King Crab

People who live in the Grove aren't weirder than the rest of the population; they're just trying to be. The village has a reputation for attracting freaks and oddballs, and no one currently living there wants to be blamed for letting the reputation die. This iconoclast Zeitgeist is so strong that less-loony people have been known to move into the Grove, only to flee almost immediately to the haven of strict zoning and order that is Coral Gables. "We love that nobody tells us what color to paint our houses, how high our weeds can grow, and that my son can keep his car on the front lawn," says Susan Billig, a veteran Grovite. "I love that I have no sidewalk or even a sewer, for that matter."

Status is conferred on those residents who survive the Grove the longest. A few days before recent elections for the Village Council, a quasi-official governing body, candidates proved their worth by declaring how many years they have lived in the Grove. "I've been here for twelve years," said one candidate proudly. "I've been here twenty," announced a second. "I've been in the Grove my whole life," boasted a third candidate, stopping the game of one-upmanship in its tracks (and ensuring the candidate's eventual election).

While not a Grovite by birth, Jack King has spent enough years in the place to be treated at least better than a tourist. He arrived twelve years ago, jobless and desperate. And he hasn't left since. He even found a way to eke out a living in the journalism business that he was almost -- but not quite -- born into.

King's father, educated in Chicago in the early Forties, had a dream opportunity: He was to start a newspaper in the emerging city of Fort Lauderdale. First, though, the elder King had to fight in World War II, from which he did not return alive. Jack King was born a month after the war ended, never having a chance to meet his dad. "If things had worked out differently, who knows?" King says with a grin. "I might be the publisher of the Sun-Sentinel."

Instead, King's journalism career followed a winding path. He got off to a rough start, lasting only a week and a half at the Alligator, the University of Florida's independent, student-run newspaper. He lasted less than two years at the university itself. Drifting down from his hometown of Stuart to the big city of West Palm Beach in the mid-Sixties, he enrolled in a junior college and found a job on the copy desk of the Palm Beach Post -- right alongside current Miami Herald publisher Dave Lawrence ("the best newspaper man I have ever worked with," notes King today).

After seven years King split the Post, taking a job selling computers. King, his wife, and their young daughter relocated to North Miami. "We were the first yuppie couple," he notes. "I drove a [Porsche] 911. She drove an Audi, and we both owned the sailboat. The problem was we were paying off the Am Ex with a MasterCard. It was like the Eighties before the Eighties ever happened." When the bills came due, the marriage broke up, and King found himself unemployed. (A few years later he remarried his ex, only to see the union again dissolve. King is currently single.)

He bounced from job to job for a while -- selling more computers, producing a sailing magazine, laboring at the Sun Post, dabbling in the printing business. The Grove became home in 1983 when, out of work, he approached Monty Trainer with hopes of doing some public relations. The two clicked so well that a few years later, when Trainer, a politically connected restaurateur, told King that the Grove desperately needed a newspaper of its own, King agreed to be the man to run it. "The only person who ever said he'd put money into it was Monty Trainer," King says now. "He's the one who told me that Coconut Grove needed a real newspaper, not a bullshit thing. He was going to put together enough investors to get me a working quarter-million dollars. He had his own problems, though, and pulled out. [Trainer was convicted in 1989 of federal tax evasion.] I tried to put it together for $10,000, but when push came to shove, not one person was there for me."

It was financially illogical, but King published the paper anyway, with the first Coconut Grover -- all of four pages thick -- hitting the streets in December 1987. Originally it was scheduled to come out weekly. Three issues after the Grover's debut, however, King scaled it back to a monthly, as the paper remains to this day. It has survived longer than many previous attempts at a Grove newspaper.

Nowadays each issue is roughly 30 pages in length, produced entirely on King's computer. Distribution remains somewhat primitive. Most of the 9000 copies printed each month are thrown onto driveways in the Grove, where they can often be found weeks later disintegrating in mud puddles. "I know the paper has a lot of impact on the driveways around town," snipes one Miami city official who is unimpressed with King's work.