I was born in the city of San Pedro, California. Our family is very large and of Mexican descent. I was the youngest of four children. We grew up in a Catholic parochial school. Then I chose to further my education. I was the only one in my family who went to college. And I […]
South Miami Heights — it brings a smile to my face. I wish the kids of today could have had the childhood we had — it was so simple. Dad was the first of the six Sinclair brothers to move from Massachusetts to South Florida. Mom and Dad moved to Miami in the late ’50s, […]
In 1924, Jo and Frank “Spud” Murphy came to Miami from Port St. Joe in the Florida Panhandle. Originally, they were both from Alabama. My grandfather is nicknamed Spud, after Irish potatoes. He got an offer for a better job as a bookkeeper to move to Miami. They bought a house in Allapattah and my […]
Miami will always occupy a special place in my heart. My beloved grandmother spent such a great portion of her life here that the two are now synonymous in my mind. She had impeccable taste, which means Miami is the second-greatest city in the world; of course, our native Petionville, Haiti, comes in first. My […]
Living in Detroit’s bustling Lebanese community in the 1940s was very predictable -unless you were Joe and Mary Thomas, two of Miami’s pioneers from our nation’s largest Lebanese population. The top priority then was doing everything to help our war effort. Two of Mary’s brothers went overseas, and the youngest died seven months later on […]
A vast field of lights met my gaze as I flew into Miami for the first time in the late ’90s. To the west was the blackness of the Everglades and to the east, the ocean, but below me were lights — a breathtaking array of tightly packed luminescence, tantalizing and exciting. And ironic, as […]
Hands shaking…holding back tears…acting as if it weren’t breaking me apart… I said good-bye with tears falling down my cheeks and walked through the doors, not looking back. They were the doors that would forever separate me from my family. The doors that made it impossible for my grandparents to see me grow up and […]
In the late 1950s, my world consisted of my home, my neighborhood of Stillwater Drive and my school, St. Joseph’s. Life was so simple because there were no worries – at least not from the kids in our neighborhood. We had moved from New York with my mother, Irene, and brother, Richard, after our parents’ […]
My family moved to Florida in December 1944 just after war was declared. I was 15 at the time. This was a time when World War II soldiers were being sent to Florida for training purposes. They occupied many hotels on Miami Beach. A couple of years later, I would become a junior Red Cross […]
I’ve visited Miami often over the past 20 years, sleeping on friends’ couches, perusing thrift stores, gorging on ceviche, watching the ever-changing crowd along Ocean Drive. But it wasn’t until 2009, when I stepped outside all comfort zones to research my book, Fringe Florida, that I got an inside glimpse into the diverse and quirky […]