda writes for her grandson, Connor. Though he may never read them, they help her make sense of the world.
Dear Connor | The day the young ones took charge
History will remember the march as the coming-to-power of Xers and Millennials. Though there were aging baby boomers aplenty in the crowd and at the microphones, the marches around the world saw these elders step aside to open the way for younger women.
Dear Connor: Breaking the loop of endless despair
The 2016 presidential election will, on hindsight, be recognized as the precursor to the catalyst that ignites the transformation of America from fragmented, angry and disillusioned into cohesive, collaborative and powerful. America will move away from six decades of tearing down to four decades of building up and then we'll start the process over.
Hurricane Irma
In September 2017, Linda Grist Cunningham created and launched a Facebook Page that aggregated news coverage during Hurricane Irma. She was off-island at the time visiting her mother in Virginia. Her husband remained in Key West. Over the three weeks that she and her partner journalists John Teets maintained around-the-clock coverage, they reached almost a million people around the world. These are the columns she wrote each day. Hurricane Season is always June 1 – Nov. 30.
Hurricane Irma | How did news coverage get so confused?
By Sept, 5, 2017, five days before Hurricane Irma battered Key West and the Florida Keys, I was swearing -- or at least muttering unpleasant comments under my breath. I was, as some will remember, visiting my mother in the Shenandoah Valley and...
Hurricane Irma | Are you ready for the anniversary?
Sunday. Aug. 20, 2017 -- exactly one year ago -- was a perfect island beach day. High temps in the upper 80s, low humidity -- at least for us -- great breezes and sunny skies. No storms on the horizon; all quiet off the shores of Africa from...
