From newspaper article. South Florida Newspaper: Newsleader. 1 Nov 1978. A PIONEER FAMILY. AT 91, HIS MEMORIES HAVEN’T FADED. BY CLARA JONES. A man gets to be 91-years-old and the years take their toll. Good health is not what it used to be and the mind works slower. For one man the memories have remained sharply edged against the inroads of time. Manuel Gomez is such a man and although his physical needs must be taken care of in a nursing home, Homestead Manor, he needs to help to recall the day when he was an electrician and told the inventor of the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, how to use the instrument. It was 1917 and Gomez was working for a man who had established a telephone exchange in Coconut Grove and W.J. Matheson who sent Gomez to install a telephone in the residence of Dr. Fairchild. Gomez had the telephone in place and was giving instructions on its use to a white bearded man who was watching from a nearby chair. “The old fellow,” said Gomez, “chuckled and listened.” Mrs. Fairchild entered the room and explained to Gomez that he was talking to the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, who also happened to be her father. “It was, “ recalled Gomez, “life’s most embarrassing moment.” His trade as an electrician brought Gomez into contact with history. In World War I, when he was working in the Key West Navy yard he installed a telephone for Thomas Edison, inventor of the electric light. Edison had an office in the old post office building adjoin the Navy yard and was doing research work in connection with the war effort. “Perhaps on depth bombs,” surmises Gomez. When President Franklin D. Roosevelt opened the San Francisco World Fair in 1939 from his Key West base, he did it an automobile to which telephone wires had been strung by Gomez, who was with the Coast Guard at that time. Back in 1910, he laid the first piece of underground telephone cable in Miami. It ran from the Seybold building to Whaler’s drug store across 12th Street which is now Flagler Street and where the telephone exchange owner by Whaler and a man named Fuzzell, was located. When Gomez strung the first telephone line to the homestead of George Merrick’s father which later became the site of Coral Gables, he cut his own telephone poles out of the pine trees. Gomez and his wife came to Homestead in 1945, when he retired after 26 years of service with the U.S. Coast Guard. They lived on NW First Avenue and Fifth Street and had seven children. A daughter, Mrs. Mabel Simmons is a telephone company employee in Homestead. Mrs. Williams’ (Simmons) daughter and several in-laws, all work for the Bell System. Gomez was born in Key West. His father Manuel Gomez St., was born in a community named Cutler, the site of Old Cutler Road in 1857 and his grandfather, Antone Gomez was one of the early Spanish settlers of Key West. In later years, he became a founder of the Cutler community. Homestead’s Manuel Gomez has a newspaper accounts of the kidnapping of his father as a boy by an Indian and his rescue by a Seminole chief with whom the Cutler Gomez family traded. For punishment the chief cut the leg tendons of the kidnapper making his a cripple for life. Later in the century when relations with the Seminoles became strained, Manuel Gomez SR., moved his family to Key West. “My father,” says daughter Mable Simmons, “used his bicycle for his telephone work in Key West and when he retired liked to watch Homestead’s telephone crews at work.” “Hell, I installed more telephone using my bicycle that you fellows can with your truck, “ he’d tell them.