Notable Neighbors

She Will Charm You One Way Or Another 

Englewood’s Amy Hibberd is an outgoing, friendly lady who captures your interest within the first few minutes of meeting her. Soft-spoken, smiling and polite, she makes you feel at ease, as comfortable as a Sealy mattress. It’s as if you had known her for years. To describe her as charming would be accurate—and not just because (among other things) she has been a certified counseling hypnotherapist for the last 30 years.

She was brought into this world in 1953 in Miamisburg, Ohio—a small town famous as the site of Monsanto’s Mound Laboratory, a center of our country’s nuclear development program that led to the creation of the atom bomb. Her parents, Marvin and Aline Hibberd, were farmers who “grew whatever would grow: corn, wheat, soybeans,” she says, and she admits to “shoveling a lot of poop” in the process.

“My grandparents taught me to read by the time I was four years old,” she says, and she took full advantage of it. “I loved reading, and public school education in my day was predicated on children who could read well.” She breezed through the Miamisburg schools like an April wind. By the time she was 16, she had completed the high school’s curriculum, received her diploma and gone on to Ohio University in Athens, where she was to earn a bachelor’s degree in journalism and psychology in 1973.

“I wanted to write,” she avers, “When you read, it’s just the flipside of writing. I always did freelance work. Even in high school I wrote articles for the Miamisburg News. I’d meet the most interesting people, and they’d tell me wonderful things, which would get published in the local papers.”

After graduating from Ohio University she got a job with Channel 21 TV in Youngstown, Ohio. “I did weather reports, and I was a floor director for other shows, cuing the speakers to do this or do that. I had to pay close attention, because it was live television, and nothing ever goes as planned on live TV.”

After about six months in Youngstown she landed a job at Channel 40, WXLT in Sarasota and found out just how crazy live TV could be. She was at the station on July 15, 1974 when Christine Chubbuck, hostess of a program called “Suncoast Digest,” brought a pistol to the studio, announced that she was going to kill herself, and did so on camera. “She looked like a model,” Amy says. “She was beautiful—tall and slender with long, black hair. Her parents were well-connected socially, she drove a beautiful new sportscar convertible, and all the guys at the station wished they had the nerve to ask her out. She was just so perfect. It was horrible, and I just couldn’t bring myself to go back in there after that.”

Luckily for Amy, her college roommate called her and convinced her that with her interest in literature and the arts, she should go to New York, where the action was. She went, and the first thing she found out was that “the action” wasn’t always good. “I went to WABC for an interview, and the man who interviewed me took me into a side room and said, ‘You want to work at WABC, don’t you?’ I said, ‘I sure do,’ and he unzipped his pants. Now, I had grown up on a farm. I had twin brothers and dozens of boy cousins. I couldn’t hold back my laughter. Clearly, that was not the reaction he had expected, and as I walked out the door, he barked, ‘You’ll never work at WABC!’ I barked back, ‘That’s fine with me!’ and left.

“From there I went over to the McGraw Hill building, got an interview with a well-dressed man and was offered a job as a scientific and technical editor in their National Technical Information Service.” She took it at the ludicrously low salary of $125 a week—a figure she unfortunately volunteered when asked by the interviewer what compensation she hoped for.

Well, she didn’t really need the money. By this time she was living with her husband, Christopher Murphy, at the home of the world-famous jazz musician, Miles Davis. Chris was his manager, and Miles was not touring in this phase of his life, so Amy had the privilege of using the limo and chauffeur Neil to go to and from her work in the basement level at McGraw Hill. “People would see Neil helping me out of the limo and say, ‘Who IS that woman?’”

But life with Miles was not all chuckles. “He was a musician’s musician,” she says, “and they would come from all over the world wanting to talk with him.” On one occasion Miles was in a dark mood and told her, “I’m not seeing White people today.” When a limo showed up at his front door, Miles insisted that Amy tell them what he said. “And here I was, just a 20-year-old girl from the Midwest.” As he watched from behind the window curtain, she went down and informed the driver and his occupant that “Miles is not seeing White people today.” Alas, a quick glance told her that the man in the back seat was Mick Jagger! The world-famous lead singer and songwriter of the Rolling Stones! She was petrified! “But the two men said in a chorus, ‘Right.’ I could have kissed them,” she says. “That was the nicest thing. Mick invited me to sit in the back seat and chatted politely with me for a few minutes. They just wanted to come and spend a little time talking with Miles about music, but I had to send them away.”

Amy stayed at McGraw Hill for a couple of years, converting to freelance status when she and her husband accompanied Miles Davis on his tours around the world. She then switched to a similar editorial role with Pergamon Press, owned by British publishing magnate Robert Maxwell.

Amy and Chris lived with Miles for four years, until 1978, but trouble was brewing. Chris was drinking and on drugs. “Everybody in the music business at that time was on drugs. It breaks my heart. We knew all these wonderful, talented people, and they’d meet us slobbering and dumb. That wasn’t the dream I had.” She had to get Chris away. She thought maybe in Mexico she could get him off drugs. Didn’t work. “So I had another brilliant idea: Key West. It is clearly the epicenter of a rarified society of raconteurs,” which was a boon to her career, but in the long term it didn’t work, either. Amy switched from freelance editing to freelance writing, producing articles for the Miami Herald, the Key West Citizen, the Sarasota Herald Tribune and a few publications back in New York City. She also spent some time as sales manager for Florida Keys  Broadcasting … and she worked part-time as a cab driver.

In 1980 her husband abruptly left her. At his urging, they were planning to head back to New York, and she had let go of their apartment, shut off the power and packed the car. “As I was getting into the car on my side, he said, ‘I hadn’t planned to take you,’ and he drove off.” She was left with no apartment, no car, and “what money I had was driving down the road. It was 10 o’clock at night, and I started walking down the road toward town.” Fortunately, a truck headed for town stopped, and the driver was someone she recognized as one of her passengers from the cab company: Charles Hernandez, a lobster fisherman who later became her second husband. How’s that for serendipity?

Charles and Amy stayed in Key West until 1992. In 1985 she earned her broker’s license, though writing continued to be her first love. “As a writer you have a free pass into any throne room on  the planet,” she proclaims. “You’re not going to be sequestered in the basement, because you will give them a voice and an audience. I have always treasured that.”

You could say that Amy broke into the real estate field almost with a bang. On her first assignment, she managed to sell a building complex owned by a Cuban drug smuggler to the leader of a Colombian drug cartel, but only after the closing was clinched while both sides had loaded guns pointed at each other. “Well,” she gushes, “I paid off our truck, I paid off the car, I paid off the house, and I paid off Charlie’s boat with the cash for my part in the deal.”

In 1992, the year she moved to Florida, Amy added yet another occupation to her resume’—as a certified counseling hypnotherapist. “To me, real estate, writing and hypnotherapy are all the same. All you do is sit down with the person and take notes, and you give them what they want. In real estate you put them in a house. In writing you produce something that other people can read. In hypnotherapy you help them get peace of mind. In each case you talk to people, hear what they care about, and give them what will bring them joy. Poof!”

Okay, so Amy Hibberd has been a TV personality, a writer, an editor, a sales manager, a real estate agent and a hypnotherapist in her day. Now nearing her seventies, does she want to continue doing all these things? “I feel like it’s all I know,” she says. “I believe strongly that the joy of life is in the variety. The Nobel Committee hasn’t called, and the Miss World Pageant apparently lost my number. I guess I’m just going to be what I am.”

And those who know Amy will agree that what she is, is charming.

Dean Laux is exploring  interesting folks living in our community. If you know of anyone with an interesting background please send an email to: [email protected]. Include the person’s name, contact info and give a brief description of the person’s background.