Email Author Kirk Semple

1992 Stories by Kirk Semple

• Billy's Last Stand: The End

  published December 30, 1992

  Seventy-four-year-old antique dealer Billy Herrero vowed he wouldn't walk away from his "friends" -- his sprawling array of period furniture,... More >>

• Dark Passage

  published December 16, 1992

  Legend has it that years ago the engineer who designed I-95's Golden Glades interchange was hunted down at his modest apartment late at night by a... More >>

• Hide and Shriek

  published December 16, 1992

  The autumn sun filtered through the hurricane-battered branches of Fairchild Tropical Garden, illuminating a scene of ecological and communal... More >>

• Stop! Thief! C-R-U-N-C-H!

  published December 16, 1992

  Pictured in this month's newsletter of the Dade County Police Benevolent Association is a tightlipped police officer bound in handcuffs, a... More >>

• The War of the Two-By-Four

  published November 25, 1992

  Sixty-year-old Louise Blair has heart trouble, asthma, and ulcers, and she hasn't got a single tooth left in her head. Her 64-year-old husband... More >>

• First The Seed, Then The Tree

  published November 4, 1992

  For those brave and unfortunate drivers who still suffer the MacArthur Causeway, the Florida Department of Transportation has some good news and... More >>

• Duany To Others

  published November 4, 1992

  Of all the images that capture the horrors of Hurricane Andrew, there may be few more enduring than those that depict the heaps of mangled metal... More >>

• Roger Dodger

  published October 21, 1992

  Officer Carlos De Varona of the Miami Beach Police Department already had followed the speeding Ford Explorer a mile across the MacArthur Causeway... More >>

• Food Fight On 41st Street

  published October 7, 1992

  Anywhere else in Miami Beach, the black-and-orange poster advertising roasted duck would be just another brash entreaty to passers-by with a... More >>

• A Patch of Green

  published September 30, 1992

  There are only two places where eight-year-old Keaudra Weatherington feels safe: behind the locked door of her apartment in a rundown and barren... More >>

• Pave It To Save It: Part 2

  published September 23, 1992

  After Hurricane Andrew paid its battering visit, a few vendors managed to straggle back to the Coconut Grove Farmers Market. The Thai family... More >>

• A Mutt Above

  published July 29, 1992

  He was a down-on-his-luck youngster facing a bleak future when the scouts found him in eastern Iowa, running with the wrong crowd. Beneath his... More >>

• Pave It to Save It

  published July 8, 1992

  Swamilike, the man they call Tomato Richard is seated peacefully in a folding lawn chair beneath an oak tree in Coconut Grove, his thin legs... More >>

• Straight Flush

  published July 1, 1992

  An unsettling stillness has befallen the Miami coast. Swimmers have abandoned the beaches of Key Biscayne and Virginia Key. Sailboats and... More >>

• 9 Weeks Later

  published June 24, 1992

  It was another lesson in imprudence, taught in this tortuous miasma of hucksters and schemers called South Florida. And everything seemed so... More >>

• The Corner of Calamity Avenue and Disaster Street

  published April 22, 1992

  Sometimes a harrowing screech precedes the collision. Sometimes there's nothing except the sudden, wrenching explosion of metal meeting metal and... More >>

• MacArthur Causeway

  published April 8, 1992

  As you head over the apex of the Intracoastal Waterway bridge on the MacArthur Causeway and swoop down across Watson Island in your rented... More >>

• Let's Get Together and Deal All Right

  published March 18, 1992

  It's early afternoon, only hours before the opening bash at the newly restored Marlin Hotel on Miami Beach, and the place is alive. The traffic... More >>

• Scuba Feature

  published February 26, 1992

  The late-October sun was still asleep as Lawrence Allen and Tania Figuerola set out for the Keys and talked about things that only lovers know.... More >>

• Northern Exposure

  published February 19, 1992

  On February 1, readers of the Miami Herald learned that Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee had made a public appearance in one of... More >>

• Water, Water, Everywhere

  published February 12, 1992

  Crack all the jokes you want about household engineering and inefficient repairmen, but Irving Spiegel isn't laughing. For three years, he and his... More >>

• There Goes the Neighborhood

  published February 5, 1992

  In the dimly lighted courtyard of the Bayside Motor Inn on Biscayne Boulevard, newly arrived Haitian refugees cluster in doorways and against... More >>

• Wheeling and Dealing

  published January 22, 1992

  If there was ever a test of your sobriety, manual dexterity, and trust in others, it's launching yourself onto Dade's unsympathetic roadways... More >>

• Guns N' Hoses: Part 2

  published January 8, 1992

  "Sheepish" is not a word you'd ever use to characterize Metro-Dade firefighter Douglas Jewett. During his nineteen years in the department, he has... More >>

• Inside Feature

  published January 1, 1992

  Jack D. Gordon Democratic state senator, 35th District "The incredibly discourteous drivers in Greater Miami, especially on the... More >>