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 […]
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 […]
My Miami experience began in 1958 when we moved from Tampa, which was considered the big city, compared to Miami. Miami was the small town and just a place for tourists to visit, where Tampa, old and established, had it all. In November 1958, we loaded up the ubiquitous ’57 Chevy station wagon and headed […]
I may be the only person who can say they were born on Sesame Street. I did not live with Big Bird, but instead in a house at 1216 Sesame St., in Opa-locka, where I was born in 1934. I lived there with my parents, my brother Danny and my sister Judi until my marriage […]
Miami became my home in February 1960 when I was based here as a Delta stewardess. I lived in Miami Springs, on a lake, with three other stewardesses – one from Eastern, one from National, and one from Delta. Other airlines were flourishing at that time, too; there was a large contingent of personnel from […]
My father came to the Magic City in 1916 at the tender age of 3. His mother had taken a new job and moved from Chicago. She wanted to start a new life in what was truly a “frontier” on Biscayne Bay. With perhaps only 10,000 people calling Miami home, it was a tropical paradise […]
My parents, John and Muriel Greist, my sister, Judith, and I were all born in New Haven, Connecticut. The Greist name was pretty well-known in the area because the Greist Manufacturing Company was a major producer of sewing-machine attachments. I don’t remember much about New Haven because I was only 3 when our family moved […]
I grew up a somewhat typical teenager in suburban New Jersey in the late 1950s. I was halfway through high school with a lot of friends and an active social life. My world was perfect. What did I know? The winter of 1960-61 was particularly harsh, with several severe snowstorms. A few times we were […]
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 […]
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 […]