I don’t think there could have been a better place for a child to grow up than Miami in the 1940s and 50s. The Depression and World War II were over and the post-war boom was in full swing. My father, Ernest R. Graham, an engineer, was forced to become a dairy farmer in 1932, after hurricanes, floods and the failure of his employer, the Pennsylvania Sugar Co.
Soon thereafter he lost his first wife to cancer. My mother, Hilda Simmons, was a teacher who left her Pan- handle home of DeFuniak Springs because the Depression-strapped school system couldn’t pay its faculty. She met my dad on a bus to Jacksonville, where she hoped to find a job. She found romance. They married with the understanding that Hilda would raise Ernie’s three children.
Ten months later, I was born. Shortly after my birth at University Hospital, I was taken to a two-story, coral rock house in the northwest Dade County village of Pennsuco (near Hialeah).
Growing up on the farm was a very formative experience. I learned discipline and responsibility through my summer jobs and after school chores raising 4-H Club Holstein and Angus heifers. My love of the environment grew from the Everglades.
For nine years, I rode a school bus to Hialeah Elementary and Junior High School (now South Hialeah Elementary). Built in the 1920s as a school for Seminole Indian children, by the war years it was home to children of working-class families and single moms whose husbands had gone to war. If you wanted a living Miami experience in democracy, few places would equal Hialeah. There was only one interruption in my nine years at Hialeah. In 1947, two back-to back hurricanes ripped through South Florida. Our home was under was under two feet of water and badly damaged. My parents sent me to live with my paternal grandmother in dad’s hometown, Croswell, Mich., while the house was being repaired. I was in sixth grade and received my first exposure to partisan politics.
The Republican candidate for president in 1948 was Tom Dewey, a Michigan native who was popular in conservative Croswell. Our class voted: Dewey, 26, Harry Truman 1 (mine). That vote has endured as one of my proudest political moments.
When I returned to Pennsuco, I was more aware of South Florida’s Southern lineage. During the boom years of the 1920’s, new residents from throughout the eastern United States flocked to Miami. During the Depression, Northerners found better opportunities and left. This was not true for Southerners, who for almost 30 years dominated the culture, economics and politics of Miami.
In 1959, Adele Khoury and I were married. She grew up in Miami. We met as University of Florida students. When we returned to South Florida in 1962, it was a community undergoing unprecedented change. The first of the Social Security retires had found Miami and were fundamentally reshaping much of the eastern portion of the country. At the same time, refugees from Cuba’s communist state had begun to settle here and were legitimizing Miami as an international city. The calm, relaxed, parochial Miami of our youth had transformed into the dynamic, sometimes confounding, always exciting and passionate city of today.