One of the disadvantages of living to a ripe, ripe old age is that when you die a lot of people don’t know it. Such is the case of Lucy Cooper, who died at almost age 96 in June. Lucy was a regular contributor to Gold Coast magazine for a number of years, but we just learned about her death a few weeks ago. Even if you don’t read obits, which we normally don’t, it is hard not to hear about the death of somebody who wrote for us and for both major South Florida newspapers.
But Lucy did not have a lot of family, at least not in Florida. Her husband had died years before, she had only one son, and therefore was deprived of the grandchildren and great grandchildren who sometimes bring a crowd to an old timer’s funeral. Lucy had suffered a stroke some years before and had been largely confined to her apartment. When you don’t get around, people don’t miss you.
Still, we should have known. The reason we didn’t was because she left the world in mid-June, at exactly the time we were enjoying an extended family gathering at the classy old resort of Cape May, N.J. We were staying at a spectacular home on the beach and enjoying it very much. We later learned that the Miami Herald, where Lucy was a restaurant critic for many years, gave her a nice sendoff. But in Cape May we were not checking the local papers online, so we did not get the word. By the time we returned to Florida a few weeks later, the few friends who knew Lucy well had stopped talking about her. It was months before somebody did.
It was when she was retiring from the Herald that Lucy began writing almost monthly for our magazines. She was more than just an enjoyer of food. She was an outstanding cook and she threw an annual brunch at her apartment for friends in which everything was home cooked. Although she took her work seriously, in 1982 she did a mugging pose for a Gold Coast cover (above). That issue turned out to be one of the more important in our company’s history. It featured the first installment of Gaeton Fonzi’s three-part series on the Ivy League drug runner, Ken Burnstine.
Although food was her specialty, Lucy also occasionally departed into other fields. She did a memorable piece on a trip she took, first to her native city of Altoona, Pa., and then on the New York. She compared lifestyles of Altoona, not known for much except the famous Horseshoe Curve on the old Pennsylvania Railroad, with New York, which is known for a lot of things. Considering the competition, Altoona got a good review.
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Maus & Hoffman family members
photographed at their old
Boca Raton store in 1998
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One of the most important of that large clan, his son Tom, died Saturday at 78 after a long illness. Maus & Hoffman executives don’t emphasize titles, but Tom, his older brother, Bill Jr., and younger brother, John, jointly ran the stores in Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach. A sister, Jane Maus Hearne, managed the store in Naples for many years.
Tom Maus was just a boy when the family arrived in Fort Lauderdale, but he grew up in the family business, along the way attending schools that share his history. St. Anthony grade school and Central Catholic (now St. Thomas Aquinas High School) along with his wife, Judy. He and his two brothers went on to Notre Dame, which has a family of its own in South Florida, a large group of highly influential alumni.
A friendly and gracious man, he was active for years in the Colee Hammock Homeowners Association and served on the board of the old Southeast Bank. His six children followed in his footsteps. His son Tom Jr. works in the original Fort Lauderdale store. A son Joseph is an attorney and former mayor of Oakland Park. His daughter Catherine is a prosecutor for the state attorney and president of the Victoria Park Civic Association. Son George is a bond salesman. Two other daughters, Mary and Susan, are married and live outside the area. All went to the same local schools as their father and grandchildren are following the same path.
Almost to the hour of his death Saturday, his grandson Joseph (Joey) Maus, was helping St. Thomas Aquinas win its first state cross-country championship.
“He made Papa proud,” Tom Maus Jr. said today.
There will be a visitation Wednesday at Fred Hunter's Funeral Homes in downtown Fort Lauderdale from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., with a prayer service at 6:30 p.m. The funeral mass will be private, with a life celebration announced at a later date.
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| Dan Christensen, founder of Broward Bulldog |
Illustrating the importance of Broward Bulldog is a piece in today’s Miami Herald. It is the kind of story that the Herald, with its depleted staff, would not do on its own. This one, written by Dan Christensen himself, describes ties between Gov. Rick Scott and former (and convicted) sheriff Ken Jenne. It is a relationship Scott has tried to keep quiet. But let’s not ruin the plot – check out today’s Herald or Broward Bulldog. But it shows the respect a major news organization has for Broward Bulldog and its handful of writers.
Broward Bulldog has had a busy few weeks, with a number of pieces picked up by newspapers. One of the more interesting pieces was a story on how former U.S. Rep. Peter Deutsch, who lives in Israel, has organized Ben Gamla Charter Schools in South Florida. If the facts in this piece are accurate, and Christensen said today that no one has challenged them or any grounds except the predictable charge of anti-Semitism, the schools are basically private schools with a religious orientation, disguised as public schools receiving taxpayer support.
The Hollywood school, for instance, has 85 percent Jewish students and offers studies in the Hebrew language and culture. Nothing religious, except after hours or off campus. Some may call this gaming the system, but a more enlightened view could be that Deutsch has done private schools with religious orientation a great favor.
As Christensen said today, how can a system that permits Ben Gamla Charter Schools to take state money, not do the same for other religious schools, notably the many old Catholic schools that are struggling in inner-city locations and have a difficult time getting a voucher system approved in legislatures that insist on separation of church and state.
Of course, this might take some logistical fine-tuning. Gamla was a Jewish fortress on the Golan Heights, where brave people fought off the Romans. Nothing religious about that, just good history. So a school such as St. Anthony would have to change its name to Padua or Assisi, or maybe Rock of Cashel Charter in deference to all the Irish priests who have labored there. It would need language studies in Irish, Italian, Polish, French and Spanish. Make sure the kids know the history of such words as glom, Notre Dame, amigo, pizza, etc. Along with the cultures of those countries, which all include a deep history in the Roman religion. But that’s just culture. No religious stuff in the schools, not even a Hail Mary pass. Leave such trivia off campus, maybe in the gym, or in the church next door.
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
The debate on gambling in Florida goes on. Weekend papers reported big money flowing to the legislature, both from existing gambling entities who don’t want competition, as well as those anxious to get in on the game.
Gambling is one habit we never acquired, unless you count five bucks on the pre-game line of Notre Dame football, and an occasional beer bet on the old college basketball team. But we have seen gambling close up, in the mid-80s in Atlantic City, and Florida might do well to study what happened there. When approved in 1976 gambling was touted as the savior of a once stylish resort. It hasn’t worked out that way, and that was evident even back in 1985 when we did some magazine work in Atlantic City. There had been some impressive redevelopment at the north end of the city, but much of the place was a dump. A few blocks off the glitzy casino crowded boardwalk, the shopping streets were shabby. The casinos, for the most part, did not want customers leaving their premises. They cared less about the town they were supposed to save.
The casinos were thriving. The city wasn’t. People got good paying jobs, which paid their way out of the old town. They moved to expanding communities across the bay or up and down the coast. The professional class largely abandoned the place, at least for residential purposes. There were unintended consequences, such as people quitting teaching jobs for better paying work in the casinos. And old Philadelphia neighborhood bars lost business as regulars traveled 60 miles on weekends to gamble. Atlantic City retail stores, which expected a boom, saw the opposite as people left the city.
Now, more than 30 years later, things haven’t changed much. Poverty is still high, unemployment is very high, despite all those casino jobs. But those jobs have declined in recent years. The city still has crime problems, including gangs, and political corruption over the years is about as bad as it gets – even by New Jersey standards. What money casinos did produce seemed to find its way to deals for political favorites.
It wasn’t exactly a coincidence that wise guy wars broke out in what was once described as Philadelphia’s “nicest family.” We saw firsthand the influence of organized crime. A business associate owned a laundry, which looked like a good business with all the new hotel rooms. The only problem was he did not keep the business, not after people showed up and told him he was going to sell, whether he wanted to or not. He sold.
Oddly enough, the Philly mob tried to spread to South Florida at the same time. In a classic takedown, a combination of local agencies and New Jersey State Police brought down one of the most violent mob units of that era, mostly through surveillance in the Fort Lauderdale area. In fact, Fort Lauderdale investigators went undercover in Atlantic City.
“We all carried two guns. We had to,” says Doug Haas, a retired Fort Lauderdale police captain who headed the group. “When you got a block away from the casinos, you could get killed. The place was terrible.”
Another unintended consequence was the appearance of competition, as neighboring states allowed casinos. They wanted people to keep their addictions close to home. All of that compromised the promise of gambling in Atlantic City. And the magazine we did some stuff for? Well, it could not have been done better. The owner gambled that what worked in nearby Philadelphia would do the same in Atlantic City. Indeed, the editor who built Philadelphia magazine was a consultant, and he had some of the best young talent in the business. One went on to Esquire; others have made their mark. The problem was that a magazine geared to the casino boom, with copies in all the rooms, had no place to send those readers.
The magazine went bust.
The recent announcement of the cooperation between the Florida East Coast Railway, Tri-Rail and CSX to maximize efficiency for both freight and passenger trains on South Florida’s two railroads invariably leads to speculation about who is going to make money on this unusual, and very welcome, deal. We don’t speak of passenger service. Usually nobody makes money transporting people on trains. Indeed, it seems extraordinary that the FEC is willing to fund its All Aboard Florida train from Miami to Orlando. For decades railroads with passenger service have been shifting the costs to government in the form of authorities.
FEC obviously sees something most transportation observers (also known as foamers) don’t, and it probably has to do with real estate. A company that got out of passenger service in the 1960s – just when the need was developing – is now under a different ownership and has done a 180 on passenger service. It not only is sponsoring its own fast train between prime Florida markets, but it is now willing to let Tri-Rail shift some trains to its rails, a move that will at last make that service truly useful. Amtrak is also considering bringing its long distance trains down the same tracks. This could become one very busy railroad. With that in mind, part of the cooperative concept is to switch the FEC’s slow-moving freights to the western CSX tracks, where they won’t stop traffic at so many grade crossings.
The FEC has large property holdings along its tracks, all the way from Jacksonville to Miami. It has already announced a major development on its extensive yards in downtown Miami. The return of passengers will undoubtedly enhance values elsewhere on its route.
Which brings up the question of real estate around its proposed stations in Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach. There is no question that development will be stimulated. Madison Square Garden is built above the underground Penn Station in Manhattan. Philadelphia’s Penn Center has 11 office towers in a four-square block area above an underground station. Fort Lauderdale already has seen a barrage of new residential construction south of Federal Highway, but not quite close enough to be an easy walk to the new station. But there is considerable empty or low-use land that will be near the station. Somebody is going to make make serious money.
There was a recent study released in Pennsylvania showing that suburban home values along the numerous commuter lines of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA), are considerably higher in neighborhoods close to stations, especially those stations with large parking lots. A home convenient to that excellent commuter system is more than $30,000 higher than a comparable home farther away. Caveat: The study was in SEPTA’s self interest. It is trying to get more state support for a system that is basically serving Philadelphia and its suburbs.
This is not quite comparable to what South Florida can expect in the foreseeable future. Philadelphia’s system is remarkable, with commuters going both ways. City dwellers now commute to suburban corporate parks near outlying stations. However, it could be a similar situation when Tri-Rail builds new commuter stations along the FEC, especially when the service is extended north to Jupiter, and perhaps even into Martin County where there is open land along the tracks. A visionary could even predict a statewide system of pretty fast trains linking all the towns that were born more than a century ago when Henry Flagler brought the iron horse to Florida.
It’s enough to make foamers out of developers.
With an anniversary of a historic event coming up next month, and with Washington in disarray and with – possibly, but unlikely as of this hour – a financial disaster in the works, two events 50 years apart seem to come together.
If we have heard it once, we have heard a hundred times over the last few weeks how much President Obama is hated by the right wing. Chris Matthews is going to the bank with that line. Thinking back in history, we can recall no time when such strong language was used to describe an American president. Perhaps Franklin Roosevelt, but we were small then, and had little sense of the gap between the haves (some of whom hated Roosevelt) and the have-nots, who revered him.
Then came give-'em Harry Truman. People mocked him with the joke: “He’s a common man. Very common.” But people did not hate Harry Truman, who now goes down as one the of the best in his business. President Eisenhower was generally admired, and President Kennedy (where this is leading) was regarded as American royalty, with a beautiful wife and kids, from a family richer than the Roosevelts. He had looks and what Scott Fitzgerald would call animal magnetism. Apparently, a lot of women thought so.
Then came a series of presidents. Discard Nixon, who is in a class by himself, but all the others since then were not described as “hated.” Sure, people disagreed with them, but there was always a degree of respect for the office, and usually the man. Moreover, for the most part the government worked. The losers lost and they accepted it. The winners governed with the consent of the defeated.
Until now. Perhaps in this age of media over reach, too much is made of it, but it seems that in Congress there is a group (Tea Party, etc.) that will not accept tradition. In fact they seem reluctant to even accept government, mindless as that position is. They bring the country to the brink of paralysis, and find it fulfilling.
Now, for the journey back 50 years. A president of the United States was seen by most as enormously popular. Which he was, but not by everybody. The same mindset that we see among a few – and they are a few – in Washington today, existed in 1963. They were not elected officials, but they were even more powerful. They were the sinister shadow government, a combination that President Eisenhower warned about, a government unto themselves, contemptuous of any authority not to their liking. They almost surely involved some military figures in high places, and surely the intelligence community with its myriad tentacles. And they had enough control of investigative agencies to cover their tracks, and least for a time...
It is hard for some to believe today, but the Camelot president, never hated in print, was hated by a small but powerful group. Ask anybody in the Miami Cuban community from the 1960s. The haters wanted a nuclear war while we could still win it. They wanted to take back Cuba. They worried that their president might get us out of Vietnam and let the Commies dominate the world. They could not control John F. Kennedy, even after they set him up for failure. They considered him a traitor. They knew they could not beat him in an election. They didn’t care about government.
So they murdered him.
The website Fort Lauderdale Daily is up, and Gulfstream Media Group has a new business. We can’t claim to have invented this idea. Other magazines, including New York and Philadelphia, have popular sites associated with their highly successful print operations. While newspapers have struggled to compensate for the loss of their traditional business by going digital, magazines have managed to hold their own while augmenting their print revenue with digital presentations.
In our case, it will be a combination of our magazine material – as featured on the site now – and fresh contributions on topics of interest. It will in general reflect the lifestyle orientation of our company’s magazines, but it does not preclude occasional comments on breaking news. Thus the word “Daily.” Not daily as in the Sun-Sentinel or Herald, with fresh material every day. Rather, we reserve the right to do so when the opportunity presents itself. And it is surprising how often we get important information before the newspapers.
And we are not strangers to that kind of work. We have had two tours in daily journalism. The first was 50 years ago as a daily columnist for a suburban Philadelphia paper, where we worked in an office right out of "The Front Page" with pneumatic tubes sending copy to the clanking typesetters on the next floor, and where the electric typewriter had not yet found a plug. More recently – only 25 years ago – for the Sun-Tattler in Hollywood, where writers were first beholding the screens we still use today. Both our Managing Editor Nila Do and Associate Editor Jennifer Tormo have worked for daily papers. And the magazine has numerous associations with bloggers and other ex-daily news people (and there are a lot of those around) who are good sources for material.
We do have some advantages over other magazines who go digital. Our related software company produces The Magazine Manager, which has 9,000 print and digital users. Some 30 techies are constantly inventing new tricks to serve the varying needs of so many clients. No reason we can’t play some of those tricks for ourselves.
It took some time to get used to that now useless laptop. It was presented in a hurry, by a woman who had no idea how it worked, just before a big trip, with minimal instructions based on words that did not mean what they meant. A big deal was made of inserting the "card." The only problem was that nothing in the support package looked like a card. Not a card like in American Express card or ace-of-hearts playing card. It took hundreds of miles, and suggestions from any number of 16-year-old experts, before an item that looked like a gizmo turned out to be the card in question. Then it took another day just to figure out how to get this little plastic rectangle to open, and determine which port (not like Port Everglades, more like a slot) it fit in.
Ultimately the obstacles were overcome, including realizing that even when correctly formatted, you could not get the laptop to work on the top of a North Carolina mountain. And there came a day, months later, when on a 90-minute Amtrak ride from Philadelphia to Washington, a whole chapter of a book appeared from that computer, rocking train and all. The joy of that achievement was lost upon returning to Florida to learn the laptop was too old, too heavy and needed a replacement.
Oh, for the day when our family, or at least one member of it, was a pioneer in the computer revolution. This was back in the 1960s when our late brother Mike, Ph.D and math whiz, who was teaching at Columbia University, took us into a building to see a UNIVAC machine that took up the better part of a city block. Already an expert on the subject, Mike said this machine could do amazing things. He knew his stuff. He even wrote a book, Numerical Methods in FORTRAN. He wrote it in 1964 with another genius, Mario Salvadori, and although we had never heard of FORTRAN, we were emboldened to review the book. Although their literary styles were similar, we could spot which parts our brother wrote and which belonged to Professor Salvadori.
For instance, this is clearly our brother’s inimitable style:
“Integration formulas for any n and any m may be derived in a similar manner. Some of them are presented in Table 3.3.1, where the interval of integration is indicated by the boldface coefficients. To illustrate, the 4-point integration formula for the strip from I to I + 1 (3.3.17), reads: I1q4 (i) = h/24 (9f. + 19f I + 1 = 5f I + 2 + fi+3).” Mike talked like that all the time.
Now Salvadori, whose prose was more Shakespearean, was obviously the author of these lines: “The Newton-Raphson integration formula (4.2.1) can be applied to the evaluation of the real roots (if any) of the transcendental equation.”
Our favorite scene in the book is when FORTRAN, having just broken up with his girlfriend, Cubicella, stares at the moon and says: “An ordinary initial-value problem is governed by an ordinary differential equation and a set of conditions all valid at the same “starting” point, x = xo.” She never found another guy who could talk like that.
Unfortunately, they don’t make writers like that anymore. And it’s hard to find a computer a block long that you can operate simply by reading a book.
The engines were lined up back to back, or nose to nose if you prefer, and you will not find trains as clean looking very often. After all, this was a public relations event, and a pretty important one, so CSX, Tri-Rail and the Florida East Coast Railway brought out their best-looking engines for the job. Tri-Rail was showing off a new, more streamlined design, and the FEC for the occasion chose to go back to the bright yellow, red and silver engine (shown above) that the line used back in the days when it last ran passenger trains.
Apparently they are repainting their current, mundane, blue prime movers to celebrate a historic event – the return of passenger traffic to Henry Flagler’s pioneering railroad for the first time since the 1960s. The fancy colors were displayed last week on the FEC tracks near Croissant Park in Fort Lauderdale, and the three engines symbolized another piece of history – the union of three railroad entities to bring passenger service back to the track where it belongs, the same FEC rails that built Florida’s East Coast cities more than a century ago.
The plan has been hinted at for years, but last week the official blessing of all involved was given. The idea is utterly sensible. Some of the slow-moving freight traffic on the FEC will be switched to the more westerly CSX tracks, which has far fewer traffic stopping grade crossings than the FEC. In turn, Tri-Rail, which now uses the CSX tracks, will switch some trains to the FEC, where they will be vastly more useful as they bisect the busy downtowns along the route. It is not a massive construction job. Tracks connecting the two railroads already exist.
Thousands of commuters will be able to walk from the station near Broward Boulevard to their downtown Fort Lauderdale jobs. And people living as far north as Jupiter will be able to commute fairly quickly to Fort Lauderdale and even Miami. In short, our area is going big-time, doing the kind of traveling that New York, Philadelphia and Chicago have had even before Henry Flagler’s days. And he died in 1913. HEAT fans will be able to take a train from Palm Beach and Broward counties to the front door of the American Airlines arena. That same track will actually pass through Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International airport. What could be more convenient?
Although it was not part of last week’s celebration, it is known that Amtrak is also considering using the FEC tracks, which come straight down the East Coast – as opposed to the current route that makes a time-consuming loop through Central Florida enroute to our coastal cities.
It is hard to exaggerate the long-range impact of this combine. As we have noted before, the FEC has large land holdings along its track. It is planning a large development on its yards in Miami, and passenger traffic will open up numerous opportunities farther up the coast. You can expect some impressive redevelopment in cities such as Fort Lauderdale. It already has considerable new apartment construction on the east side of the FEC in the downtown area. These units will be mostly walkable to the new service. But there is plenty of land on both sides of the tracks, now lined with small old buildings housing small businesses, that would be natural sites for high-rise structures.
Not so long ago we complained of all the construction underway in downtown Fort Lauderdale, without planning for the increase in traffic sure to follow. This announcement of railroad cooperation is a game changer. The people buying or renting in the downtown area had little choice in getting in and out. But now they will. This may not be quite as historic as driving in the golden spike in Utah on the transcontinental railroad in 1869, but it will do until something better comes along.
We knew him a long time, but for years not very well. That changed in 2003 when our daughter, Julie, went to work for Rep. E. Clay Shaw in his Washington office. She was looking for work in Washington, and, coincidentally, he was looking to hire another person who knew his South Florida district. Julie did know the home territory. She was the only one of our four kids to be born here. St. Anthony grade school, St. Thomas Aquinas High School, FSU – a similar path as his own family. When he lost in 2006, he recommended her to another Republican member of the House, David Camp of Michigan, and she worked for him until marriage and motherhood took them apart.
Republican. That word is important. Clay Shaw first entered politics in the 1970s, when Republicans dominated Broward County, at least the Fort Lauderdale area. That was to change, fairly quickly, but Shaw served for 26 years in Congress, even after the demographics of his district changed and made his re-elections more difficult. He should never have lost, but as he aged, the people who knew his qualities best also aged, and many went above. He never liked campaigning, especially the fundraising aspect.
The mid-term election of 2006 was a tough time for all Republicans, even in what were considered safe districts. Republicans on the Ways and Means Committee were demolished. Events that had nothing to do with Shaw, such as the Mark Foley scandal and the Terri Schiavo controversy gave Democrats ammo that year.
Had he survived that election, he likely would have won easily two years later, as the Republican tide made a mild recovery. He was a noted non-partisan and his presence in Washington would have been welcome in a day when so many Republicans are against anything President Obama is for, even when it is a position they themselves previously endorsed. And vital subjects such as Social Security and Everglades restoration were his specialties.
Illustrating his statesmanlike nature, he did a local public television show and invited government figures from around the country. Often they were Democrats, and he would point that out, usually with a jest, but invariably raising their stock by letting them share the stage with a man who was an experienced and highly respected House member. Although a Republican, he was never on the extreme right, and managed to like even those on the extreme left. For want of a better word, he was a middle man.
Julie Donovan, who worked as his scheduler (also known as his gate keeper), had a front-row seat of the last years of that era. She recalls:
"Mr. Shaw was the mayor of Fort Lauderdale when I was born and the only House representative I knew growing up. His service and accomplishments spanned my lifetime. He and Mrs. Shaw (you can't say one name without the other) treated all the staffers like family, and I absolutely loved working for him and for Florida’s District 22. We both took such pride in calling it 'home.'"
To those close to the congressman, his ability to connect was obvious. Julie Donovan remembers:
“Mr. Shaw and Charlie Rangel, another long-time member of the House and also a member of the Ways and Means committee, had a friendly working relationship. It was such fun to watch the two of them go head to head on the networks. They would have their disagreements but it was always very respectful. Mr. Shaw spoke often about this, and how much he missed the old days when Congress was less partisan and relationships more meaningful.”
We bury the man with the prayer that some fine day it will be that way again.
