Category: Miami Stories

Jane Wilson – and countless others who called Miami home from the late ’40s through the mid-’80s – recalled the sweet, heady aroma of baking bread serenading the senses in South Miami.

Seth Bramson, a leading chronicler of Florida history through his more than 20 books about the region, saw his collection of Florida East Coast Railway memorabilia grow after he shared his tales of local lore with readers.

Haitian activist Gepsie Metellus, executive director of Miami’s Haitian Neighborhood Center, found new voices for her cause after she detailed her deepening connection to the city in her Miami Stories feature.

These are just some of the more than 100 people who have written about growing up in South Florida for the popular Miami Herald Neighbors column, Miami Stories, since its inception in May 2009. The weekly feature is a collaboration by HistoryMiami, historian Arva Moore Parks, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, National Conference on Citizenship Chairman Michael Weiser and The Miami Herald.

Miami might only be 116 years old since its incorporation but its history is rich and vibrant. This is a place where change is the only certainty. Books and photographs capture the places and faces along the way but add personal memories and the stories really begin to come alive.

“It’s your own story, it’s your own life,” says Parks, acting director of the Coral Gables Museum. “When I used to teach history they’d say, ‘I hate history!’ I’d say, ‘What don’t you like about yourself?’ I’d always have them tell me their life history – from their parents to their grandparents. When they would do so, I’d say, ‘That’s your history.’ ”

Personal remembrances, through oral history, are particularly valuable, Parks says, because it gets to the truth.

“If you are watching something happening it tends to be accurate, they are eye-witnesses.”

And what a set of eyes we have.

‘Miami is for me’

Metellus opened her story in February by recalling an old tourism ad popular around the time of television’s pastel-colored crime drama, Miami Vice: “When I arrived in Miami in the early 1980s, the slogan ‘Miami Is For Me’ was ubiquitous. As someone who had just arrived here from New York, I not only wondered what the buzz was all about, but I did not believe for one second that it could ever apply to me.”

Turns out Miami was for this reluctant arrival.

Metellus, 50, quickly immersed herself in the Haitian community and its issues. The community, she recalls, was recoiling from “the abuses and neglect of the Duvalier dictatorship,” not to mention a period when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified being Haitian as a risk factor for acquiring the HIV virus.

Metellus worked in the fields of research, education, government and community work, with a goal toward empowering and enriching those who had arrived from the island. Today, she’s the executive director of Sant La, the Haitian Neighborhood Center.

Writing her story, she said, was purposeful.

“Miami is a place for new beginnings of so many people and that’s the magic of Miami. I had to sit down and write this story,” she said. “I hope it encourages other people to follow suit. My work is all about making sure our immigrant population becomes fully integrated and becomes self-sufficient, can prosper and open doors for future generations of immigrants from Haiti.”

The feedback she received after her story ran still touches her.

“It was most exciting. People would say, ‘I didn’t know those details. I didn’t know you met your husband in Montreal. I didn’t realize you were married.’ That one got me laughing. Some others were very touching and some thought I’m doing what I’m meant to do. The Haitian community has such interesting stories that, too often, go untold.”

Sense of place

Nidia Rodriguez-Gralewski wrote of her arrival in Miami in 1959, three months after Castro took power in Cuba. She moved to “where all the newly arrived Cubans were living” – Southwest 14th Avenue and Second Street, home of Ada Merritt Junior High, the first junior high school in Miami, built in 1923.

Life in Miami for Rodriguez-Gralewski in the Kennedy space-race era meant meals under a dollar at McDonald’s. Royal Castle deals – two small hamburgers, a birch beer and doughnut for dessert – for .99 cents. Fun Fair off 79th Street, which offered a day’s worth of arcade games and finger foods for pocket change. Top of the Columbus Hotel was an extravagance with their $5 steak meals. A down payment for the family home east of the airport went for $350 in 1962. Rodriguez-Gralewski moved back to Miami in 1973 after five years in New York City, back to the same neighborhood where she grew up and where her parents remained. That’s Miami’s lure.

She hoped to find more people who graduated from Ada Merritt, so she wrote her Miami Story in June 2011. Rodriguez-Gralewski and a schoolmate have managed to track down some 60 people over the years who graduated from the school in 1961, including the principal and a couple teachers.

Miami Stories like these “build a sense of place,” Parks says. “Particularly the Cuban refugee stories help people who have been here for half of Miami’s history recognize the connection of love of place. That’s how you build a sense of place since only about 10 percent of people were born here. Building a sense of place is difficult because they leave their sense of place somewhere else. When you connect with someone you build a sense of place.”

Baking bread memories

“The stork” brought Wilson to Homestead in 1927, she wrote in November, so her fond recollection of growing up the daughter of the man who made South Miami smell yummy for generations didn’t quite lead to an avalanche of calls or letters.

“A lot of my peers have moved out of town or passed away, so my group has gotten very small,” Wilson, 84, says from her home in Coral Gables. But her feature – “a full page,” she says proudly – adds texture to several books that have been written about her family.

Her father, Charles T. Fuchs, Jr., opened Fuchs Baking Company which became known as the baker of Holsum Bread. South Miami went from sleepy to wide awake with the smell of bread after the bakery’s opening in 1934 and remained famous for unleashing its tasty aroma until its closing in 1984.

“I think about it every time I go by,” Wilson says. “All my shopping is in South Miami and I have fond memories of it. It was the most modern bakery in the country and people from all over the country came to visit. People need to know where they came from and try to save as many historical buildings as they can. The Historical Museum is doing a good job downtown and Coral Gables has a historical section and they are trying to collect things for their museum. I think it’s great.”

Alas, today Sunset Place Mall sits on the bakery’s grounds. An earlier mall at least tried to evoke the name of the landmark bakery which, in the 1950s, decorated U.S.1 with Christmas displays and automated ice skaters and moving trains, but the Bakery Center soon failed on that location after its opening in 1986.

Growing collection

Perhaps Bramson, who wrote of Henry Flagler’s Florida East Coast Railway, has the most tangible result of reader reaction to his Miami Story, published in April 2010: more artifacts to add to his swelling collection, reputed to be the largest private collection of Miami memorabilia in America.

Just check out his garage, as it’s festooned floor to ceiling with cherished relics of our past. “That’s 56 years of collecting,” he boasts.

Readers sent him booklets and postcards, FEC timetables and photographs, rare hotel brochures and menus, ice tongs from the Biltmore Hotel, a Burdine’s employee’s hat and even a fez from a Shriner. Bramson also received a monument from a less enlightened time in our nation’s history, a Negro Housing in Greater Miami booklet published by the University of Miami in 1952.

“While my Miami story did not bring out any old girlfriends – didn’t have to do any explaining to [wife] Myrna! – or long-lost relatives, it did turn up some things that, to me, were equally as important. The Miamiana was marvelous,” Bramson said.

The first time I traveled out of the city of my birth was on a 24-hour trip from Rio de Janeiro to Miami on an old propeller airplane in 1958. We were one of the handful of immigrants trickling into Miami just before the Cuban exiles started arriving. At that time, my father was required to have a sponsor and a deposit of $12,000 to be allowed to emigrate.

I don’t know why he chose Miami – perhaps because it was the closest city to South America, although it was so far that it took 24 hours to reach our destination. At some point, I looked out of the window hoping to see Miami, but saw instead an unusual sight: cotton, piled as high as buildings. It didn’t look like the pictures of snow I had seen. I was 6, and I looked hard at that cotton before I realized I was looking at clouds. Many meals later, we broke through the clouds and Miami in all its glory appeared below us.

We settled in the home of our sponsors, the Aguiar family, in a pristine neighborhood of modern houses and deep black asphalt near Tropical Park, at that time a race track. Even as a child, I was amazed at the cleanliness of the neighborhood – its wide-open spaces and its wide, smooth, ebony streets, so unlike the crowded cobblestone streets of my Rio neighborhood. And the freedom! We were allowed to play outside on our own, leave our toys on the lawn, cross the streets without adult supervision, and live and roam freely. Miami was a small town then.

We bought a house across the street from our sponsors, and I began attending Emerson Elementary School. It was such a modern school that each classroom had its own bathroom, and we didn’t have to raise our hand in order to use it. On the other hand, there were no air conditioners, so the windows were always opened. At Emerson Elementary, I learned to speak, read and write English.

My father loved outings. With four kids, my father couldn’t afford to take us on too many expensive outings, but beaches were free, so every Sunday we switched from Crandon Park (where there was a free zoo!), Haulover (clothing was required then), South Beach (mostly filled with retired people), Cape Florida (not Bill Baggs then) and one of our favorites, Matheson Hammock (we called it “Devil’s Toilet”).

One beach we never visited when we first arrived was Virginia Key, which was reserved for blacks. I never even knew Virginia Key existed until the 1970s when, as a teenager, I went there to hear my brothers’ rock band playing at an outdoor concert. By then, beaches had been desegregated and Virginia Key was a haven for hippies, bands and young people playing Frisbee.

Occasionally, my father splurged, taking the four of us to those wonderful, old Florida theme parks that flourished before Disney World: Monkey Jungle, the old Parrot Jungle in Pinecrest, Pirate’s World, Pioneer City. His favorite was the Seaquarium. He delighted in hearing us squeal at the shark sculpture revolving at the entrance to Key Biscayne. The shark is still there, but motionless now, and much less threatening.

Because I was the oldest, and the only one who could appreciate it, he took me alone to a Seminole Indian Village, a place he’d visited the year before we moved here, when he came to make arrangements for our arrival. Before the casinos, many of the Seminoles lived in thatched huts. Though Seminoles are now identified with Broward, the Miccosukee and Seminole were one and the same before the early 1960s, when they were recognized as independent tribes.

Then, in 1960, the Cubans began to arrive. Rapidly, Miami began to change. More and more of our neighbors spoke Spanish. Around the mid-1960s, my mother was able to have a shot of sweetened espresso (now known as Cuban coffee) at Kress. Even as children, we noticed that something was happening. Cuban neighbors would sometimes give us cans of free food given to them by the U.S. government as a way to help the new refugees. The cans came with no paper labels, merely an official “Cuban Refugee Program” stamp and a description of the contents. I guess the Cubans didn’t much like them because they kept giving them to us. None of us liked the powdered scrambled eggs or the canned meat, either, so my mother stopped accepting them.

When we moved to Hialeah, I found a boyfriend, who took me to an empty area he called Master’s Field not far from our house. It had once been an airport, but what was then nothing but rocks and gravel. He told me that as a kid he often biked there to watch Army tanks and soldiers but was oblivious to what was probably the preparation for either the Bay of Pigs invasion or perhaps the Cuban Missile Crisis. Later, part of that field became Amelia Earhart Park, and another section became Amelia Earhart Elementary and Hialeah Junior High School, which we attended.

When the Cubans arrived, we found much of Latin America taking root and growing right in our backyard. Our family was once again able to live a Latin lifestyle – sweet, strong coffee at every corner, a language my mother could understand, although not speak perfectly, and crowded beaches filled with loud, rhythmic music.

Being a third-generation Miamian, I have lots of stories.

This one will begin with my father, Del Matchett, who was born in Miami in 1923 in the original Jackson Memorial Hospital that later became the Alamo Building at UM/JMH Medical Center.

He grew up in North Miami on Northeast 132nd Street. His father built the two-story house that they lived in. He was a newspaper boy for The Miami News and rode his bicycle from North Miami down to the Miami News building, which later became The Freedom Tower. He went to grade school at William Jennings Bryan and later to Miami Edison High School. My mother, Margaret Knowles Matchett, and my father graduated from Edison.

When I was a child, they took my brother and me to many Edison-Miami High football games in the Orange Bowl. The two high schools filled the stadium in the 1950s and ’60s. It was a sea of red/white and blue/gold and very exciting.

We attended First Baptist Church of Miami, which was behind Edison. The pastor there, Dr. Ray Culbreath, always said a prayer with the football players before each game. He was a big football fan. My parents were married in his church on May 13, 1945. That church later became the Yahweh Temple.

After high school, my father joined the U.S. Air Force. When he came back from the military he went to work at Eastern Airlines as a sheet metal mechanic, later rising to foreman in engine overhaul. He met and spoke to Eddie Rickenbacker many times during Eastern’s early years. He always respected and spoke highly of Rickenbacker. He said that he would come on the job dressed in working man’s clothes and sit and talk to the guys.

My father met the Radio City Rockettes in 1979 when they flew to Miami on Eastern. He proudly owned an autographed photo.

We were able to fly free and took full advantage of that benefit. We dressed in our Sunday best when we flew. He told us that we were representing the airline and we had to dress accordingly. He loved working for Eastern Airlines and was fortunate to retire after 40 years, when Frank Borman was in charge. He saw the end of Eastern coming and decided to get out early.

My mother’s family lived on North Miami Avenue and Northwest 60th Street. The Cape-Cod-style house was built by my step-grandfather, Jack Mangum. It was a beautiful white two-story house with green shutters and a fireplace. He also built a two-story apartment building behind the house. After World War II, my family lived on one floor and my aunt and uncle and their family on the other floor. My brother, cousin, and I had many happy days there playing in the big yard. The house still stands, but it is now yellow with brown shutters and there are chickens in the yard.

I have seen many changes in Miami over the years but I still love it here. Just take a look at the Miami skyline at sunset. One word comes to mind: “Paradise.”

Wanderer Buddy Hayes painted his way from Depression-torn Atlanta eastward to Charleston, S.C. He settled in North Charleston, where he frequented a popular local restaurant.

In a cold Connecticut convent, Marie and Helen, two nuns from immigrant families, had grown up together, singing popular songs like Begin the Beguine, about tropical nights and swaying palms. They ran away for Miami one bitterly cold morning. Helen had a nice car, Marie had a nice case of wanderlust.

They got along fine all the way to Charleston – a town of warm winter days, beaches and swaying palm trees. Then, sitting in a popular restaurant north of Charleston, the two friends argued.

“Just go on without me, I’m staying here,” Marie told Helen.

Then without leaving that restaurant, Marie found a job, a roommate, and, on her first day at work, Buddy Hayes walked in and found her.

Fast-forward to 1946: Buddy and Marie have two little children, my brother Jim and me, and she’s pregnant again. “Aunt” Helen is visiting from Florida. They’re laughing about old times and singing Begin the Beguine.

Mama died in childbirth with that third child. Helen’s visit is a rare memory of her. When I played piano years later, my father gave me sheet music for Begin the Beguine, which I played repeatedly hoping she could hear me.

Before the ’60’s brought us hippies, the decade brought us Beatniks and coffeehouse poetry. I wrote my own “drifter” songs and poetry, but I eventually married anyway, moved to a Low Country island and excused my wanderlust as youthful notion.

When we separated in ’71, the Midnight Cowboy theme became myBegin the Beguine. I left my last day of work in a sun shower – rare for Charleston – while my car radio played, “I’m going where the sun keeps shining, through the pouring rain…” I had left my job, my husband, his island, our friends. Mama, it’s time for Miami, I thought.

I felt her beside me on the drive and when I landed a job at the great JM, Jordan Marsh’s gorgeous five-story downtown store. I found a nearby apartment at the Bayshore Drive home of feisty matriarch Adelaide Allocca.

Oh, Mama, I can walk out my door and see Biscayne Bay! Across 18th Street was the small, homey Miramar Hotel, where I breakfasted on Sundays with only Mama’s spirit and The Miami Herald for company. JCPenney was a block west, on Biscayne. Across Bayshore from Jordan Marsh were the Herald building, the Seaboard building, a cathedral and the Miami Women’s Club. A vacant lot lay between the cathedral and the Women’s Club, with a dock where yachtsmen frequently tied up, came ashore and crossed Bayshore Drive to shop at Jordan Marsh.

Although they were decades older than me, Adelaide and her friends became my first source of Miami social life and information. She and her sons welcomed me at Thanksgiving. She enlisted me to drive her places, to join her card-playing socials. When I admired the Women’s Club’s gracefully sloping coconut palms, they told me about the lethal yellowing that was expected to wipe out all our palms. One card player, Mary Fascelli, introduced me to her son Dante. “He dropped the ‘i’ from his name when he went into politics,” Adelaide explained later; I had just met Dante Fascell, Florida’s most famous Congressional representative of the time.

Both JM and the Herald had employee cafeterias, and as many Herald people ate at ours as did JM employees at the Herald’s. Three outstanding Herald cafeteria moments:

1. Briefly meeting John Keasler, my favorite Miami News columnist.

2. Complaining to coworkers about a doughnut-shaped roll that seemed stale. The JM ladies laughed, but the next morning at breakfast, they showed me how bagels should be toasted, buttered and savored.

3. An alarming glimpse out the cafeteria window, eye to eye with the huge Goodyear blimp that appeared to be coming in at us. But it was only positioning for a landing across the channel at Watson Island.

Walking home from Bayfront Park one day, I noticed people gathering, standing on the sidewalk. I asked someone what was happening and was told, “Orange Bowl Parade is coming.”

How could I have forgotten? My father and I watched that parade every year on TV, and I could already hear the music. So I stayed, too. The Coppertone float, carrying four attractive young men, drew the loudest cheers. “It’s the Rhodes Brothers,” someone said of Miami’s iconic, nationally known entertainers.

Before I left JM and downtown, Adelaide’s neighbors buzzed with rumors that a large shopping mall would soon take over our neighborhood between Bayshore and Biscayne, between JM and JC Penney’s. Offers were made to Adelaide and her neighbors, but she swore to hold out.

Years later, I returned downtown to the multi-storied Omni Mall, with its huge carousel in the round feature window.

Jordan Marsh and JCPenney anchored it, and the Omni monster had devoured all the homes between, except for Adelaide’s. Her place still stood, a little dog ear carved out of Omni’s northeast corner. She had held out like she said she would.

From somewhere far away, I heard an ex-nun laugh.

My Miami story began before I was born.

My paternal grandfather, Thomas Tilden, arrived in the 1880s in Syracuse, Mo., and built a magnificent barn. It was “the largest in Missouri, the third-largest in the United States, and the sixth-largest in the world,” crowed the newspapers at the time. Like a fine home, it had mahogany woodwork throughout and cost well over $10,000 – a goodly sum in those days.

But tragedy struck.

In 1896, the barn and all its contents went up in flames. Grandfather, subsequently depressed, decided to sell his farm and move his family to a milder clime. To scout the territory, he boarded Mr. Flagler’s train and rode all the way to its just-completed terminus at Biscayne Bay. There, according to my grandmother, he found a settlement, recently incorporated, of fewer than 50 inhabitants.

Evidently this did not suit his needs, so he reboarded the train and went north; about halfway up the state, to what is now Florahome. There, he bought land and built an architect-designed home. Back in Missouri, he loaded his furniture, some livestock, tools and other belongings into a freight car, and on Oct. 16, 1901, he and his family took up residence in Florahome. When my grandfather died in 1906, my grandmother, with her four youngest children (my father included) moved back to Missouri.

But two of the children stayed on at the farm in Florahome and, even today, there are Tildens at Winter Park.

Fast-forward to 1946: World War II had ended. I was a sophomore at Lindenwood College in St. Charles, Mo., and my parents’ wartime employment in Oak Ridge, Tenn., was no longer needed.

They planned to start a new life “out West,” but wanted to see some of the USA. They bought a trailer and, with my three brothers in tow, headed south to Miami.

Oops, their timing was off – September was upon them, and school started. They parked the trailer and enrolled Billy and Tommy and Bobby in nearby Edison School.

Trailer-park living did not appeal to them, however, but they found that no homeowner would rent to them with three boys. They ended up buying a house on nine acres at the edge of the Everglades – East Glade Drive and Coral Way (Rural Route 4, Box 222). No other manmade structure was within sight except the tip of the Biltmore Hotel nearly five miles to the east in Coral Gables.

I came home from college and we still didn’t have a telephone (wouldn’t for another year). We did have electricity, solar water heating and a tennis court. We had an acre in lawn and only a push lawnmower. One of us was always out pushing the mower.

Meanwhile, my father, William Tilden, an architectural draftsman, found a job. He took our lone car to work every day and deposited me for a summer course at Alex Gibson’s Modeling School. Billy was enrolled at Miami High, Tommy and Bobby at Olympia Heights. Mother, at home with the laundry, sprayed the screen door for mosquitoes each time before she darted out to hang clothes on the line.

So much for the dream of moving “out West.”

Truly a model of tropical living, our Florida home had hurricane shutters; it had coconut palms in the front yard and Australian pines in back. We had mango, avocado, orange, grapefruit, sour orange, guava and kumquat trees. And Daddy put in a patch of sugar cane. He taught us how to slice off a piece of the stalk and suck the sweet juice, sharing with us a pleasure of his Florida boyhood in Florahome.

On weekends, we took long drives around the county, the city, to various parks, the Everglades, and the ocean with its glorious beaches. There was the thrilling trek on the long, narrow, rickety bridges of the Overseas Highway to Key West. Seeing a huge tractor-trailer truck barreling toward you on the Seven Mile Bridge, you couldn’t help but hold your breath and brace for the shudder as it thundered by.

I learned to drive on the Overseas Highway, turning back before the toll booth at Lower Matecumbe Key.

As we became involved with the community, my mother, Josephine Tilden, became president of two school PTAs and started the South Florida Weavers guild, becoming the state president. After my father died, she designed and built her own house among Redland pines. My father eventually retired from the planning department of Dade County Schools and proceeded to tend his “farm” surrounded by grandchildren and, at various times, cats, dogs, chickens, turkeys, rabbits, a horse (Tommy’s), a cow and a bull (Bobby’s), a pigeon named Henry, and Charlie, a vocal bantam rooster that followed him everywhere.

We children grew, married, settled or scattered, and multiplied.

I spent almost 26 years editing Sea Frontiers for the International Oceanographic Foundation on Virginia Key. Billy died in an auto accident during Orientation Week as he entered the University of Florida . Tommy, a retired Marine, is a veteran of the Korean and Vietnam wars. Bobby retired from the school system and moved with his family to the mountains of northern Georgia.

In 2012, Tommy and I are still here, confirmed Floridians, as Grandfather had planned – and not “out West” as our parents once dreamed.

P.S. Since writing this story, I regret to add that my brother, Thomas Tilden, passed away Oct. 1, 2012, just three weeks shy of his 78th birthday.