‘Sounds of freedom’ are always on time in South Tampa

TAMPA — The dogs kept racing over the grass, but their owners froze when the music started.

Renny Braga held a sweaty baseball cap over his heart and faced MacDill Air Force Base, just beyond the fence of Gadsden Park dog park.

“It’s a reminder of where we are,” Braga said when the instrumental “The Star-Spangled Banner” finished playing. “Personally, I stand. I don’t say anything if other people don’t stand, because to each their own, but I stand.”

“I feel very patriotic when I hear it,” said Beth Bryan, whose dog played nearby. “And if you’re a person who partakes in cocktails, you know it’s 5 o’clock.”

For decades, as Tampa has swelled with new residents and old landmarks faded away, the eye-opening sounds of bugle calls have remained in the air like clockwork.

Weekdays at 6 a.m., the base blasts reveille to signal the start of duty. The day ends at 5 p.m. with retreat and the national anthem. At 10 p.m., the somber sound of taps floats over the neighborhoods south of Gandy Boulevard, from Port Tampa to Sun Bay South, honoring service members’ ultimate sacrifice.

How far north the music reaches depends on how the wind blows, and, some say, the clouds. The sound travels nearly 2 miles on a good day.

Robin Nigh usually hears the tinny-sounding bugle on her early-morning walks in Ballast Point. After 25 years, she thinks of it as part of the sunrise.

“It’s like an old friend,” Nigh said. “You can count on it. As I get older, there’s a real comfort in that consistency.”

When the anthem plays on base, everyone halts. Even the cars stop. Across South Tampa, civilians within earshot of the base’s 13 speakers stop moving, too.

Not everyone freezes, of course, but games of tennis and pickleball have paused at the Tampa Yacht & Country Club, and generations of Robinson High School athletes and Interbay Little Leaguers can recall pausing practice.

There’s a Navy veteran who often salutes at attention in his front yard along West Shore Boulevard, and a Ballast Point home flying an American and a Georgia Bulldogs flag where a husband and wife mute the TV and sit silently.

For some who’ve moved away it’s the sound of a memory. Adam Webb, now living in Virginia, recalls hearing the bugles in the 1980s, sitting parked at the end of MacDill Avenue with friends watching the planes take off and sharing quarts of beer from “the green store” (another South Tampa institution, officially named Interbay Meat Market).

Some longtime area residents even claim they can’t sleep as well if they don’t hear taps.

The Times spoke with nearly two dozen people who hear the music from their homes. Baby boomers, Gen Xers and millennials, registered Republicans, Democrats and independents all described it as part of the area’s charm.

Asked how it feels to consistently hear the same patriotic music day after day, multiple people said “proud” or “safe.” Others think of the words “sacrifice” and “liberty.” One couple lovingly refers to it as “the sounds of freedom.”

“I don’t mean to sound sappy or anything,” Heather Leseney said, “but it makes you feel American. It makes me think about that more often.”

Others hear it and ponder their proximity to vast military power and potential destruction. Without the bugles, it might be easy to forget you’re living feet from the headquarters of two of the military’s most important commands and potential targets, U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command.

There’s no live bugler with their cheeks puffed out each morning. The music comes from a digital file set to a timer and played through a large console covered in switches and a microphone housed at the base’s Security Forces unit. It’s the same apparatus used to broadcast emergency messages across the base. An Air Force spokesperson said it’s referred to by the highly technical-sounding name “The Giant Voice System.”

For many residents and even their pets the music means routine.

Lianne Monteiro, Port Tampa resident since 1970, said her African grey parrot Buttons heard the music so often he learned to whistle it. Then the bird would holler, “Hey, it’s morning!”

Rachelle Hammill hears the national anthem while working from home and feels relief that her workday is almost over.

Sassy, a long-haired cat, jumps into her owner’s bed upon hearing taps at night. Her owner, Andrea DiChiara, takes it as her cue to go to bed, too.

The music can puzzle newcomers. When Matthew Keefe moved to Port Tampa, he could not fathom why a neighbor seemed to love blasting bugle music from his backyard at the same time every day. He posted about the annoyance in an online neighborhood group and learned it was coming from the base.

He also learned another lesson: Reveal publicly that the music bugs you and face the wrath of appalled, patriotic neighbors. (Keefe stressed that he is fine with the music now that he understands where it’s actually coming from.)

And while the music is a quirk of southernmost South Tampa, it also connects those who hear it to the wider world.

When Barbara Griffith hears “The Star-Spangled Banner” from MacDill, she feels a swell of emotion and memory. Her father served, and she grew up on an Air Force base. She has a son at West Point. But mostly, she said, she thinks about how thousands of service members and their families across the world, maybe some on bases in this same time zone at this same exact moment, are also freezing in place for the anthem, honoring the country they serve.

The thought gives her goosebumps.