Category: Miami Stories

As I stroll through Biscayne Boulevard I glance up to see La Torre de la Libertad, a former political asylum center for Cubans. Although the Freedom Tower no longer carries out its administrative function, it continues to serve as a beacon of welcome for all Cuban refugees, those of the past and future.

The tower elicits few emotions inside of me, since I arrived from Cuba at the age of 3; however, it does remind me of both the triumphs and struggles my parents endured when settling in Miami in hopes of creating a brighter future for me, their only daughter.

My parents were among the influx of immigrants who arrived in the late 1990s. My father, Roberto Perez, arrived on a Friday in 1999. The following Monday, he began working as an electrician by day and cleaned restaurants as a busboy by night.

Six months later, my father found himself waiting in the airport with a bouquet of roses and a balloon that said, “It’s a Girl” (he still had not enrolled in English classes). Before he knew it, he was reunited with his young daughter, wife and mother-in-law. With a family under his wing, it was time to move forward at full speed; fortunately, my mother and grandmother were by his side.

Only a month after my mother Ani arrived, she eagerly began learning English at the Adult Education Center at Coral Gables Senior High School. She later enrolled in the REVEST program, an English class tailored to immigrants, at Miami Dade College Wolfson Campus.

While taking classes, she worked in the jewelry department of Service Merchandise. It was her first job in America, one she remembers clearly from soaking her feet in a bucket of hot water each time she came home from work.

The following year, she enrolled in MDC to take computing and accounting classes as well as ENC 1101. At the age of 30, she sat alongside recent high school graduates. While taking ENC 1101 in the day, she took on a night job as chief of data input in the Miami Jackson Adult Education Center.

My father also completed the REVEST program at night, while continuing to work as an electrician in the day. He continuously hopped from company to company in search of a higher wage.

Fortunately, my grandmother offered to stay home and take care of me so that my parents could work and further their education at the same time. My household valued what it meant to be a family. Even as a child, I realized the continuous interplay of teamwork among us. They figured that if they overcame the hardships of Cuba together, then they would surely overcome these times as well.

Once I was old enough to go to school, my grandmother Miriam Alderete was hired as a Spanish teacher at a private K-8 school, where she worked for 14 years. She was recognized by the Institute of Hispanic Culture with the Academic Order of Don Quijote de la Mancha award for her excellence in teaching Cuban literature.

The pivotal point in my father’s career occurred when he matriculated in vocational classes in electricity at Miami Senior High to obtain his journeyman license, which soon proved advantageous when he was hired four years later as an electrician for Miami-Dade Housing, and later as a plant electrician for Miami-Dade Water and Sewer.

No longer being able to bear going to work when I came home from school, my mother took her Florida teacher certification examination and was hired as a full-time teacher at Booker T. Washington Senior High. She woke up at 5:00 each morning for five years to avoid the expressway traffic heading to downtown; still, she thought it was worth it.

In 2004, my brother was born and so my mother transferred to Miami Sunset to be closer to home. She earned her master’s in mathematics education from Nova Southeastern University five years later. Soon after, it was my father’s turn as he earned his master’s in electrical, burglar alarm and fire alarm specialty.

While growing up, I saw my parents build a new home, a new life and even extend the family, whether it was by having another child or lending a hand to others so they too could build their new lives.

As refugees we cannot measure how grateful we all are to have been able to step foot in Miami and watch our lives unfold in ways we could have never imagined. However I am even luckier than my parents because I have been able to “stand on the shoulders of giants,” as Isaac Newton said.

My parents, along with other refugees, have played their own role in the building of the city, but most importantly they have laid the foundation for the next generation. They held our hands and carried us on their backs through the storms of adversity the new country brought forth only to steer us into calm waters, hand over the wheel and say, “now it is your turn.”

They call Miami “the Magic City,” which is fitting, because it’s always able to reinvent itself.
I was born in Hialeah Hospital in 1981. History is full of eras, but this specific moment was the beginning of change, an almost traceable line of demarcation.

My mother fled Cuba in 1969 when she was 19 with her sister and my grandmother; my grandfather, a political prisoner, joined them five years later. She met my father after he arrived here in 1979, after 20 years as a political prisoner in Cuba.

I belonged to two worlds. I was an American, but at the same time, I was Cuban. I didn’t quite fit either group. In many ways, my story is the story of the city in which I was born: Hialeah is part of South Florida; yet, it feels totally different from Tallahassee, or Tampa, or Titusville, and worlds away from “the South.”

Hialeah, like South Florida, isn’t just one place, it is many simultaneously. As such, every major street carries at least three names. Red Road is Northwest 57th Avenue, West Fourth Avenue, or la cuatro.

In 1981, South Florida was just barely recovering from a riot and an influx of Cubans that arrived on the Mariel boatlift – events that shaped public discourse, policy, and dinner table conversation for years.

My parents’ first home was in a community called Lago Grande. It was so new that there was nothing nearby and it seemed like it was in the middle of a forest.

My grandparents lived in East Hialeah, back when there were no Spanish-speaking neighbors. To visit, we passed the Holsum Bread factory and the smell of bread filled the car. We passed Hialeah Racetrack, filled with photographers taking their iconic pictures of Quinceñeras in their poofy white gowns, among the pink flamingos and peacocks. There was a viandero who drove by and sold yucca and chorizo, as well as an ice cream truck whose Pink Panther ice cream bars with gumball eyes always tasted better than those at the store.

Vendors walked up and down 49th Street selling fresh churros – coated in fine granulated sugar that always managed to make a mess, making them contraband inside my father’s car – and little white paper cones of roasted peanuts.

There was a Jumbo Supermarket, where Cuban bread disappeared as soon as it was out of the oven, a Latin American restaurant – where I first saw ham hanging from the ceiling – and a new McDonald’s where I met Ronald McDonald and had my face painted.

Ocean Drive wasn’t as popular as it is today, but the beach was always full of visitors. I bounced over waves – wearing pink floaties and building sand castles on beaches – wearing Coppertone sunblock, because that’s what the little girl on the billboard used. We parked at Penrod’s, today’s Nikki Beach. And one of the major rites of passage into teenhood was taking a leap off the South Beach pier.

Everyone loved the Dolphins, Don Shula and Dan Marino. Everyone remembered their perfect season. All this started to change in the 1990s.

When I was 5, we moved, and our family now included my new little brother. I enrolled in a new school, Ben Sheppard Elementary. In third grade, the family moved to Miami Lakes. This was the edge, the newest part of town – again, right next to the “forest.” Everything south of Northwest 149th Street was filled with dense trees. As kids, we rode our bikes into “the forest” and half believed we’d find monsters, wild animals, and maybe even Tarzan. Those were the trees eventually plowed down for new homes and for Barbara Goleman Senior High.

In the 1990s, Art Deco became cool and South Beach was the place to see and be seen. The University of Miami Hurricanes became champions in football for the fourth time, we got a basketball team, and there was a struggle to protect decency: Sheriff Navarro banned a 2 Live Crew record, and Palm Beach banned female street hot dog vendors wearing thong bikinis.

Like today, there were plenty of political scandals; somehow, hundreds of dead people voted in a mayoral race. There was a flood of immigrants – thousands of Cubans braved the sea on rafts, tires, and just about anything that would float, prompting President Clinton to enact the Wet Foot / Dry Foot policy.

Hurricane Andrew arrived on what was supposed to be my first day at Miami Lakes Middle School. Other than downed trees, we were fine. But other parts of South Florida weren’t as lucky. School was delayed almost two weeks and many kids were displaced, left homeless by the storm.

Eventually there was a building boom and Miami’s skyline changed. . At that time, my mother was a vice president at Capital Bank and excited to move into a modern building in the “new” downtown, and even more so when it appeared in the movie “Bad Boys.” But after 5 p.m., downtown died. Stores and businesses closed for the night.

I attended Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior High before the FCAT, when kids carried beepers, not cellphones. Football was big. Everyone attended the game versus Hialeah High, our biggest rival. The coveted T Trophy always resided at HML.

After graduation, I attended UM and completed a double major in journalism and English. My husband and I, high school sweethearts, married and moved to Miami Lakes. I teach at Miami Lakes Educational Center and he is a CPA with a small firm in Hialeah.

We stayed close to home. But home keeps changing. The Miami of my childhood doesn’t exist anymore, but neither does the Miami of 10 or even 5 years ago.

But some things remain unchanged. You can find anything that you need in Hialeah and all the streets there still have three names, although la doce, Ludlam Road, 67th Avenue is now also Flamingo Road, but that’s a whole other story.

I reached to pull the yellow lever that would release our glider’s tether to the noisy silver crop duster that was towing us to 3,000 feet over Homestead at the edge of Florida’s Everglades.

This lever — and the towrope that connected us to the plane — was our only link to the powered flight. If I tugged the lever toward me, we’d be on our own in the ether, no engine, just a narrow white cylinder with wings relying on elusive warm updrafts to keep us aloft. My new boyfriend, sitting behind me and piloting the glider we had rented for an hour, had instructed me to release us from the crop duster — but I hesitated.

The origins of my fear of flying are a mystery to me.

I’d suffered life-long psychological paralysis surrounding air travel. Maybe this fear was the result of an association between flying and becoming motion sick at 7 years old as an unaccompanied minor on a flight from Miami to New York. Perhaps the dread was the due to being tossed around in a seaplane in a terrifying lightening-rife storm halfway to the Bahamas from Miami. Maybe a clue to my irrational fear could be found in the panic attack and vomiting episode just after take-off from Miami International Airport after drinking too many dirty vodka martinis in the airport bar in an effort to quell my terror of jetting to Philadelphia.

I didn’t fly anymore. Period.

Over the years, I’d ridden almost every rail Amtrak travels. I’d taken the Queen Mary 2 to Europe and back over the North Atlantic, avoiding air travel and eating a lot of shipboard scones. I turned down free vacations to places in corners of the globe where it would have been impossible to travel expediently by land or sea. Amtrak doesn’t go to Malta.

The irony of my fear is that I’m an exotic-bird enthusiast, expert, and rescuer. I’ve written more than 30 books and hundreds of magazine articles on the care and training of parrots, canaries, finches, and doves. I’ve been a fan of birds since I was a little girl when my grandfather taught me how to charm pigeons to eat from my hands in the coop he built in the backyard of our South Miami home. Birds are the only animals with feathers, structures so strong they can lift a wearer many times her weight into the air for flight across oceans.

But I wasn’t a bird.

I found comfort in the terra firma. So how was I gliding over palm tree nurseries and sawgrass prairies at the edge of the swampy Miami wilderness in an engineless aircraft, being asked to pull a lever that would set the glider free? I hovered my hand over the T-shaped bar with its chipped canary-colored paint and thought about the risks of becoming unanchored and set adrift. What if the sky couldn’t sustain us? We were, after all, heavier than air, and unable to flap like birds.

My paramour is an officer in the Coast Guard based at the Opa-locka air station whose job is to fly helicopters over the South Florida seascape to spot Cuban migrants, save people from sinking boats, and pluck heart-attack victims and pregnant ladies in labor from the decks of cruise ships. He earned a medal for rescuing people from rooftops after Hurricane Katrina, an honor for which he is too humble. He teaches people to fly small planes and gliders and has a 4-seater plane of his own. There could be no one better with whom to share the sky.

I wanted to pull the yellow lever. I have a vague understanding of how wings work, but for the most part, keeping a 10,000-pound hunk of metal airborne seems like magic to me. What if I pulled the lever and we plummeted like a pelican into the sea?

The yellow lever was warm as I grasped it and eased it toward me. With a clunk the glider lost purchase on the towline and we separated from the noisy tow plane, leaving us alone with the only sound of the air whooshing over the clear plastic hood above our heads. Below us, houses with blue backyard pools gave way to tomato fields, which yielded to vast swaths of wetlands.

No hyperventilating into the vomit bag he had brought for me. No crying or hiding my face in sweaty palms. No whispered foxhole prayers that if I made it back to the ground alive I’d never eat bacon again.

“Let’s fly with the birds,” my boyfriend said, turning the glider sharply toward the hazy blue Atlantic.

He knew my weakness. He had told me that a great way to find updrafts—the fuel a glider uses to stay airborne — was to follow turkey buzzards as they swirled beneath the clouds, rotating inside an invisible funnel of wind. We flew toward three buzzards, their black wings outstretched, feathers gleaming in the sun. I forgot about being half a mile above the earth, instead focused on how close the birds allowed us to them, the communion we shared up there in the firmament. I forgot about gravity. I forgot that I was afraid.

Maybe my fear of flying isn’t about plunging to the ground at maximum velocity in an exploding tube filled with fire, as I had once believed. Maybe I just hadn’t met anyone until that moment that made flying fun, someone with whom I wouldn’t mind being set adrift. Experiencing flight with him had become, in a single gesture, with the pull of a yellow lever, more important than my anxiety.

My father was a fisherman, as were his fathers, and since I followed in their footsteps, I am a fisherman, too.

He fished the streams of Scotland as a boy and, when he came over to Orlando, he fished the freshwater lakes and Indian River, catching bass, trout and flounder. Later, one of his outstanding Metropolitan Tournament winning catches was a 25-pound redfish he caught while fishing with his brother-in-law, Carl Lauer, at Flamingo in 1962.

In 1963, my father retired from Southern Bell and went to Freeport, Grand Bahama, to manage the telephone company for a few years. Then he consulted for a few independent telephone companies around Florida until he died in 1970 at 67 years old.

My family and I first moved to South Florida in 1945. As a kid, I remember winning some fishing contests, then identifying fish on an outdoor radio show in Jacksonville. I fished the Palm Beach Inlet Dock with my father and, in the evening, jacks and snook would chase schools of mullet onto the beach and the rocks. A large moray eel lived in a pipe by the dock, and there was only one building to be seen across the water on Riviera Beach (a nightclub?).

I came back in the 1960s to fish the mullet run each fall, becoming the only Miami member of the Jetty Conchs fishing club.

In 1946, we moved to Coconut Grove and kept our boat in a canal near the end of Southwest 22nd Avenue. This area east of Bayshore Drive was all mangroves at that time. I remember fishing off Key Biscayne before they built the bridge, and in the bay, we caught snapper, trout and mackerel using small surf rods with 36-pound squidding line. Boats would come into Dinner Key, and then people would load their car trunks full of fish.

After we moved back to Jacksonville in 1948, we often fished the bridges around St. Augustine, Matanzas Inlet and the old Mandarin loading-dock piling south of Julington Creek on the St. Johns River.

In 1954, my parents moved back to the same neighborhood in Coconut Grove and bought the house where my family and I live now. At this time, my father and I became interested in spin fishing. Our first reels were Garcia Mitchells, then Orvis 100s.

In 1955, I started working summers at The Tackle Box fishing store at Southwest 27th Avenue and U.S.?1, where I built custom fishing rods and repaired reels for the proprietor, Jack Primack. While working there, I met many people who were influential in my early development as a light-tackle sport fisherman. Some of the names I remember are: Eddie Miller, Joe Brooks, Lee Cuddy, Arthur Beryl, Buddy Hawkins, Capt. Bill Smith, Capt. Stu Apt, Capt. Gary Simmons, Capt. Bill Curtis, Chico Fernandez, Flip Pallot and John Emery.

In 1958, I went away to the Army and upon my return in 1961, I started surveying for the new Dade County Port of Miami. I also built custom bonefishing skiffs at the Glenncraft boat company. Eventually, I built my own skiff and went fishing most of the time. During this period, I developed innovations to the technology of sport fishing, some of which are still being used in the fishing community today.

Among the innovations I primarily created are: Inside/Outside Fly, Mutton/Cockroach Fly, Puff Permit Fly, Twenty-Times-Around Knot, wire-leader connection, Duncan Loop Knot, deep jig glow worms, boat side curtains and rod blank designs. Other innovations that I contributed to were: arrowhead jigs, inverted flies, loop-on fly tippits, Redfish Fly, sinking head fly lines, blue fly lines, red bandannas and the first fiberglass push pole.

I returned to college part-time, eventually obtaining an engineering degree from the University of Miami and several professional licenses. I have recently retired with 30 years of experience as a construction management engineer. I also became involved in several conservation issues, such as the creation of Biscayne National Park and the banning of commercial fishing in Everglades National Park.

Many things have changed now, but partially because Biscayne National Park was created at our doorstep, we still have fish in Biscayne Bay. On a recent trip, I caught a nice mutton snapper in park waters. I used the head and bones to make fish soup and the sauce for my quenelles.

I still look forward to fishing, although it is now a new era and there are fewer fish than there were back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. However, we can turn the tide if sport fishermen keep pushing for reforms in the preservation and conservation of our natural resources.

Although my mother, the former Edith Leibowitz, was born in New York, she graduated from Miami Beach High in 1942. So it was only natural that she and my father, Marvin Kuperman, would move to Miami following their marriage in 1946.

I was born in Victoria Hospital (which no longer exists) in 1948. We lived in a small one-bedroom apartment in what is now the heart of Little Havana.

In 1950 we moved into a “huge” two-bedroom, one-bath house with a Florida room in a new development called Coral Gate (purchase price – $10,000.00). The development consisted almost entirely of young baby boomers and their families. No one had air conditioning so everyone kept their front door open since all houses came with screen doors which allowed for cross ventilation and which invariably remained unlocked the entire day. (Needless to say, no one had alarm systems!)

My sister, Debbie (Debra), was born in 1951, which initially was exciting until it became apparent that she was going to permanently reside in and basically take over my bedroom.

My mother didn’t have a car in the early fifties so we walked almost everywhere. Nearby was Margaret Ann, a large grocery store on the corner of Southwest 32nd Avenue and Coral Way, the new Sears Roebuck on Coral Way, and of course all of the stores on Miracle Mile.

On the northwest border of Coral Gate stood the Coliseum, which housed a large bowling alley (at which my parents bowled regularly) with adjoining athletic fields. Every Saturday at 1:00 p.m. an air raid siren which sat on the top of the Coliseum began blaring for several minutes.

I attended Auburndale Elementary where I majored in misbehaving. I still managed to win the fourth grade spelling bee and was also one of the fastest kids in school in the shuttle run.

A large segment of the Coral Gate kids took a city bus home from school each day and all of us would spill out of the bus at the Southwest 18th Street and 32nd Avenue stop. We all purchased bus cards which cost $1.50 for 30 fares and which the driver would punch holes in. Between the ever-increasing hole punches and our stuffing the cards in our pockets, they became frayed and tattered within a week or two.

Two or three mornings a week we had Home Milk delivered to our doorstep by our milkman. Every once in a while he gave us blocks of ice to play with (which quickly melted), as well as wooden milk crates. In the afternoons (especially in the summer) the Good Humor Man in his starched white uniform would drive up and down every street broadcasting music from his truck in order to market a variety of ice cream. I also remember lady truck drivers who regularly delivered laundered cloth diapers to those families with babies.

After school we played baseball and football right in the middle of the street. Every once in a while we got into trouble when a stray baseball bounced off of someone’s car.

At a young age, my father began taking me to watch the “original” Miami Marlins play at the old Miami Stadium. The Marlins were a Triple A team playing in the International League, which played U.S. teams as well as teams from other countries, including the Havana Sugar Kings. We were once very fortunate to attend a game in which the late great Satchel Paige pitched.

In the late ‘50s the kids in my neighborhood began collecting Topps baseball cards which came in a small wrapper and also included a piece of bubble gum as thin and hard as one of the baseball cards. We would “flip” the baseball cards off a wall and keep whatever cards our card landed on. Incredibly, it also became popular in our neighborhood to attach our cards to the spokes of our bikes with clothespins which resulted in the bike making loud clicking sounds when we rode. I still get nauseous thinking about all the Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays cards that got shredded in our bikes.

My grandparents owned a small apartment building on South Beach and we would visit them almost every Sunday. We often walked to the beach where we swam in the crystal clear waters of the Atlantic Ocean. On other occasions my grandfather and I would walk to the Clevelander Hotel armed with a pickle jar and fishnet to catch guppies in the small waterways which lined the hotel.

Some of the restaurants that we frequented were the Big Wheel drive-in located just south of Coral Way on Southwest 32nd Avenue, the Red Diamond Inn on Lejeune Road, Harvey’s Restaurant on Flagler Street, as well as Wolfie’s and the Famous Restaurant on Miami Beach. A special treat was a trip to Fun Fair on the 79th Street Causeway. All of these restaurants closed decades ago.

In the summer I spent many days playing baseball and other sports at the Boys Club on Southwest 32nd Avenue and Dixie Highway. Almost every summer, my family went on a “stay-cation” to the Colonial Inn Motel on Sunny Isles Beach. Not only did the motel have a low diving board, it also had a high diving board, both of which are unheard of in today’s liability conscious society. We used to run off the high dive with legs flailing, screaming “Geronimo!” and hope that we didn’t land on any unwary swimmers. In those days, all females, regardless of their age, were required to wear bathing caps.

Although Miami is now a bustling, culturally diverse, cosmopolitan city, I sure enjoyed being a kid in the simpler, slower paced Miami of the fifties.

My wife, Mayita, and I live in Pinecrest. After practicing law in Miami for more than 40 years, I see retirement in my future. Although our son lives in California, my daughter and her family live nearby. My granddaughter is the fifth generation of my family to call Miami home.

I wanted to spend my retirement entertained with a million things to do each and every day. My husband Steve, on the other hand, wanted to spend his retired life in the sun, fishing for permit. He said, “Key West.” I said, “New York.” I was determined to remain in New York, and Steve was just as determined to move to Florida.

Steve hated the cold and the sleet and the snow. And he loved fishing and baseball.

Steve and I visited Florida on vacation in 1957, and we stayed at the Nautilus Hotel. Even the names of the hotels conjured up visions of far-away, exotic lands — Casablanca, Sans Souci, Marseilles, Fontainebleau, Eden Roc, and Seville.

In 1972, my aunt rented an apartment next to the Diplomat Hotel where, each night, famous stars performed, and she would take us to her favorite restaurants: Rascal House, Pumpernik’s, Corky’s, and the ever delicious Tivoli.

In the end, I gave in — with a compromise. We would move to South Florida but not to Key West.

So in 1994, we moved into the same building on the beach where my aunt lived, next to the waiting-to-be-imploded Diplomat Hotel. I soon discovered that the heat didn’t bother me at all, and having a pool where people congregated and created friendships certainly helped us quickly get used to our new home.

Strolling down Lincoln Road years ago, when the middle of the street was still open to traffic, was always thrilling. And Steve and I loved Hialeah Park, the race track where thoroughbreds ran and beautiful flamingos fed along the ponds in the sculptured gardens. The elegant betting area bore no resemblance to any race track we had ever been to; Hialeah was a gem of mahogany-sculptured paneling that conjured up old-fashioned splendor and always made me feel out of place making a two-dollar bet.

I liked to visit Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden because not only were the gardens colorful and fragrant, but otters frolicked in the small pond there. Steve and I always enjoy visiting the Biltmore Hotel, in Coral Gables, where we walk around the immense swimming pool and recall that Johnny Weissmuller and Esther Williams swam there. The GableStage theater, housed at the Biltmore, offers memorable performances that each season garner awards.

Steve enjoys sporting events, and he followed Tiger Woods on the greens of the Doral Country Club, and on Sunday afternoons we would go to Joe Robbie Stadium, now known as Sun Life Stadium, to watch the Miami Dolphins play.

Miami also has wonderful museums, such as the Bass and the Wolfsonian. One of the most astonishing exhibits I ever saw was a display at the Bass Museum: a kitchen, living room, and a garden all made out of beads; even the kitchen sink and faucets were made from beads.

The Holocaust Memorial on Miami Beach always brings me to tears. Secluded in a garden and surrounded by sculptures depicting the horrors of the concentration camps, a giant hand emerging from the exhibit’s center. The hand itself is covered with naked, emaciated bodies climbing up to the wrist, evoking the horrors and the sadness of the millions lost.

I still love the old, Art Deco buildings of South Beach, now renovated into chic boutique hotels. Latin music erupts from Gloria Estefan’s restaurant on the west side of Ocean Drive. On the beach side of the street, we always would stop to admire the sand sculptures. I miss the artist who created these fanciful cities out of sand stretching a quarter of a block in length and lasting perhaps for months. After a while, he would start all over, a new creation from nothing, but now he, too, seems to be gone for good. Also gone — and sorely missed — is that fabulous panoramic mural on the wall of the Fontainebleau Hotel depicting an Eden-like garden; it always felt as if we were driving right through the arch and into the hotel.

I used to love the fatty corned-beef sandwiches at Rascal House, and now at Jerry’s Famous Deli, and I revel in the tastes of Chinese food at Christine Lee’s.

When Steve and I moved to South Florida, I found all the things I really wanted: serious, great theater and musicals, better than what is offered on Broadway.

Better yet, my children now live in South Florida, too, and heaven, in the shape of my grandchildren, came with them. Now I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. I read somewhere that you are truly lucky if you live near a beach. Well, then we are all very lucky to live in South Florida, surrounded by beautiful beaches.

From my windows, the ocean is a stunning aquamarine mural. “Florida? You must be kidding!” has turned into “Florida? I am sure glad I live here!”

My sojourn to South Florida started before I moved here in 1957. My sister and brother-in-law were here from New York on a winter vacation on December 26, 1947. The metropolitan area of New York had a snowstorm of 26 inches in a 24-hour period. It was a record then and may still be to this day. My sister called my father to find out the conditions and my father told them to stay in Miami, the city was paralyzed, no transportation, nothing was going on. They decided to stay and move permanently to South Florida. They came back to gather their personal belongings.

I started coming down in 1950 when my nephew was born. I went to jai alai every night and sat in the balcony for 50 cents. Back then jai alai was the place to be, especially on a Saturday night. The highlight of my trip was when we would go to Leonard’s La Peña on Bird Road, where I think the Palmetto Expressway is today. The menu, if I am not mistaken, was a shrimp cocktail, steak or lobster, stuffed baked potato and, for dessert, hot apple pie with a slice of American cheese — all for $3.95 (plus tip).

I moved to Florida in 1957, a day after the New York Yankees lost to the Milwaukee Braves in the World Series. My parents followed me one month later. They bought a house one block north of the Tamiami Trail and Southwest 60th Avenue. There is an elementary school called Fairlawn, which also had a park with a baseball field. Playing there one day I was recruited by a team that was practicing. They mentioned a league they played in at Shenandoah Park off Southwest 22nd Avenue and 19th Street and asked me if I wanted to join their team. Naturally I said yes. It was a church league and I played for St. Matthew’s Lutheran one year and Shenandoah Baptist the following year.

My first job in Florida was at the Food Fair warehouse on Northwest 71st Street and 32nd Avenue. I believe at the time they were the largest supermarket chain in South Florida. Other supermarkets at the time were Margaret Ann and Kwik Chek, which eventually merged with Winn Dixie, their main competition. Other stores came and went such as Grand Union, Albertson’s, and Shell on Northwest 58th Street. Publix was not as prevalent around South Florida in those days, but of course they have come a long way since then.

In 1960 I bought a hardware store on Northwest 183rd Street and 7th Avenue. The Palmetto Expressway only extended from the Trail (Southwest 8th Street) to Golden Glades. They used to call the Palmetto “Dead Man’s Highway” since there were no overpasses, or very few. You had to drive way below the speed limit to avoid accidents since very few cars stopped or slowed down at the intersections. I think within a year they started building overpasses at key streets which opened the area to residences and businesses immediately.

Some familiar and favorite restaurants through the years were Gold Star Deli on the Trail, just east of 62nd Avenue, the Great Gables on Ponce and the Trail, The Pub (with Whitey the host) on Coral Way, Royal Castles all over, Shorty’s BBQ, Captain’s Tavern, and Frankie’s Pizza on Bird Road, which is still there under family ownership. Dressel’s Dairy Farm on Milam Dairy Road had rides for the children and the thickest malt shakes anywhere.

Miami Beach in the ‘50s and ‘60s was second only to Las Vegas in live entertainment — from Roberta Sherwood and Don Rickles at Murray Franklin’s to Charlie Callas and Shecky Greene at the Deauville Star Theatre and Buddy Hackett and Joan Rivers at the Diplomat. Movie theaters included the Miracle on Miracle Mile, the Tower on the Trail, the State and Claughton theaters.

I have been happily married to my wife Elaine for 52 years (45 for her and seven for me – our joke). We have three children (and one grandchild) and, 45 years on, still live in our house off Miller Road and Southwest 92nd Avenue.

I was an avid tennis player for 30 years and dazzled many courts such as the Dadeland Inn, Marlin Racquet Club, Kendalltown and Courts at the Falls until my shoulder and knees finally gave out.

In between all this I enjoyed a long and successful career in real estate, where our company built, developed and managed warehouses, retail strip centers and private residences, mostly between Bird Road and Southwest 120th Street, and also along South Dixie Highway and Kendall Drive out west, when it was largely undeveloped. It has been a great ride. Thanks for the memories, South Florida (Miami).

In 1951, I was young and it was the summer of my junior year in high school. I left St. Louis to join my older brother, a waiter at Martha Raye’s nightclub. It seemed to me to be an interesting life and he had agreed, after some pleading, to let me join him – as long as I worked and paid my own expenses. So, after apparently every possible stop in Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida, my non-air conditioned Greyhound bus arrived in Miami Beach and I saw, for the first time in my life, the ocean, framed by palm trees, sand and the just rising sun — and I was hooked.

My brother lied about my age and my “several years” of experience to get me a union card and a job as a busboy. My “experience” consisted of an hour or so of practice carrying dishes and glasses piled upon an up-turned coffee table. From the late ‘40s through the ‘50s and ‘60s the Collins area between 20th and 25th Streets was one of the liveliest in Miami Beach. Martha’s Five O’Clock Club was on the corner of 20th and Collins; Collins and 22nd housed “Wolfies,” the quintessential New York delicatessen. The Grate, the Pin Up, the Place Pigalle and the Night Owls clubs were within blocks; the Embers restaurant and Dubrow’s cafeteria were nearby; Junior’s deli and the old Roney Plaza hotel were just off 23rd Street. The 22nd Street public beach, between the Roney and the Sea Gull hotel, was well known by natives for its homosexual clientele, both male and female, and occasional bewildered tourists, wondering just what they had stumbled on to. My daytime job was working for three dollars a day and tips as a “cabana boy” at the Sea Gull, handing out towels, setting up beach chairs and umbrellas, keeping an eye on guests in the pool and ocean and selling them on the local water ski schools, hand-woven palm hats, Monkey Jungle tours, scuba lessons and other “opportunities” for which, if they bought, I received a one percent commission.

In the 1950s, the Five O’Clock Club was a popular, small nightclub offering two shows a night and three on weekends. The club was named for dispensing free drinks to anyone still at the bar at 5:00 a.m. The 5:00 a.m. sessions were populated primarily by after-work waiters, waitresses and musicians from other clubs, an occasional hooker and sometimes, a celebrity or two. The club had a three-drink minimum and, if you didn’t order food at the 6 p.m. dinner show, you paid a separate cover charge. The experienced nightclub goer nursed a glass of wine, paid the minimum or cover and never, ever ordered food from what was one of the worst kitchens on the Beach. Martha’s was where I learned to maneuver trays of dirty dishware through narrow aisles of tiny, tourist-filled tables and sometimes helped the bartender water down the bourbon, scotch and rye. I also learned that the “snowbirds,” particularly those who had perhaps had a drink too many, were often easy marks for inflated bar tabs. Martha’s was a lesser club, not as big or flashy as Copa City, the Beachcomber or the Latin Quarter but, when Martha was on the bill, it catered to loyal locals and aging movie-going tourists who remembered her from her ‘30s and ‘40s Hollywood musical comedies and who appreciated her off-color comedy routines and very considerable talent as a jazz pianist and vocalist. The five o’clock shows also featured lesser comics, male or female vocalists on their way up, or down the showbiz ladder and, sometimes, a movie-star friend of Martha’s.

I sometimes frequented the Rockin’ MB lounge which featured saxophone duos, drums and no-name vocalists, performing from an elevated “stage” behind the narrow bar. The band played mostly tunes like Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock,” always at full volume. The sound cast out on Collins from late night to early morning and the entrance sheltered a large, bored gatekeeper, seated on a stool, who casually checked IDs and denied entrance to nobody. The offices above the MB also housed a phone-filled “wire room” handling bookies’ action. This was still Meyer Lansky/Al Capone/pre-Kefauver Miami and the horse parlors, “private” casinos and bolito shops had not yet been shut down as consequence of the crusading senator’s traveling hearings on crime and corruption (Kefauver’s first hearing was in Miami in 1951). What wasn’t legally wagered at Hialeah or Gulfstream on the horses or at dog tracks on the greyhounds or at jai alai frontons was gambled with bookies in cabanas by the pool at the ocean front hotels — like the one at the Sea Gull.

The Rockin MB’s clientele, like that at the Sea Gull and other beachfront hotels, were mostly young tourists, often female, in groups of twos and threes — secretaries, teachers and office workers, down from East Chicago, Indiana, Cleveland or other cities up north lured to Miami Beach by the airlines and hotels advertising “3 days and 2 nights (or 7 days and 6 nights) of sun and fun” on the “American Plan” where airfare, hotel, and most meals were included in the package. For example, in the 1950s you could stay at the Di Lido or Shore Club and other ocean-front hotels for less than $27 a day and for an additional $25 get breakfast and dinner. The American Plan became very popular in the 1960s and its utilization by mega-hotels like the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc with in-house nightclubs and New York/Hollywood level shows and entertainers marked the beginning of the end for clubs like Martha’s as well as the bigger entertainment venues.

I met celebrities besides Martha — had my picture taken with Jake LaMotta and Rocky Graziano at the Sea Gull, parked a car for Elizabeth Taylor and Eddie Fisher, made sure Irving Berlin’s jock strap and bathing suit were dry for his morning dip, and was able to finance my “other” education at the University of Miami — thanks to Miami Beach and the generosity of tourists.