Category: Miami Stories

My first encounter with Miami was in the 1940s after the war. We lived in Curacao, Netherlands West Indies, and traveled every year to New York City on vacation.

In those days of DC3 and DC4 airplanes, one could not fly nonstop to NYC – not even to Miami – because of refueling requirements. Pan Am’s route to Miami was via Ciudad Trujillo (now Santo Domingo), Port-au-Prince and Camaguey, Cuba. KLM had stops in Aruba and Jamaica.

Arriving in Miami in the afternoon, we would stay at the Miami Colonial or Columbus hotels on Biscayne Boulevard. The next day we would board an Eastern or National plane for NYC with refueling stops in Jacksonville, Raleigh, N.C., and Washington, D.C.

As a boy I was delighted to walk over to nearby Flagler Street for piña coladas at Sloppy Joe’s and cheeseburgers and chocolate milk shakes (neither of which were available in Curacao) at Walgreens. Best of all I got to go to double features at the Olympia Theatre (in Curacao movies were largely restricted for children).

Many decades later, my wife and I would attend performances of the Miami City Ballet at the same theater, now named Gusman.

Skip forward to the early ’60s when the first wave of Cubans were ousted by Castro. My father’s uncle and aunt from Havana, Henry and Elsa Senior, had taken up residence in Palm Beach – “temporarily.” My parents, who then lived in Caracas, had visited them frequently in Havana, now visited them in Palm Beach. They liked Palm Beach so much that they decided to establish residence there. My Curacao-born father died in Palm Beach in 1984 and my Budapest-born mother, who is 97, still lives there.

After graduating from Harvard, I returned home to Caracas. Later I got an MBA from Columbia University. While in New York, I met and married my wife, Suzanne Lesh of Indianapolis, who was working in fashion for Mademoiselle magazine. With my new bride I returned to Caracas.

After working for several companies in Caracas, I set out on my own, founding the first executive search management firm in the country. By the early 1980s, however, Venezuela, which had been booming for several decades, was facing an economic downward spiral.

The logical move was to Miami, which was becoming the place to do business for Latin America. Many U.S. multinationals had set up Latin America headquarters in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. We bought a “temporary” home in what is now Palmetto Bay, where we still live.

My daughters, Jennifer and Stephanie, born in Caracas, originally went to Gulliver, but changed to Palmetto High. They both headed north to college at Penn State, then attended graduate schools in Florida. After completing their education, both worked in Miami. They now live in Parkland and Palm Beach. All of our grandchildren were born in Florida – a family first.

And that is how my family from various points of the world all ended up in South Florida.

I was born in Miami in 1940 when Victoria Hospital still existed as a full-service hospital with a maternity ward and Miami was a sleepy Southern town.

There was still alligator wrestling at 27th Avenue and Northwest Seventh Street at an Indian Village called Musa Isle. I lived in one house in the Shenandoah section when it was known as the Jewish neighborhood.
My friends and I had the freedom to ride our bikes from home to elementary school. A kid could go alone on a bus to downtown and feel safe.

My family of four lived in the same house for my entire childhood. We had a close neighborhood of 10 single family houses, where everyone knew everyone, and sitting on the front porch seeing your neighbors was an evening’s entertainment.

The first time I lived away as an adult, other than college at Tulane, was in 1965 when my wife, Rosetta, myself and my 1-year-old son, Mitchell, went to Washington D.C.

We moved there where I started my career as an attorney in the Criminal Division of the United States Justice Department.

In a year, I wanted to do trial work, which led me back to Miami and ultimately allowed me to be a part of a special time in the city’s history. It was an era that would profoundly change the place where I grew up.

I applied for a job as an assistant U.S. attorney, arriving at 7:30 a.m. for an interview. I was struck by the boss, U.S. Attorney William A. “Bill” Meadows. I remember him at the soda machine, getting a Coke at 7 a.m.

My memory may be failing me, but I’m pretty sure he would usually eat a Moon Pie with that Coke, a Southern tradition for breakfast.

I was lucky enough to get the job and it was the beginning of great friendships and a discovery of a part of Miami that I had not known before.

From 1966-1970 while I was an assistant U.S. attorney, Miami’s federal criminal scene was much different than it is today. We tried small drug cases, [even lent $20 to agents to make controlled buys], interstate stolen car cases, and an occasional fraud case. Back then, a $2 million fraud case was considered huge.

We could not even conceive of today’s multi-billion dollar Ponzi schemes. While the criminal prosecutions were not as large and complex as they are today, the federal court was busy making life-changing decisions.

The late C. Clyde Atkins was ordering school busing to complete integration, and he courageously allowed a poet, Alan Ginsberg, to recite what was then considered an obscene poem.

Today, Ginsburg’s best known work Howl is taught in schools. He once told me that he received much more obscene and angry mail over Ginsberg’s poetry than he received for the busing decision.

Judges Peter Fay, Joe Eaton and James Lawrence (Larry) King were courageously dealing with community-changing issues on a regular basis. It was the Civil Rights Era and Miami was still the South.

We worked in a small, compact office where we also met as a group once a week. Bill Meadows came from Goodman, Miss., and had been a circuit court judge in Miami when he accepted the appointment as U.S. Attorney.

With Meadows’ background as a native Mississippian and member of the Miami “good ole boy” network, one would hardly have imagined the diverse makeup of the U.S. Attorney’s office.

The office had between 15 and 17 full-time attorneys, as compared to the 200-plus today. This group included seven Jewish men, the first Hispanic lawyer in the office’s history, its first black lawyer and one of the few females to ever have served in the office.

The diversity of today’s office shows we were on to something.

These were the city’s most ambitious lawyers. Yet the spirit was collegial, “one for all.” We shared cases, we shared credit, and we shared a mission: to make Miami a safer place to live.

Meadows fostered that spirit. He never considered a person’s religion, appearance or background, only at what they could do and how he could help them do it better.

Meadows was the type of boss who would always back you up in public. He would discuss any problem in private, resolve it, and never do anything but give a single cohesive statement of the office view.

If he did not share your view at the beginning and he could not persuade you to change, then your view became the office view.

Unfortunately, this attribute is rare in public service today, where everyone wants to cover themselves.

There were some comical times as well. When it was “duty” day, one assistant would take in new law enforcement cases and citizens’ complaints.

I remember two in particular. One octogenarian came to the office and, when asked “could I help you,” he responded repeatedly, “I’m 85, my wife is 83 and we don’t need any help.”

I finally found out what he needed. He thought his wife was having an affair with a 33-year-old Secret Service agent.

Another woman complained that her thoughts were being stolen electronically. After a half hour of her story, I asked for her phone number so I could have the FBI call her. She responded simply, “phone – I don’t have a phone. They are stealing my thoughts through the walls.”

Our group, along with some who came before and some who came after, meets every September as a memorial to Bill Meadows. The spirit may not be there all year, but on that day, everyone seems to go back in time to what was, to many, a golden era.

From two U.S. District judges, Jose Martinez and Fred Moreno, who worked with Meadows, to three former U.S. Magistrate judges – Mike Osman, the late Jack Eskenazi, and the late Ted Klein – to Neal Sonnett, past president of the National Criminal Defense Association, and for the too-many lawyers to name who are listed in Best Lawyers in America, for all of them, working with Bill Meadows remained the highlight of their legal careers.

Certainly in a memory of Miami, this was a golden age.

My parents, Harry and Mildred Grand, met each other on South Beach in 1946.

My mother was on vacation from her home in a very cold Roxbury, Mass. Dad and his family owned and managed a small apartment/hotel at 112 Ocean Dr., The Rainbow.

Today the Rainbow is the home of Prime 112, the chi-chi restaurant. Previously, Dad had lived in Ellenville, N.Y., and had helped build and run a family hotel, the Paramount Lodge in the Catskills. His family had enough of the frigid winters so it was time to head south to Florida

I was born in St. Francis Hospital (now condominiums) in Miami Beach in 1948. We lived on the second floor of the Rainbow in a one-bedroom apartment with a balcony overlooking Ocean Drive. We had an unobstructed view of the beach and ocean. In fact, my bris (circumcision) was celebrated on that very balcony, which is now used for diners at Prime 112 restaurant (just between you and me).

In 1950, my parents decided they needed more room and moved to a newly built subdivision in Miami on the border of Coral Gables, named Coral Gate. Most of the homes were bought by young families purchasing their first home.

“The Gate” was a wonderful place to grow up in the ’50s. It was only two blocks from Miracle Mile, the main shopping street of Coral Gables. I remember at the age of 11 collecting candy with a group of friends on Halloween night. We would walk around most of Coral Gate, yelling in unison at each house for whatever treats we could get.

We had no adult supervision and we rarely returned home before 11 p.m. It was a different point in time.

I developed my life-long love of film at the three movie theaters in Coral Gables – the Miracle, the Coral, and the Gables. These movie theaters were all within a mile of each other.

While attending Merrick Demonstration School for fifth and sixth grades, all of us patrol boys walked after school to the Coral to see a free movie each Friday. This was a reward for helping fellow students cross a busy Douglas Road each morning. Many years later just before graduating from Coral Gables High School, I spent a summer working as an usher at the Parkway movie theater .

At the time, this theater was Miami’s only “art” theater, showing mostly European and independent films. In addition, patrons were offered free coffee and various showings of art in the lobby – very unique for 1966.

The Sears on Coral Way near Miracle Mile was the place to get just about anything you needed in the 1950s and ’60s. There were some wonderful memories hanging out there with friends on weekends and shopping with my parents.

But there were also some disturbing remembrances of a department store (at a certain time in history) with bathrooms and water fountains clearly marked “white” and “colored.”

There were always a few restaurants that were our favorites during those years. These included Red Diamond, Dean’s Waffle shop, Jahn’s ice cream parlor, Biscayne Cafeteria and China Maid. And, yes, how can we forget Royal Castle? We were all addicted!

Meanwhile, my dad had opened a store on Giralda Avenue in the Gables in 1959. He was a distributer of Westinghouse light bulbs and also sold small electrical appliances. My mother helped him each day with various accounting and secretarial duties. I usually walked over after school and helped out until closing most days.

After attending Shenandoah Junior High and during my time at Coral Gables High, I worked most of the University of Miami football season selling Cokes at the Orange Bowl. I would take a bus from the Orange Bowl at 11 p.m. back to the Coral Gables bus station and walk two blocks to Royal Castle for a well-deserved “refueling.”

College was divided between Emory University and the University of Miami, graduating in 1970. It was while attending my junior year at UM that I decided what was to be my future profession: optometry. My four years of post-graduate study brought me to Southern College of Optometry in Memphis.

I returned to the Miami area to scout for future practice locations after many dreary and cold Memphis winters. I first established my Kendall optometric practice in 1979. My present office location is in the Pinecrest/Kendall area.

Seven years ago my wife Belle and I moved to Miami Beach. We always felt a special connection being close to the ocean and the beach. Somehow, things have come around full circle.

I was born in Nashville and spent the first four years of my life in Tuskegee, Ala.

My father, Dr. John O. Brown Sr., moved to Miami in 1955 to begin his practice in ophthalmology. To this day, I’m glad he did.

We had neighbors who were white and black. Our next-door neighbor was an older white lady who inspired my mother’s love for growing orchids and my brother’s passion for collecting butterflies.

I attended schools — Jackson’s Toddle Inn and Floral Heights — that were all black. I remember those as happy years.

My life changed dramatically when I started sixth grade at Gladeview Elementary, the year desegregation was implemented in Dade County. I was too young to know this was a victory for my father and the other parents who had filed a lawsuit against the Dade County School Board in 1956 to make this possible. I only knew that I was sick every morning and that I was not happy there.

It got worse when I attended Miami Edison Junior High. In my first year, there were only three Negro children in the school, and one left after a short time. I felt different, disliked by some of the children and just tolerated by the teachers — because of the color of my skin.

It was not until the ninth grade that many more students of color enrolled and I finally I had friends. I continued at Miami Edison Senior and led a peaceful “sit-in” in my senior year to protest discriminatory practices.

My years of experience being the “token” Negro child propelled me to leave Miami in 1968 to attend Fisk University, a historically black college in Nashville.

The summer before I left for college, the riots of 1968 exploded. I remember our family being on the floor of our home off 62nd Street, frightened by bullets fired at the National Guard tanks parked in our front yard, from the residents in the projects across the street.

I recall working for the U.S. Department of Immigration and Naturalization in the summer of my first year in college. I was responsible for processing the visas for new arrivals from Cuba. I remember being instructed to type on every visa under the heading of race the letter “W” for white, despite the accompanying photo being of a person much darker than myself. It reminded me again of the second-class status of African Americans.

I graduated from Fisk in 1972 and returned home to Miami. Life seemed uneventful until the riots of 1980. I had just returned home from the hospital with my newborn baby. We had to evacuate our home due to the lootings, fires and loss of electricity in Liberty City. I remember being on the floor of our car, holding my baby for safety.

We were seeking refuge at my brother’s home in El Portal, where residents were barbecuing and watering their grass, oblivious to the civil unrest only a few miles away. Later that year, I moved to the Bahamas, where I spent the next 15 years.

I found it ironic that Bahamians referred to me as an American, an identity I had never been identified with in the United States. All through my life I was “colored, Negro, black, Afro-American or African-American” — never only American.

When I returned to Miami in 1995, it was a very different place. People of color were no longer African-Americans, but were from the Caribbean, Haiti, Trinidad, South America — with different languages and cultures.

I take pride in growing up in Liberty City. To this day, I find myself defending it against those who only see it as drug- and crime-infested and fear going there. Overlooked are the many success stories of Liberty City.

I remember my father saying that he chose to build our home in Liberty City — when we could have afforded to live elsewhere — because he wanted to be among the people he was fighting so hard for.

My father fought tirelessly to help bring about many of the changes in Miami we take for granted today. We can attend any public school, shop wherever we want, eat wherever we choose and go to any movie theater — all because of the barriers he helped to bring down. He sacrificed time spent away from his four young children, which in his later years he regretted.

It saddens me that there are no streets named after him, nor schools or community centers to honor his contributions. But in my heart, I know that because of him and so many others like him, this country now has an African-American president and he is smiling and saying it was well worth the fight.

I was born Martha Anne Peters in Victoria Hospital on Dec. 20, 1937, a second generation native-born Miamian.

My daddy, Hugh Peters, Jr., was born in the family home, on the corner of 75th Street and Northeast Second Avenue.

My paternal great-grandparents, Solomon J. and Sidney Martha Peters, moved to Miami-Dade county in the fall of 1896 from Lady Lake in Central Florida, where the Big Freeze of 1895 had killed their orange groves. The entire family of eight sons, ranging in age from 8 to the mid-20s, and their 16-year-old daughter Mattie, came with them.

The youngest boy, Hugh (Pat) was my grandpa. Solomon and all but three of his sons farmed — primarily tomatoes. The three who pursued other interests were Edgar, who became a doctor; Arthur, who was active in real estate; and my grandpa, Hugh (Pat).

Grandpa was a county commissioner for more than 20 years and was commission chairman when the Dade County Courthouse was built and when the county bought Vizcaya, the Coconut Grove estate of Chicago industrialist James Deering. He also was in charge of roads and bridges in Dade County.

One of my cousins, Thelma Peters, was a well-known historian of Dade County.

My maternal grandparents, Abner and Annie Hearn, moved to Dade County in 1911. They had five sons ranging in age from 6 to 21 and a 2-year-old daughter, Annie, who would become my mother.

Mama was born in Dunedin, a small city near Tampa. Grandpa Hearn owned several packing houses there and in other locations, primarily on the West Coast of Florida. Their oldest son, B.E. Hearn, my uncle, was a Miami City Commissioner in the 1950s.

When I was born, my family lived in Little River in a house built on the original family property. I have one brother, Gordon, named after the doctor who delivered him, Dr. J.G. DuPuis. We moved to Miami Shores when I was 11 and I have remained a Miami Shores resident ever since.

In 1958, I married Harley G. Collins, Jr., now deceased. His father served one term on the Dade County School Board. We were blessed with one daughter, Cheryl (now Calhoun). She and her family live in Miami Shores, as well.

Daddy owned a paint and glass business for many years. Mama was the registrar at her alma mater, Miami Edison Senior High School. My brother and I both graduated from Edison. Daddy, however, graduated from Miami High, which made for a very interesting Thanksgiving day and night, considering the rivalry that existed between the two schools.

I am a retired teacher, having taught high school English and Reading for 27 years.
I have been truly blessed to live in this special city all my life. I am proud of my family and what they have contributed to the growth of Miami. I am especially grateful that they had the good sense to move here.

Our family came from Havana, a beautiful city that some have called a tropical paradise.

My brothers and I came to Miami on a Pan American flight and were taken to a campground that the Pedro Pan organizers had set up in Kendall, near where Town & Country Mall now stands. We were there for about two weeks before being sent to Albuquerque, N.M., where we were taken in by the family of Dr. Eugene Purtell.

The Purtells had six children ranging in age from 14 (Kathleen) to 2 (Timmy). I was 12; my brothers were 11 and 10.

The Purtells helped us learn the language, comforted us and allayed our concerns over whether our parents would be able to leave Cuba.

My father was a vice president for Upjohn Pharmaceuticals. He worked in Cuba; the company was based in Kalamazoo, Mich. Upjohn staged a high-level meeting in Mexico City to convince the Castro government to issue my parents a temporary visa to attend the meeting.

The Cuban government did. When they arrived in Mexico City, they learned there was no meeting and that Upjohn, along with the American ambassador to Mexico, had secured resident visas for them to live in the United States.

We lived in Kalamazoo for about 1 ½ years, until my father retired from Upjohn after 25 years. We moved to Miami, which was small then.

In those early days, it was difficult. My brothers, Ramon and Rafael, and I delivered newspapers for The Miami Herald, waking up in the pre-dawn hours to deliver on our bikes. We kept those jobs throughout high school. I came to Miami when I was 14.

We attended LaSalle High in Coconut Grove. We were taught by many of the same brothers who had been our teachers in Cuba, which helped us reconnect to our culture. Later, we attended Miami Dade College.

While there, I got a job at Burdines as a merchandise handler. Burdines was a company that helped the Cuban community by giving them jobs and extending credit. Burdines, now Macy’s, has been, and still is, my only employer for 40 years (other than the paper route).

Miami is where I met my wife, Ivonne. Her father and uncle took part in the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. We married in 1972 and have always lived in Miami.

Our two children were born here. Our daughter graduated from Nova Southeastern University and is a psychologist; our son graduated from the University of Miami and is an attorney. We have two grandchildren, and a third is on his or her way.

Thank you, Miami, for all you have meant to my family and me.

My father, Ernest Peyton Jones, worked for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was his campaign manager for the southeastern United States and became the associate commissioner of the Federal Housing Administration. My mother, Betty Schwab Jones, was the secretary for Sen. George Norris of Nebraska.

They married in 1936 and lived in Washington.

When Roosevelt died in 1945, they packed up my brother Eric and me and moved to Coral Gables. My father said Miami was the land of opportunity. He opened a loan company.

My brother and I attended Coral Gables Elementary, Ponce Junior High and Gables High. We were lucky that our teen years were in the ’50s and early ’60s. In 1953, I was student council president at Ponce and there was a girl vice president as well, which was very forward-thinking then. In fact, I was the only girl at the state convention.

Coral Gables was a great community to grow up in. My parents were very active, especially in the Garden Club and Rose Society. They were in the first Sister-to-Sister Group from Coral Gables to Cartagena, Colombia.

In 1949 our parents built a home in Coral Gables. The home still stands; it’s near the Coral Gables Youth Center. My son, Andy Elwell, lives there with his wife, Susan, and their two children, Alex, 11, and Katherine, 9. So, four generations of my family have lived in the same house.

I met my first husband, Walter Elwell, at Shenandoah Presbyterian Church. He graduated from Miami High; Sen. Bob Graham was in his homeroom. We had two sons, Andy and Timothy, who lives in California with his wife, Carol Ann Kelley, and their 3-year-old daughter, Audrey.

I eventually divorced Walter, and in 1989 I married Frank Zagarino, who graduated from the University of Miami. He loved Miami for its weather, sailing and golf. He was a photographer for Life, Time and Sports Illustrated. He was a member of the Coral Reef Yacht Club.

After Frank died, I was lucky enough to buy a house directly behind Andy’s. I have my family and friends close by, and I continue to keep my Gables High Class of ’57 together.

I can imagine my dad’s excitement leaving gritty Newark behind him and hitting the highway in his old Studebaker bound for paradise . . . Miami Beach. I can see the bathing suit postcards guiding his way and hear the ocean calling his name: M-I-L-T-O-N B-R-A-N-D, come on down!

The year was 1948 and young Milton was not welcome everywhere down here. He saw signs that said, “No Dogs Or Jews Allowed,” and got polite rejections in places that had no signs.

That didn’t deter my dad. There was enough to tantalize him in places he could go to: the racetrack, the beach, a few fine restaurants and hotels and the “after-hours” clubs my dad discovered in his meanderings through Miami’s nightlife.

It was in the portals of these watering holes that my dad’s future was carved out. Through the force of his larger-than-life personality, he made friends everywhere. A year after he arrived, he opened a bar and store-fixture business.

In his flush years my dad had many friends among the cities’ business leaders, politicians and entertainers. And he was familiar to a subculture of characters he knew from his gambling and nighttime cavorts: touts, bookies, loan sharks, party girls and of course, “tough guys.”

They all called him “Big Milt” or “Milty Boy.” He would regularly pick up the tab and dole out $20 tips. He got front row seats at the Fontainebleau and the fights and his car curbed everywhere. His name somehow jumped to the top of the page at the toniest restaurants.

Like Miami’s story, my dad’s had its share of pathos. He had a fall from grace for a while, lost his hold on the glamour life and was forsaken by many of the “fair-weather” variety. But like Miami, there was a depth of charm and character in my father that no rising and falling tides could wash away.

My dad’s last years were spent in an efficiency apartment off West End Avenue that he called his “pad.” “Big Milt” was well over what he’d lost in life and very much focused on what he had: a son and daughter and their spouses who adored him, grandkids, nieces and nephews, a job he enjoyed a few days a week, the track on weekends, his beloved Chevy (“White Beauty”) and friends everywhere he went.

My dad had nicknames for all. One of the names he especially liked was “Dr. Brown.” This is the name he always used at Joe’s Stone Crab. Some, even famous or brandishing large bills, have been told they have to wait. But anyone who accompanied “Dr. Brown” will attest to the fact that after greeting the maitre’d and being told to wait in the bar, within five to 10 minutes “Dr. Brown” was summoned to his table. Invariably, when someone in the party would marvel at the quick seating, my father would say, “You have to have the ‘Dr. Brown’ attitude.”

My brother and I jazzed up dad’s pad the week he was in the hospital knowing he would never want to spend his terminal days anywhere else. He told us he was thoroughly enjoying his “abode” and that hospice sent him only “the good-looking” nurses, as he had requested.

When he could, he sat in “White Beauty” and listened to the radio. He had visits galore and enough goodies to open a bakery. I have photos of him gaunt, but smiling from ear to ear with grandkids piled up in the bed with him.

Miami came to him in the night and he was gone with the place he loved so much. It didn’t matter what had been lost or changed. Always, his endearing spirit remains.

I was in the right place at the right time. I graduated from school with a business administration degree in Spain and I wanted to come to the United States for an master of business administration degree.

At the same time, my father wanted to open a branch of the family business here. We have been in ceramic tile, manufacturing and sales, in Spain for three generations. He always thought the United States’ market was so big — you couldn’t just come here and sell; you had to open a company.

So my father came to Miami to open Iberia Tiles with a partner, and I came to attend the University of Miami.

It was January 1980, the same year as the Mariel boatlift. Two weeks after we arrived, the partnership didn’t work out and my father found himself with no one to help him start the business.

My father said, ‘Instead of paying for the MBA, I’ll give you $100,000 and you’ll do your MBA in practice instead of in theory. You can be president of a nonexistent company.’

All we had was a signed lease in a warehouse in the northwest part of the county. My father stayed two more weeks. We incorporated, and then my father left for Spain.

I was here alone. I didn’t know what to do. I had to start somewhere. I don’t think about those days, as they were very stressful.

My father told me two things: First, don’t worry about the money. I have already lost it, he said, and I’m still happy so don’t worry. I was very concerned that $100,000 is a lot of money, especially when you are 22.

The second thing he told me: Anytime you have a doubt and you want to call me, call me. Anytime. It was very reassuring. It wasn’t the father I had known when I was growing up in Spain. You didn’t bother him every five minutes.

In the beginning, I called a lot. Whatever question I asked him, he would ask the question back to me. So, after a few weeks, I stopped calling.

You are going to make a lot of mistakes, he said. But every time you make a mistake, pay whatever you must to fix it and don’t tell anybody.

One of the first things I realized was that I didn’t speak English very well. When you are young, you think you do everything well. My accent was British, and I didn’t understand the American accent. I hired a teacher, and I really learned the language.

I met a guy in 1983, married in 1984, and in 1985 I had my son, and in 1987, a daughter. I had been here for seven years and I had a business, two kids — the dog came later. Until 1990, all I did was work and have a family.

By 1990-91, I could lift my head out of the water and started looking around the American landscape. I didn’t have any American friends who had been to my house for dinner. I lived in Key Biscayne, with a lot of Hispanic people.

I realized I was not part of the community here. So I started to get involved in organizations. First the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce, and then the board of trustees at Florida International University.

I have grown to love Miami. It’s a beautiful place and the crossroads between North America and South America.

I realized Miami was a very new city, and any contribution a person would make could make a real difference. In Barcelona, it’s a great city, but everything was already done.

Here, everything remained to be done. The more you do for a person, the more you love that person. A community is like that. Now, if someone asks me where I’m from, I say ‘I’m from Miami.’