Legendary bad neighbors: Egypt and Israel. The Hatfields and the McCoys. Dennis the Menace and George Wilson. Let’s add a new twosome to the list: Homestead Air Force Base and Biscayne National Park. Separated by a scant two miles, the sites are linked by a drainage canal that has become…
This past summer, Dade County Court Judge Victoria Sigler won the Singing Judges Contest at the South Miami-Kendall Bar Association’s annual banquet at the Biltmore Hotel. Every year the association invites Dade’s judges to sing for their dinners; besides dining free, the winner parades around the banquet room to the…
First there was Moses and his Ten Commandments. Then David Letterman and his Top Ten List. And now Miami Herald publisher Dave Lawrence introduces his Nine Pillars of Excellence. Faced with a newspaper in decline and staff morale at an all-time low, Lawrence and Herald president Joe Natoli issued a…
While other municipal governing bodies are more ethnically representative of their constituents, the Miami Beach City Commission has been dominated by Anglo Jewish males.
Omar Hernandez watches paternally as the regular crowd shuffles into the card room behind the Copacabana Lounge. Each Thursday the players arrive here at approximately 8:30 p.m. to enter the Tropicana’s weekly blackjack tournament, the first, and so far only, such tournament held aboard a cruise ship in South Florida…
Rising from the clutter of condos along the shoreline of Biscayne Bay in Miami Beach are two great, white, Y-shape relics of Sixties block architecture. Touted as the largest apartment complex in South Florida, the 1277-unit Morton Towers has been featured in the Latin American version of the popular show…
Rod Glaubman got carjacked on the information superhighway, and his disk has been a little bit floppy ever since. Glaubman, an amiable, white-bearded South Dade resident and concert producer, subscribed to America Online this past summer, intending to use the commercial online service to access information, send e-mail to friends,…
As Capt. Dave Shaw can tell you, it’s a straight shot from Key West to Havana. Just keep the compass pegged to 225 degrees, kick back, and pop a Budweiser. No worries. During the past twelve months, Shaw has made more than a dozen trips to the “large island 90…
On a sunny Sunday afternoon in East Hialeah, a rooster crows in a shady, fenced-in yard located a few blocks from LeJeune Road. Across the street, in the carport of a pink stucco house, sits a truck emblazoned with a sign that reads “Efrain Box Lunch.” Not far away is…
Nine years ago a part-time letter carrier in Edmond, Oklahoma, killed fourteen people before turning a .45-caliber pistol on himself. In 1991 a postal worker in Royal Oak, Michigan, killed four of his supervisors before shooting himself with a sawed-off .22-caliber carbine. Earlier this year a staffer at a postal…
The Heftel Broadcasting Corporation’s acquisition last year of four of Miami’s most popular Spanish-language radio stations — including two of the three most politically influential AM outlets in the Cuban exile community — raised the ire of moderate exile groups opposed to those stations’ strident anti-Castro bias and their methods…
Victor Van Gilst isn’t a tourist in this town, but he knows a lot about what it’s like to be one: As a free-lance tour guide, he makes his living leading visitors on excursions around South Florida. And late last month, Van Gilst says, he got a different sort of…
Kirk Semple has won a 1995 School Bell Award for Journalistic Excellence for his cover story “After the Brawl.” The award will be presented this Saturday, October 14, during the annual Florida Education Association/United luncheon, which is being held this year at the Hyatt Regency in Miami. Semple, a New…
Going south on U.S. 1 near SW 220th Street, off to the right in a grassy clearing down a scarcely paved road from the Disco South Inn and a ramshackle grocery braced by metal bars that stretch over every gap in its faded wood faaade, you can see Pastor Bonny…
As the sun bakes their blue Nissan Sentra, Peg and Pepper cruise the streets of Perrine on a weekday afternoon in search of Janet, an angry crack addict who suspects she is HIV-positive. With Peg behind the wheel and Pepper riding shotgun, they drive up and down streets dotted with…
At the trophy presentation following this year’s Lipton Tennis Tournament, victor Andre Agassi waved his heartfelt gratitude to the legions of cheering fans. Being the deeply religious fellow that he is, at some point in the proceedings he more than likely raised his gaze skyward in thanks to an even…
For new listeners, WLRN-FM (91.3) can be a bewildering place. One minute the public radio station may be broadcasting a symphony from Royal Festival Hall in London, then in the next minute, a New Orleans Mardi Gras brass band. Or a percussion ensemble from Zaire. Or synthesized music from outer…
The press conference at Victor’s Cafe had been convened to introduce Jorge Luis Gonzalez to Miami. The heavyweight amateur boxing champ from Cuba defected a few months earlier while at a meet in Finland, and now, on this June afternoon in 1991, he was a hot property. Dozens of representatives…
Like many trade associations, the owners and operators of duty-free stores around the world get together once a year for a convention that provides opportunities to study industry trends, listen to presentations from their peers, and to pass around business cards in that never-ending endeavor known as networking. This year’s…
Within easy reach, Jim Wellington has virtually everything he needs to watch over the South Miami Avenue drawbridge that spans the Miami River. Looking like a St. Nick of the waterways with his white hair and beard, Wellington has settled in for the overnight shift inside his fifteen-by-fifteen, glass-walled lair,…
A line of cars snakes down U.S. 1 toward a party in Kendall. Although tropical storm Allison is directly over Cuba at the moment, a torrent of rain has fallen on Miami, leaving the streets glistening and slick. There are about twenty cars in all, including a BMW 325i, a…
As the gavel finally falls on the O.J. Simpson trial, so too ends one of the greatest advertising coups in Miami history. Since May, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Lance Ito has been tacitly endorsing the only Miami television station that sent a reporter to California to cover the…
