An early cruise industry promoter who helped launch the Miami Goombay Festival and the Coconut Grove Farmer’s Market, Herb Hiller shifted gears later in life to spread the gospel of bicycling and ecotourism.
Editor’s Note: Former Grove resident Glenn Terry wrote this tribute for the Spotlight to his friend and neighbor, Herb Hiller.
Herb Hiller’s 10-speed got wings this week. It carried the Coconut Grove trailblazer up a steep, heavenly hill. He died earlier this week in North Georgia at 93.
Although he spent just 20 years living in the Grove, he had a huge impact on our seaside village and much of South Florida. And when he moved to a North Florida island in the 1980’s he’d return often for visits.
A New York native, Hiller found his niche helping to create South Florida’s modern cruise industry. He sold the vision of a voyage to tropical paradise. “Get on a ship and visit the sun-filled Caribbean!” he preached.
A friend told me that Hiller, as communications director for a major cruise line in the 1960s and early 70s, made things happen: writing letters, making connections, on the phone in interminable conversation. In the mid-1970s, in an effort to strengthen South Florida’s bond with the Bahamian islands just off our coastline, he helped launch the popular Miami Goombay Festival, which continues to this day.
Hiller also was instrumental in launching another nearly-half-century-old Coconut Grove institution, the Grand Avenue Farmer’s Market.
He and his wife, Mary Lee, raised their two daughters in a spacious compound on Main Highway in South Grove. In the 1970’s I’d see this tall, thin man whizzing by on his 10-speed. When he finally stopped to talk he told me his life had vastly improved since he traded his car for a bike. He was changing in other ways too.
Rather than stuffing people into cruise ships he started promoting something new – bicycle tourism. He wanted everyone to peddle their way to new adventures. He’d come back to South Florida for bicycle events and Eco-tourism conferences.
Herb biked all over Florida discovering the Sunshine State’s hidden wonders. As a talented writer he would share them in his travel guides and numerous magazine articles.
For several years the brilliant Harvard grad led bicycle tours. He told me once, “Yes, you can look out on Lake Okeechobee but why not really get to know it and its people? He invited me on one of his two-day 135-mile bike tours that straddled the top of the dirt levee that surrounds the endless watery expanse. I politely declined as I think it would have killed me.
Fifteen years ago my wife and I caught up with Herb at his 1850’s home. Being Herb, it was on an island in the middle of North Florida’s Lake George. You could only get there by boat. While he made sour-dough bread from scratch, he told us he was working tirelessly to create a 3,000-mile bike path stretching from Maine to Florida.
A few years later, when we all became well aware of global warming, Hiller turned into an octogenarian climate warrior. He began working feverishly on ways to stop tourism from adding to the problem.
Herb started his “Climate Traveler” blog, part of a continuing effort to get us all thinking about how the tourism industry could stop contributing to the slow destruction of our planet. Each entry was extremely well-written and included extensive footnotes.
Last year he summed up his post-cruise-line life writing that after he quit the ocean liner life he became the “maverick director” of the Caribbean Travel Association. His new career focused on promoting the interactions of travelers and the people in the places that they visited.
He wrote about the importance of getting people off of big ships and into nature, the growth of ecotourism, and the subsequent realization of how all travel has an effect on climate change. “Trying to get people out of their houses and out of their cars is not easy work,” he told me back in 2010. “Sometimes it feels like pushing boulders uphill”.
My maverick friend was still writing eloquently about saving the world six-weeks ago when his health took a turn for the worse.
We should all be grateful for the likes of Herb Hiller. They are the ones that keep pushing the boulders, who open our eyes to new possibilities like home-made bread, stepping outside, and saving our marvelous planet.
