Thomas Putnam, who gave the 27th annual Ernest Hemingway Birthday Lecture at the Oak Park Arts Center last Wednesday evening, is the director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. According to the program, the JFK Library is "responsible for collecting, preserving and exhibiting the documents, audiovisual material and memorabilia of Kennedy and his administration."

So why is the largest collection of Hemingway-related material also housed there?

As you might imagine, there's a story behind that, and Putnam was the man to tell it. The story begins near the end of Hemingway's life. When Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba in 1959, Hemingway and his wife, Mary, fearing anti-American sentiment, fled their beloved Finca Vigia (Lookout Farm) in San Francisco de Paula outside Havana and left most of their belongings behind.

Hemingway never returned, but after his death in 1961, Mary began negotiating with the Castro regime to retrieve their belongings. Castro, who was a Hemingway fan (particularly of the Robert Jordan character in For Whom the Bell Tolls), was gracious and invited Hemingway's widow to return. Unfortunately, U.S. travel restrictions prevented her from doing so.

Enter Bill Walton, a former war correspondent who befriended Hemingway in Europe and who also happened to be the next door neighbor of one John Fitzgerald Kennedy when they lived in Georgetown prior to Kennedy's presidency. Walton appealed to President Kennedy who eased the restrictions, allowing Mary Hemingway to return.

Castro gave her his pledge that she could take whatever she wanted back to the states. Mary, in return, donated their home and the belongings she left behind to "the Cuban people" (not the government). However, fearing the material she was taking might be confiscated at the port of Havana, she paid the pilot of a shrimp boat twice his usual rate to transport the crates to Tampa, Florida (the crew didn't know what the crates contained).

Once safely back in her now very cluttered New York City apartment, Mary Hemingway began to search for a safe home for her late husband's manuscripts and artifacts. She wanted a room somewhere dedicated to the collection.

Enter Bill Walton again. He talked to Jackie Kennedy Onassis about the possibility of housing them in her late husband's library. Once Mary Hemingway met Jackie O., well, the rest was history - or historical preservation. The Hemingway Room, modeled on the living room at Finca Vigia, opened in 1980.

Walton's nephew, John Hackett, and his wife, Mary (who has written a book about their well-connected relative), were on hand last Wednesday to listen to Putnam briefly outline the impressive extent of the JFK's Hemingway collection:

• 90% of Hemingway's known manuscripts (many of them unpublished)
• 2,500 letters he wrote
• 7,500 letters he received
• 10,000 photos
• The French student notebooks in which he wrote the first draft of The Sun Also Rises
• All 39 endings to A Farewell to Arms
• The OPRF High School English paper on which he received a "D"
• The shrapnel from his leg during World War I
• A collection of his flasks
• Sundry scrapbooks filled with newspaper clippings (probably assembled through a clipping service).

Putnam also brought along video clips of authors talking about Hemingway's influence, including one forum led by NPR's Scott Simon, who hails from Chicago and noted in his introduction that his mother grew up in Oak Park. She instilled in him a healthy respect for her hometown's most famous native son.

Though Hemingway and Kennedy never met, Putnam noted that they exchanged letters. Kennedy first contacted him when he was working on Profiles in Courage and wanted to quote Hemingway's famous definition of courage, "grace under pressure," but couldn't find it in any of his books. Hemingway replied somewhat vaguely that it might have appeared in his bullfighting chronicle Death in the Afternoon, but Kennedy could "slug it 'in conversation.'"

After watching Kennedy's inauguration from the Mayo Clinic, Hemingway sent the young president a handwritten note, observing, "It is a good thing to have a brave man as our president."

After Putnam's talk, the Hemingway Foundation held its traditional champagne toast, followed by birthday cake. In attendance at the celebration was Brigid Pasulka, of Chicago, author of A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True, the winner of this year's Pen/Hemingway Award, given annually by the JFK Library to the best first novel.

Also attending was Ralph Frese, 84, legendary canoe guru and outdoorsman, who put the evening in perspective.

"Hemingway," he said, "proves the power of the written word. It outlasts man-made structures and pretty much everything else."

Ernest Hemingway at his home in Cuba in front of a 1929 portrait of himself by Waldo Pierce.