The Palm Beach Post
Saturday, April 14, 2007

By LIZ BALMASEDA
      Palm Beach Post Staff Writer 

Ask Robert Mykle, author, adventurer, all-around Renaissance man from Palm Beach Gardens. He knew Pamplona even before he traveled there. Months before he staked out a prime spot along the Calle Estafeta, his perennial vantage point for the running of the bulls, he showed up at a Pamplona gang gathering in Miami.

"Hemingway, of course, is why we’re all in Pamplona," says the 54-year-old, Boston-born Mykle, who is rereading Hemingway . . .

Liz Balmaseda, two time Pulitzer Prize winner.

Robert Mykle - Palm Beach 2004

See Robert Run!
Watch Robert Mykle run with the bull in Pamplona 2003.
Click on the movie to watch him run!
  

Robert Mykle, award-winning author of KILLER ‘CANE: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928,
is an avid explorer and adventurer. Aside from new literary ventures, he is working on a
number of international humanitarian and environmental projects.

Recipient of

The Florida Historical Library Foundation

STORM STORIES

Killer 'Cane and its survivors are captured in film by the Weather Channel's series Storm Stories. www.weather.com/newscenter/stormstories/

RUN ROBERT RUN

El Encierro -- The Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Third day 2003.
Made famous by Ernest Hemingway in his 1926 Lost Generation novel The Sun Also Rises, each year Pamplona attracts hundreds of thousands of spectators and runners for the fiesta of San Fermin known simply as Fiesta. Robert was captured on this Spanish postcard, front row second from left. His good friend and running buddy, Peter "Perfect Pete" Martinez from Tampa, is to his immediate left.

Courtesy Jose Vicente of POSTALES "IRUÑA" Pamplona (31011).
LOS AMIGOS DE PAMPLONA -- MIAMI
LA PEÑA EL CALLEJON -- Taurine Club of Florida -- Tampa

Robert Mykle's Killer 'Cane: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928 was instrumental in reclassifying the 1928 hurricane as the second-deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history.

According to the National Weather Service, Robert Mykle's Killer 'Cane: The Deadly Hurricane of 1928 was instrumental in reclassifying the 1928 hurricane as the second-deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. In a book review to the American Meteorological Society, Rusty Pfost, the meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office in Miami wrote

"(Mykle's) justification for the higher number makes sense. In fact, instead of the official count, the National Weather Service should adopt an estimated death toll of 2,500 for the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane, marked with an asterisk that the true count will never be known. The change would be more accurate, and would solidify the Okeechobee hurricane of 1928 as causing the second worst death toll from a hurricane disaster in the United States (after the Galveston Hurricane of 1900)."

   KillerCane.com

   From the warm waters off the African coast, it drank its full, filling its lungs until satiated then it moved south and westward before colliding with the substantially cooler airs along the Gulf of Guinea. Cooled, the super saturated air condensed into clouds, large, elegantly shaped anvil clouds; a few at first, then a dozen, then a gross, until a treacherous wall of thunderstorms formed. Forced by the spin of the earth, it curved around in endless circles until it created a funnel. Then, spinning in a deliberate counterclockwise direction, it grew, gained momentum and spun faster. The agitated air sucked up more energizing, warm water from the ocean surface, feeding its thunder, giving it strength to spin faster and faster still, until it had formed an eye. Now, it could see. It was big, but not yet mature. In fact, it was entering adolescence; and like an errant teen, it was doomed and determined to test its limits. Spawned in the heat of Africa, a perfect killer was in the making that would leave six thousand dead in its wake, many of them children of its native sons.

Relaxing in his favorite hammock
  with his orange tabby, Gucci.