Everybody in South Florida is complaining about traffic. And half of South Florida is complaining about one part of what could be a mild remedy - the idea of running passenger trains on the railroad that built Florida in the first place.
Just yesterday, we overheard a conversation, which started out about youth soccer and quickly morphed into a discussion about problems the marine industry will endure due to the expanded use of passenger trains on the FEC Railway. We have discussed this before; the concerns of the marine industry could not be more real – especially in downtown Fort Lauderdale where raising the lift bridge over the New River many times a day would play havoc with the busy boat traffic on that waterway.
This is in Fort Lauderdale. Meanwhile, in Dade County there is enthusiasm for the plan to use All Aboard Florida’s terminal station in downtown Miami to connect to Tri-Rail trains. Those trains currently use the CSX tracks that miss the downtowns of all the cities along Tri-Rail’s route. It is proposed to move some of those trains to the FEC tracks, where they should have been all along, but this would only increase the number of bridge delays in Fort Lauderdale.
Meanwhile again, in northern Palm Beach County and points above, the opposition to All Aboard Florida has reached the point of lawsuits. The Indian River County Commission has filed to stop All Aboard Florida on the grounds that the proposed fast train service from Miami to Orlando will cause harm to that county.
Alas, the FEC is suffering from wild speculation over its motives for running the fast train. A columnist in Palm Beach suspects it ties in with secret plans for a casino on its large Miami property. Whisk betters in from distant places. Letter writers to papers say it isn’t for passenger trains at all, but rather to run fast freights from ports in Miami and Fort Lauderdale.
What we have here is a failure of communication, and it may be on purpose. But nobody seems to put together the long range picture in all its parts. For starters, this should be regarded as the first step in modernizing the FEC corridor to serve the same purpose as the Northeast Corridor from Boston to Washington. This means far more than just improving crossing gates and silencing horns, which help people near the tracks avoid sleep at night. It means closing crossings where feasible, elevating tracks in some cases, bridging over them in others.
We have twice ridden on FEC freights and have checked out the railroad from Miami to Vero Beach. There are many stretches, even in Dade and Broward counties, where relatively minor improvements would clear the tracks for several miles and permit trains to hit high speeds – up to 90 miles and hour. In Hollywood, for instance, the tracks run in a median along Dixie Highway for long stretches. An engineer has a clear view far down the tracks and could react to an emergency. It is not like stopping a freight train a freight train a mile long. Modern passenger trains can speed up or slow down quickly.
This is now. In the long run, tunnels need to be built under waterways. We suspect that the proposed schedule of 32 All Aboard Florida trains is too ambitious. It will likely be scaled back to perhaps half that, and still suit the railroads purpose, so the impact on marine activity, while considerable, will not be as bad as forecast.
We think All Aboard Florida’s ridership estimates are wildly exaggerated. So what? What would not be exaggerated is the benefit if Tri-Rail begins using the same tracks for commuter service. A few stations in Palm Beach County would do a lot to silence critics in that area. Tri-Rail is reluctant to estimate ridership when that happens. It is still touchy that its original 1988 estimates took years to be realized. But we would be surprised if current ridership does not double in a short time.
Since All Aboard Florida will only go to Palm Beach for the first year, it will be in effect a fast commuter service. And with Tri-Rail aboard, that service could be stretched to Jupiter. And if that happens, people in Stuart will start driving to Jupiter and begin complaining that the service should include their town. And on up the railroad it will go, a domino effect as Martin, St. Lucie and Indian River counties become part of Tri-Rail.
If viewed in perspective, which few people seem to be doing, this rail initiative is a game changer, a game whose change is long overdue.
Monday’s Miami Herald had an informative piece by Eric Barton on the problems facing Florida’s solar industry. Barton, one of the most talented contributors to Gulfstream Media Group’s publications, collaborated with The Florida Center for Investigative Reporting to explain how Florida’s Legislature is thwarting efforts of the solar industry to grow in the state.
As usual, the reason is money. The article details the enormous contributions from Florida’s power companies to almost anything that moves in Tallahassee to assure that any legislation to benefit solar development goes nowhere. Since 2010, the state’s Big Four of Energy – FPL, Duke Energy, Gulf Power and Tampa Electric – have contributed $12 million to the campaigns of state lawmakers.
They give to everybody, but mostly to Republicans, and in a Legislature dominated by very conservative GOP members, the handful of legislators who want to capitalize on Florida’s natural gift – abundant sunshine to provide renewable energy – get no movement on their bills. What they do get is pariah treatment, sometimes in an insulting manner. Barton quotes Representative Dwight Dudley (pictured above), R-St. Petersburg, on an encounter with a utility company lobbyist. Dudley was talking to an acquaintance at a function.
“Oh my gosh, do you know who this is? The devil’s holy man,” said the lobbyist. “It was loud and unpleasant,” recalled Dudley, “and it became very uncomfortable.”
This is exactly the opposite of what should happen. Good men should not be attacked. Those whose votes are bought by campaign contributions should be those suffering the boycott. Boycott, by the way, comes from the Irish land wars of the 1800s. A land agent named Charles Boycott was despised by the peasants who were losing their homes when they could not afford the rent. Instead of killing him, which they would have preferred, the people shunned him. Absolutely. No one talked to him or recognized his existence. Restaurants would not serve him. Carriage drivers would not transport him. People closed curtains on windows when he passed by.
It worked. Boycott became a sordid celebrity in the British Isles, and he could not stand it. He left Ireland, and the publicity gave momentum to the land reform movement, which ultimately regained much of the land the Irish had lost over the centuries.
The solar situation is just the latest example of money corrupting our Legislature. Big Sugar buys votes to prevent money already approved for restoring the Everglades from being spent. Any gun law opposed by the National Rifle Association has no chance, even though police departments and most Floridians favor gun control. School administrators and police are appalled by the current bill to allow guns on campuses. It makes no difference to this Legislature.
The pro-solar community is trying to get around the Legislature by means of a constitutional amendment, perhaps next year. That would likely pass. Most Floridians, at least those who vote, care about the environment. But even that is no guarantee of action. The voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment to provide funds to buy land for the Everglades cleanup. But the Legislature has approved only a fraction of the money. It is obviously responding to Big Sugar dollars, now that the sugar companies have decided they don’t want to honor previous agreements.
What can we do about the arrogance of these elected officials who deny the will of the people? It is illegal in most parts of Florida to have them drawn and quartered. Maybe the Irish had the right idea.
Image via
The problem with the world is that there are too many names. There was a time when we were young when the names controlling the world were easy to remember. Churchill, who was named after a famous racetrack; Roosevelt, who was named after a bridge in Stuart; and Hitler, who was named after his father, did not twist the tongue.
Famous generals had easy names – Eisenhower, Marshall, Patton, Montgomery, Bradley, MacArthur. They did not challenge brain cells. Even the enemy had fairly simple names, such as Tojo, Hirohito and Rommel. Some Teutonic monikers were a bit challenging, but historically there was usually a way to associate them with real life. Hindenburg was named after a blimp. Bismarck after a town in North Dakota. The B-17 was named for a popular vitamin used to counter blitzkrieg syndrome.
Today, one feels for any serious student of world affairs. Just in the last 20 years or so, major events have taken place in places nobody heard of. It started in the 1990s with the awful war in Bosnia. The names of prominent political and military leaders were uniformly hard to pronounce, and impossible to remember. Alija Izetbegovic, Radovan Karadzic, Milomir Stakic, Ratko Mladic, Sefer Halilovic, Haris Silajdzic and Slobodan Milosevic were among the many who made the news. If some of these spellings are incorrect, keep in mind most of these people could not even pronounce their own names, much less spell them.
You had to feel for the poor broadcasters dealing with this problem. Several had nervous breakdowns on camera, and to this day, there are cases of newsmen being treated for brain trauma, a lingering effect of years of tongue twisting.
The painful thing is that as soon as we begin to come close to getting these names right, the world crisis tends to change to other places and other names nobody can get straight.
Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the Middle East where the shifting tides of turmoil have forced upon innocent Americans names that only a mother could abide. And as soon as we come close to getting them straight, they disappear and are replaced by equally challenging names.
We are assaulted with names such as Muammar el Qaddafi, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Nouri al Maliki, Hosni Mubarak, Benjamin Netanyahu (Pictured above, thank god they call him Bibi), Khaled Meshaal, Asif Ali Zardari, Hamad bin Khalifa-Thani, Zine El Abidine Benali, Abdullah Saleh and others for which there are no letters in the English alphabet.
Perhaps the natives have dealt with that problem over the years by naming half the people Muhammad. Indeed, even in the U.S. we have seen creative solutions to difficult names. In our old high school, on the first day, a teacher named Gallagher (O Gallchobhair in old Irish) was going through the names of the class when he came to Szymkowski. We can only spell it because he became the stroke of a championship crew and as a sports writer, we had to deal with it on a regular basis.
Mr. Gallagher fumbled with the pronunciation and then said to Szymkowski, “From now on, you’re Murphy.” And Murph Szymkowski it is, 50 years later.
Image via
The opposition to a railroad being a railroad is growing. Last week Indian River County (that's Vero Beach) commissioners voted to sue to stop All Aboard Florida – the proposed fast train from Miami to Orlando on the Florida East Coast Railway tracks. Comments from some elected officials up that way make the high-speed line sound like the worst thing that ever happened to their communities – the very destruction of their way of life.
Actually, the idea is one of the best things to happen, not just for the Treasure Coast, but for all six counties from Indian River to Miami-Dade. It is just going to take time for the public to get it. And the longer government figures continue to view the situation in short time, the longer it will take. In the long run, All Aboard Florida is the beginning of a transportation reformation that is long overdue. It is the modernization of the railroad that literally built the east coast of Florida. Its tracks run through the heart of every city, large and small, from Jacksonville to Miami. Those tracks are the reason many cities exist.
The FEC is partly to blame. It gave up passenger service in the 1960s, and over the years, it permitted hundreds of grade crossings as new roads to serve new communities were built. Between Miami and northern Palm Beach County there are only a few bridges over the tracks. They are so rare they should be designated tourist attractions. Most northern railroads eliminated grade crossings a century ago, as it became obvious that motor vehicles and the iron horse had an inherent conflict of interest. There could be no Northeast Corridor, one of the busiest rail lines in the world (with Acela trains hitting 150 mph) if cars and trucks crossed the rails every few blocks or so.
But the FEC has new management with new ideas. We have noted before that this is an obvious real estate play, which over time will benefit the railroad. Most obvious is the major redevelopment already underway for its large and idle rail yard in Miami. Critics – almost all of them are well north of Miami – see this as some sort of evil. They do not see that, again in the long run, it is one of the best things that could happen to their increasingly traffic-jammed towns.
Making the FEC a busy passenger corridor – and it sure will be – will necessitate rebuilding the entire line, closing crossings where feasible, bridging others and ultimately (and very expensively) tunneling under the major waterways, such as Fort Lauderdale's New River and Stuart's St. Lucie River, where the trains now cross on lift bridges. Those opposing the railroad see only the problems – and they are very real – without perceiving the solutions.
Some perceptions are absurd. Letter writers to the Palm Beach Post suspect All Aboard Florida is a ruse to permit increased high-speed freight traffic on the FEC tracks. One writer suggests building a new railroad along U.S. 27 to carry all the freight expected to arrive at South Florida ports when the expansion of the Panama Canal is complete – as if constructing a new railroad is as simple as adding a flight on an airline.
What is disturbing is that media north of Broward County are not putting this historic opportunity in perspective. It was announced last year that the FEC, CSX and Tri-Rail are cooperating in an unprecedented way. Some of the long, slow freights will be transferred to the CSX, which has far fewer grade crossings. Tri-Rail had already identified potential stations in Palm Beach County when it shifts some trains to the FEC tracks where they always belonged. Opposition to All Aboard Florida would fade quickly if stations in Boca Raton, Delray Beach, West Palm Beach and Jupiter could serve commuters.
And looking deeper into the future, the entire east coast of Florida could have commuter service and fast inter-city trains on the same railroad. If those Indian River commissioners foresaw a station in Vero Beach from which they could get to Fort Lauderdale in an hour, they might not be so fast to write checks to lawyers.
Image via
Last week we took a trip to Naples for a weekend getaway. We wanted to beat traffic, so we left at 2 p.m. The drive from downtown Fort Lauderdale to I-595 normally takes about 10 minutes, sometimes even quicker. This day, it took 30 minutes to go a few miles. Once on I-595, we traveled the 109 miles to Naples in about 90 minutes.
We wish our experience was unusual, but everywhere we go we hear the same complaint. The neighborhoods surrounding downtown Fort Lauderdale, which have for years been unusual for their suburban-like atmosphere while at the same time been wonderfully convenient to the city core, are becoming unlivable because of the traffic congestion.
Just yesterday comes a letter illustrating the frustration of long time residents. The family is old – dating to the 1940s – and the letter writer would be the first to admit that growth has been good for his business. It was written personally, not for publication, but we share a few of his thoughts:
After recalling the pleasure of living here for so many years, he adds: “Once the developers got control of the city and the county commissioners, the almighty dollar took precedence over our quality of life.”
The writer criticizes the city’s decision to increase heights, eliminate parking regulations and waive impact fees, causing “land values to skyrocket and our great restaurants and single-story ranch-type homes could no longer stand the onslaught of developers throwing money at them to build something bigger and better.
“The developers were successful in selling the theory that high-rise tax income would fatten city bank accounts when in reality the cost of services, congestion and quality of life have suffered to the point where there is no monetary gain.”
The bottom line: Preparing for retirement, he and his wife are moving.
This writer is hardly alone, and it isn’t just limited to Fort Lauderdale. In Aventura recently, there was an arrest of a couple that drove over fresh concrete on a sidewalk poured on their property. But the background is trying to prevent a developer from putting in a large complex in an area that residents say is already overbuilt.
In western Palm Beach County, there is an ongoing fight between homeowners who bought on promises that their area would remain rural, and are now being challenged by builders seeking to chip away at designated open space.
In all of these situations, people feel betrayed by elected officials who buy office with pro-growth contributions and ignore the will of the voters. Often the politicians pretend to be on the people’s side when they are definitely not. We are seeing this today in the effort to clean up the Everglades. Elected officials routinely say they are all for saving the environment, then vote for the polluters and pretend that helps the public. The Palm Beach Post recently reported that elected officials from the Treasure Coast cities suffering the damage of discharges from Lake Okeechobee often talk like champions of the environment, and then vote just the opposite.
This is in a word corruption. And it goes on throughout the state in many areas. But their hearts are not the problem. Their wallets are.
As we get ready to celebrate Gold Coast magazine’s 50th anniversary in April, one of the reflections over the decades is the decline of The Miami Herald. When we arrived in 1970, the Herald set the agenda for Broward County, and much of the state. It had several offices outside Miami, including a major presence on Sunrise Boulevard near Holiday Park. It routinely out-covered the Fort Lauderdale News (now Sun-sentinel) in Broward.
Those days are long gone, and there is no better example of that than yesterday’s Herald Business Monday section, which had a cover story on the explosive growth of glossy regional magazines in South Florida. True enough. In 1965, there were only two such magazines – ours and Palm Beach Life, which is still published occasionally by Cox Newspapers, owner of the The Palm Beach Post. Today, between Miami and Vero Beach, there are at least 40 lifestyle magazines, including six of Gulfstream Media Group’s. We aren't complaining too loudly because our related company's software package, The Magazine Manager, goes to hundreds of regional magazines, many much like ours. And, in addition to our six print publications, all lifestyle magazines have a large digital and social media presence.
Monday’s Herald story mentioned numerous publications and listed various companies active in the field. But indicative of its lack of attention to Broward County, it did not mention us – the oldest and most successful magazine publisher in the area. We suspect that the writer, Cindy Krischer Goodman, may not even know we exist. If she has ever seen a copy of Gold Coast, Fort Lauderdale Monthly (our visitors version), Boca Life Magazine, The Palm Beacher, Jupiter Magazine or Stuart Magazine, she probably did not take the trouble to see who published them. In a story that mentioned so many titles and companies (it took up four and a half pages), it seems an inexcusable lack of leg work. One can’t imagine the old Herald being so irresponsible.
Example: Goodman called Ocean Drive the “grandfather” of local magazines. It started around 1990, a mere 25 years after Gold Coast.
We wonder if Goodman looked into the mentioned magazines' circulations. We doubt many other publications come remotely close to our recent postage bill for one issue – $17,481. And we know exactly who gets those copies. In contrast, so many of the new glossies drop off copies to advertisers and then stack up the rest of their free publications in restaurants and bars. We know our readers’ profiles in detail. What does a stack-up publication know, except that some drunk may have walked out with a copy of their book?
Many people ask us why there are so many magazines. The answer is that technology has made them easy to start, and too few advertisers demand proof of circulation. The Herald would do the advertising community and readers in general a real service if it took the time to ask some questions.
It was the morning of March 29, 1977. Gaeton Fonzi showed up at the office. Usually the personification of low key, he seemed a little more animated than usual. We went back a long way. We met in the early 1960s in an army reserve unit, and he got us into magazine work at Philadelphia magazine. We came to Florida together and he had been our editor at Miami Magazine. When we got out of it, he began working for government committees that had reopened the investigation into the murder of President Kennedy. He had gotten a tip that a man who could be a valuable source was visiting near Palm Beach. He had a name of a resident, but could not find an address.
Maggie Walker, our very southern associate editor, overheard our conversation.
“Gaeton,” she said, “why don’t you try the social register?” She had an old one for Palm Beach, and sure enough, the name Fonzi was looking for was in it. Tilton. In Manalapan. He was off.
What happened next was all over CNN yesterday in connection with the Fox news star, Bill O’Reilly. Fonzi went to the address in Manalapan. The man he was looking for, George de Mohrenschildt, was not there. His daughter said he was in Palm Beach. Fonzi left his card, identifying himself as an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations. When de Mohrenschildt returned and saw Fonzi’s card, he blew his brains out.
We don’t know how much Fonzi knew about the man at that time, but he was eventually to learn (he worked on this matter for almost 20 years) that de Mohrenschildt was friendly with Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused JFK assassin. In fact, de Mohrenschildt was a longtime CIA asset who seems to have played a role in setting up Oswald to take the blame for the murder. There are indications he was under great stress when Fonzi came calling. He must have figured the game was up. He killed himself.
Now for Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly had done some freelance work for us in Miami when he was a grad student. He and Fonzi remained in touch after O’Reilly got into television. O’Reilly, working in Dallas, was interested in the Kennedy assassination and knew Fonzi was working on it. The CNN spot takes it from there: CNN Report.
As the years passed, Fonzi and O’Reilly remained in touch. In fact, Fonzi played a role in getting O’Reilly his big break in New York. He recommended him to a TV executive he knew. On at least one occasion, O’Reilly visited Fonzi at his home in Miami Beach. He arrived in a limo. Later, Fonzi wrote an amusing piece for Gold Coast magazine on how the brash O’Reilly walked into our Miami office one day and announced he was our new film critic.
Although he personally liked O’Reilly, Fonzi was increasingly disappointed in his work at the corrupt Fox News operation. The O’Reilly he had known as an ambitious, idealistic young guy in Miami was not the same Bill O’Reilly who became the popular mouthpiece for Fox’s slanted version of the news. Fox, and O’Reilly, became a joke among serious journalists.
Gaeton Fonzi had a knack for saying profound things in a few words. Not long before he died two years ago, he summed up O’Reilly: “Bill took the money.”
Seventy-one years and two days after he almost died, Ron Roth-Watts did. His call came in the night last week, in a Fort Lauderdale retirement home. His mind and body gave out about the same time, and in his last months, he could not recall his war record.
It was impressive. Ronald Leslie Roth-Watts joined the British Navy at the beginning of World War II. He was still a teenager, with an interest in photography. His technical talents got him into sonar – the nautical equivalent of radar – at a time when very few knew what is was about. Fortunately, the British did, and it saved them in their finest hour.
Ron served on four British ships during the war. His ships took part in the invasions of North Africa, Italy and Normandy. It was off Anzio, in the Italian campaign, that he dodged the bullet, or more accurately a torpedo. He was aboard the cruiser H.M.S. Penelope on Feb. 18, 1944, when a German U-boat hit her with two torpedoes. The ship went down in 11 minutes. Ron’s normal sonar station was below decks, where he would likely have been a goner. But that day, he was delivering a message topside. He simply stepped off the deck into the water as the ship slipped under. He claimed the enemy sub surfaced, and Ron, now in the water, got off a curse.
“You bostids,” he shouted, “you sank my camera.” He was one of 206 of a crew of 623 to survive. He went on to sail and fight another day. Interestingly, when he spoke of his war experiences, he seemed proudest of being part of a group from his ship that, when berthed in North Africa, got the task of fixing a bunch of broken down Italian trucks that had been captured after the Axis surrender.
“We got them all running,” he liked to say.
The camera he lost when his ship went down was a Leica, which he had just acquired. It was one of the best cameras in the world – but it was not his last. After the war, he became a successful photographer. He was among the pool of photographers assigned to the Royal Family, and to his last days, he kept magazine shots he had taken of princesses and future queens.
He moved to Canada, then to the U.S. in the 1950s. He worked out of New York for numerous important companies. He specialized in interior design photography, and his work appeared in Architectural Digest and later, when he came to Florida, for our Gold Coast magazine. He also taught at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale.
That was in the 1970s, when the photo above was taken. At the time, he was one of the best photographers in his field. His work in our magazine attracted the attention of interior designers and developers, and he had a good run for the next decade or so. Technology began to pass him by, at least as a photographer, but he never lost his flair for things mechanical. He was very good with cars, and jobs that most of us wouldn’t touch – such as replacing a radiator, or fixing electrical stuff – he did routinely. Our company turned over a well-used Chevy to him in the late ’70s and he kept it running for years. He also built his own home computer.
He had been married, and kept a photo of a pretty girl he said was his daughter. She might have been a stepdaughter. He didn’t say much about his immediate family, although he had an interest in his British past. He said the Roth part of his name came from a Jewish background, but he also spoke of a relative who was a Catholic monk in Ireland. He had a brother who visited about 20 years ago. He was a bit of a bounder, as the Brits say, and outstayed his welcome. Ron did not seem sorry to see him depart. The brother died, and after that Ron could find no relatives.
He remained physically active until his last few years. With his photography years behind him, he did some part-time work for our company in the graphics department. Even at advanced age, he was quick to pick up new technology. His vision and hearing declined, but he was a walking fool. You would see him all over town. He once got bored (he couldn’t hear in the crowd) at a party at the Lauderdale Yacht Club and left unannounced, walking to his apartment near the Galleria. He was pushing 90 when he fell crossing Sunrise and couldn’t get up. Two good Samaritans stopped their cars and helped him to the sidewalk. He was disoriented and one of the drivers stayed with him for several hours until the police could identify him.
He made it another 18 months. His most interesting life ended at 91 ½. Not bad for a bloke who almost lost it in 1944.
The kid is built like spring steel, and with hair close cut; he looks like what he is – a young guy waiting to leave the hospitality industry to go on active duty, and can’t count the days until he does.
“You would be willing to go over to Iraq?” he's asked.
“That’s probably where I’ll wind up,” he says, giving no indication that he would not welcome that assignment.
It got us thinking about something we threw out as a half-joke not long ago – the idea of forming a special international force of volunteers to do what no country seems willing to do on its own – put boots on the ground in the Middle East. Countries seem willing to do everything but that. They supply modern aircraft, drones and missiles whose names we haven’t even heard yet. But they're not sending people to actually go in and eliminate the barbarians whose daily acts of savagery stun the civilized world.
And that is the operative word. Civilization. What if a call went out for men to defend the values the Western World has established over the last thousand years? Not from just one country, but from anywhere where people are willing to risk their lives for civilization. We are speaking of people who are morally motivated (probably not a good idea to call them crusaders, or sport red crosses on white tunics. You might mix that up with the Ku Klux Klan).
This is a unit that should be formed by the United Nations, but it won’t be.
We are thinking more of a model along the lines of the French Foreign Legion, which for nearly 200 years has been composed of soldiers from all over. Indeed, the uniforms could resemble those of the Legion, just not quite so peacock-y – the kepi hat, which in the U.S. service was once known as the Ridgway cap, with a neck cloth. Of course, in battle, they would look just like our current soldiers, with all the body armor and face shields that have become international.
These would be soldiers of fortune, a breed that never seems to go out of existence – men who ignore those “Wounded Warrior” ads that feature maimed veterans, and see only the adventure of being in harm’s way. We suspect an elite unit could be quickly formed of men with military experience, ex-marines, army rangers and those from equivalent units in other countries.
They would have to be paid grandly, and supplied with the best of equipment (which seems to be no problem), and part of an elite outfit, whose feats would surely be the subject of Hollywood treatment. Mostly, however, they would be motivated to counter, in Churchill’s words at a different time, the world sinking into “the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”
If ISIS can attract thousands of recruits with a malformed concept of human behavior, can’t the free world find just as many good guys who have the right stuff?
Fort Lauderdale's St. Thomas Aquinas High School has developed a reputation as one of the best athletic schools in the country. It routinely wins the All-Sports Award from the Sun-Sentinel and Miami Herald, and recently one of those outlets that compares teams around the country named it the third best athletic school in the nation.
That standing has been enhanced in the last year, as its track team won both boys and girls big school state championships last spring, followed by the football team in the fall, volleyball and softball, and just last weekend the girls soccer team won its 14th state championship. You read that right. Although its football coaches have built a dynasty, winning eight state titles since 1992 in a state with numerous strong high school programs, they are not even close to St. Thomas' winning-est coach. Carlos Giron came to the school in 1982, and in addition to his 14 state championships in girls soccer, he set a record for consecutive games without a loss. From 1994 to 2001 the Raiders went unbeaten in 158 games. That's a record that may last until eternity. The nearest team is a Texas school with 115.
To put that in perspective, this year's state champions had one loss and a tie, both to Broward County schools. And it isn't as if South Florida schools are pushovers in soccer. To the contrary, Broward's American Heritage (which tied St. Thomas) won the state 3A title – its eighth championship. And Cypress Bay defeated St. Thomas in mid-season, only to lose in a hard fought regional playoff game.
A cynic looking at these records might surmise that girls’ soccer is like football, where a few elite programs attract the best players, sometimes from distant locales, and benefit from transfers. Both St. Thomas and American Heritage got some of the area's top football players last year when University School lost its coach, and saw a mass exodus of talented players wanting to be on a winning team, with the exposure that brings to college recruiters. St. Thomas’ reputation for strong academics as well as sports has created a tradition of attracting sons and grandsons of well-known South Florida football families. It includes names such as Shula, Duhe, Bosa and Carter. Many of those top prospects, especially from lower income families, are on scholarship.
Girls’ soccer is different. None of the St. Thomas players receive financial aid other than what they would normally get without athletics. More than 20 percent of the school's students get some aid. Nor is it a case of kids moving to the area or taking long trips to reach the school. Five of St. Thomas' best players this year came from one grade school – the downtown St. Anthony Parish. That's only fitting, for Central Catholic, St. Thomas's name until the 1960s, started at St. Anthony. Most of the other players come from neighborhoods that have historically sent kids to St. Thomas.
One of Carlos Giron's coaching talents – at least this year – is his ability to build depth on his roster. He substitutes a lot compared to other teams, especially at the positions that involve the most running. Three of his wins enroute to the title fit a pattern. The opponents started strong, dominating early in the game. But by halftime, you could sense a momentum shift, and in the second half his fresh legs began to tell. This was especially true in the championship win over Oviedo, near Orlando. That team used few subs and after an impressive first half, it began to tire. St. Thomas shots on goal built; it was 19-6 at the end. And finally with five minutes to go, the Raiders broke through for a 2-0 win.
In the spirit of the Brian Williams Candor School, we must admit that this detailed knowledge of this matter comes with a price. That price is confessing that one of the St. Thomas players has a name similar to ours. Of course, she is no relative, except our son’s daughter.
