In early 1941, Europe and Asia were at war and the threat of United States involvement was growing exponentially. Not to be deterred, the Bennett family (Mom, Dad and 5-year-old Billy) stuffed its belongings into a cream-colored 1937 Packard convertible and set sail for the land of coconut palms and sea breezes. With Miami the […]

Growing up in South Dade in the early years was a great time. I was born in 1923 at home in Redland. My father came to Florida from West Virginia in about 1917. My mother came from Massachusetts. My father tried tomato farming for about a year, and failed. He then began growing avocadoes. We […]

Vivid memories of Miami in early 60s I arrived in Miami with my mother on Friday, July 7, 1961 a little before 7 p.m. I consider myself Miamian, Dade-ian, South Floridian, Southeastern, all of those demonyms. Bus fare was 20 cents. Newspapers were on wire racks at sidewalk curbs on the honor system with a […]

April is National Poetry Month. In South Florida, that means the month-long annual O, Miami Poetry Festival. As part of the festival, students from all over took part in programs that encouraged them to write and share their own poetry. This week’s Miami Stories will feature poems from some of those students. The poems are […]

Seventeen. That is when I graduated from high school. I had many choices of where I wanted to go to school, but the university I dreamed of going to rejected me. I ended up choosing a school I had never visited and taking a blind leap. A couple of weeks after I turned 18, I […]

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 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 […]

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 […]

I was born in 1939 in Winston-Salem, N.C. I’m the last of eight children. I was born to John Fair and Mary Lou Fair. People ask me about the name “Talmadge,” which is an unusual name for me to have. The day I was born, I came home and the insurance broker came by and […]