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 […]
In the 1920s, the film industry was beginning to invest in “sound” for movies. Impressive theaters were built and audiences came rushing to escape the reality of life. Movies and vaudeville drew thousands of people to these spacious, elegant buildings known as movie palaces, and Miami was no exception. The Olympia Theater was one of […]
It was the end of the first week of June, 1963. I had just finished third grade at Shenandoah Elementary School and I was looking forward to summer vacation. Papi was a third-year resident in neurosurgery at Jackson Memorial Hospital; he was on call 36 out of every 48 hours. Neither my mother nor my […]
The Silver Meteor and the Champion were the two sleek trains that came to Miami from the Northeast in the early 1940s. My first trip to Miami was with my parents, Harry and Jeanette Levine, and my younger brother, Yale. Leaving Metuchen, N.J., on a drizzly morning in February, we traveled all night, through the […]
Although I was born in Miami, I left when I was a couple months old and did not return until I was almost seven. My father got hired as a pilot for Pan American Airlines, but when they cancelled his training class, he took a job for Dominicana Airlines, based in Santa Domingo. When the […]
My father, John Mantell, was born in 1898, somewhere in Romania. At age 16, he emigrated to the United States and was employed by relatives as an apprentice in the parquet and flooring craft industries. Industrious and of high intelligence, he quickly became skilled in this craft, learned to speak impeccable English, and adapted quickly […]
As a youngster, I was excited to be driving out 36th Street to see my uncle, Dave Click, arrive in an airplane. He was secretary to Florida state Sen. Trammell. The airstrip was just a small landing area in a big grassy field with a chain-link fence around it. (In later years, I spent much […]