Cambo Family
by Manuel Cambó
Over the course of two decades as refugee from Cuba, my father was able to purchase a home on South Mashta Drive with the oceanfront view he promised my mother. The Cambó Family has called Key Biscayne home since 1975. I was in the sixth grade at the Key Biscayne Community School in 1976.
One my fondest memory growing up on Mashta Island was snorkeling the Mashta House on the point, that had been destroyed by a Hurricane decades earlier. Imagine a kid from Westchester, Florida moving to an island with a lighthouse and discovering my own underwater Atlantis in my own backyard! Naturally after that experience I became a scuba diver throughout my adolescence; spearfishing Stiltsville, Soldiers and Elliot Keys as well as tropical fish collecting for my aquarium.
Being a Key Rat, I had to compete in sports with the “real” Key Rats who were born on island. Soccer was the thing. KBAC was the top program in youth soccer and our rivels in Coral Gables and Miami Shores knew how to play against you. Better take it seriously. The programs were always top 1, 2, and 3 at various age levels for boys and girls teams in Miami-Dade. Our community Parents were so involved in our sports and all functions that it is no wonder that Key Biscayne was not just any community. It had a special personality. Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn had nothing on us, Key Rats. We were barefoot too!
With my mother‘s encouragement, my father got into the hardware business after retiring from the produce business. It was quite an exciting opportunity to purchase Key Hardware in 1992. At the time it was the earliest days of the Incorporation of the Village of Key Biscayne, Florida. Incorporation was my father’s biggest dream come true as a committed member of the Original Charter
committee establishing the Village Charter. We had just suffered Hurricane Andrew and were not yet in the Hardware supply business when he purchased two stores here on the island, the True Value and Ace Hardware franchises. Both locations were consolidated and in 2001 the hardware store relocated to its current
location at 800 Crandon built new in 2000. That took some doing, as a gas station had previously occupied the property, so an environmental cleanup was required.
We concentrated on service to our customers that were so loyal since the store’s founding in 1953. It was originally located in the Key Biscayne Shopping Center at 644 Crandon Boulevard, along with other notable shops like Bristol’s Camera and Vernon Drug Store as tenants there. Since then, we have grown the business from 6,000 products in our inventory to 9,900 products as well as a Benjamin Moore
Paint Center with a most recent expansion into a pictorial showroom of Key Biscayne’s past history. We just completed an expansion for Christmas 2023. Our store now encompasses 6,000 square feet of a ground floor storefront within an 11,000 square foot two story mix-use retail center at 800 Crandon Boulevard. Today it is the Home of WSQF 94.5 our community very own Radio Station to the mainland.
As oldest Mom & Pop family operated retail store on Key Biscayne, our family has called Key Biscayne home and our store is here to stay because what would a barrier Island community be without a Hardware Store!
