My grandparents, Adolf and Anna Hofman, were among the early settlers of Delray Beach, arriving there from Germany in 1895. The little town was named Linton. My grandfather was a pineapple farmer. My mother, Clara, was one of their three children. She moved to Miami in 1918 and lived in the downtown YWCA while she […]
My mother was born in Tampa in 1895. Shortly after her birth, the family moved to Punta Gorda. In 1898, there was an offer of free land for homesteading in Dade County. My grandfather and grandmother gathered their brood of six and started out in a horse and wagon. Their route took them north of […]
My father met and married my mother in 1929 and I arrived in 1930. Her mother came to Miami from Cleveland, OH, in 1923 to begin a new life. She opened a tropical fruit stand on the front porch of her coral rock house at Northeast 26th Street and Second Avenue. The fruit was purchased […]
In 1953, my father realized his dream of many years when we moved from Allentown, Pa., to South Florida. I can remember stepping off the train at the old Florida East Coast Railway station in downtown Miami in the middle of August. When the blast of heat hit me, all I could think about was […]
A vacation from my very first job in New York brought me to Miami Beach in 1952 where I stayed with a family friend, just blocks from the ocean. “Aunt” Gertrude Reid, aka “Madame Zaza,” was a crystal-ball gazer who worked at the Kenilworth Hotel, where Arthur Godfrey did his broadcast. The apartment where I […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
My dad, Anthony Abraham, just turned 99 and lives in the same Coral Gables house he bought in 1952. I wasn’t even born yet, but my mom, dad and my three siblings — George (7), Marion (5) and Judy (3) left Chicago and arrived in Miami in 1950 along with my cousin Dorothy, who was […]
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 […]