Feb­ru­ary 22, 2009 Skipper’s Smoke­house, Tampa, Florida
Moon­al­ice poster by Chuck Sperry

Accord­ing to Wikipedia, the Calusa tribe called this place Tampa, which meant place of burn­ing sticks. The prob­lem is that the place where the Calusa lived was not the place the Span­ish found. They sailed right past the Calusa vil­lage with­out even see­ing it. And yet they took the Calusa name. How could that be? We looked up the word “Tampa” in a Moon­al­ice to Eng­lish dic­tio­nary. And accord­ing to Moon­al­ice leg­end, Tampa means place of big, fat smokin’ doo­bies. Which not only is a bet­ter name, it also explains how the Span­ish could space the vil­lage and still come up with the right name.

Accord­ing to Moon­al­ice leg­end, the 420 Moon­al­ice Sig­nal Brigade under the com­mand of Col. Buford Thud­pucker Moon­al­ice spent some time here dur­ing the War of North­ern Aggres­sion. Their job was to send smoke sig­nals from Fort Brooke to Con­fed­er­ate gen­er­als in the east­ern part of the state. To get the sig­nals to reach that far, the brigade found an inge­nious solu­tion: they cheated. They inhaled deeply, puffed liked crazy, and then, when the Colonel wasn’t look­ing, they would send a telegram. The Moon­al­ice Sig­nal Brigade in Tampa per­formed bril­liantly through­out the war, but when the war ended, they fell under the influ­ence of Vin­cente Mar­tinez Ybor, who led them astray … and straight into the cigar busi­ness. Things were never the same for the tribe in this area.

Accord­ing to Moon­al­ice leg­end, today is the birth­day of the most famous hemp farmer of them all, George Wash­ing­ton. Farmer George’s diary is a core ref­er­ence work among hemp hor­ti­cul­tur­al­ists, pro­vid­ing keen insights about the impor­tance of remov­ing male plants a month before har­vest and the need to cure the females prior to enjoy­ing their bounty. In his honor, the tribe asks the ques­tion, “what would George do?” The answers to which are: light a fat one, inhale deeply, and never tell a lie.

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