STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

                Dr. Nancy Sindelar would have dated Ernie Hemingway in a heartbeat.

                “He was so cute,” said Sindelar, the author of “Influencing Hemingway: The People and Places That Shaped His Life and Work.”

                Sindelar was born too late to have a crack at dating Hemingway. But the Hemingway scholar found that immersing herself in the famed American author’s life wasn’t a bad choice, either, as she delivered a lecture titled “The Most Fascinating Man I Know” to a sell-out crowd of 120 people at the 2015 Hemingway Festival.

                Make no mistake about it, though—that quote didn’t come from Sindelar but from actress Marlene Dietrich, who was a lifelong friend of Hemingway’s.

“She found Ernest to be one of the most positive life forces she had ever encountered,” said Sindelar. “He really pushed the edges, immersed himself in the fun things that interested him and he didn’t hold anything back. He found time to do things most men only dreamed of. He lived by the words: ‘Never confuse movement for action.’ ”

Sindelar presented her findings before attendees from places like Ohio, Florida and California during the annual festival held this past week at The Community Library in Ketchum.

It was a challenge just keeping track of where Hemingway lived, Sindelar said. Before the age of 40 he had lived in Oak Park, Ill; Kansas City, Mo., Italy, France, Switzerland, Spain, Cuba, Ketchum, Idaho, and Key West, Fla.

At 18 months Hemingway told his mother that he was “fraid of nothing.” He wanted to hunt lions with his father, who was an adventurer in his own right.

Hemingway’s mother is often maligned—she ripped his “Farewell to Arms” as the filthiest book she had ever read. But she and his father were simply very strict, Sindelar said.

Hemingway’s father didn’t allow the kids to sit around doing nothing. In their down time they had to be reading from the extensive family library or doing something else worthwhile. In fact, Hemingway and his sister read all of Shakespeare’s tragedies when they were home with the mumps.

Hemingway’s fathers would take the kids out on the lake at their summer home in Michigan, rock the boat until it capsized and tell the kids to swim to shore.

“The kids thought that was great fun,” Sindelar said.

He also admonished his children that they had to get involved.

Indeed a peek at Ernest’s school yearbook showed he was involved with the school literary magazine, newspaper, rifle club, orchestra and football. He even played Beau Brummel on the stage.

Another great influence in young Hemingway’s life was his grandfather, who proudly wore his Civil War uniform at every Memorial Day parade. Hemingway, too, kept his World War I and II uniforms and he jumped at the chance to be an ambulance driver in Italy before the United States got involved in World War I.

“He said, ‘I can’t let a show like this go on without me,’” said Sindelar.

While living in Europe, Hemingway skied in Switzerland to escape Paris’s damp winter weather. He even bobsledded—and people didn’t wear helmets those days.

He wrote, “It’s a thrill that starts at the base of your spine and ends with you nearly swallowing your heart.”

His wife Pauline’s trust fund enabled him to go on African safaris, and his stints in Cuba found him reeling in 400-pound marlins.

Hemingway never actually fought in a war, but he was a world-class noticer, said Stacey Guill, who did her doctoral dissertation on “Hemingway and The Spanish Earth: Art, Politics and War” and put together a “Hemingway in Venice and the Veneto” photographic exhibition for Boise State University.

Hemingway attended a press conference with Mussolini, in which he noticed the Italian dictator intently absorbed in a book. He walked around Mussolini to find he was holding a French-English dictionary upside down.

And he eagerly heeded the call to cover the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, saying, “You can’t preserve your life by putting it in mothballs.”

Later, in Cuba he got four bartenders and 4 waiters to be part of a spy ring he set up at the Crook Factory.

While Hemingway courted the rich and famous, he was equally at home with simple fishermen. When Hemingway died, the fishermen at Cojimar—a small fishing village east of Havana, Cuba--melted boat propellers to make a bust of their giant friend.

Death came at 61, as Hemingway shot himself with a shotgun in his home overlooking the Big Wood River in Ketchum.

                He had never been the same, friends said, after 1954 when he used his head as a battering ram to open the door of a small plane that crashed in Africa, exploded and caught on fire.

“That was the beginning of the end,” said Guill.

Hemingway struggled to write a paragraph for John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. And shock therapy prescribed by Sun Valley doctors further compromised his memory.