Category: Miami Stories

As a kid growing up in a small New England town, I remember people going on winter vacations to Miami. They always returned with stories about what a magical town Miami was – 70 degrees in January!

The sunny snapshots always featured palm trees and other beautiful tropical plant life, so from an early age I always associated Miami with beautiful summers in winter. My family never got to go on vacation though – my father’s “vacations” consisted of painting the house or putting in a new lawn or something else equally exciting.

In August 1968, a friend invited me to accompany him on a vacation to MIAMI! After two days of driving, we finally arrived. Even though it was the hottest month of the year, that didn’t bother me because Miami was even more beautiful than I’d imagined.

After returning home to New England, I just couldn’t get the place off my mind, and I couldn’t get the girl I’d met there off my mind either. After a couple of months of phone calls and letters, that girl drove up north and, in September 1969, we were married. In November 1971, we moved to Miami along with our brand-new son.

Since my wife’s family was in construction, I soon became a carpenter’s apprentice and worked as a carpenter until 2007, enjoying almost every day of it. Miami was the perfect place to live. Where else can you work outdoors year-round? I must have installed at least 5,000 windows. Now, I notice buildings that I helped construct or renovate: Winston Towers; the Palm Island home once owned by Al Capone; the Imperial House in Miami Beach, where I ran into Meyer Lansky; and the Burleigh House, where I installed doors for Barbara Walters’ parents.

I also like to think back to the weekends – going to Crandon Beach, where the Miami Zoo was also located, with my wife, son and daughter, who was born in 1980. Driving along Bird Road and stopping to eat at Pizza Palace on 87th Avenue or Arbetter’s across the street. There was a Mister Donut and Daddio’s Hot Dog Emporium on 163rd street. Most of those places are gone now but they live on vividly in memories.

We did take one short detour, though. In 1984 we decided to give small-town life another try, as most of our friends were doing at the time. But we just couldn’t get Miami off our minds. Watching the television show, Miami Vice added to our homesickness. One year later we returned, broke, but determined to start over again.

We made a good life here. In September, that girl I met on vacation in 1968 and I celebrated 43 years of marriage. Our son works with the Miami Herald and our daughter is now a teacher at Felix Varela Senior High School. When I turned 62, I retired from construction and took a job at Publix, where in November, I’ll have been for five years.

And, as for my wife and I, we’re still busy soaking up the magic of this town. Miami still is and always will be, “The Magic City.”

I was born during a knee-high snowstorm on Feb. 20, 1921 in Pittsburgh. The Bureau of Vital Statistics misread the doctor’s crossed t as two t’s, so I became Ritta instead of Rita. I was second oldest of six children – Eva, Ritta, Josephine, Mary, Frank and Dolores.

I started grade school at age 5, skipped the third grade and graduated at age 12. I was a voracious reader, especially on the weekends. The travel advertisements in the Sun-Telegraph and Pittsburgh Press about Florida were so enticing to look at on zero degree days. Every step along my route to school reinforced my thoughts about Florida.

After graduating from high school at age 16, I attended business school and then was employed by Carnegie-Illinois Corp. as secretary to the expeditor for a shipbuilding company, which built destroyers, etc. for the war effort.

We were a very patriotic family, and since the only male was 12 years old (he later served in the Korean War), I enlisted in the Navy in the organization “Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service” (WAVES). I was sent to combined boot/yeoman training in January 1943 at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater.

As our training was coming to a close, we were asked to indicate if we had a preference of Miami, Washington or California for a place of deployment. Naturally, I chose the place of my dreams – MIAMI, and was fortunate to be deployed to the U.S. Naval Air Station at Opa-locka.

I was assigned to the Flight Training Division in Hangar No. 1. At that time, only pre-operations training was given, since the runways were too short for the larger, heavier planes required for operational training. Later, when the runways were completed, the base became Operational Unit –VSB-5 OTU-5. The plane used was the famous SBD-5 dive-bomber known for its “Swiss cheese” wings. Newly commissioned Navy and Marine officers were trained there, in addition to a few British, New Zealand and Australian pilots.

Opa-locka had its own bus line to Miami, which was heavily used by both civilianworkers and military when on “liberty.” Miami and Miami Beach warmly embracedall servicemen. I still have my “Serviceman’s Guide,” which listed the places that welcomed us:

The MacFadden-Deauville Hotel for a very small fee provided use of their Olympic-sized pool and lockers, etc. Richards department store had a lending library for two cents a day – no deposit required.

At Shangri La Restaurant, lunches started at 40 cents. At Club Bali, deluxe dinners cost $1.50. The daily rate at Hotel Patricia was $3 and weekly rates were $18 for one person and $25 for two people.

I was discharged in late November 1945, returned to Pittsburgh and took a few months off.

My military service was a most gratifying experience – doing what I felt was my duty and enjoying the camaraderie with my WAVE friends and the officers and enlisted men stationed in Miami. Some have remained friends for life.

In 1946, I was re-employed by Carnegie-Illinois in Pittsburgh and attended Duquesne University at night. After a couple of unendurable winters, I came to my senses and applied for admission to the University of Miami. I enrolled in 1948.

The main campus consisted of the administration building, a wooden science building, apartment housing, and an unfinished Merrick building (the “Skeleton”). The bottom floor was the bookstore and the second was a library. The top floor, when added, became home to the law school, many wooden portables, and the student union building, which was called the “Slop Shop.”

I was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1951 and enrolled in the law school. I graduated in 1953 and became a member of the Florida Bar, which I maintained for 50 years, retiring in 2003.

In November 1953, I married a fellow law-school graduate, Clifford S. Hogan. He served in the Army Air Force in the European theater as a fighter pilot, flying the classic P-51 Mustang.

In the early 1960s, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was recalled to serve at the Homestead Air Force Base and we temporarily moved to the base.

The army had set up a tent city for the troops. The year before his assassination, President John F. Kennedy visited the base. All of the residents lined up to greet him. He rode in an open-air car. Everyone was quiet and I shouted “Hi” and he looked directly at our camera and we were able to get him on film waving at us.

After the end of the Cold War, we returned to our home in South Miami. My husband remained in the reserves for many years and later retired as a colonel.

We were blessed with three children: Clifford, Robert, and Valerie. They received their primary educations at Epiphany, Lourdes, and South Miami High School. Two obtained degrees at the University of Florida and one at Florida State…so, we had all three schools covered football wise. We have been parishioners at Epiphany Catholic Church all of our time in South Florida.

Miami has more than exceeded my hopes and dreams…which began at age 12 in frigid Pittsburgh.

My father George Alberts was a reserve officer in the United States Air Force. When he was called to active duty during World War II in 1943, some of his basic training took place on Miami Beach. This was to have a huge influence on the Alberts family 10 years later.

I was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1946, and my family lived there during the first 5 years of my life. In 1951, my father, who was an Air Force navigator, got called up again because his services were required to navigate military aircraft between Tokyo and Seoul. When it became apparent that the fighting would be prolonged, he was allowed to send for his family, and we lived in Tokyo for a year and a half.

He was discharged from active duty in 1953 and we then moved to Wisconsin. My mother did not like the cold Wisconsin winters, so my father, recalling the beauty of Miami Beach, decided to take the family to live in Miami. He rented a two-bedroom apartment near the University of Miami where he finally managed to complete his college education that had been interrupted twice by war. He graduated with a degree in business administration in 1955.

Miami was a much different place in the mid-1950s. I can recall going to a food market in South Miami in 1954 with my mother and sister Maureen, and hearing my sister complain to my mother that the drinking fountain in the back of the store labeled “colored” was out of colored water! Fortunately, that sort of overt racial discrimination stopped by the end of the decade.

In 1955, my father started his business known as Alberts Advertising. Dad also purchased a new home on Southwest 18th Terrace and 82nd Avenue. Back then, the area that is now known as Westchester was so rural that I can recall seeing hunters with shotguns bird hunting across the street from our house.

Many of my fond memories from the early 1960s are of things that happened at the former Westbrook Country Club, which was located on the southeast corner of Southwest 87th Avenue and Eight Street. This club was very popular during the summer because it had an Olympic-sized swimming pool which, viewed from above, looked like a giant W. All of my friends and practically every lovely young lady I knew swam in and sunbathed around that pool. Unfortunately, the club closed in the mid 1960s. The beautiful pool, cabanas and two-story clubhouse with its formal ballroom are gone.

My mother was pretty much a stay-at-home mom. She did like to dine out frequently and in the mid 1960s she had dinner at a small restaurant on Southwest 32nd Avenue called The Studio Restaurant. She became fast friends with the owner and was hired as a hostess. She loved to tell us about people standing in line for up to two hours, sometimes literally fainting from heat and hunger.

Later on, Mom also worked as a hostess in another small restaurant that was located on Bay Harbor Islands called the Inside Restaurant. This establishment was owned by Dick Schwartz who was Meyer Lansky’s stepson. Lansky, the mob’s financier liked to dine at the Inside. He was frequently seen huddled with his associates having a quiet conversation at his favorite table in the back of the restaurant.

A few years after my mother left this job, Dick Schwartz was having drinks at the bar of the Forge Restaurant with a “made man” from the mob and they got into an argument about something. Dick drew a handgun from beneath his jacket and shot the man dead. A few weeks later, as Dick was getting out of his car parked in the lot adjacent to his restaurant, retribution came in the form of a shotgun blast that ended his life.

I received all of my education in Miami.

The first school that my sister and I attended was Sunset Elementary School. I spent my middle school, or what was then called junior high school years at West Miami Middle School. In 1962, I started 10th grade at Southwest Miami Senior High School. I wish I could say that I was an honor roll student but, unfortunately, I wasn’t wise or mature enough to take advantage of my educational opportunities.

What I did take advantage of was the fabulous social scene. Back in the early to mid-1960s, high school sororities and fraternities were very popular. There were legal (supervised by responsible adults) and illegal clubs. My passion was to socialize and party with my “brothers” in my illegal fraternity known as Eta Sigma Phi or “Eta Sig” for short. Southwest High, Gables and Palmetto all had these social clubs. Most of these fraternities had students from only one school. One of the nice things about Eta Sig was that it was comprised of students from all three schools, which helped widen the circle of my social contacts.

Most clubs followed the college tradition of using Greek letters, but others had more creative monikers. Readers who lived in southwest Miami Dade and attended high school at this time may remember some of these club names: Ching-Tang, Counts, Lynx, Decalion, Saxons, Bucks, Centurions and Tri-Sellet, to name a few.

The main purpose of these clubs was to throw parties. The instructors and administrators of the schools and local law enforcement did their best to discourage these clubs and the underage drinking that they promoted, but they remained popular until the late 1960s.

My freshman year of college was spent at Miami-Dade College, popularly known at the time as Dade Junior. In 1965, there was no South Campus so classes were taught at Palmetto High School in the evening. In 1966, I transferred to the University of Miami. My tuition for 15 credit hours of classes was $700. At my UM orientation, I recall a guide proudly showing the new students the school’s IBM 360 series computer, which was housed in a large room behind a glass wall. Can you imagine, the school only had one computer!

I majored in business administration and my time at the university was fairly uneventful except for the Vietnam War protests, which fortunately helped bring that conflict to an end several years later.

Today, Miami is a very different place with its multicultural and multiethnic population, its sprawling communities and its many beautiful buildings. Miamians have much to be proud of, but I also believe that among long-time residents there is a consensus that a relaxed, less stressful existence has been lost.

I guess my earliest memories are from the time of World War II, when I was aged 6 to 10, and all of Miami Beach was an OCS (Officer Candidate School) for the Army. Soldiers were marching in the streets, coming to our house for dinner, and training on the golf courses, where “obstacle courses” were set up.

Car headlights were painted black on top. Windshields had stickers to show the amount of gas you were allowed (according to need). Once or twice, my dad or someone drove us to the beach to watch a freighter burn that had been torpedoed by German U-Boats. On Purdy Avenue, there was a fenced-in area where they kept German POWs for a short time. I remember walking by, but don’t remember saying anything to them.

Port Elco, a marina at Dade Boulevard and Purdy Avenue, is a good place to start a tour of our neighborhood. I remember that I was at Port Elco on VJ Day (the end of the war). All the boats in the marina started blowing their horns, and everyone was shouting, “The war’s over!”

Right next to Port Elco was the bridge to Belle Isle. It made a good ramp for our home-made skate scooters (an apple box, nailed to a 2×4 with roller-skate wheels) and was a good place to fish with our drop lines, and especially good for dropping our home-made crawfish and stone crab traps. Back then, we thought that shellfish had to be cooked alive, so we just ran home with them.

The mouth of the canal, where the tide either came in or went out under the bridge, was another great fishing spot. That’s where I kept my rowboat, and later on it was a hurricane refuge for my brother Tom’s and my sailboat.

Mother Kelly’s was a nightclub on the corner of Dade and Bay roads. Mother Kelly (no relation) was a round, white haired, Russian man with three grown sons. Because I lived so close, I was adopted as their mascot. Sometimes, on Sunday morning, I would help Mother Kelly clean up the bar.

Three blocks south of Lincoln Road was the start of Flamingo Park, the biggest park on the Beach. It had red clay tennis courts (sometimes when I went to play, my sister Babe would give me her white tennis shoes to take along and scuff up to look worn), basketball courts, softball fields, a football field (my high school, St. Pat’s, played our home games here), a band stand, a professional baseball field (AAA), and two four-wall handball courts. Some of the best players in the country played here. In my late teens & early 20s, they let me play with them if they needed a fourth.

In the beginning, when we left the neighborhood, it was either by foot, thumb, bus, or jitney.

There were not enough bikes to go around. In fact, I think I had the only one for a while. It was a hand-me-down from my sisters, which I used on my paper route until I saved enough to buy a new Columbia from Western Auto. Of course, we also got rides in my mother’s car – mostly to the beach at 21st Street and Collins, but also many other interesting places, like Matheson Hammock, Tahiti Beach, Venetian Pool, Greynolds Park, and many others.

The bus system in those days was great. If my mother wasn’t taking us to the beach, we caught the “L” bus across from Mother Kelly’s to the 21st Street beach. The L bus was also our ride to downtown Miami, across Venetian Causeway, down Biscayne to Flagler, the last stop for the beach bus, and beginning for all Miami buses. At this stop was the famous “Jahn the Magic Man” hobby shop. Model trains, planes, boats – the works. At one end was a small stage where Jahn would put on magic shows.

On Saturdays, I got to work with my dad at his produce company. I’d help put up orders, and ride with the drivers. Dad and I would go to breakfast at Charlie’s Marketview Restaurant. We always sat at the same table and had two cake doughnuts.

Dad’s warehouse was on the railroad tracks and when the circus came to town, he brought me down to the station to watch them unload the animals and gear. The field where they set up was also nearby, so we got to watch them put up the “Big Top” and lay out the midway. They used elephants to help put up the tent, carry the gear, and pull up the center pole. Just as much fun as the actual circus.

When Tom came back from the Army and UF, about the time that my father died, I was 13. I gave Tom my paper-route savings (about $400) and he put up the rest, and we bought our first sailboat – a 20-foot center-board sloop with a star rig. Tom came up with an enterprise for her: advertising for Picciolo’s Restaurant. My mother sewed a sign on the boat’s sails in red letters, “TONIGHT DINE AT PICCIOLOS” on the main sail, and “DINNERS $1.25 & UP” on the jib. Mr. Picciolo paid us $100 a week (weekends and holidays). The “enterprise” ended when we turned her over in Government Cut and tore up the rig on the jetties.

After her demise, we bought a 30-foot sloop with a cabin and gas inboard. She was a “double-ender” and looked like a submarine when motoring. We named her Gypsea.

We sailed her down to Matecumbe one time for her most eventful cruise. She sunk at her mooring behind the VFW hall, when she impaled herself on a submerged piling we didn’t know was there. After that, we moved on to power.

Well, that takes us up to the ‘50s, and the days of my first car, a 1937 Ford Coupe, black, 3 speed on the floor. Cost me $35 and she ran! Needed a new transmission pretty quick, which I got at a junk yard for $18. A friend of Tom’s put it in for me, and off I went. The 50s were right out of “Happy Days,” and happy they were, but a little too wild for these pages.

I was born in Guantánamo in 1956. I moved to Havana as a teenager to study and ultimately graduated with a math degree. In 1994, I decided take a raft to the United States.

I had to leave Cuba. I had no future there.

I graduated from the University of Havana believing that if I had a good education and worked hard, I would succeed in life. But because I wasn’t integrated enough with the government, there weren’t opportunities for me. So I resorted to selling produce on the streets with my university degree in my pocket. Later, I cleaned floors at the Hotel Inglaterra.

I also wanted to leave because I valued my freedom and found that I didn’t have the freedom to express myself in Cuba.

I started plotting my escape with a plan to try to get through the border fence at the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay. On Aug. 1, 1994 I went to my 1-year-old niece’s birthday party in Guantánamo. That was the last time I saw many of my family members, including my father. I couldn’t even tell most of them that I had plans to leave. But it proved too difficult to try to get passed security and onto the base.

On Aug. 5th, I returned to Havana to find the streets filled with protesters. Several days later, Fidel Castro announced that whoever wanted to leave, could go. So I got in contact with a cousin who also wanted to leave and we started working on a raft.

When it was ready, everyone in the neighborhood helped us get the raft on a truck we had rented. They wished us well, hugged us and gave us blessings. Many of the old women cried.

We drove the truck to the Brisas del Mar beach east of Havana. Even the people at the beach helped us get the raft out on the water. A neighbor of mine, who had planned on going with us, backed out at the last minute. And my cousin, who was just supposed to help us get out, ended up coming along.

We left on Aug. 30, 1994.

I was the guide on the raft. I had the compass. Before we knew it, the coast of Cuba was gone. We left in the late afternoon so we saw nightfall.

The night out on the water was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever experienced. The only light you see is the moon. We would see empty rafts out on the ocean. I later realized that those probably belonged to people who didn’t make it because when the U.S. Coast Guard rescued rafters, they would usually sink the raft.

We were out on the ocean for the entire night. Our sail didn’t work so our hands were destroyed from rowing all night. Our drinking water had been contaminated and we were too nervous to eat.

There was a point when everyone saw an image in front of us on the sea. I’m not a particularly religious man but, to me, it was an apparition of the Virgin Mary. She stood in the direction that we were supposed to be heading. She came at a time when things were getting desperate for us. Next thing we saw were helicopters.

At this point, night was falling on our second day at sea. We had been out there for a little more than 24 hours.

We were picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard and they took us to a ship that was full of people. We were in bad shape. The ship had the biggest American flag I have ever seen. For me, it was like an angel hugging us and welcoming us to the United States. It was the first time I felt safe since I left Havana’s shore. Even in Cuba I didn’t feel safe. So it was the first time I felt that way in a long time.

I knew there was a chance that I wouldn’t be able to get into the U.S. Nothing was guaranteed. But I had to try. The freedom to express myself and have a voice was worth it.

We were on the ship for about a week. We would travel around the Florida Straits picking up more people on rafts. Then we finally made it to the base in Guantánamo.

We stayed in tents on the sand in extremely hot weather and with barely any clean water. I was in Guantánamo for a little more than two months. With conditions as bad as they were in Guantánamo, they began building camps in Panama. Some friends and I decided to go there.

When I got to Panama, all I had on was shorts and shoes that I had made out of cardboard. I was there for almost four months. In Guantánamo, they were creating better conditions, so that they could send us back.

Finally, I was able to come here to the United States. I arrived on Aug. 31, 1995.

It then became about a new struggle for a new life. I had to adjust to a new language and a new system of living. In Guantánamo, there was a program that taught us about these adjustments. I still work with this program to help other refugees.

My first job here was at a Pollo Tropical; I lasted there two days. Then I got a job at a pharmacy.

I went from a place where nobody was allowed to aspire and where everything was decided for you and given to you, to working at a place with so many products by all of these different companies. I wasn’t used to having so many options.

That was my first dose of the reality of living in the United States. Here, they don’t teach you, they push you to learn. You have to go look for work instead of waiting to be told what to do.

In Miami, I feel at home. I love the Cuban atmosphere, the people and the culture.

Twenty years later, I miss my close family and Havana, where I grew up. But my life here gives me independence. If I had gotten here when I was younger, I would’ve probably flourished more. But I can’t complain. I have everything I need for my life here.

What I want to celebrate 20 years after I fled, is not the fact that I left on a raft but that I now know that every country has the ability to be free. I hope that, in the future, every person realizes their potential in whatever country they’re in. So that they don’t feel the need to leave their lives and the people they love to find freedom.

I don’t want there to ever be a need again for what we did and what we went through. For me, that has been the biggest lesson from the past 20 years. I’m grateful to this country for giving me that lesson.

It will be fifty years this November since we took the Pan American flight that would separate us from the life of the privileged in Cuba to that of political refugees.

They served us tiny ham-and-cheese sandwiches with the iconic blue PanAm logo that tasted to us of the future – America.

We moved in with my aunt and uncle and their children into a three-bedroom house on the corner of 82 Avenue and 17 Street, a neighborhood known as Westchester. The community was predominantly Jewish with a handful of Cuban professionals, actors and writers. Walking distance was Everglades Elementary, a lovely school, but not if you didn’t speak the language.

I knew a few words in English – the colors, numbers and so on – but not enough to survive the third grade. I was made to feel alien, which I was. I looked forward to my afternoons in the warmth of the kitchen of Mrs. Meyers’s house, down the street. She would give me a quarter after school for babysitting and she allowed me to lick the cake batter off of her beaters. She was so nice to me and I acted as if I enjoyed her batter, but I didn’t because I was suffering from anorexia nervosa and couldn’t keep anything down.

No one really knew how bad things were for me at Everglades until my mother was informed that because of my problem with the language, I was being held back in second grade. Thank God that practice has since been abolished.

I also cherish the memories of the holiday traditions that were established early by my parents in an effort to bring normalcy to our lives. We would all pack into the Ford Falcon and head to Jordan Marsh department store downtown (where the OMNI eventually would be built) to see the beautiful animated Christmas displays and head upstairs to the toy department where we would get our traditional picture with Santa.

The holiday tradition would culminate with the New Year’s Eve parade down Flagler. Sometime around noon we would set up the fold-out chairs in the parking lot across from Walgreens and, with sandwiches and hot cocoa, we would see the likes of Paul Anka, Bobby Darrin, the stars of TV shows such as “Flipper” and the terrific high school bands. Everything in the “Magic City” was bright and shiny.

Spring of 1964 would bring The Beatles to Miami Beach, the Mustang, and Coral Park High School to Westchester. “Wow, Mom, that’s where the big kids go,” I said, but all these things were in the future.

Spring also brought the celebration of Easter. Services at noon would be in Spanish at St. Brendan’s on 87th Avenue, with me in my two-piece pink outfit and straw hat from the Zayre department store, also on 87th. Lunch would follow at the Pizza drive-in on Bird and 87th followed by a jelly-bean-decorated coconut cake from Publix on Coral Way.

I did not go to Coral Park High after all. I graduated from Southwest High off of 87th Avenue and 47th Street in 1973, and by the time of my ten-year-reunion, both my parents had died of cancer at the age of 47, and I was divorcing. I had nothing to share.

The OMNI by then had replaced the magical windows of Jordan Marsh. As luck would have it, while getting certified in teaching, my internship landed me back at Everglades Elementary, in the exact second grade with the same teacher who had held me back as a seven year old because I did not understand the language.

I eventually did end up at Coral Park, but as a teacher and, amazingly, the little seven year old who had been held back was now honored by her peers and elected 1999 Teacher of the Year.

The “Magic City” will never recapture the luster of the sixties through the eyes of a seven year old. I miss the blimp on Watson Island, the train rides at McArthur Dairy on Mother’s Day, flying kites on Father’s Day at Robert King High, the colorful Christmas windows at Jordan March, and most of all neighbors like Mrs. Meyers.

I was not allowed to talk at six o’clock when the news came on. Dinner at the pull-down table in the breakfast room was a silent affair, but for the radio.

Edward R.Murrow was reporting: Hitler’s crossing this river, that river. Daddy fumed that he wanted to go “over there,” to help our country – but he was too young for WWI, too old for WWII and he and Mommy were saddled with 3 little girls and one on the way. Mommy would say, “Why am I bringing another life into this horrible, hopeless world?”

A recurring ghastly nightmare — me, 5 years old, swinging on the playground at North Beach Elementary – and suddenly Hitler was standing on a giant swing, arcing over the playground, with a uniformed German on each side in identical mustaches and on swings, each one scoo-o-o-oping up little children – me, one of them, disappearing into instant night.

During the day I would march alongside soldiers outside my house on Royal Palm Avenue and in Polo Park (where Nautilus Middle School now stands). The army was occupying Miami Beach hotels, with the streets as their training grounds. One of my first songs was, “Over there, send the word . . . that the Yanks are coming. . . .” Me wondering, who ARE the yanks, anyway?

There were blackouts every night and rationing; my parents were on Civil Air Patrol “birdwatching” from the Roney Plaza hotel tower for German subs off the coast.

In school, I remember wrapping bandages for the war effort and singing, “Off we go, into the wild blue yonder. . . .” There were daily drills and we had to duck under our desks.

Then, on Fox Movietone News, concentration-camp skeletons were being liberated. Then came the great day! I was nine years old, and my whole childhood of memory had been nothing but war. Now that childhood was almost gone – I danced around the radio with my sister singing, “The war is over, the war is over, the war is over!!!!”

On Sundays when I was little, my dad and I would take the tandem bike and ride from our home in North Miami to the beach. Most of the time, my legs were just along for the ride and rested lightly on the rotating pedals, allowing my dad to do the hardest pedaling. With the 19-mile round trip, I preferred to save my energy for galloping through the waves. I started tap dancing when I was four, and it was always more fun to shuffle and lindy through the waves. The flapping of my feet struck the water, and resonated with even more satisfying sound than the beat of metal taps on a wooden dance floor. It was always a celebration, dancing.

While my dad and his dad were football players at my age, I was never interested in sports. There was, and still is, something magical that happens when I step out onto a stage. The feeling is a strange cross between everlastingness and fleetingness. And somewhere in between the -ness, I have always remained caught. For me – much more than the acknowledgement that dance is a language and that dance is a representation of everyday experiences – dance is much like life: some days it feels like forever, and then there comes a day when there are no more days. In this way, dance is also a measure of time. And this love for dance has helped me through many difficult times, including the loss of my mom when I was 9.

One of the best memories I have of my mom is standing on the tops of her feet as she danced around the living room. I remember the feeling of shifting from one foot to the other, the continuity of her movements and my role as her abiding partner, neither controlling nor directing the dance but a part of it nonetheless. After she passed away, I would stand in the middle of the living room, close my eyes and try to recreate our waltz. It was never the same.

My mom started me in dancing. Once a week, we’d all get in the car together and drop her off at an adult tap class in North Miami. My dad and I would then continue on to Donavan’s Bar & Grill on Northwest 7th Avenue. Donavan’s had billiards and French fries, and we’d hang out there for the hour or so of her class. Eventually, I grew curious about my mom’s tap class and began to stay and watch. This led to being enrolled in dance class myself and it was strange at first – not the same as leaping through ocean waves or whirling into dizziness at home, but I soon caught on.

I am very close with my dad, and for a few years after my mom died, he too became closer with his. Around this time, my dad signed me up for a football summer camp. I tried football, but I prayed for rain every day we had practice. Most of the other boys at Bunche Park already understood football and played it in their own backyards, much how I practiced dance in mine. I remember doing sprints – that was the one thing for which I was passable. I could run without tripping on my own two feet. Aside from one kid I befriended with a perpetually runny nose, who could also burp on command, the entire experience was pointless. I have a faint memory of my dad bringing Grandpa Lou to one of the practices (when I had been unsuccessful with my rain invocation), and as terrible as I was, my grandpa seemed far more pleased with my mediocre football than my love for dance.

A few years later, my grandpa passed away. And for another year or so after that, his ashes and wristwatch waited on the mantle. After watching the movie Around the Bend with Christopher Walken and Michael Caine, my dad and I awoke from our moratorium. We walked outside and stood on the dock behind our house to cast his ashes into the dark lake, leading into a canal of brackish water that weaves through many of the neighborhoods in Biscayne Gardens. After minutes of silence, my dad turned to me and said, “Give us a little soft shoe, son.” So there I stood holding my grandfather’s ashes in a cardboard box and tapping out “Tea for Two.” I felt highly inappropriate doing this, believing this ceremony required a more solemn reflection.

After making sure all of Grandpa Lou was out of the box and into the lake, I noticed for the first time just how cathartic dancing is for me. The tapping out of the rhythms brought me back to my best memories of my mom, and suddenly this was not so much about solemnity as it was of celebration. Celebrating life that can be over as quickly as a dance. And it is in this precious fragility I now find my place as a dance artist and choreographer.

Much like my earliest experiences with dance, I am very interested in creating dance for non-traditional and unexpected locations. We have plenty throughout Miami – secret places we drive past everyday without ever knowing of them. I was recently awarded a Knight Arts Challenge grant for a project called Grass Stains that will help commission and mentor other artists interested in creating work that highlights Miami’s hidden spaces. As I continue to change as an artist, my early memories of growing up in North Miami inform my art making and remind me of those in-between moments, of everlastingness and fleetingness, the dances that have ended and those whose music hasn’t yet begun.