Category: Miami Stories

n 1963, I made my first trip to Miami.

I had just graduated from college and was invited to visit by the man who would become my husband, Richard Rosichan. At the time, he lived in Bay Heights with his parents, Arthur and Claire Rosichan. I was young and had lived my whole life as a northerner. I could not believe my eyes when I saw my first Miami house, filled with beautiful paintings and tasteful décor — the “marble” floors, the den filled from ceiling to floor with books, the tropical patio and what I perceived with my northern eyes as exotic landscaping.

Over time, and as our relationship became more serious, I returned to Miami and was introduced to neighbors and family friends. When we got married, I was teaching school in Buffalo, New York, and Richard quickly finished his degree at the University of Buffalo. For the next eight years, and no matter where we were living, studying and working, we spent every winter vacation in Miami.

My favorite event was going to the sumptuous New Year’s day celebration at a neighbor’s home just down the street. Upon our arrival, we were always handed a glass of homemade eggnog, which in my memory is still the best I have ever had.

My in-laws had no pool, but they used to rent a cabana at the Executive House in Miami Beach. I loved going there and felt like a “fancy” lady. It is hard to believe in this day and age, but when we went swimming, Claire always reminded me to keep my face to the sun so I could go back north with a healthy tan.

Less than 10 years and two children later (Amy and Lori), Richard and I moved to Miami (no more “face in the sun”). By that time, my mother-in-law was suffering from a serious illness. We didn’t want to inflict two active toddlers on our in-laws, so while we were waiting to close on our house, we lived in various places, including an efficiency apartment and two weeks at the KOA campground in Homestead.

While waiting to establish ourselves, we started a small business — Rider-Driver Exchange — a service to connect young folks who needed a ride up north with a driver who needed assistance with driving. We were quite successful in getting people together, putting up signs on a community bulletin board in Coconut Grove, but we had a cash-flow problem. We rarely got paid!

We finally settled in the Buena Vista neighborhood, just north of the Design District. In those days, most of the stores in the Design District were closed to the public. In order to get in, you had to either go with or be sent by a decorator. Richard and I had to be content with just looking. The neighborhood was quiet and sedate, with large two-story houses, but that did not last.

Years after we moved, the neighborhood was revitalized, the Design District became fashionable and open to all, with interesting decorating stores, restaurants and boutiques. During our Buena Vista years, we established new careers, Richard working as a research consultant and I working in the business center of a prominent law firm.

In 1983, we moved to Alton Road in Miami Beach. The city was in decline, and we were lucky to buy at just the right time. In those days, the median was filled with flowers, and the golf course was beautifully landscaped with more flowers. Sometimes wedding parties would stop to have pictures taken with the golf course as a backdrop.

Frequently, passers-by would stop and ask directions to a restaurant, and we were hard pressed as to how to direct them. There was the Villa Deli, a neighborhood institution, and Kim’s Chinese (both now gone), and Bella Napoli and Masters Pizza (still going). In the other direction was a Howard Johnson’s and, of course, Wolfie’s on Collins Avenue.

Lincoln Road was a wasteland, and Ocean Drive was in serious decay. Over time, of course, there was a dramatic turnaround, and the rest is history.

Each of these neighborhoods represents a thousand family dramas, comedic and dramatic, of our family’s life — young love, family growth, teenage turmoil, empty nest and now grandchildren. I have been truly blessed.

I’ve been trying to leave Miami for a long time now.

Miami was my home after I left Haiti. Creole was in every corner, familiar faces spilled out of supermarkets and Quick Marts, and botanicas haunted every jitney bus and crowded every small church between businesses. I felt at home, lakay as we say in Haiti.

I loved the symbiosis of Haitian and Latin culture, be it Cuban or Dominican, because our food and our body language, our passion and our mannerisms, in many ways mirror each other. Miami was a pilon, a mortar and pestle, and the people under the pestle were the ingredients that brought out flavor.

Miami started to lose that flavor when I lost my job during the recession and my mortgage went under. Thirty percent of residences foreclosed in my building. My morale took a big blow and suddenly, I’d had enough. Enough of the neighbor’s 7 a.m. music displacing the art on my walls, enough of the mother and son-in-law caught in a daily soap opera of Te voy a matar next door, and enough of the sour faces that old lady made every morning down in the lobby, waiting for me to ask her how she was feeling just so she could tell me her ailments.

I was tired of the angry letters that came in the mail from our disgruntled new resident who was angry at the association for “lying about the pet policy.” The elevator hadn’t been inspected since 2007, and I was tired of having to climb seven flights of stairs. I dreaded board meetings, where one of our residents, a mustached veteran, consistently interrupted with objections and motions that always led to physical fights and, most recently, required the presence of the condo-board attorney as well as the local police.

I dreaded the woman who thought she was doing us a favor by chain-smoking in the stairwell where we carried our groceries up and down up the steps, leaving cigarette butts in her wake. When I came home, or left for work, I tried to avoid the neighbor who never spoke a word to me but sat there at the entrance, smoking by the carton and staring straight ahead even when I greeted him. He, too, was angry with the condo board, and was plotting ways to sue them by forming a coalition of residents calling themselves “the justice seekers.”

I didn’t even want to take my dogs out, for fear of having my neighbor call me from his second-floor apartment. “Hey! Pssssssst! HEY!” Every time I looked up, I saw his silhouette behind the screened patio gesturing for me to join him for a drink, and throwing his hands up in the air, exasperated, when I refused.

Drunkards were in every corner outside, downing six packs of Keystone and smashing bottles of Corona against the ground in a kind of blind rage aimed at their own condition, leaving the shards on the asphalt for dogs to cut their paws. They urinated behind trees and squatted on the embankment of the canal to relieve themselves, with no regard for mangrove crabs and iguanas, or humans for that matter.

I avoided the man who pushed his obnoxious shi-tzu around in a shopping cart because he threw eggs at other people’s cars. When my neighbor two doors down insisted on bringing my dogs chicken bones from his dinner plate, his mouth and fingers sticky with sauce, I dreaded taking them but accepted the offering with a feeble “thank you.”

When I became pregnant and gave birth to my son, I sunk even deeper into a new darkness of post-partum depression. My neighbors saw me pregnant, and when my baby spent a month in intensive care, they all wanted to know what had happened. I avoided them even more. I wouldn’t open the door for anyone.

It was when my husband and I came back home with the baby that I finally noticed a change in our neighbors. Suddenly, we were Joseph and Mary harboring baby Jesus. My neighbors were the Wise Men, come to see him bearing gifts and cards, and smiles. There were baby tubs and mobiles, even strollers and bouncy chairs at our door. Suddenly, the neighbors I felt uneasy with were friends.

No. Suddenly, my neighbors became family.

The “justice seeker” greets me happily and now opens the door for me when he sees me coming crushed under the weight of grocery bags. The mustached meeting interrupter who gave us the silent treatment now addresses my husband with a “hello.” The letter-writer hasn’t mailed us manifestos threatening to call “Help Me Howard” in a while. Now, at the end of a long day when I rush home to see my baby’s face and kiss him, part of that longing includes a yearning for a waft of that Cuban coffee from my neighbor’s kitchen right before he stops by to offer me bones.

Yes, my building is the manger, and it feels like everyone has morphed overnight into benevolent creatures full of good will.

Or is it me who changed?

Perhaps it is this new love that opened me up to them. To letting them tickle my son’s toes, to lending them aluminum foil, to handing them holiday cards and dialing their family overseas when their eyesight fails them. They are family.

I’m working now, and my baby is healthy, and I spend less time thinking of moving away. Now, at least for a while, Miami is lakay. Miami is home.

I started my life insurance career in Norfolk, Va., then transferred to South Florida in early January 1964 to manage my company’s Miami district office.

I had previously rented a small, new house in Coral Gables for my wife Barbara and two young daughters, Jane, 7, and Margaret, 5. What we didn’t know was that there was a minimum size requirement for houses, and to qualify, the builder put a bomb shelter underground, in the garage, covered over by a steel plate so a car could still park. It was an airless hole in the ground, and fortunately we never had to use it.

At the end of the first year we all posed for a picture against a palm tree at Tahiti Beach, now a private enclave, and placed our photo on our New Year’s card, which we sent to our Virginia friends to wish them a warm new year.

After a few years, Barbara started what became a successful interior design practice while continuing her studies of languages, and was among the first to enroll in the new Alliance Française in downtown Miami.

Early on we joined the original Coral Oaks Tennis Club, then owned by the tennis pro Leo Fullwood. I still play in the mornings with “the Dumbheads,” a name conferred upon them by Leo, a group of men who show up for round-robin tennis each morning.

I was given the opportunity to invest with a man in Key West who was diving for sunken Spanish gold. My money is still at the bottom of the ocean, but a year later, Mel Fisher discovered a vast quantity of Spanish bullion and jewels.

Some friends and I went scuba diving in the Keys, only to find upon surfacing a waiting police officer who suspected us of robbing the crab pots. After we were searched and found empty handed, we were released.

Several years after our arrival, the insurance company I worked for moved their offices into a new high-rise office building built in downtown Miami after World War II, the Ferre Building at 100 Biscayne Blvd. From my office, I had a beautiful view of the seaplane as it arrived each day from Bimini. In those days, you could literally shoot off a cannon on Biscayne Boulevard in the summer and hit no one. Parking was no problem. All that was soon to change.

I still miss the fine dining at the Pub on Coral Way, and my favorite wedge of lettuce and the three choices of dressing. Fortunately, we can still go to Whip ‘n Dip on Sunset Drive for our favorite ice-cream desserts.

Eventually, we bought a home in the Gables, conveniently located near Sunset Elementary, Ponce Junior High, Coral Gables High and the now-defunct Deerborne School.

To this day, I’m like a walking Chamber of Commerce, but from the beginning, my wife Barbara would complain about the heat and humidity. I would reply, “Off to Fargo, North Dakota!” reminiscent of Jackie Gleason’s “To the Moon!” remark to Alice in the then-popular “Honeymooners” TV show. I finally mailed my comments to the Fargo newspaper asking for their sympathy, and they not only printed my letter but also put it on the radio, prompting a flood of letters to my wife, inviting her to come to beautiful Fargo and stay with them.

The years were passing too quickly. We moved to our second home on Hammock Lake and resided there almost 30 years, where my mother-in-law swore she saw an alligator in the lake and we were hesitant to let the children go swimming. I remember going for the newspaper one morning and seeing snow that melted as it hit the ground. It was the only time in my 50 years that that had occurred. Many trees and plants were damaged, but the following spring was the most beautiful I can remember.

I loved to garden in our lakeside yard. Hurricane Andrew in 1992 did minimal damage to our house but destroyed all my plants. We started all over and it was so beautiful the next year that it made The Villager’s Garden Tour.

Eventually, I became the South Florida agency manager for my company and retired Jan. 1, 1990. Then I volunteered for 10 years as a docent at Zoo Miami, taking people on private tours and carrying animals to schools and nursing homes. In 2014, Barbara and I will celebrate our 60th year of marriage, which we can partially attribute to limiting our games of mixed doubles in tennis, as the photo attests. I fell in love with South Florida from day one and look forward to that love affair continuing into the rest of my life.

I am sitting here in our den and weathering another tropical storm. Fortunately it is one of the smaller, less significant ones, but interestingly enough, it is on the 20th anniversary of Andrew.

I was born in Miami and so storms and hurricanes are just some of those things that we have to endure for the pleasure of living here all the rest of the year.

When I was a child, I lived in Shenandoah. My Aunt Anna had moved here when she married a man I never knew, William Mankes. They started a bottled gas company on Flagler Street, near the courthouse, which was the tallest building downtown at the time. It was also close to the train station, our major source of transportation. I remember sitting in front of the store on a curb watching the Orange Bowl Parade. We had great seats.

William Mankes passed away very shortly after they moved here and my aunt was left to run the business. She had a large family in Connecticut and she sent for my father Robert Brenner to come help her. Soon after, almost everyone moved here.

My aunt married a man named Ben Meyers, and in doing so, she became Anna Brenner Meyers. She had been a teacher and a nurse before she came here, and at some point she also became an attorney. She later met many political figures, was involved in politics and once ran for mayor. I remember handing out leaflets and stomping for her. She did not win, but she did serve on the Dade School Board for many years. She also received many, many honors (too numerous to recount). In her later years, a building in downtown Miami was named for her.

One of my best memories of my mom Rose was our Saturday girls’ outing to Burdines Tea Room. She would always order a Snow Princess for me. It was an ice cream sundae with candy pearls on it. After lunch, we would go into the bookstore and I could add to my collection of the orange-covered Bobbsey Twins set. After that, we would go to the Olympia Theater (now, Gusman). We would see a stage show and then a movie — our rendition of Radio City. Some years later, I would take my little sister, Helene, on the number 9 bus. It was so safe; I was 10 years old.

Also, when I was 9, my dad was on a radio show. I don’t remember the name, but he decided I should go into show business and he put me on the show. That did hook me into theater for quite a long time. My Dad used to put on shows at the Coral Gables Jewish Center, and other venues later on. He continued acting and directing for many years. Early in his life, he had been in vaudeville and the Federal Theater. The Federal Theater, which was created during the Depression, had many actors who later became very well known.

We had moved to Coral Gables and lived around the corner from the Coral Gables Youth Center. My sister grew up loving that place and later worked there. Also, living around the corner were our good friends, the Barrishes and the Skops. I was encouraged to send my story after reading other Miami tales.

I choose to remember the really good things about Miami, but there was a lot going on in those days. I remember “KKK” on temple buildings, signs where certain people could not be seated in restaurants, waiting for colored water to come out of the fountain, and some people purposely walking to the back of the bus to be seated. But the great thing was, there were so many other people to counteract that.

When I rode with my bus driver, Paul, after dark, he would drive me off his route on Le Jeune to deposit me safely in front of my house. I have been fortunate enough to have spent my entire life here, watching Miami grow and seeing cultural changes that have totally enhanced our jewel. These memories of my Miami will stay with me forever.

“In the Everglades there´s a way of life.

There´s a way of peace without stress or strife.

There´s a natural danger and a man to face.

Lincoln Vail of the Everglades,

The man on patrol in the Everglades.”

Before there was Flipper, before Gentle Ben, way before Miami Vice, there was Lincoln Vail of the Everglades.

Vail was one of my first childhood heroes. The television show on which he appeared was called Everglades and it was also among the earliest television programs to be filmed entirely on location in South Florida.

In the early sixties, having only recently arrived from Cuba, my brothers and I learned about life on the “River of Grass” and about good and evil from watching the show. I even started learning English with Vail. One of the first phrases I picked up in my adopted language was, “This show brought to you by…” Who says TV is not educational?

I sometimes thought that the only people who ever watched the show were my brothers and me, as nobody else seemed to remember it. Vail was a law enforcement officer in the Everglades. He patrolled his territory aboard an air boat, defending it from criminals, poachers and other evil-doers. I clearly recall the words and music of the excellent theme song, which I have always been ready to sing for unsuspecting and usually unappreciative audiences.

In later life, I sometimes asked friends, acquaintances and even perfect strangers who were about my age if they remembered the show. If they seemed at all interested, I would even burden them with my rendition of the theme song. To my surprise, it would be a long time before I found anyone who remembered the 1961 series.

In the mid-nineties while attending a nephew´s birthday party at Gator Park airboat rides out on Tamiami Trail, I asked the attendant, who was about my age, if he remembered the show. With a bored look, he told me he was from New York. I suspected that he was thinking that I should “get a life.”

In that pre-Internet age, I set out to find whatever information I could about the show. I wanted to confirm that we had not imagined the whole thing.

My initial efforts led me to the Miami Herald archives, where at least I was able to find the TV listing for the program. It was shown on Sundays at 6:30 p.m. on Channel 4. The librarian suggested that I try the Wolfson Media History Center. The technician for film and video archives at Wolfson, who was extremely helpful and understanding, had grown up in South Florida but had never heard of the show. He was, however, able to send me some information. He also referred me to the Florida Department at the Main Library. Here at last there would be a break in the case.

At the Main Library, I spoke to Steve and explained what I was trying to do. To my delight, he immediately said, “Oh, Lincoln Vail of the Everglades!” and proceeded to recite the words of the entire first verse of the theme song. (There were two verses.) He asked me if I knew the name of the lead actor and then said, “No, no, I remember… it was Ron Hayes.” I knew this already, but I was very impressed. It was exciting to finally find someone who remembered the show. He recalled the day and time when it aired and said he thought it was a great show. At that moment I thought that perhaps Steve should also get a life.

Everglades was a syndicated program distributed by ZIV-United Artists, made by Schulberg Productions and actually filmed on location in the Everglades. It premiered in October 1961. As Steve correctly remembered, Lincoln Vail was played by Ron Hayes, who was described in one review as “a distinctive young actor”. A total of 38 episodes were made.

Thanks to information provided by the library, I discovered that all of the episodes were still in existence. They were on 16mm film and stored in the archives of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Video. I called the center and asked if there was any way I could view the shows. They said yes, but that I would have to obtain permission from the owner of the programs.

The owner turned out to be MGM. I went as far as writing a letter to MGM´s Legal Affairs Department and made the request. They responded that it was “not their policy to authorize screenings for such purposes.” My purposes, while honorable, were not particularly serious.

The first episode was called “The Escape” and featured a then-unknown actor in an uncredited role. That actor was Burt Reynolds. The episode dealt with Lincoln Vail´s efforts to recapture a convict who had escaped from a road gang. It turned out that the convict had run off to be near his dying father and help his impoverished wife and child. Vail caught the “cracker” criminal, but with what was described in one of the reviews as “too much innocence.” This all sounded pretty good to me. The critics rated the show as “a notch or two above the standards of its breed.”

I have sometimes wondered why the memory of this particular show has stuck in my mind the way it has. I now think that I would have loved for my three boys to have enjoyed a show like this when they were growing up. I wonder which show or shows they will remember in a similar way when they get to be my age.

At the risk of sounding sappy, perhaps that was a more innocent time. At least the very survival of the Everglades was not in question then. It would be very sad if rather than being a quaint piece of “Floridiana,” the show would come to serve as a celluloid record of the Everglades that once were.

One of the reviews I was able to find said that the show “suffered, when it suffered at all” from excessive talk and “from the effete theme song, which it would be better done without.”

“As they fight for rights,

and the homes they make,

simple grassroots people of the Everglades,

there´s a fellow there who protects their rights,

Lincoln Vail of the Everglades,

The man on patrol in the Everglades”

Effete indeed!

The question, “Who will remember?,” comes to mind when I think of the fragments of Miami history that never made it to the popular prose about my hometown, our “city of dreams.” Who will remember these times, these people, from decades before digital news and social media? Here is my short epitaph to some of those long gone.

The city of Miami Police Department in the 1940s and ’50s was the focus of stories my father told me of his many exciting cases as a uniformed officer and later, detective. The Miami Herald and Daily News followed some officers’ careers surprisingly closely in those days, when the police force was still relatively small. All the stories I heard growing up were verified when I received hard copies of news stories many years ago, thanks to a Herald archivist. Stories my young mind had made mythical turned out all to be true.

Those fascinating times my father spoke of included recovering stolen cars, and investigating Voodoo cult activity and the Ku Klux Klan. Most of his career was in the auto-theft bureau, but this focus led him and his various partners to bank robbers, murderers, and domestic abuse on the dark side, and to lighter duties like finding lost children and catching escaped monkeys!

My father was Charles M. Johnston, Charlie. His career as a Miami policeman began in 1944 and was summed up in 1963 by Chief of Police Walter Headley, who wrote, “He compiled an outstanding record which will probably never be equaled in the recovery of stolen automobiles and the apprehension of felons… His service record is filled with commendations from Federal Bureau of Investigation, State Attorney, and grateful citizens.” By then my father had well earned his sobriquet — Eagle Eye.

One of the most celebrated cases that my father “solved” was that of Cleveland bank robber John Wesley Hux, who on Jan. 11, 1950, robbed $35,000 (over $348,000 in 2016 money) from Cleveland Superior Savings. The FBI traced his movements south for 50 days, ending in Miami where agents asked assistance from Miami Police. Within five hours of that request, my father saw a car with license plates matching Hux’s parked at The Turf Club on Northwest Seventh Avenue and 79th Street. He and his partner, John Resick, blocked the car in, drew their guns, and arrested Hux as he exited the club. Hux had a loaded .38. Remarkably, Detective Resick recognized Hux as a classmate from a Cleveland High School they had both attended. Much of the bank money had already been lost, as Hux had bet heavily and lost at the Hialeah race track and The Bahamas, a gambling club at 3890 Northwest 36th St.

The Ku Klux Klan was active in Miami in the late 1940s when they “invited” Herald reporters to a meeting and promptly assaulted them and stole a camera, all in retaliation for honest reporting that the KKK felt was damaging to its public image. The ruckus, as reported in an article by Jack Anderson (not the syndicated Jack) in The Miami Herald, happened at the John B. Gordon Klan No. 5 Woodman of the World Hall at 2800 Bird Ave. My father was first to arrive as part of a police riot squad. He and his partner, Patrolman P. Lipscomb, confronted the Klansman, rescued the reporters, and recovered the camera. Anderson wrote eloquently in the Herald story, ironically comparing the Klan’s “hooded bigotry” and burning cross invitation card to the contrasting Red Cross, “a service which renders help and first aid to humanity without regard to race, creed, or color.”

There is also the story of an 11-year-old boy my father found huddled in a pasteboard box at West Flagler and 23rd Street. He’d gotten lost during a house-hunting trip with his parents. My father tracked the parents down before they even noticed that their son wasn’t in the car with them.

My parents had a social life focused on police friendships, and my Mom had worked the police microphone at the Division of Communications for the city of Miami, so it was not uncommon to have families of other officers at our house on Southwest 118th Street. This was a great source for hearing stories I still recall, like a Twitter feed of Miami crime stories and city politics. All those memories and more came alive when I was given a photocopy archive of news stories from the Herald’s basement many years ago. Who had saved just these stories in a manila file, all about just one officer? Who had diligently gone through and circled just my father’s name in each story? It’s doubtful we’ll ever know, but this was the template that preserves this small history, with my gratitude to the Knights of the Fourth Estate. There are so many stories it is hard to count– long and short, all about these early days of police work in a Miami that no longer exists. I hope this short essay will allow others to remember.

When I was in college, I made a vow: I would NEVER move back to the Catskills and I was NEVER going into the hotel business. I also learned an important lesson: Never say never!

As luck would have it, I married my high school sweetheart David Etess, an internist, who decided that the Catskills was the perfect place to set up his private practice. Of course, the fact that his parents and mine were nearby was a major factor in the decision.

I had grown up in the Catskills, daughter of the famous hotelier, Jennie Grossinger. My grandparents, Selig and Malke, had left New York City’s Lower Eastside in the 1920s when my grandfather became ill. His choice was to relocate to Connecticut and grow tobacco or live in Sullivan County, New York, as a farmer. He chose the agricultural route, but the land was not fertile.

Thankfully, my grandmother was a fabulous cook and they decided to take in boarders. Their business was so successful that, by the second summer, they needed to pitch two additional tents in order to house all the guests. The Grossinger’s Catskills Resort Hotel was officially off to a promising start with my parents and grandparents as partners.

It has been said that our hotel, one of the many famous family-style resorts that dotted the Catskills’ landscape, was the inspiration for “Kellerman’s Mountain Resort” featured in the 1987 movie Dirty Dancing. There also are claims that we were the first to use artificial snow for the ski slope, create a day camp, host a singles weekend and promote future stars such as Eddie Fisher and Freddie Roman.

As proud as I was of our family’s fame and success, I decided I was not going to work there. As a teen, I had worked the front desk as a key girl, helped out in the golf club and ran the switchboard (my favorite). My plan was to be a typical doctor’s wife and join the garden club while staying home with our children.

The problem was that I was bored. I asked my brother Paul, general manager at the hotel, for a task. The task became a job and by the time Grossinger’s closed in 1985, I was executive vice-president of the hotel and secretary- treasurer of the American Hotel and Motel Association (en route to becoming its first woman president).

In the meantime, my husband and I already had established ties in South Florida. In the 1940s, the Grossinger family had built a hotel on 17 Street and Collins Avenue. The army took it over for rest and recreation and then returned the property to us. We sold it and opened the Grossinger Pancoast where the historic Seville Hotel on Miami Beach is now located. But my brother had young school-age children and was finding it difficult to commute, so we gave up the notion of a southern branch.

I never gave up my Florida connection. In fact, our first vacation home was located in International Village at Inverrary, near Forest Trace, the resort retirement community where I now serve as director of hospitality. When my husband could no longer handle the bitter cold New York weather, we bought a condo in Highland Beach where he spent the winter while I commuted to the Catskills. When I retired, we bought a home in Boca Raton so we could be close to our many friends who had relocated to South Florida.

I am a country girl by nature, but I do love the sights and sounds of the big city. That’s why I love South Florida. We can enjoy the amenities of a small town at our local bank, dry cleaner and restaurants where everyone knows your name. But we also have the advantages of a big city with plenty of cultural activities and numerous universities.

I also love the national and international mix of people that is a signature feature of the South Florida melting pot. It reminds me of the hotel where we attracted guests from everywhere, and from every walk of life. Did I mention that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt used to serve pickled herring from the Grossinger kitchen?

Once we moved to Florida, I vowed I was never going to work again, until I was asked to serve as director of hospitality at Forest Trace. The resort retirement community, which opened in 1990, was seeking to duplicate the high standards that made Grossinger’s a success – lavish food, top-notch entertainment and wonderful amenities. I was so taken with the community and with Stanley Rosenthal, who still manages the property, that I came out of retirement and have been part of the team ever since.

Florida in the 1980s was good. Florida in my eighties is NEVER better.

In the 1950s, while I was still a young child, my family moved to Miami Beach from Woodbine, N.J.

When we arrived in Florida, our household was an extended one. There was my mother, Rose, my father, Kalman, and my mother’s parents, Morris and Sophie Silberman. We opened a shoe store (Don’s Bootery) on Washington Avenue shortly after arriving in Florida.

At first, the whole family lived in a rented apartment at Ninth Street and Collins Avenue. A few years later, we purchased a small apartment building at 620 Jefferson Ave., where we all lived. The old Hebrew Academy was located across the street and I remember students playing softball in a vacant lot next to our apartment. On Friday nights, I would go roller skating at Flamingo Park.

Many hotels had large dining rooms or coffee shops where guests on the American Plan ate their meals. I worked as a bus boy at the Algiers Hotel Coffee Shop where I got to deliver trays of food to the Miss Universe contestants staying at the hotel. I also transported baked goods from the in-house bakery to the coffee shop. When I dropped an entire frosted layer cake on the floor, the baker re-frosted the cake and sent it on its way back to the coffee shop.

I paid more attention to clothes than I do now. I remember buying genuine pigskin Hush Puppies shoes with their own brush, and a “bleeding madras” shirt with special washing instructions. Darwin’s was the place to go for the latest men’s fashions, such as tight-fitting, beltless DAKS pants.

For entertainment, we enjoyed taking evening strolls along Washington Avenue. At the Mars Juice Bar, I drank coconut milk from cone-shaped paper cups. There were “fruit shippers” and other stores where tourists could buy baby alligators, little wood crates of orange-colored chewing gum or turtles with painted shells.

There were several movie theaters on Lincoln Road. One of my favorites was the Caribe, which had a live parrot on a perch. On Saturdays, I went to the Colony Theater to see horror movies. The Beach Theater hosted the “Summertime Fun Shows” where you could buy “mystery boxes” hoping they were the lucky ones containing coupons for prizes.

Miami Beach was once referred to as the “winter crime capital” of America. Meyer Lansky attended services at Beth Jacob Synagogue, the “gangster shul,” where I was bar mitzvahed. Illegal bookmaking was prevalent. My grandfather never had a telephone in our shoe store, but some bookmakers wanted to put one in so that illegal bets could be taken at that number. This was an offer he DID refuse.

Many events were held at the Miami Beach Auditorium. The night Dick Clark’s Saturday night “Beechnut Show” was broadcast from the auditorium, I saw Brenda Lee sing “Sweet Nothings.” When Jackie Gleason relocated to Miami Beach, the auditorium was renamed the Jackie Gleason Theater. At the Jackie Gleason show broadcasts, I was on a first-name basis with announcer Johnny Olsen and bandleader Sammy Spear.

Previously open to vehicular traffic, Lincoln Road (between Alton and Washington) was converted to a pedestrian mall in the early 1960s. There were fountains, band shells, colored lights and trams running the mall’s length. In the large Woolworths on the corner, you could buy everything from a parakeet to a banana split. Also on the mall was Saks Fifth Avenue, which piped perfumed air into the street.

Because of easy bus access, downtown Miami seemed to be an extension of the Beach. The Sears Department Store on Biscayne Boulevard had its own restaurant, gas station and candy counter where you could buy bags of nuts and rock candy. Christmas time, we went up on the Burdines roof for carnival rides. At Bayfront Park, I could buy peanuts to feed the pigeons and walk though the “rock garden.”

Before Art Deco came in vogue, the hotels on Ocean Drive were inhabited primarily by senior citizens, some of whom migrated from Eastern European shtetls (villages). Along Ocean Drive were benches and makeshift stages where elderly people played instruments, sang songs and told stories in Yiddish. At Lundy’s Market you could buy lox, knishes, and smoked sturgeon. Butterflake Bakery sold kichel, taiglach, rugelach and onion boards.

Eventually, our shoe store (Don’s Bootery) went out of business, in large part due to the changed demographics. Since my father had worked at the shoe store, he had to look for another job. Eventually he found employment with the City of Miami Beach Parks Department where he worked until the time he retired.

My mother went to work at Burdines on Miami Beach and is still enjoying her lifetime employee discount. Many of the places I mentioned have vanished, but their sights and sounds remain vivid in my mind. Suffice it to say, growing up on “South Beach” was a unique experience that I remember fondly.

My father, Jacob Siegel, came to Florida from Livingston Manor in the Catskill Mountains in New York State. That was in 1925 during the boom in Miami. He and a friend started a concrete block plant in Little River. He went back home to see if the family was well in 1926. He had my mother, brothers George and Harold, and my sister Frances and me. While he was gone the great 1926 hurricane struck and completely wiped out the concrete block plant. He loved Miami and always wanted to return.

In time he had three gas stations on Route 25 in New Jersey: two in Rahway and one in Avenel. When the Depression hit in 1929, the banks foreclosed the mortgages on the three stations and he lost everything again. At that point he decided to start a new life in Florida. My brother George was working on a ship that went from Miami to Argentina so my father brought my mother, my brother Harold and me to Miami. He bought a gas station on Northwest 7th Avenue in Little River.

I was 10 years old and no one wanted to rent a room to anyone with a child. My father then bought what was called a railroad shack in Little River on 79th Street and it had an outhouse in the back yard. Within a week we had indoor plumbing and a bathroom. There wasn’t anything my father couldn’t do. We lived there for about a year and I went to Little River School.

He was looking for something he could do to make a living. He had been a painter and decorator in New York before moving to New Jersey so he started a painting company in Miami, Siegel Painting Company. He painted the Army barracks in Jacksonville and several other Army installations. He had painted some buildings in Clewiston and made many friends there.

One weekend when he was getting ready to return to Miami, he stopped at a gas station and asked them to check a tire on the car. He thought that it was low and might have a slow leak. When he left the station it was getting dark. As you drive past Clewiston there is a small hill. As he was coming down the hill the tire flew off and the car crashed sideways into a tree.

It just so happened to be close to a home where a friend lived. The man heard the crash and came running out. A paint can had fallen from the back of the car and hit my father on the head. The man recognized my father and called out “Oh Mr. Siegel, are you alright?” He helped my father, cleaned him up and took him to the Greyhound bus station so he could get a ride home. When my father got to Miami he just took a bus home. When I saw him come in with a banged head and bloody shirt, I nearly died. He came in the house and took a shower. He then got dressed and sat down to have dinner. He was famished. He ate like he had not had food in a week.

He bought a new car on Sunday and was ready to go back to work in Jacksonville on Monday. This was way before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. We were living in a house that my cousin owned on Southwest 20th Road. My mother was taking care of my cousin’s two children. My father was a member of the Workmen’s Circle and on the Board of Jewish Education in Miami. I was going to Ada Merritt School. We lived there for about 2 years. Later we moved to Southwest 6th Street and 22nd Avenue. I finished at Ada Merritt School and then attended Miami High School.

I used to go to the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA) and play ping pong and dance to the songs on a juke box. When we were teenagers we would go to 8th Street to the Puritan Ice Cream Parlor and get ice cream cones and sit outside at a table. While we were sitting there, William Reiser and another boy came and rode their bicycles with their ice cream cones around our table. Bill’s ice cream fell out of the cone. We all laughed but I guess it wasn’t funny. After that Bill started coming to the YMHA to dance with me.

Bill and his parents lived on Ohio Street in Coconut Grove. When they first came to Miami in 1934, they lived near Southwest 27th Avenue. Bill used to go across the street and shoot rabbits in the woods on the west side of 27th Avenue. Bill’s father was a WWI veteran and he belonged to the Harvey Seeds American Legion Post and played a bugle in their marching band.
Bill learned to be a dental technician and worked in a dental laboratory in the Huntington Building downtown. Miami was still a very small town. Then after Pearl Harbor, Miami and Miami Beach became a training area for the Army and Navy. The band from the aircraft carrier Yorktown was sent to Miami to wait for a new Yorktown to be commissioned. It took so long for a new Yorktown to be built that they were afraid to send them back to sea. They became the 7th Naval District band and played at service centers where the servicemen danced. The girls had to be sponsored by an official in order to dance there. Bill enlisted in the Army.

Bill went through maneuvers in North Carolina and when he was ready to be sent overseas, a desperate call came from Camp Cook in California for dental technicians. They had a lone dentist who needed a technician to make gold crowns and inlays for the men who were going overseas. Bill was also an artist and it was simple for the dentist to teach Bill to do preps for the crowns as well.

When he was sure that he was staying at Camp Cook, he came home on furlough and we got married at my parents’ home by a rabbi. We went back to Camp Cook and stayed there until the war ended. We came home to Miami when he was discharged by the Army.

At 92, I still call Miami my home and although times have changed, I still love it here. This is a picture of me with three cousins on South Beach in 1934. That is the “Million Dollar Pier” in the background with the Minsky’s Burlesque sign.