Round two of the Confederate flag war is underway. Now we see the pushback from those who like to flaunt the stars and bars. Unfortunately, they are the same motorcycle and pickup truck set that branded the flag as socially unacceptable in the first place.
What is disturbing is not so much the depiction of the Confederate flag as a symbol of slavery, which has evolved into racism, but the tendency of the flag-haters to distort the reality of the whole Civil War. We saw a black congressman on television attacking the flag and saying that if the South had won the Civil War, he would be a slave today.
Such nonsense. Can anyone seriously believe that slavery would have continued for long in this country had there been no Civil War? Moral reasons aside, the industrial revolution alone was rapidly replacing human work with machines. But moral reasons alone had already turned much of the world against slavery. Even some prominent Confederate leaders, beginning with Robert E. Lee, gave service to their native states even as they were personally turning against slavery. It was doomed.
As we noted in round one, the flag debate has had the unfortunate side effect of hardening the belief that the Civil War was only about slavery. It is true that slavery was the economic cause of the war. Southern state legislatures were dominated, much as most states are today, by commercial interests, and they were the slave owners. As today, the middle class had little voice in the decision to secede. And yet the middle class (if we can use that term for 19th century life) did the fighting and dying.
The common soldier owned no slaves, but in that era his first loyalty was to his state. Overwhelmingly, one’s neighborhood roots trumped ideology. There are countless examples of this. Wesley Culp died at Gettysburg fighting on Culp’s Hill—land owned by his uncle, and where he played until his late teens when he moved with his employer to Virginia. Much to his family’s chagrin, he returned to die as a Confederate soldier.
John Pemberton, the Confederate commander in defense of Vicksburg, was from Philadelphia (where he died after the war), but had married a Southern girl. He fought for his new home. Confederate General Richard Ewell was pro-union at heart, but, as was the case with Lee, could not go against his native Virginia. Ewell, like Arkansas General Patrick Cleburne, favored freeing the slaves and making them Southern soldiers.
The exceptions to the neighborhood rule are so rare they are conspicuous in history. Union General George Thomas was a Virginian. His family considered him a traitor when he stayed with the North. Confederate General James Longstreet was a friend of Union General Ulysses Grant before the war and remained a friend after it—a different kind of loyalty that clouded his reputation in the South for generations.
This was the reality of the 18th century. It is our history. The Confederate flag was part of a sad chapter. It need not be honored at state capitols. Nor should it be degraded by historical revisionists.
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When the Warren Commission Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy was released in 1964, hardly anybody read it. People took it as gospel that a lone nut had murdered an American president. Among the few who actually read the entire 26 volumes of evidence supporting the report was a Philadelphia lawyer named Vincent Salandria. He didn’t believe it.
Salandria challenged the report in a Philadelphia legal newspaper, which few read. One who did, however, was Gaeton Fonzi. Fonzi was early in a career at Philadelphia magazine, which would make him one of the best investigative reporters of our time. Fonzi suspected Salandria might be a bit of a nut himself, but thought he might make an interesting story.
Fonzi’s initial meeting with Salandria, which we happened to attend, convinced us both that Salandria was anything but a nut, and had identified major discrepancies in the Warren Commission’s findings. It was a natural Philadelphia story, for Salandria’s questions dealt mostly with the “magic bullet” theory, upon which the whole notion of a single gunman depended. The man who came up with that theory was Arlen Specter, an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia who would go on to become a longtime United States senator.
Fonzi interviewed Specter and was stunned that the man who developed the “magic bullet” theory could not explain it. Specter had not been questioned in detail before that, and he fumbled all over the place when confronted with specifics about the president’s wounds. Fonzi wrote about Specter in a piece for Philadelphia magazine. Although it created quite a local stir, the story was not picked up by Philadelphia papers or any national media. It seemed that a sensational development in the case had just died.
However, one who had read, and remembered Fonzi’s story was Richard Schweiker, a congressman from the Philadelphia suburbs who, a few years later, was elected a U.S. Senator. In his capacity as a member of a Senate intelligence committee, Schweiker did some personal investigating into the background of the alleged JFK killer, Lee Harvey Oswald. Schweiker concluded that the ease of Oswald’s movements, to Russia and back, and his subsequent activities as a high-profile pro-Castro figure, suggested a connection to U.S. intelligence. In Schweiker phrase, “he had the fingerprints of intelligence all over him.”
The idea that JFK’s assassin could be an American intelligence agent had enormous implications. Furthermore, Schweiker suspected an Oswald connection to the CIA and anti-Castro Cubans in Miami. When he learned Fonzi was living in Miami, he asked him to check some stuff out. In the next year, Fonzi discovered a prominent Miami anti-Castro figure who off-handedly told him he had seen his CIA handler, who used the name Maurice Bishop, with Oswald in Dallas shortly before the 1963 assassination.
That CIA contact turned out to be David Atlee Phillips, who had risen to a top post in the agency. Although Schweiker’s committee expired shortly thereafter, it had opened a door that led to the House Select Committee on Assassination, where Fonzi worked for the next three years. In 1980, that committee issued a report saying the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy, but offered only several theories to back it up. Fonzi by then was convinced that if the CIA was not behind the Kennedy murder, it surely engineered an elaborate cover-up — controlling the Warren Commission in the1960s and thwarting efforts of investigators over the next few decades. He wrote, in effect, a dissenting opinion as two long magazine articles in Gold Coast magazine (he was a partner at the time), which years later became his book, The Last Investigation in 1993.
That book, the first on the assassination written by a man who had an insider’s perspective working on government investigations, has become must reading for students of that great crime. It inspired numerous other researchers who continue to this day, and who develop further evidence that an American president was killed by his own government. Upon Fonzi’s death two years ago, The New York Times praised his work as among the most important books on the subject.
But without Richard Schweiker, who died last week, it may never have happened. His obituary in the Philadelphia papers did not even mention his connection to the Kennedy investigation, although The New York Times did. Most of the obits cited his friendship with President Ronald Reagan, whose vice-presidential running mate he would have been if Reagan had been nominated in 1976. They also mentioned the respect Senator Ted Kennedy had for the man’s work as secretary of health and human services under Reagan.
Schweiker himself was quoted as saying his most important legacy was from his years in the Reagan administration, “fixing the amounts Medicare pays for medical treatments, instead of leaving costs open-ended. That will have the greatest impact of anything I was able to do."
Some, with slightly longer memories, would disagree. Most respectfully.
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Philadelphia—With so many people running for the Republican nomination for president of the United States, it is impossible if not hard to get them all together for a debate. A democracy deserves better, which is why we came to Philadelphia, the capital of American rowing, if not the whole world. This is the city of the famous Boathouse Row (pictured above), where 13 boat clubs sit side by side, very close to the stately Art Museum, which "Rocky" made famous by using its steps for aerobic activity. In season, the boathouses host crews from every major college in the Philadelphia area, and a few dozen high schools as well.
Years ago the sport of rowing solved the problem of too many boats in a race, and this solution applies nicely to the Republican dilemma. It is called a repechage, a French term for giving a loser a second chance. A number of sports use it, but it is most fitting in rowing because weather conditions, such as wind and current, sometimes affect one boat more than another. So in a race with 18 entries, where only six boats can fit in a body of water at one time, they have heats of six.
The winner moves on to the semi-final race, but the second boat, and sometimes the third, gets a chance in a second race. You get the idea. After the repechage, the winner makes it to the semi-finals and, with luck, might make it to the final race. Possibly even win—it has happened.
This concept is ideal for the large Republican field, most of which is made up of obvious losers. You can't have all the candidates in one debate. But it is not fair to leave somebody out just because polls say they are a loser among losers. We therefore propose at least three debates, with six candidates in each heat. After the polls show who has won, and who was close, those two would advance to the finals. In the likely event that wealthier candidates buy their own pollster, and the polls do not agree, simply take a poll to show which polls have the most credibility.
If, in the likely event that more Republicans declare, you simply declare additional heats, which would make semi-finals necessary, as it often is the case in rowing. That would provide great excitement for the fans, and tremendous commercial opportunities for a capitalist society. In this campaign, it is important that Donald Trump make the finals, no matter how he polls in his heat. The fix must be in. You can't let polls stand in front of ratings.
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It is mid-summer, and people are complaining about traffic in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Just wait until January.
Well, some people don’t want to wait. They think they have waited too long to begin complaining about the overbuilding of Fort Lauderdale’s central core that's threatening to make the fine old neighborhoods that distinguish Fort Lauderdale unlivable.
For some people, that happened last season when all those high-density buildings that had been vacant lots with “coming soon” signs suddenly appeared. People living in Victoria Park, the Las Olas Isles, Colee Hammock—just about any of the neighborhoods that made Fort Lauderdale unusual for their convenience to downtown—suddenly found themselves locked in traffic. On some days, a trip that used to take 10 minutes to the airport took half an hour.
City planners and officials are welcoming thousands of new residents and increasing numbers of winter visitors; they seem not to care about the people who have lived in the area for generations. We previously wrote about a prominent real estate family that had lived in Fort Lauderdale since the 1940s but found traffic in the Coral Ridge neighborhood so compressing that they decided to retire in the mountains of Tennessee. These people feel they are being forced out of the city they helped build.
This all broke like an unexpected storm last season, and for the first time people noticed all those vacant lots with “coming soon” signs depicting, for the most part, large buildings yet to come out of the ground, promising only to make the congestion worse in coming years.
The result: A recent series of meetings of leaders of neighborhood associations in an effort to form a unified protest against more high density development now under consideration on the beach or on the few roads leading to it. The proposed development in the Galleria area is a major target. As one city commissioner put it, belatedly, what good are the new attractions planned for that area if you can’t get to them?
The older neighborhoods are trying to get the attention of city leaders to make them realize that the arteries to the beach, which are about a mile apart, simply can’t sustain the traffic generated by all those people living or working in the neighborhoods between those few roads.
In the case of the Las Olas Isles—one of the nicest residential sections in Florida—there are days when bumper-to-bumper traffic to and from the beach locks them in their streets. It is good that many have boats, for soon that may be the only way out.
For some time we have been calling on Tri-Rail to do what should have been done when the service began in the late 1980s—expand to the FEC tracks. This is the railroad that runs through the downtowns of every city on Florida’s East Coast. It would be far more useful for a commuter railroad than the CSX tracks now being used. They are just a bit too far west to realize the potential of the service.
Well, now it is happening, but not the way we had envisioned. Tri-Rail is planning to use the FEC line, but only in deep Dade County. There is an existing connection between the railroads near 79th Street, and Tri-Rail wants to use it to connect to All Aboard Florida’s massive new station development in downtown Miami. This is a great improvement for Tri-Rail, which now ends near Miami International Airport. That is a useful destination, but not nearly as useful as a train that will be going into the commercial heart of Miami.
That’s good news, but not as good of news as Tri-Rail’s other expansion concept would be. That idea is to run some trains on the FEC all the way from West Palm Beach to Miami, serving high traffic locations such as Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood and Aventura—before terminating at the All Aboard Florida complex in downtown Miami.
That idea is still on the drawing board, but that board appears less draw-able now that Tri-Rail is concentrating on the other idea. Meanwhile, All Aboard Florida’s proposed high-speed service to Orlando faces mounting opposition on the Treasure Coast. It now rivals the scandalous water situation as the hottest political issue in Martin, St. Lucie and Indian River counties.
It seems All Aboard Florida has a chance to defuse that issue by partially advancing the Tri-Rail scheme to use its tracks. All Aboard Florida plans to start its Orlando service on an abbreviated route—only from West Palm to Miami—while it undertakes the bigger task of building new tracks to connect its right-of-way to Orlando at Cocoa Beach.
This, temporarily, will be a high-speed commuter line for 60 miles from West Palm to Miami. It will only stop in Fort Lauderdale. Why not expand that a bit by anticipating Tri-Rail’s goal and add a station in Delray, Boca, Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International and Aventura? They need not be expensive structures, just wooden platforms that Tri-Rail used when it began in the 1980s. This service would have undoubted appeal, and its success could lead to an additional stop to the north in Jupiter. These stations could eventually be taken over by Tri-Rail.
A bi-product of this move would be to silence the critics on the lower regions of the Treasure Coast who say All Aboard Florida does nothing for them but add the commotion, and danger of a fast train cutting through their turf. And surely it would not be long before Stuart, whose residents would be driving to Jupiter to catch that train, would start saying, “Why not us, too?”
Tri-Rail will have at last achieved the usefulness it sought when it began almost three decades ago. And All Aboard Florida will have smoothed its path to making a good idea a reality.
One of the sadder effects of the cutbacks in the newspaper business is the virtual elimination of non-paid obituaries. It doesn’t seem to be good business, because most people who read obits are candidates for the space themselves, and they are also among the dwindling numbers who still read newspapers regularly. Sure there are obits, lots of them, clustered together like the markers in a military cemetery, but they are all paid and written by family members. They are often maudlin, amusingly pious, and they usually don’t really tell you much about the real life of the departed.
Thus, we fill the gap. Patti Phipps, also known by various names due to various marriages (Bates, Brannan and Houston come to mind), died recently at a nursing home in Washington, D.C. According to her brother-in-law, Ted Drum, she was in her early 70s and died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. Until her illness, she was for much of her life one of the prominent socialites in Fort Lauderdale. For more than 30 years she was a regular in the pages of Gold Coast. So much so that the above photo of her in the early 1970s appeared in our April 50th anniversary celebration issue.
She had a running start. Her mother, Zada, who is still going at 98, was a Burdine, the daughter of the founder of Burdines. It was for years the leading department store in the area. It is now Macy’s. Patti was beautiful, blonde and ebullient. Her father, who left her life early, was a romantic figure who flew in World War II in China with the 14th Air Force, successor to the legendary “Flying Tigers.” Her last marriage was to prominent banker Ed Houston.
She was a good friend of Margaret Walker, associate editor of Gold Coast from the 1960s until her retirement in the 1980s. As such, she became an early friend of Gold Coast’s new owners in 1970, and was helpful in giving strangers in town valuable recognition. She literally matured with the magazine. She appeared in the 1990s on a group cover promoting the revival of “The Showoffs”—a live review staged by prominent people in Fort Lauderdale, which she helped start in the early 1970s. She even made the magazine after moving to Vero Beach, in a piece on locals who had migrated to the Treasure Coast.
John Therien’s obit did make Sunday’s Sun-Sentinel—in the paid listings—and although it mentioned he was prominent in the restaurant business, it failed to emphasize a contribution he made, which was revolutionary in the bar business at the time. In 1971, he was a partner in launching the Banana Boat on Commercial Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale.
The restaurant was a dramatic break from the traditional dark, smoky bar. It was blonde and airy, and featured a U-shaped bar where people could relate to each other. It was one of the first of what now is a standard design for a dating bar. Its great popularity made Commercial Boulevard one of the fun streets in South Florida, as a number of other restaurants, with some of the most popular bartenders and barmaids, open nearby. They were constantly in and out of each other’s places, trading dollars. The late Jack Riker, known as “Turtle,” was one of the original Banana Boat staff members. He used to say he was working on a book—How To See Commercial Boulevard on a Thousand Dollars a Day.
John Therien’s most visible partner in the Banana Boat was Pat Kirk, a former stockbroker. Kirk was a bit of a wild man; John Therien was not, which is why he outlived Kirk by several decades. The Banana Boat concept spread to a number of locations with various partners, but all using the same concept. Today only one survives in Boynton Beach.
Therien, joined by three sons (Luke Therien is president) went on to succeed in a number of ventures, including the Fifth Avenue Grill in Delray Beach, which is still going under different ownership; and another in Deerfield Beach, which closed in 2012. He also opened Old Calypso in Delray Beach. His company, Restaurant Holdings, still runs the Banana Boat and also the more upscale Prime Catch in Boynton Beach. John Therien made it to 80, pretty good for a man in a high stress business.
Finally, we bid farewell to Rosemary Jones, who died at 85 on June 20th. She was a long-time freelancer for Gold Coast and she was active for decades in literary organizations. She earned a special place in the magazine’s history in 1992 when she introduced publisher Bernard McCormick to Fred Ruffner, her boss at Omnigraphics Inc. McCormick was looking for investors to rebuild Gold Coast after a long legal fight to regain control.
Instead of investing, Ruffner bought the magazine, and in one year restored its credibility as the leading South Florida magazine. He then sold it back to a new investment group headed by McCormick.
Grandfather Sweeney probably never went beyond grade school, but he managed to become a publisher more than a hundred years ago. None of his books dealt with the Civil War, but he saved some beautiful volumes on American history. In them, before we even started grade school, we admired the detailed lithographs of battle scenes of the Civil War. Confederate flags flew over neat rows of even neater soldiers, all uniformed splendidly in gray. The pictures were not in color, but that did not make any difference when it came to gray. The Confederate flags, of course, in real life were red.
And in real life, those neat uniforms on Confederate soldiers were often not gray, and often not even uniforms. Many Southern soldiers wore what they had worn on their farms. And those who had gray uniforms often found that the sun quickly turned them into the natural color of the fabric. "Butternut scarecrows" is the term historian Shelby Foote used to describe the underfed, poorly dressed Southern soldiers. And in real life—this was in the 1950s—there was nothing sinister about the Confederate flag. It was just a memory from the Civil War, like the little gray replica caps we bought in Woolworth’s. It even had entertainment value, as when the rowing teams from Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia showed up in Philadelphia with Confederate flags on the backs of their rowing shirts.
We hardly noticed it, but that all changed a decade later when the red flag—The Stars and Bars it was nicknamed—began assuming a new sense of rebellion, showing up in the livery of motorcycle gangs and license plates on pickup trucks. It said, “We’re looking for trouble.” It was the time of the civil rights movement, and to many, the flag symbolized resistance to change. To blacks especially, it became a racist symbol. So much so that during the recent debate on the flag one black TV commentator likened it to the swastika—the symbol of Nazi horror in World War II.
Under the circumstances, who can argue with taking the flag down on official state grounds, or deleting it from the Mississippi state flag? But one wonders about calls to change the Florida state flag, which is the St. Andrew’s Cross, the same X as on the Confederate flag. The cross was often used throughout history. It is part of the British Union Jack, for instance. It showed up on some colonial flags of Spain and Russia.
What is also disturbing, however, is the tendency among the anti-flaggers to distort the whole background of the Civil War, in an effort to change history. For years some Southerners contend it was about states' rights. To others, it was all about slavery. In fact, it was both. Slavery was the economic cause for that great conflict, but it is not the reason most men fought. They fought, as men have done for centuries, for their neighborhood, and for country—right or wrong. It is easy to forget that until that war, there was a real conflict between federal and state priorities. Many thought their state loyalty superior to a national interest. Robert E. Lee, a moral man as our history has produced, said he could not fight against his native Virginia.
Lee, who was wealthy, owned slaves, but was in the process of setting them free. Most soldiers, on both sides, did not own slaves and may have had no opinion on the issue, one way or the other. Especially in the South, where much of the war was fought, people considered themselves invaded. They fought for family and home.
How else can you explain the notable contribution of Irish soldiers in that war? Most of the Irish—who were practically all immigrants—were in the North, but there were strong pockets of Irish in the older Southern cities. They had all come to America at about the same time, and for the same reason—to escape oppression and famine in their homeland, which was under the rule of the British flag. In fact, many were not far from slaves in Ireland. They lost their land, and during the famine could not even eat the food they grew on the owners' farms. When the Civil War broke out, the famed Irish Brigade went to battle for the North flying the same green flag they had flown in revolt against British rule.
Although far fewer in numbers, and in much smaller units, the Southern Irish waved the same flag and exhibited similar valor in battle after battle. Very few moved north or south out of moral conviction. They simply fought for their new homeland, for identical motives. The classic example was Irish-born Confederate general Patrick Cleburne, who had prospered in Arkansas and died fighting in gratitude for that state, even though he became unpopular with politicians when he said he favored freeing slaves.
It was a great irony of our history, that a war meant to set men free had so many combatants on both sides fighting in appreciation of their own newfound freedom. Those in the South fought with honor under the Stars and Bars, and most of them, if alive today, would probably understand the lowering of that flag.
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Do you want to know what happened in Baltimore? Here’s what happened.
“From the wild Irish slums of the 19th-century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows large numbers of young men to grow up in broken families… never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future – that community asks for and gets chaos.” – Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
When Moynihan wrote that passage he was not thinking of Baltimore. But then again, he was. He died in 2003 and the quote is from a 1965 report he wrote when assistant secretary of labor in the Johnson administration. Moynihan was a sociologist by training, and went on to become a much admired U.S. senator from New York. Criticized by some as a racist at the time, he has since been recognized for his vision. He saw the future by observing the past. A year before his report, there had been a race riot in Philadelphia.
The Philadelphia riot was nothing if not complex (to this day people argue about it) and laden with irony. In 1964, Philadelphia had a new police commissioner, Howard Leary. He was progressive, reaching out to the black community and initiating a review board to handle claims of police brutality. But that made no difference one August day when a black couple on Columbia Avenue, not far from Temple University, got into a fight at an intersection. She was blocking traffic, but the woman refused to move her car, and when police tried to get her to move it, the neighborhood moved in. One man attacked the police (one black and one white officer), and soon word spread that a pregnant black woman had been killed by white police. Keep in mind, this was long before the Internet was around to fuel such wild rumors.
Three days of rioting and looting followed. The destruction of stores made the recent Baltimore violence seem tame. Commissioner Leary avoided heavy force, although hundreds of people were arrested. He sort of let the fire burn itself out, working to contain the looting to one busy street. Some contend black militants fueled the flames while local black clergy tried to stop it. Most of the destroyed stores were Jewish owned, adding an element of anti-Semitism to the incident.
After things settled down a bit, we were sent by Philadelphia magazine to analyze what had happened. We had a good guide. A black guy in our circulation department lived in the neighborhood. Our most vivid memory of that story is visiting a pool room at night. There was a bare bulb over the table, which seemed surrounded by 100 young guys, whose faces appeared olive green in that dim light. Some wondered if this white guy was a cop.
We met some of the guys who had been involved in the looting. If you asked them if they were angry, they would of course say yes, offering a litany of excuses for their behavior. But that mood seemed staged, and temporary. For the most part, they seemed pretty happy, joking around. None appeared to have any guilt about destroying the shopping street in their own neighborhood. One young man, a leader in the riot, actually gained stature for his role. "Street cred," before that term became popular. We had never heard of Daniel Patrick Moynihan at the time, but we were seeing up close and personal what he had written about. These were young men who, in another Moynihan phrase of “furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure.” All they needed was an excuse.
Not long after, we had a much different view of the same problem. We did a freelance piece for the United Presbyterian Church magazine. The church had poured money into a grade school in the same black neighborhood. They offered every program available to give little kids a better start in education. We spent some time in the back of a class of youngsters, second graders, we recall. Their teacher was an idealistic young white woman. We admired her for even venturing into that neighborhood on a daily basis. Not many would. Although we were a long time removed from our own early grade school days, we sensed that with these kids something was missing. The Olympics were going on at the time, and when the teacher asked if anyone knew what the Olympics were, dozens of hands crowded the air. The boy she called on said, “That’s where the man jumps over with a pole.”
As our assignment was ending, the teacher asked us to stay a few minutes after school. She showed us her book. Of about 30 children in her charge, only two or three came from homes with both a mother and father. The rest were either single parents, or in a number of cases, relatives, often grandparents.
“That’s the problem,” she said. This brings us back to Moynihan.
Fifty years later, that problem has only gotten worse. Even as educated or talented blacks have ascended to prominence, in such fields as the media, the military, sciences and the professions, and not the least, politics (notice who’s president of the U.S.), the black underclass has grown enormously. Seventy percent of black children are born out of wedlock. Single mothers struggle to support them. It takes two middle-class wage earners to raise a family today. Poverty is almost inevitable. Crime is its predictable accomplice. There are no father figures creating examples or exercising control.
The media, many of which are black, tell us the problem in Baltimore is poverty, unemployment, boarded up houses, crime, etc. But those are symptoms of the disease. Moynihan identified the germ so long ago, and to date no cure is in sight.
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It was November of 1977. Peggy McCormick was having a baby, and the delivery was tough. The obstetrician was Dr. Warren Stough, who had been delivering half of Broward County wee-ones for decades. He was greatly respected; in addition to his professional competence, he had a delightful Southern style, which put everyone at ease. As the labor dragged on, we asked him if there was a problem.
“No, Mac,” he said, “This is just a big doggone ole baby.” The big baby was 10 pounds and ultimately required a C-section. The baby was fine, but the mother had heavy bleeding, which took a few days to control. We took the baby home while the mother remained in the hospital. For those first few motherless nights, Mark McCormick, age 11, got up for the two o’clock feeding, burping and rocking to sleep his new little sister as if he did it for a living.
When the mother came home, the bleeding started again in the night. It was heavy and we called Dr. Stough. He said we better take her to the hospital. He would be over in an hour. We got there fast; the bleeding was getting heavier. We were scared. When we got to the hospital, we alerted the first nurse we saw. The nurse said OK, they’d check her out.
Long minutes passed and the bleeding did not slow. It got worse. We told the nurse she better get moving. This was serious. She said OK. We also saw a doctor we knew and asked him for help. He said he would. More long minutes passed. Finally, seeing the bleeding was becoming a torrent, we grabbed a nurse. “She’s not bleeding, she’s hemorrhaging!” we almost screamed, literally pushing the nurse into the room. The nurse took one look and all hell broke loose. She ran from the room, a look of guilty panic on her face, and within seconds it seemed every nurse and doctor in South Florida was running into the room. A blood transfusion was underway quickly, but it still took several days to get the bleeding under control. During those nights Mark McCormick, pushing the ripe old age of 12, continued his two o’clock baby feeding. Almost forty years later he recalls his nocturnal activity as lasting about three months, but it was actually about a week.
This event occurred in Broward General Hospital (now called Broward Health) and it did not leave a wonderful impression of the hospital. At that time our opinion was shared by others. Broward General did not have an outstanding reputation.
This was written almost 40 years later in the same hospital, and this time the father was the patient. And the situation could not have been more different. From the moment we were admitted after a strange spell that ended a memorable 50th Anniversary celebration of Gold Coast magazine, the staff of the hospital could not have been more attentive. From the emergency room staff, who were our first contact, to the nurses, who popped in every 30 seconds to take blood or record blood pressure, to the lads who wheeled you around for various tests, this staff seemed to be addicted to nice pills.
Everybody introduced themselves by name, and the nurses were the polar opposite of the indifferent people who scared us half to death decades ago. They popped into the room often, often simply to ask if we needed anything. Due to local spies, we learned that a big part of this avalanche of attention is no accident. The hospital administration for the last four years, led by CEO Calvin Glidewell, emphasizes such good conduct because one of the criteria Medicare uses to reimburse hospitals is patient satisfaction. That remuneration trickles down to the lowest employees. This is obviously an induced behavior, but behavior tends to be habit forming. If there wasn't a person in the hospital who wasn't high on happy pills, we didn't meet them. This was not one man's opinion. Visitors who visited during several days all commented on the obvious dedication of the hospital staff.
Nobody wants to be wished a hospital stay, but if you need one, it is hard to beat Broward Health. Especially compared to 1977.
