THE MYSTERY OF CRACKER BAY…

PLASTICVILLE-USA

THE MYSTERY OF CRACKER BAY…

There’s an old saying that says you know you’re old when the first page you read in the daily newspaper is the obituary column. Well..I guess I’m old. I started the practice of reading the obit page in my hometown newspaper a few years ago. I did it primarily to see if there were people my parents knew from their church or work who might have passed away and they would like to know about it. Over time I began to find names of people of my own age who were listed there. Never a good sign.

As you read the notices you can almost always tell how the person passed away. There are various clues whether it’s a request to donate to a specific medical organization or simply how the cause of death is spelled out. The term “brief illness” almost always means a heart attack or stroke. Sometimes “died unexpectedly” means the same thing. Sometimes the notice just spells it out.

The recent death of TV “Wizard Of Oz” Gary Morse brings this thought to light. Virtually none of the published or broadcast reports indicate his cause of death. The Morse family has let it be known that they do not intend to announce the cause of Gary’s death, and have further said that no public memorial service will be given.

The lack of a public memorial has saddened a number of Villages residents who wanted to be able to pay their respects to the man who built their plastic nirvana. There was a very public memorial for Gary’s father Harold Schwartz when he passed away in 2003. In fact, on the Spanish Springs town square there is a statue memorial to Mr. Schwartz that has the creepy addition of old Harold’s ashes being entombed in the statue.

But the question of how Gary Morse passed away isn’t really an idle curiosity. Being that Gary was a virtual recluse and very little information was ever given about him, it’s possible although not likely he had passed away much earlier..or..he had been a very sick man for some time. Locally no one was of the opinion that the Wizard was on his deathbed.

The Palm Beach Post in their write up of Gary’s passing made mention that since so very few people knew him or what he really looked like, he would from time to time dress in very plain garb and walk around TV a bit. If you didn’t know him, you wouldn’t know him from any other Villager. Gary was indeed a private man..private to the point of being secretive.

However..there were people to whom Gary was not a secretive hermit. Those people were the major powers within the Republican party. To these people Gary was a rock star. Gary had twice served as one of the Florida electors for George W. Bush in the electoral college. He was what amounted to the Florida CFO for the Bush, McCain and Romney campaigns. He often used the “Morse Air Force” his stable of private jets to fly Republican campaigners around the country. And very often he used his 147 foot mega-yacht the Cracker Bay to host dinner parties and other events for the bluest of blue chip Republican donors. To these people Gary was no recluse. He was the man of the hour.

In fact if you Google “Cracker Bay” you come up with an amazing amount of information about Gary and his ocean liner. The first thing you encounter is a set of stories talking about how Gary hosted a dinner of major donors for Mitt Romney. The gist of all of the stories is that Romney who was continually portrayed in the media as being completely out of touch with Americans, was raising money for his campaigns on the yacht of a billionaire who’s boat was under the flag of the Cayman Islands.

The media’s playing a game of “gotcha” here and at the same time showing their utter ignorance. The ignorance comes into play over the boat being flagged in the Cayman Islands. The truth is that U.S. flag shipping regulations are so ridiculous and punitive that very few large watercraft are licensed/flagged in the USA. None of the major cruise carriers are, and very few large private yachts are either. It’s just unaffordable to do.

Once you get past the political stories you run across a very interesting article from the publication Boat International. The article says that the boat brokerage firm Yachtzoo in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida has been signed as the sales agent for Gary’s yacht Cracker Bay.

The article is dated September 2, 2014, which means that the deal was struck sometime in late August. So why would Gary Morse suddenly want to sell off his yacht? This same yacht which has been the home to massive Republican fundraisers and according to a number of various reports Gary’s place to “get away” from the world. Is it possible that Gary KNEW that he wasn’t going to be needing or using his boat sometime in the near future? It now becomes the realm of possibility that Gary has been a sick man for some months.

If you combine this story with several other items that have been taking place in TV over the last 6 months it might lead one to believe that Gary has known for awhile that things were not so good. For awhile Gary has been selling off, or leasing the operations of a number of his Villages-based businesses. The opinion of the time was that he was just making good business decisions as he usually did and was taking people off his payroll and putting them on somebody else’s. But maybe that’s not exactly so. Maybe Gary knew full well that the sand was speeding through the hourglass.

We will likely never know..and maybe it’s none of our business. But..the death of Gary Morse leaves us with something to think about. The mystery of Cracker Bay.