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 […]
Every mother who wanted to buy her daughter a stunning dress will remember the name “Dorissa of Miami.” This is the story of our mother, Doree Fromberg, a girl who won a scholarship to attend the New York Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) after graduating high school, began designing and sewing dresses in her home […]
Raleigh Atrus and Maitre Bird Bailey left Dacula, Ga., in 1938 in a one-seated car with a boot in the tire and $150. Twelve-year-old Jack sat in the front with Dad and Mom. Three-year-old Jim and I, then 5 years old, were curled up behind them in the crawl space. It took a day and […]
I got here by way of birth, born in Victoria Hospital, which was built in 1924. My mother, Louise Guckert, came from Louisville, Kentucky, and she married Ralph Yount, also from Louisville. My mother was a trip; she never counted this first marriage because today people would just have lived together. The only reason I […]
My adult daughter, Sage Hoffman, lies in a hospital bed, her body attached to numerous IVs, monitors and a catheter. I am in a little cot only a foot away. Sage has just donated a kidney to a long-time friend. Now she is recovering in the ICU unit where the nurses never seem to rest. […]
Oh, Miami! What a wonderful and glorious place to live. I have been in Miami since 1949. My parents moved here from Pennsylvania, when I was almost a year old. My father opened a soda fountain on Southwest 67th Avenue and Eighth Street. At the time, it was the closest place for the Miccosukee Indians […]
The winter in Cleveland was very cold and snowy in 1975. We just came home from a night on the town, and Mort tried to put his key in the front door lock, but it was iced over. He grabbed The Plain Dealer, which was under the mat, and luckily had a match in his […]
The Chandler clan arrived in Miami early in the 1920s so that my father’s father, Thomas Chandler, could make a living working construction in those boom years of early Miami prior to the big hurricane of ’26 that destroyed it all. The family, including six children, lived in the Allapattah area enjoying the fruits of […]
Growing up in Miami has been an experience for me. You never realize that where you live can have such a great impact on your life. Living in Miami has taught me some things — through struggles and hardships, to moments of rejoicing and opportunities, it has taught me that with endurance and faith I […]
We hauled my parent’s aluminum canoe off the roof-rack of his 2002 Mitsubishi Montero and onto the grass near the edge of the Biltmore canal. I grabbed the essentials from the trunk and tossed them into the canoe: two wooden paddles, a foldable, plastic seat, a faded, waterproof cushion, and a couple of well-worn life-jackets. […]