Michael Connelly was in town last weekend. He did a book signing at the Barnes & Noble off Federal Highway, then attended the 75th anniversary dinner of St. Thomas Aquinas High School, his alma mater.
I’ve taken an interest in Connelly’s success as a crime story writer, partly because I made a minor contribution to his career. In the early 1980s I got a call from his father, also Michael Connelly, a former Philadelphian who at the time was working for Arvida, busily leasing out Boca Raton’s Town Center. He asked if I knew anybody at the Sun-Sentinel. His son was working for the newspaper in Daytona Beach and wanted to get back to Fort Lauderdale.
I did know people at the Sun-Sentinel. Joe Jennings, with whom I had worked at a suburban Philadelphia paper, was the city editor. A few years before that Bill Bondurant, at the time the managing editor, had recalled that I worked in Chester, Pa., in the 1960s and wondered if I knew Joe Jennings, who had applied for work. I gave Joe a strong recommendation, which he deserved, despite the fact that he used to kill some of my best columns on the grounds that they were massively libelous.
As a young columnist, I was desperate for approval. From the back of the news room I would watch Joe’s reaction when he read my stuff. His shoulders would shake in laughter. Then he came back and said: “Funniest thing I ever read Bern. It ain’t running.”
Anyway, I told Joe I did not know young Connelly, and had never read a line of his work, but I knew his parents and, judging by them, he had to be a great guy with exceptional talent. Joe Jennings set up the interview, Michael Connelly got the job, and a few years later he was part of a team nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. I actually arranged another interview at the same time for a young fellow who had done some interning for us at the magazine. He was pretty good. But he never showed up for the interview.
I eventually got to know the younger Connelly. The newspaper people used to meet on Friday nights at Poet’s (now Mango’s) on Las Olas, and for awhile he was a regular.
Michael Connelly moved to Los Angeles in the late 80s, and a few years later he burst upon the literary scene (at least the crime story genre) with Black Echo. It was the beginning of fame. Many books later people marvel at his knowledge of police work and the minds of criminals. He has a great sense for the small details that bring people and places alive. Sadly, his father never lived to see it. He died just as his son was making it big. His mother did, however, and by the time she was called about seven years ago she knew her son was going down in history, along with such names as Raymond Chandler and John D. MacDonald, as a master of a special form of literature.
Recently I learned from one of his school buddies that Connelly had the playful habit of throwing in faintly disguised names of some of his old Fort Lauderdale acquaintances. We all got a free copy of his latest book, The Fifth Witness at the St. Thomas Aquinas dinner. I read the first few pages when I got home. Right there in the opening scene a murder victim’s name is Mitchell Bondurant. We already mentioned Bill Bondurant and his son is named Michael. Both are quite alive.
As for the other guy who never showed up for the interview, he became a chef. Pretty good, it is said. The last time I saw him he said he’d still like to do some writing.
With Florida schools so much in the news, it is useful to compare our educational condition with conditions elsewhere. Take Philadelphia, where this is being written. Now, there are many nice things about Philadelphia, including cheese steaks, Boathouse Row and colonial history. Where I sit is two blocks from what was once known as the King’s Road. It runs from Chestnut Hill, on the northwest border of the city, down through Germantown and into the heart of the city.
At one time it was the path wealthy people took to escape to what was then country and a safe distance from the Yellow Fever epidemics which invaded the city in the summer. It was also the route that George Washington’s army took to engage the British at the 1777 battle of Germantown. It was an ambitious attack, designed to hold the British in place while other forces surrounded the redcoats. A rare fog helped foil the plan. The enveloping forces got lost and the British fought off the main body.
Although Germantown was a victory for the British, it was encouraging to the revolutionary movement that the Continental Army, still largely untrained and inexperienced, was able to stand up to the enemy in a large-scale engagement. Washington’s forces retreated intact back up what is now Germantown Avenue to spend the historic winter at Valley Forge. And just before Germantown, at distant Saratoga, another part of the Continental army soundly whipped a British force. The combined events had a great impact in Europe, especially France, which would soon come to the aid of the American Revolution. The trumpets of success began to echo throughout the colonies.
The neighborhood, in the beginning named after German immigrants who settled there in the 1700s, prospered over two centuries, a mix of upper and middle class. But decay set in. As a kid I could have walked to three Catholic schools. All have closed. Whereas the old neighborhoods closer to Center City are enjoying gentrification, with professionals reclaiming what were once near slums, Germantown is still on the way down.
Unlike Valley Forge, which is a famous national park, the Battle of Germantown is not noted by pleasant highlands or monuments. Some buildings that got shot up are still standing, but the city grew around the place. It prospered for two centuries and then decay set in. It is said you were safer between the Continental and British lines than you are walking the streets of Germantown today. But you may be safer on the streets than inside the schools of Philadelphia.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, formerly affiliated with The Miami Herald, spent a year looking at violence in the schools, and the results are stunning. Look for the Inky, as ex-patriots call it, to be nominated for the big prize on this series. The numbers: In the last school year, 690 teachers were assaulted. In the last five years, the number is 4,000. That’s teachers. The paper has also reported student-to-student violence, including sexual assaults. Some schools have several events a day, and cynics think a lot of this stuff is not even reported.
It is not just the frequency of the violence, it is the breadth of the problem. Students as young as 5 have been accused of assaults. Some of the assaults are racist. Asian students in south Philadelphia, once “Rocky” turf, have been targets where they are minorities in mostly black environments.
Black kids are often victims. One mother whose son got jumped by a gang refused to send him back to the school. Fortunately, he got transferred to a safer environment. A teacher summed up the problem, pointing out that one of the most badly behaved kids saw his mother murdered, with a baby on her lap, when he was very young. They grow up in a life of violence, she lamented, so why should school be different?
Pennsylvania, like Florida, has an ongoing debate about vouchers or other programs which help students escape troubled schools in favor of environments in which they can actually learn something. Ironically, many of those schools to which they can flee are barely hanging on.
The kids who need them most can’t afford them.
What would a smart fellow like Washington do today? Back when he worked for the British in the French and Indian War he was known to hang troublemakers. Today that would be politically unacceptable, and he might even get beat up for his trouble.
Washington, D.C. – Spring began with a flower, winter counter attacked, and last Sunday morning the temperature was exactly at freezing and a light coat of snow covered the roofs and windshields of cars. It was a strange end to a strange winter, north and south. People walking the streets all wore hats and bulky jackets, yet the cherry blossoms were blooming and golden daffodils and an occasional tulip popped from the frosty little lawns of the Capitol Hill neighborhood.
Considering the weather, the Eastern Market was busy by mid-morning. This is a Washington institution, dating to 1873 when Washington had a series of city-owned markets scattered in its then growing neighborhoods. The market concept was envisioned almost a century earlier by Pierre L’Enfant, when he laid out the plan for the capital. All the other markets are gone, and the Eastern Market almost joined them, but was twice saved by community preservationists, first in the 1930s when the other markets closed, and then in the 1950s. At the time super markets and corner groceries were making the market obsolete. Yet its obsolescence, joined with a building designed by a famous architect, brought it back to life. Capitol Hill was at the time somewhat obsolete itself, running down fast, but gentrification was on the way and it seemed sensible to retain what was historic and charming.
It’s a classic market. Indoors are booths selling just about every kind of food, many varieties of meats, fish, pastries, coffees. The market moves outside on weekends, when a street is closed, and then there is also food, especially fruit, but a little bit of everything – arts and crafts, unusual clothing, a stand specializing in crepes. People stand in line for 20 minutes to buy these. You can purchase everything but a zoning change – all of it sold by people who come from many cultures, all nicer and more helpful than the next person. On the streets around the market are cozy cafes, bars, coffee houses. It’s a place with thousands of regular customers, including those who drop in early in the day for breakfast, but also visitors who have heard of its reputation. It is popular with young families, many of whom work for government or related companies, who have poured into this old neighborhood. On weekends the kids are entertained by musicians in the original old building.
In the crisp cold air scented by the aroma of near residential fire places, thoughts head south to balmy Fort Lauderdale, and Las Olas Boulevard, specifically the Hyde Park property in front of the Stranahan House. The old supermarket, razed to make room for a large condo, would have made an ideal site for such a facility.
The condominium project was delayed by litigation after the city passed a bond issue that would have given the developer four times what it paid for the property a few years earlier. It likely would have been a disaster for the developer, who would never admit that. Instead the property sits idle, unlikely to be acted on for years. The city wanted the property as a park, a green compliment to the historic Stranahan House.
We wonder if the city might be able to use the economy to reopen negotiations. If not a park, a market with the style of Washington’s would be a wonderful addition to Las Olas, offsetting the disaster that befell the street when the Riverside Hotel expansion collapsed, a classic error of knocking stuff down without the money to replace it, leaving a gap where the heart of the action once stood.
It probably will not happen, but it is aromatic to think so.
It isn't plagiarism if you cite the source, and today we steal from The Miami Herald's Fred Grimm, who today devoted his column to criticizing our new governor for omitting beach replenishment from his budget. There has been a chorus of boos as officials around the state realize that one of Florida's greatest assets is now an endangered species. Next to the warm sun, the ocean and beach are what keeps tourists coming year after year. And anyone who has lived near a beach knows that it isn't forever. Storms and other natural elements wear beaches away, sometimes very drastically. After the hurricanes of a few years back, some beaches were like small cliffs, a mini-version of California, where bluffs often plummet to the sea.
How important are the beaches? Grimm quoted an expert saying that every dollar spent on beach preservation returns $8 in tourism and the like.
The good news in Grimm's piece came at the end, where he reported that the Senate Government Appropriations Committee seemed to ignore the governor by budgeting $16 million for 12 beach restoration projects. We have a feeling that this is going to turn into a pattern with this governor, in which legislators hearing the howls from home are going to get around his stated desire to save the state by killing what makes it work.
The Sun-Sentinel today had its own story on Tallahassee travail. It detailed the effort, this time in the legislature, to make doing business in the state easier by eliminating regulations that some businesses don't like. The idea is to override the power of local municipalities to impose restrictions on all sorts of things. It was a very long article, far beyond the attention span of the average Sun-Sentinel subscriber, but some of the points legislators (lobbyists is more accurate) make seem sensible. Others, however, are scary, and seem to forecast what many fear about this governor.
Example: Fertilizer interests want to invalidate local rules restricting the sale and use of fertilizer. This at a time when one of Florida's greatest environmental problems, which we have been fighting for years, is the pollution of Lake Okeechobee, and by extension the estuaries on both coasts, as well as the longer distance effects on the Everglades. Fertilizer may be great food for crops, but it is poison to everything else.
It is hard to believe such damaging legislation could be considered right after the state manage to get a very trimmed down program to buy U.S. Sugar land to begin correct damage to the Everglades which began 100 years ago and has gotten worse as land meant to be swamp was drained for agriculture. Swamp should never have become farmland, but 100 years ago few realized it. Today we do understand, just as we understand that dunes never should have been replaced by tall buildings close to the water's edge.
It appears that this administration, and those elected officials who support it, are willing to enact laws to kill laws — to seek a short term financial gain and leave the problems they create to the next generation, or the next administration.
The front page headline in today’s Sun-Sentinel jumped off the page: “Properties near beach suddenly are hot.”Scott Wyman’s piece revealed that two separate investors have spent $39 million to buy up property in the same areas where luxury high rises were built just before the real estate bust. Even at bargain prices, this is welcome news for it shows that some people are regaining big-time confidence that the world has not ended.
It also reinforced an impression we have had for some time – namely that the older eastside neighborhoods of Fort Lauderdale and neighboring towns have done better in the recession than less desirable locations to the west. Studies often lump Miami-Dade and Fort Lauderdale, which is not valid. Miami had a condo market absurdly overbuilt, and sprawling poorer neighborhoods where people got mortgages they never could afford. Most Fort Lauderdale residents wouldn't go to Miami on a bet – unless the bet is on a sports team.
They same distinction exists in Fort Lauderdale, which has its share of poor neighborhoods and some new western communities which should never have been built. Our impression is that eastern communities have not seen the same rate of foreclosures or people forced to sell with drastic losses.
We asked an expert, Jack McCabe of McCabe Research and Consulting in Deerfield Beach. “It is generally true that oceanfront and waterfront property have fared better during the downturn,” he says. “And older established neighborhoods on the east side have also done better, although in some those sections people refinanced their homes and that led to trouble.”
He points out that situations vary greatly, even in the same location.
McCabe adds: “We are nearing the bottom, but it might be a year to 18 months before we get there. And then when we see values increase it will be at the rate of inflation for a few years. I think we’ll hit a period of hyper inflation in next four to five years due to our $14 trillion national debt. Generally values rise at or above the rate of inflation. The flip side is that interest rates may go so high that it will shrink the pool of buyers and have a negative effect on inflation. It’s a double-edge sword in essence.” Jack McCabe is not always optimistic, but he's usually right.
It must have been 12 years ago, maybe more, when I got a call from the insurance company. The guy was irritated. He wanted to know why I had not reported an accident.
“What accident?” I replied. “I haven’t had an accident since the Civil War." He went on to describe an accident involving a woman driver, who happened to have my daughter’s name. I still did not know what he was talking about. My daughter never drives my car, I told him.
He went on, giving me the the date, time and location of the accident. I think it was on Commercial Boulevard. Slowly, memory cut in. As the insurance guy bombarded me with figures, I began to vaguely recall an incident. My daughter had borrowed the car and she called to say a strange thing had happened. She was almost in an accident. A beat-up car filled with people who did not speak English (probably Haitians) had almost hit her. She thought the other driver was trying to hit her, cutting her off, but missed. Just a light tap. No damage. The other car was so beat up it didn’t count. The cops came and ticketed the other car because the driver had no license. I forgot about it until the insurance company called.
Memory revived, I told him I did not report it because it wasn’t an accident. Then he told me a bunch of claims had been filed. I told him right off this must be a scam. Nobody had been hurt that day. He told me insurance companies usually paid such claims, even though they doubted them, because they did not trust juries, who sometimes gave huge awards to people with mysterious whiplash injuries. The insurance guy scared me by saying my insurance could be cancelled, even though I had not filed a claim since the Spanish-American War. When the insurance guy supported the claim in writing, I followed up by calling a doctor’s office listed on the accident report. No answer.
Being scared, I went on record with a letter explaining I had not reported an accident that never occurred. I saved the insurance guy’s name and a few months later, I read about a ring that had staged false accidents, and one of the names was the doctor on my non-accident, I called the insurance guy. He was delighted, and wanted all the details of the bustees.
This rant comes from an editorial in today’s The Miami Herald, citing a fake accident ring that was busted in Dade County last week. The Herald reported 25 people arrested, involving a staged accident in which an insurance company paid out $80,000. The Herald wondered why, and added an angry aside about medicare fraud in Dade County, and asked why the criminals manage to stay ahead of enforcement on such matters. Why indeed? When the fraud is so transparent, with dozens, sometimes hundreds of complaints coming overnight from the same source, where is the oversight?
For perspective, and in the interest of accuracy, I just checked with my daughter. Her fake accident occurred almost 20 years ago. When will we ever learn?
There’s nothing like middle east turmoil to make Americans anxious about energy supplies, and renew the cry (which goes back to the 1970s) to make this country less dependent on foreign oil. This time, however, it is well to note that remedies are at last underway. Libya and Florida appear to be playing a major role. This is not just good for the U.S., it might turn out to be great news for the state economy.
The scoop: Within just the last few months, stuff that has been talked about for decades is at last taking shape. It is hard to say which of three initiatives in the field might pay off, and possibly dominate, but the hope is that all three will contribute their share.
Closest to home, Florida Power & Light has proposed a wind farm on the edge of Lake Okeechobee. Florida has not been seen as ideal for wind energy. Despite breezes that always seem to be blowing in from the sea, western states are generally seen as more favorable for wind energy than Florida. But FPL has a pretty good track record in the field, and one must trust their instincts. Okeechobee is a huge body of water, the largest lake south of the Great Lakes, and if there’s any place wind can build up the volume necessary for a wind farm, that is it.
Not far away in Vero Beach, a concept long talked about is actually underway: making ethanol, a substitute for gasoline, from waste. The idea has been on the table for years, especially using sugar cane and its waste products. An Illinois firm, Coskata, has been planning a facility with U.S. Sugar Corp, but they have been beaten out of the gate by New Planet Energy and INEOS, the partners in Vero. Ethanol from waste is very unlike ethanol from corn, which is expensive and uses up food supply. This plant will take nature’s junk (yard waste and agricultural waste) and turn it into energy. It solves a waste management problem in the process of solving the larger energy problem. The plant is scheduled to begin construction late this year, and should be producing 8 million gallons of fuel by 2012. Ethanol has its critics, who consider it less efficient than gasoline, and damaging to some engines. But the auto industry is working on engines that can run on it. You have to think if consumers want it, technology will deliver it.
Finally, FPL again, is into the solar energy business. Several Florida facilities that already produce electricity from the sun are operating. President Obama came down to open the largest one in DeSoto County, capable of serving 3,000 homes. The potential of solar is huge. We read almost daily of new buildings which produce their own electricity from panels on their roofs. Unlike other renewable energy systems, solar has no harmful by-products. Wind energy is dangerous for some birds. Biofuels obviously have some emissions. Solar is simply clean. All it needs is sun, and they don’t call us the Sunshine State for nothing. Leave your car in the sun for an afternoon and try to touch the steering wheel. That may be the only downside to solar heating.
In the larger sense of the problem, what is happening on three fronts may appear to be baby steps, but babies grow up and some of them run very fast If the projects already underway prove successful, Florida may someday be the Silicone Valley of renewable energy.
The Fort Lauderdale Historical Society had a sensationally successful Founders Dinner last fall when it honored H. Wayne Huizenga as “Man of the Centennial.” The dinner was sold out at the Ritz-Carlton in just a few weeks, even before invitations went out. Did that ever happen around here before? The demand for tickets was so great that the hotel eliminated the dance floor to make room for additional tables. Even with that expansion, important people were calling around in the weeks before the dinner trying to find an extra seat or two.
It is not likely the Historical Society will match that great success any time soon, but it is making an effort to do so with its spring Friendship Luncheon, scheduled for April 29. There’s only one Wayne Huizenga, but there happen to be five former and present Fort Lauderdale mayors, and the luncheon will honor them all. It is an appropriate gesture in this centennial year, for starting with E. Clay Shaw (photographed here in 1975 before he became mayor) the list of mayors represent a good slice of the city’s 100-year history.
The others who followed Shaw are Robert Dressler, Bob Cox, Jim Naugle and present mayor Jack Seiler. Gold Coast magazine is preparing a special centennial issue, with emphasis on the development of the city during each of these mayors’ terms, along with profiles of pioneer families and businesses, including descendants still in the area.
Interestingly, four of the five mayors were introduced this morning for the Executives Association's very well-attended 50th anniversary economic forecast breakfast at the Hyatt Regency Pier Sixty-Six. Equally interestingly, the idea for the Historical Society to celebrate the city’s anniversary by honoring the mayors was the idea of Historical Society trustee Susan Maurer, whose mother-in-law, the late Yolanda Maurer made her own contribution to history as the founding publisher of Gold Coast back in 1965.
The man’s name was Ryan. We were watching the tribute to former President Ronald Reagan Sunday, getting ready for the Super Bowl, and one of the speakers was a fellow I never heard of named Ryan. The name gets my attention. My great grandmother was Mary Ann Ryan, and we lost touch with her family in Worcester, Mass., around 1876. Her brother Pat owned a bar, and in those days those were the only Irishmen eating well. While listening to Ryan’s speech, which was good, I suddenly saw Robert Kennedy. The shock of hair, the quick nervous flashing smile, the rapid staccato delivery.
And thinking of Robert Kennedy, I had to think of his brother, the president. And the quarter-century link almost nobody remembers between JFK and Ronald Reagan. President Reagan, as this tribute reminded us over and over, gets credit as the man who brought down the Berlin Wall and ended the Cold War in the process. But what few people remember, because few knew it at the time, is that President Kennedy tried to do that very thing almost 25 years before. In fact, in distributing credit, President Eisenhower should be noted as well. Eisenhower realized the enormous dangers of nuclear war inherent in the mutual hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union. As his second presidential term was ending, he was attempting to reach out to the Russians with a summit meeting when in 1960 the U-2 incident, in which an American spy plane was shot down over Russia, spiked the deal.
Eisenhower, in his parting speech to the American people, warned of the dangers of “the military industrial complex.” That seemed like a vague notion, and not a lot of people understood the message. Eisenhower surely did not mean it as a warning to his successor to watch his back, but that is how it turned out. We now know that by 1963, President Kennedy, having experienced the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the stress of the Cuban Missile Crisis, had determined to thaw relations with the Soviets. He distrusted his intelligence community and much of the military high command, who he sensed wanted a showdown with Russia while we still had more nukes. He actually spoke privately of dismantling the CIA. He had established his own back channels with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, and like Eisenhower before him, was seeking a way to end the Cold War. He took that effort public, though few recognized its importance at the time, in his American University speech on June 10, 1963.
Recent researchers, in books such as James W. Douglass’s JFK – The Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, have provided context. Kennedy at the time was greatly admired by the public, but (it still shocks some people) was hated by the intelligence community and some of the high military brass. They were furious at his failure to back up the Bay of Pigs effort, followed by his secret agreement to pull missile bases out of Turkey in return for the Russian retreat in the Cuban Missile Crisis. It looked like a great victory for the U.S. at the time, but insiders knew it was just a trade off. There was also a sense that he might pull out of Vietnam. That brave and conciliatory American University speech was one of the last straws. In wonderfully crafted words, he was asking the Russians to come to the table. It took years to be revealed, but there is evidence the Russians were listening. However, it was exactly the kind of language that powerful forces in our government did not want to hear. It helped convince them that JFK was a traitor who needed to be eliminated. A few months later he was.
The great irony is that JFK’s policies and actions were similar to what Eisenhower’s would likely have been under the same circumstances. Eisenhower, having seen war on a massive scale, was not anxious to engage the U.S. in random military adventures. He had gotten us out of Korea as fast as possible. He was wary of involvement in Vietnam. He had sought the same peace process three years before JFK.
Reagan is remembered as a hero for ending the Cold War. Kennedy was murdered for trying to do the same thing. History should salute them both.
