It was February 1964 and Chicago was really cold – a blustery, painful type of cold. I vividly remember standing on the corner of East Superior Street and Lake Shore Drive, waiting for a bus to take me to the warmth of my new apartment located on Surf Street. It was well after midnight and […]
On the plane ride from Panama to the United States, there was a short layover in Nicaragua. However, we were not allowed to deplane. I looked out the window and asked my mother, “Why are there men with guns outside?” That was my first memory of Nicaragua, where I was born. The day was Feb. […]
My great-grandfather, Joseph Rapisardo, Sr., was a farmer in Chester, New York, with my grandfather, Leo Nicotra. As the cold and nasty winters arrived every year making crop growing a challenge, they decided to move to sunny Florida in 1950. After arriving in Florida my great grandfather and grandfather built a home in Homestead, Florida […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]