I was born in 1946 in Greenwich, Conn. Every winter we would take the train to Miami and stay at the Gulfstream Hotel in Miami Beach. One could look down the beach and not see another hotel nearby. There were a lot of “snowbirds” (although that term had not been coined yet) who stayed there, […]
As it happens with all the affections destined to last, my love for Miami was initially tentative, and needed time to mature. Since my childhood, living in Argentina, I associated South Florida with intrepid pirates raiding the Caribbean waters. Its name awakened the traveler in me, that wanderer that we children of immigrants carry in […]
The Village of Biscayne Park was, during the ’50s and ’60s, a residential community of small neighborhoods squeezed between Miami Shores and North Miami. A single block would house a group of families who were as familiar with one another as they were with close relatives. In the period following World War II, there were […]
In various cultures, grandparents have been seen as a rich treasure. A grandparent’s life is one to be mined for the depths of riches shared in the form of unique stories. One example was the late Winifred Ann Jackson Herzog, my own beloved grandmother. This is an account about how she led a motorcycle club […]
My mother Myrtis Virgina Bell came to Miami in 1913, her birth year, from Polk County. Charles and Virginia Bell, my grandparents, worked in a phosphate mine there. In Miami, they successfully built houses in the Shenandoah area. They had two more children, Jack and Donald, before they divorced, leaving the three children for Virginia […]
The year was 1950. My parents, Bernice and Eddie Melniker, came to Miami because my dad had purchased a drive-in movie theater, the Coral Way Drive-In. They settled in at the Brickell Point Apartments, right on the river, and I was enrolled in the Lear school, then located on West Avenue in Miami Beach. It […]
The road trip began in northeastern Pennsylvania and ended in Miami, Florida, in August of 1985. The plan was two years of grad school at UM for my spouse and then back home. Seemed like a doable plan. We took an apartment at Red and Bird Road. We walked to Allen’s Drugstore for breakfast. Walgreens […]
My thanks to those who have written of their beginnings in South Florida. Their memories have kindled long dormant, almost forgotten, ones in me. And that is a good thing. Although I was born in the 1940s at Jackson Memorial Hospital, my paternal grandmother, Clara Belle Thomas, and her husband came here from Louisville, Kentucky, […]
I have called Miami home for 82 years. Sometimes I feel like “The Last of the Mohicans” because there are so few native born left. I was born in 1927 at Victoria Hospital. My husband Pete Williams also was born that same year, but we grew up in different neighborhoods so never met until high […]
The homeless man knocked on my window while I was stopped at a red light on North Federal Highway, just east of the Miami Design District. He made the motion of hand-to-mouth, the one that says, “Feed me. I’m hungry.” It just so happened that it was June, and in the middle of a heavy […]