Surprisingly, it was his search for a sedate career that led Liss to the arena of education. Born and raised in Philadelphia's Jewish ghetto, he had made a small fortune in that city's real estate and insurance business by the age of 29, when he moved to South Florida "to kind of semiretire," he says. But a heart attack at age 32 put him out of work entirely.
After Liss was hospitalized, it fell to his wife to become the family breadwinner. "I said to my wife," Liss recalls in an accent redolent of his birthplace, "I says, 'You know, if you want to continue living the life you are accustomed to, you have to do something.'" With her experience as a mother of three children and as an artist, she suggested opening a daycare center. Liss bought a one-acre parcel of land on NW 22nd Avenue and, ignoring his doctor's admonitions, threw himself into the project. The one-story, rectangular building that arose at that address in 1959 was Liss's design, and included a kitchen, an office, and three big classrooms. On April 4, 1959, the doors of Beacon Hill School opened and in walked its first class of twenty prekindergarteners and kindergarteners.
Before the first school year was out, Liss already had begun construction on a second building for more kindergarten space. The waiting list for admittance was growing long and Liss was restless. "You're looking at a fat old man," he says. "Back then I was young and full of vigor and full of, as they say, piss and vinegar." During those early years, he adds, his responsibilities ran from maintenance to bookkeeping to bus-driving to construction. "You did it all!" he exclaims. "You gotta make it work, and I was a workaholic."
Liss says that in 1963 Beacon Hill was the first private school in Dade to integrate. "Everybody was talking about it but they weren't integrating," he says. "Look, children are children. What the heck? When I was growing up in Philadelphia, that's what I knew. I went to school with everybody." The first black student, he recalls, was the daughter of a locally popular jazz singer who frequently performed at the hotels on Miami Beach. "I had expected problems but I think you gotta learn to live with yourself," Liss reflects. "In this particular case, it worked out well. A majority of parents would pat me on the back. But there was also the dark side of it."
Liss recalls how he began receiving anonymous threats by telephone. "At first I really was frightened about it. 'I'm going to kill you,' they'd say. They called me 'nigger lover,' 'you kike bastard,' that sort of thing. I can't even repeat some of the language that was used. Until finally I says to this one caller, 'What's your name?' And he wouldn't tell me. So I says, 'I know you're yellow because you got a streak running down your back.' He says, 'I'm going to come by the school and kill you, that's what I'm gonna do.' So I says, 'I'll tell you what. I'm going to do you a favor.' I says, 'I'm going to stand outside and let you take a shot at me.' Now keep in mind, I wasn't about 70 then. I was young, and when you're young you think you can take the world on." The man never came by the school as far as Liss knows, and with each semester more and more blacks moved into the neighborhood and into his school.
As the years progressed, Liss gradually added more grade levels and built more buildings. He opened the fifth grade this school year and plans to inaugurate a sixth grade this September. Meanwhile, plans are under way to erect another set of classrooms on the site.
And after 35 years, Liss has begun to contemplate the possibility -- as remote as it seems -- of retiring. Or, at least, of passing on the school to his kids or to a nonprofit community organization. Meanwhile, his attention is focused on more immediate concerns, such as the new classrooms and library he wants to build, and the computer system he wants to upgrade so that when his time comes to move on, he says, he "can leave behind a real fine institution."
Amid boxes and files stacked in a school hallway sits a pile of old wooden blocks, segments cut from a two-by-four. "I made those building blocks 35 years ago," Liss boasts. "Cutoffs from an old lumberyard." The blocks are now dark from years of handling in the dirty palms of toddlers and they might be overlooked as trash. But in them Liss sees something emblematic of his institution and his purpose. "If you do it right," he says, turning a block over in his hand, "look how long it will last.
