Tag: Written

My father was a traveling salesman for my grandfather’s haberdashery business, Dixie Company, which manufactured white suits for the poor to buy on layaway in the rural areas of the deep South. He would be more centrally located out of a base in Florida, so my parents, baby sister and I moved to Miami Beach from New York City when I was 6 years old.

We first rented an apartment on Pine Tree Drive near 41st Street. There were hotels on nearby Collins Avenue, but no apartments at that time. That area of Pine Tree was all apartments, not single family homes as it is now. Indian Creek Canal was a lazy waterway with sight-seeing boats docked a little to the south of 41st Street.

The first thing I remember was going over the MacArthur Causeway and seeing the old Flamingo Hotel. The roof would light up at night and it was spectacular. After the hotel went out of business, a group of us kids would bicycle over there to look at the pool. It was a salt-water pool and full of fish, though the hotel was uninhabited.

The MacArthur Causeway was an old drawbridge made out of wood. That, and 79th Street Causeway, were the only ways to access Miami Beach. My grandfather’s brother would take me fishing off that old wooden bridge.

When I was in second grade, we rented a house on Nautilus Court, just off Alton Road. I had a friend whose father was a doctor and he lived behind Mount Sinai Hospital on an island with homes for people who worked in the hospital. It was connected to the hospital by a pedestrian bridge. Mount Sinai’s location originally housed a hotel called The Nautilus.

I went to Nautilus Elementary and in the sixth grade I attended North Beach Elementary on 41st Street, where it still stands and functions today for my friends’ grandchildren. There was a vacant lot on Nautilus Court where soldiers had been bivouacked during World War II.

My father saw the opportunities in Florida development and real estate and began building in North Miami Beach. He built custom homes in a section named Skylake, and then went on to build in an area quite remote, called Kendall.

I started building there years later where Brown’s Airport had been, on Southwest 104th Street and 77th Avenue.

My parents bought a lot at 5004 North Bay Rd. and we built our house in 1950. There was no air conditioning at that time; our house had a hurricane fan to cool it. Jalousie windows and vented wood slats in the interior spaces allowed the air to move freely within the residence.

Carl Fisher’s mansion was a few lots down and we bought the land from his estate. He reportedly had gone bankrupt at some point and in order to save on taxes, he filled his land in. To our chagrin, when we put the pilings in to build the home, we hit his magnificent pool made of thousands of pieces of mosaic tiles.

The house was on Biscayne Bay and as a teenager I would ski in front of the tourist boats that would come to show off Millionaire’s Row.

Some of the families made their parties and celebrations very ostentatious. One of my friends had Tony Bennett as the entertainment at his Bar Mitzvah. They could not stop outdoing one another. Eddie Fisher sang on another’s yacht.

I would take my boat to what is now Fisher Island. On the south side of the island, we would all go fishing. Nothing was there but an abandoned Vanderbilt mansion and rows of large gas tanks kept for storage. There was a road around the island, but it was uninhabited except for an occasional vagrant.

Also, at that time, Lincoln Road was a two-lane street for car traffic. One could park one’s car and do high-end shopping at Saks Fifth Avenue or The Dinghy. The street boasted three theatres — the Carib, the Beach and the Cameo.

In ninth grade I was sent to a boarding school in St. Petersburg called Admiral Farragut Academy. In 10th grade, I entered Miami Beach Senior High School. The old Beach High was on Pennsylvania Avenue and Española Way. It was not air-conditioned and most of the students were Jewish.

I have kept in touch with my friends all these years and have watched Miami Beach and South Dade grow beyond my wildest expectations.

In 1925, my parents and I disembarked in Miami after a three-day train trip from Chicago, and went to stay at a cottage surrounded by a grapefruit grove that belonged to my mother’s aunt. I was three years old, and it marked the beginning of my nearly nine-decade-long adventure in South Florida.

That first evening I responded to a noise at the back door, and found what appeared to be a large kitten, but turned out to be a Florida bobcat. We lived on that farm, now part of the University of Miami campus, for three months before the electric grid reached us.

After the 1926 hurricane, which we rode out in the old McAllister Hotel, we relocated to Fort Lauderdale where my dad operated the city’s only shoe store.

One local character was a Seminole named “Shirttail Charley,” who wandered the unpaved streets cadging nickels and dimes for beer. One day he produced a 50-cent piece as a deposit on “paleface shoes.” Dad gave him a pair, which Charley carried under his arm, donning them only when entering a bar or store.

My life in journalism and public relations began when I was 15, and my football coach asked me to make notes on practice sessions for the Fort Lauderdale Daily News sports editor. After two weeks the editor persuaded me to file complete stories, eventually with a byline. After three months he said, “You’re doing a great job, kid, and I’m going to pay you, too!” He did — one dollar for football season and a second dollar for covering baseball season.

Early on I became fascinated with flying. One day, my best friend Leonard and I scraped together two dollars for a 30-minute sightseeing flight in a World War I “Jenny.” My parents were furious. The pilot was fond of bourbon, and we were henceforth grounded.

Saturday morning movies cost a dime in those days, and after seeing “The Last of the Mohicans,” my pal and I got mohawk haircuts a full 75 years before they became trendy. We were forced to wear caps to hide our “ avant garde” style for months.

After almost four years at the University of Florida and summers spent as a full-time Daily News reporter, I was summoned by the Army Air Corps and eventually flew 35 combat missions as a navigator on a Flying Fortress bomber in the European front.

On a January 1945 bombing mission two of our engines were shot out, forcing us to crash land at a Belgian farm. Both German and Allied forces were in the vicinity. Fortunately, the British got to us first.

In June 1945, I began the final six months of military duty as a public relations officer at Coral Gables’ Biltmore Hotel, at that time a rehabilitation hospital. Those were heady days, with 315 nurses to date, two swimming pools and a golf course.

Among the staff were special services officer Ben Hogan, whose assignment was golfing with visiting generals, and future Dade County Mayor Steve Clark, the payroll sergeant.

In January 1946, capitalizing on my Biltmore PR contacts, a University of Florida fraternity brother and I opened a public relations agency on Lincoln Road. We specialized in nightclubs, restaurants and hotels, including the new oceanfront Sherry Frontenac.

Through the years I have represented such interesting clients as evangelist Oral Rogers, the Fontainebleau resort and Rosie the dancing bear. After arranging an “interview” for Rosie and her trainer at the Miami Herald, the trainer bowed out, leaving the bear and me to fulfill the assignment. When we arrived at the old Herald building on Miami Avenue, pandemonium broke out. A photographer positioned Rosie at a typewriter and the clamor drew Publisher John Knight from his office.

Glaring at me, Knight asked, “What’s going on, Stuart? I thought you only represented hotels!”

“Mr. Knight,” I quickly replied, “this bear just bought a Miami Beach hotel.” The publisher led the laughter.

My public relations career, mostly representing leisure-travel clients, has provided me extraordinary globetrotting opportunities. Though I have visited countless cities in more than 80 countries and every continent except Antarctica, none has replaced Miami.

I’ve led a charmed life in South Florida. In 1948, I married Edith Koenig, a registered nurse, newly arrived from New Jersey. In 1950, I received the first GI housing loan on Miami Beach, which allowed us to build a three-bedroom home on Biscayne Bay for less than $17,000.

Our daughter, Cathy, now a veteran editor and author for National Geographic, and son, Andy, who has taken our PR agency to new heights, have given me three equally successful grandsons.

Following my first wife’s passing after 44 years of marriage, I married another nurse, Sandy Sharpe. We summer in Greenbrier County, West Virginia, where my claim to fame is as the region’s reigning barbecue ribs champion.

Because Miami has been good to me, I strive to give back to the community. We support the University of Miami’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center and the University of Florida, where my son, daughter-in-law Maria and grandsons Alan and Michael are alumni, too. We also support Camillus House.

I’ll celebrate my 92nd birthday this month and still manage to wrestle Gulf Stream game fish as well as play the same bad golf I’ve played for 65 years.

My mother lived until she was 101. That’s my goal now. But even if I don’t make it, Miami has provided a more than rewarding life for me and my family.

I was raised in the Christian Science faith and went to church from the time I was 4 years old in 1939, but I always considered myself culturally Jewish. I had to go to school during the Jewish holidays as a kid in Brooklyn, and when classmates and teachers expressed surprise that I was at school, I responded: “I am a Christian Scientist of Jewish extraction.”

My parents, Paula and Louis Gelman, never denied their Jewish heritage to anyone, and many of my Christian Science friends in New York were also Jewish. I loved visiting my grandmother in Palm Beach as a child when my parents took me on vacation. Sadie Louber, my grandmother, owned a kosher hotel called the Louber Villa, at 231 Sunset Ave., a block and a half from the ocean.

Grandma Louber was a strong, loving influence in all our lives. My brother, Larry Gelman, says that Grandma took him to black churches in West Palm Beach because she loved gospel music, and Larry credits Grandma with his love of music to this day.

There were always interesting guests staying at the hotel. Grandma served kosher meals. My mother and her sisters were always very close, and it was fun getting together in Palm Beach with my cousins and their parents. There was never any discussion in my presence as a child or an adult about being Jews in a predominantly Gentile area, nor did I realize that it was highly unlikely that a Jewish hotel could have been owned by Jews in Palm Beach.

I moved to Miami as an adult in 1958. It was my first introduction to Miami Beach and its Jewish population and culture. During the early 1960s, we would visit Grandma at her hotel. We always got a kick out of the fact that the Kennedys had an estate in Palm Beach not far from where our family hotel was. To the best of my knowledge, we were still the only Jewish family owning property at that time in Palm Beach.

I decided to investigate how my family came to own this property. I asked a friend, real-estate attorney Daniel Doscher, to look into it, and he did the legal research on the property. He discovered that my father, who was an attorney in New York City, somehow managed to buy it in the late 1930s. He gave the title ownership to Paula Gelman, my mother, and her sister, Ruth Louber.

In 1945, the Louber Villa was transferred to Sadie Louber, my mother’s mother, and Grandma Louber took over the hotel. My grandparents had owned a hotel in Saratoga called the New Windsor Hotel, which they lost in the Great Depression of the 1930s. (I have no memory of Louis Louber, my grandfather, since he passed away when I was very young.)

A few years ago, I visited the Jewish Museum of Florida in Miami Beach and was shocked to see a sign in the museum collection that read: “Always a view, never a Jew.” I thought that the museum might be very interested in the story of the Louber Villa, a hotel that was Jewish-owned and that welcomed Jews in Palm Beach during those years. Today, the picture of the Louber Villa is now in the permanent collection of the Jewish Museum.

Even after the hotel was sold and torn down some years ago, we visited the empty lot annually and walked around the area for sentimental reasons. Recently, my cousin and her husband were in Palm Beach, and we got together there once again!

There is now a large, modern accounting firm on Grandma’s property. We walked to the corner of Sunset Avenue and County Road on our way to the beach, a block and a half away. Almost as a commentary on the inexorable passage of time, there is a beautiful Orthodox Jewish temple on the corner, barely two doors down from where our hotel had been.

Palm Beach has a special sentimental meaning for me, but my permanent home is now in Miami. The changes in the culture and population in South Florida over the many years I have lived here make me proud to live in Miami. It is an exciting place to call home.

My grandfather, George W. Smith, and my grandmother, Ellen Cook Smith, came to Homestead in 1925 at the height of the boom.

My grandmother’s brother, “Uncle Bob” Cook, had urged them to come south. He later served as a Dade County commissioner. My mother Evelyn Smith was 10 years old. She had two brothers (Lester and Wade), and one on the way when they drove their Model T Ford down the two dirt ruts in a road called “Dixie Highway.”

My grandfather had converted the Model T into a sort of camper with a kerosene burner so that Grandmother could cook and they could all sleep inside. There were no road signs, no rest stops (except in the woods), and only painted markers on trees to show the way. According to my mother, the east coast highway was marked with red birds painted on pine trees and the road from Georgia to Florida’s west coast was painted with white stripes on the trees.

During a particularly bad rainstorm, the road became so muddy that they could not travel. They decided to stop and stay at a turpentine camp for several days where they lived on stale doughnuts.

My mother told her favorite story of finding a bracelet in the bushes on one of their “rest stops.” She gave it to her dad who took it into Miami when they arrived. A jeweler gave him $75 for it and he bought his first piece of property in Lemon City with the proceeds.

They finally settled in Homestead and endured the terrible hurricanes of 1926, 1928 and 1935, all the while farming (tomatoes and potatoes), first in the Redlands and then in the East Glades. Granddaddy told of the massive clouds of mosquitoes in the ’glades that required him to wrap his arms and legs in newspaper under his clothes and to put burlap bags over the muzzle of the mule to keep it from suffocating from inhaling the bugs.

He said that he always carried a shotgun under one arm to shoot rattlesnakes “just in case.” He didn’t want to lose his plowing mule. Eventually, the old mule became too old to work and died, whereupon Granddaddy gathered his sons around him and announced that they “might not have a crop this year” because he was going to buy a tractor and didn’t know how it would perform. But, he was never one to shy away from technology and later bought a new car every two or three years. Apparently, the tractor performed very well.

My mother and uncles attended Homestead schools and graduated from Homestead High School (later, Homestead Junior High). The uncles all served their country during the war. Hubert, the youngest, and Wade were in the Navy, while Lester (the oldest) went into the U.S. Army. After the war, they all came home to farm with their dad.

My mother met my dad in North Carolina when she was a teacher in his hometown, Rural Hall, near Winston Salem. My dad, George W. Ledford, drove for Greyhound bus lines during the war, taking Marine recruits to boot camp at Parris Island, SC.

After World War II, they moved to Homestead to farm with my grandfather. They farmed with him and Mother’s brothers, Wade and Lester, for 50 years. The youngest, Hubert Smith, went to school to become a chiropractor and he moved his family to Gulfport, MS in the mid-1960s.

As my brother, Larry Ledford, and I grew up, we experienced the growth of Homestead with the establishment of the Strategic Air Command (SAC) base. Many of my friends at South Dade High School were from Air Force families with the rest of us “farmers’ kids” coming from older families who had been in the area for a while.

I was there during the Cuban Missile Crisis and sat on my parents’ front porch watching the endless convoys coming down Krome Avenue. We could hear the B-52 bombers revving their engines at all hours, on alert should their service be needed. I also felt our house tremble when an underground missile was test fired in the Everglades, west of town. I was 15 years old and home alone at the time, certain that we were all going to die and that I’d never see my family again.

I was a senior at South Dade High School when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I was sitting in the parking lot waiting for my riders to meet me after school when one of them raced out to the car crying that “the President’s been shot!” All these years later, I still recall that moment very clearly. That singular event changed us and it changed our country.

Many of my classmates went off to Vietnam; others of us went to college. For security and solidarity, seven of us girls from the class of 1964 went to the new University of South Florida, which was then a sand dune with several buildings. There was one little pizza place and a Holiday Inn nearby, as well as a Schlitz brewery.

Freshmen were not allowed to have cars so we were pretty much stuck on campus. There was no football, basketball or other intercollegiate sports, so some of my friends bolted for the high life at the University of Florida. Gainesville certainly had more to offer, but my wise parents knew I would HAVE to study at U.S.F. and so I stayed.

I never returned to live in Homestead but visited many times during my adult life and came back to help clean up after Hurricane Andrew, another event that changed our lives forever.

My grandparents’ story is not unique among the pioneers, but I often wonder if any of us today would have the fortitude to stick it out in South Florida if conditions were the same today. With the end of the war and the advent of air-conditioning, my grandparents saw South Florida go from a booming agricultural area to a huge city.

They survived many hurricanes, and yet they stayed, farmed the ‘glades and raised their family. They saw interstate highways being built and they saw men walk on the moon. (My grandmother never quite believed that.) To paraphrase Shakespeare: “What a piece of work!”

I became enamored with Miami in my early teens. Hearing that it was the “in” place to vacation and, as a 15 year old, wanting desperately to be “in,” I persuaded my parents to take our family on a much-needed vacation, at least according to me.

My mom, dad, two younger sisters and my roly-poly grandma (known as Bubs) all left for our vacation in our ‘50s Chevy sedan, driving from Michigan to Miami Beach for the Christmas holidays. Daddy knew everything, or so he said, and of course we didn’t need any hotel reservations. We’d just “play it by ear.”

After three and a half days of a grueling drive (no freeways then), we arrived in Miami and spent an entire day going from hotel to hotel, stuffed like sardines in a hot car (no air conditioning, either), with my baby sister crying all the way. In spite of a frantic start, our stay was heavenly: the weather, the palm trees and the Miami colors, all eye candy to me, a Midwestern teen-ager.

A few years later, I visited Miami Beach for the second time, this time accompanied by my handsome husband, both of us in our late teens. We honeymooned at the Nautilus Hotel and, upon checking in, were given the Presidential Suite. The hotel was oversold and wanted to make amends because our requested room, the least expensive in the hotel, was not available. Being young, inexperienced “adults,” we demanded our tiny room, frightened that the hotel would make us pay for the upgrade. The management agreed and gave another couple the thrill of a lifetime.

While at the Nautilus (referred to in the Midwest as “Honeymoon Heaven”) we made lifelong friends, saw the stars: Carmen Cavallaro and his orchestra at the Fontainebleau Hotel and also the very funny “Professor” Irwin Corey; ate stuffed cabbage at Wolfie’s and had fun in the sun, me wearing what became known as the “Siren” swimsuit by day and my “merry widow” corset and plastic Spring-o-Lator shoes in the evening.

Some years and four babies later, we visited Miami for our third time with our very young children. The occasion was the American Trial Lawyers convention. We stayed at the Beau Rivage in Bal Harbour, headquarters for lawyers with families.

The convention was nearby at the Americana and featured superstar lawyers . One evening we joined other lawyers and their wives (female attorneys were a scarcity in those days) at our first taste of Little Havana.

Years later, Barbara Capitman invited me to speak to her Art Deco Preservation League, comparing Deco architecture to the fashions of the period, which by this time had become a subject of my expertise. When my husband joined me later that week, Capitman’s son and his business associates talked us into investing in some of the original Deco hotels, such as the Cardozo and the Leslie. We saw my favorite side of Miami, the Deco district, and later partied with Eartha Kitt at the Hotel Victor. I took lots of pictures in the nearby Amsterdam Palace, later to become Casa Casuarina, home of my good friend, the late designer Gianni Versace. We held our “hotel” meetings at “The Pink House,” where the TV show “Miami Vice,” starring Don Johnson, was being filmed.

Yes, Miami Beach was in our blood and, after staying at various places on the beach, we bought our present home near the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc hotels – almost 30 years ago. Getting away from the Midwestern winters with frigid temperatures and snow, spending Sundays on Lincoln Road, early December at Art Basel Miami, and midwinter antique shows have added to my fun times.

The boardwalk and the clay courts have been a big draw to my tennis playing, jogging husband. The wide choice of restaurants with their famous and soon-to-be-famous chefs have also added another element of good times/good eats (and good diets) over the years…but the broadening culture base in the area, with its Design District, Arsht Center, Bass Museum of Art, the stunning and educational Wolfsonian and, of course, the gorgeous New World Center, designed by Frank Gehry, together with the always heavenly Books & Books, have given us more than just “fun in the sun.” Miami has given us a home away from home, and then some.

Being raised in St. Louis, Miami was always that exotic place I read about. I never really thought I’d be living here.

On a trip back from Central America in 1975, my partner Jim Hewitt and I landed in Miami in February. We didn’t want to face winter up north, so we found a cheap apartment on Miami Avenue and 20th Street. A noisy place that is still there, it is wedged between a busy street, a jet flight-path and a railroad track.

In 1978 Jim and I parted in New Orleans, and by 1980 I met Brenda Williams. We fell in love and were soon living together. In 1982, we moved to Miami Beach, living at the Chesterfield Hotel on South Beach.

At that time the city still required Civilian Registration cards to work on Miami Beach, a leftover from the 1930s for monitoring seasonal workers that the State Legislature overturned in 1986. So, we got ours but never had to use them. Within a month we had moved across the bay to Miami, living in the Edgewater neighborhood off Biscayne Blvd. at 23rd Street. It was an old neighborhood with a few new multi-storied apartment buildings, but mostly old residences subdivided into apartments like the one in which we lived.

Brenda’s 15-year-old daughter Rosalyn moved down here with us and went one year to Robert E. Lee Jr. High School at 3100 NW 5th Avenue. We then enrolled Rosalyn in Miami Beach High. Normally, from where we lived she would have gone to Jackson High School on 36th Street in Allapattah, but we were leery of an inner city school in that neighborhood, so because of desegregation policy and her being black, we were able to enroll her in Beach High.

Beach High is where she met a local boy, Keith Lankford, whom she eventually married and with whom she had our two grandsons, Keith Jr. and Kevin.

Our neighborhood in those days was a pleasant place to live. One of our family traditions was to walk down the Boulevard to the Omni Mall. At the time, it was a thriving mall with Burdines and Penney’s anchors and full of eating and shopping places and even a movie theater. Our Friday destination was for pizza at Cozzoli’s, then just hang out walking the mall or take in a movie.

In 1983, Brenda and I got married at Unity on The Bay in Miami, a couple blocks from our home. Having lived together for three years it was a small wedding celebrating our life together with just the Church Notary officiating, Rosalyn and two friends as witnesses.

Brenda and I were living on Miami Beach in 1996 when we got divorced. It was amicable and we remained friends. Brenda later became ill and was diagnosed with ALS. She stayed with Rosalyn’s family in West Park until she died in August 2000 and where I visited her often. I am still a part of Rosalyn’s family and did extensive travels with my youngest grandson Kevin when he was a teenager.

I am still here, living on Miami Beach and working for the past decade at MACtown a residential facility for developmentally disabled adults in Little Haiti (Little River) Miami.

My parents, Sam and Esther Leviten, and my brother, Eddie, came to Miami from Chicago, in the summer of 1946, because my father had hay fever.

They moved to the Shenandoah area in the city of Miami. I was born on December 8, 1947. My father worked for different companies, until he bought Atlas Moving & Storage in 1948, and he later started Atlas Rug Cleaners. We moved a few times (it was free) until we bought a house on Southwest 18th Street and 18th Avenue. We stayed there until 1980.

My parents were active in many organizations. One was the American Jewish Congress, where they helped to fight religion in the schools. Our family was active at Beth David Congregation from 1949-59. I rejoined on my own in 1967. Other organizations Dad belonged to were: the Greater Miami Jaycees, the Graybeards, Sertoma International, the Elks Club, Business Exchange and The Movers Association.

He was president of the National Defense Transportation Association when Hurricane Donna came to South Florida in 1960. My parents and I went down to the upper Keys after the storm to find out what kind of transportation was needed to get supplies and food down there. Dad died from Parkinson’s in 2006.

Mom was active in the PTA at Beth David and at my brother’s and my schools: Coral Way Elementary, Shenandoah Junior High, Miami High for Eddie and Gables High for me. She was also active in many diet clubs! Compared to Americans today, she wasn’t that fat! My parents and I were also active in many political campaigns. Mom died from lung cancer in 1970, although she never smoked.

Eddie was active in 322 AZA (B’nai B’rith Organization) during high school, and he was even president one year.

I was active in the chorus at Gables High, even though I was told to lip synch by my best friend! I was better at selling chorus candy and working in the choral library. I tied for the win in candy sales my sophomore year. We enjoyed the state chorus contest in Daytona every year. After I started lip synching, we were rated superior!

Eddie went to the University of Florida and received his bachelor’s degree, and was in Tau Epsilon Phi. I went to University of Cincinnati for 1¼ years and froze. I came back and worked for two years. Then I went to Miami-Dade Junior College and F.A.U. Dade Center (on South Beach).

Eddie moved to New York, got married, had a son and two grandchildren, and owned an electrical supply business. He retired a few years ago. He plays bridge!

I worked at different jobs until I was hired by Dade County. I worked there for 31½ years, until I retired a year and a half ago. Volunteering has been my life, through political campaigns, the feminist movement, my temples, history groups, the LEAD program, and fundraising for breast cancer research. Now I volunteer for the county. Temple Israel is my temple now, because they helped me so much when I had breast cancer.

Robert Conner died on March 3, 2012 before he was able to finish compiling his Miami Story. His wife Linda Conner submitted the article for publication on the one-year anniversary of her husband’s death:

I was born at Jackson Memorial Hospital, but my life really began when I was fortunate enough to be adopted by Wilton and Enid Conner.

Dad, “WW” as he was known, grew up in Washington, D.C. Mom is from Marietta, Ohio, and grew up on a farm. Dad was transferred to Miami by the U.S. Quarantine Service in 1943.

They first lived on Biscayne Boulevard, and then, in 1946, bought a home in Hialeah. The house was quite small, especially by today’s standards, at about 700 square feet and it cost less than $6,000. In those days, there was a cow pasture across the street and Hialeah was a very small town. Henry Milander was the mayor – often referred to as “King Henry” – and he got me my first job, with the trash department.

Most of my friends went to Hialeah High School, but I ended up at Miami Springs High the first year it opened. During high school, I joined the civil air patrol just so I could go flying in airplanes. We spent the most time in C119 Boxcars, flying out of Opa-Locka airport, and had bivouacs in various places, including Greynolds Park.

I looked forward to the special occasions when we ate out at Pickle Herring Charlie’s or went for ice cream at Jahn’s on Miracle Mile. We went to the Essex theater on Hialeah Drive, the Olympia Theater downtown and the Drive-in on LeJeune. On the way to the drive-in or to Jahn’s, you might get stopped by an airplane on LeJeune Road, because the hangars were on the east side of the street and they would taxi across to the runways on the west side.

The family attended the Presbyterian church and mom sang in the choir. After high school, I was going to go to Central America to work with a missionary group from the church, but plans changed and my girlfriend, Pat Walters, and I got married. We found a garage apartment in Biscayne Park and I went to work for Winn-Dixie, and a little while later we welcomed our daughter, Tamara. As too often happens when couples marry young, Pat and I parted ways and Tami now lives in Alabama with her husband, Charles Anderson, an Iraq war veteran.

I stayed on in South Florida and went to work for flood control, part of the water management agency. My route took me all over the county and out into the Everglades. Later, I became a manager at Arby’s on Coral Way, and started the most interesting part of my life.

It was the early 1970s when I became a volunteer at Switchboard of Miami, often referred to as the “hippie hotline.” The cast of characters volunteering at Switchboard was an interesting one – Vietnam vets, commune members, bored-but-committed rich kids, high school and college students looking to find their way.

Volunteers were given basic first-aid training and on-the-job training for answering the phones. Phone calls also ran the gamut from callers just looking for someone to talk with and listen to their problems, to partiers looking to identify the drug they were about to ingest, to the more serious calls from people contemplating suicide and those who had taken too much of a drug and were afraid to go the hospital.

We also directed people to various agencies for everything from food stamps, to housing, to spousal or child abuse. We ran first-aid rooms or tents at all the concerts, which was a particularly popular job with volunteers as it got us into all the concerts free.

In the summer of ’72 we had a call that there was a riot on Miami Beach and all hands were needed to go to Flamingo Park to render first aid and help with the situation. It was the Republican National Convention and many were braced for trouble.

Miami Beach was blessed to have at that time an amazing police chief in Rocky Pomerance. Chief Pomerance was smart and calm, and he created a “no bust zone” in Flamingo Park . So rather than a riot, we arrived to find “Beat Poet” Alan Ginsburg sitting in a large circle reading his poetry and smoking – and he was completely nude. It was quite a sight.

I would say that it was a wasted trip but something happened that would change my life forever. I grabbed a ride home from someone with a car and, when I got in, I met Linda Schimmel, my future wife. We got married in 1975 at the Venetian Pool in Coral Gables. Linda always says it was a much larger wedding than originally planned, as every time I ran into old friends I would invite them. It was an interesting guest list and the best party I ever went to!

At the time, I was working as a bridge tender running the Brickell Avenue Bridge, and then I transferred into bridge maintenance. Eventually, I left work with the state to pursue my talent, which was working with plants. I went to work as grounds foreman at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, and then in plant cultivation and production, and finally to work for myself doing landscaping and lawn maintenance.

Linda and I loved to eat out, but many of our favorite places no longer exist. Later in life, we were not much into concerts anymore, but were big Marlins fans and really looked forward to the new ballpark.

From Linda Conner:
Bob was diagnosed with cancer in 2004 and suffered many challenges. Back when “Miami Stories” started appearing, we began working on our own stories and, as Bob’s health declined, it fell by the wayside. He passed away March 3, 2012, never having quite finished, and never getting to sit in Marlins Park. As his wife, I have gone back and done a little “polishing” of Bob’s Miami Story, but it is a fond remembrance of his life in South Florida.

During the early 1940s, my dad was making uniforms for the Armed Forces, but by 1944 it was time to move on.

Dad had experience working in his father’s hotel in Hartford (The Hotel Bond) and his brother already owned a hotel in South Beach. When they learned The Betsy Hotel was available, Dad (Abe Libman) leased it with his brother (Lou Libman), and that began our life in Miami Beach.

The hotel was a great pride and joy. I handled the beach chairs and towels for our guests and made great tips. I knew Rocky Pomerance then, when he was just a rookie on the police force. He was on a six-month trial period, but Rocky was bright. He wore an arm band that read in Spanish that he could speak Spanish, but he couldn’t speak a word.

We leased the downstairs of the lobby of The Betsy to S & G (a gambling syndicate) and that’s where I would go and have my lunch with my brother. They would be on the phones, and we would have cold cuts – corned beef, salami, and every other kind of cold cuts you could think of, plus cold drinks and coffee, and they would help me with math homework.

When my dad entered into an agreement with the National Baptist Convention, The Betsy became one of the first hotels to allow a black convention to be held in Miami Beach. Our friends at the Henrosa Hotel around the corner promised us that nothing would go wrong, and they sat in the lobby keeping watch. It was a great convention.

When my friend Irwin Meltzer and I were teenagers, we thought a night club for teenagers would be great idea. We made a deal with the owner of the Wofford Hotel, next to the Roney Plaza, and we started the Rhythm Club, with ice cream, soft drinks, and jazz from Liberty City. It was a blast.

South Beach was a kid’s playground, but the graveyard for old people. At The Betsy, we had Mrs. Tisch, Larry and Bobby’s mother. Larry (Laurence Tisch) told me he was going to build a high-rise hotel in Bal Harbour, and call it the Americana. I told him he was nuts, too far from the beach. Was I wrong!

My brother and I went to different schools. I went to the Lear School, on West Avenue, and my brother, Larry (the smart one), went to Beach High. My brother went off to the University of Florida and I went to the Air Force.

I was stationed in San Francisco and took advantage of being in the Air Force by going to the University of California, taking night courses. I also taught judo and life-saving training. I moved up to sergeant very quickly and was discharged 3 1/2 years later.

When I returned, I got a job at the Robert Richter hotel as an assistant manager. Later, I went to the Versailles, and then I became the assistant manager at the Floridian. I ran the card games for Mike Wassell, Meyer Lansky and others, and supplied the food and was allowed to cut the pot. Later, I became the manager of the Floridian, and then the manager of the Fleetwood, next to the Floridian.

I was introduced by mail to Bleema, a very beautiful girl in Montreal, and after three years of writing, but not seeing her or calling her, I went to the Cornell School of Hotel Administration in Ithaca, N.Y. My father said I was so close to Montreal, I had to meet her.

Three dates and now 58 years later, we are still married, with four children and seven grandchildren. What a lucky break. You should always listen to your parents. We came back to Miami Beach, and I took over the Bal Harbour Hotel as manager.

Those years were exciting. When a friend of mine, Irwin Gars, got out of law school, we started to develop commercial real estate in New England, but remained living in Miami Beach.

Much has happened in Miami Beach, and it’s still the greatest place to live. The future of Miami Beach is in the leadership it will have, and I think the new convention center will make a big difference. Miami Beach will be here for the next generation. Enjoy it – it’s one of a kind.