Our friend W.C. feels awkward on certain occasions, such as Memorial Day, when they ask veterans to stand in church. “I’m embarrassed,” he says. “I never did nothin'.”
That goes for yours truly. Sunday, at the end of Mass, the priest asked the veterans in the church to come up to the altar. We hesitated, until the wife nudged. And so we stood there, about 20 of us, and the priest read some nice things and then gave us a special blessing and the congregation applauded. There was nobody up there old enough to have been in the Big One, but maybe a few saw time in Korea, and certainly some were in the Vietnam era. Others, we suspect, just put some time in at some safe place, just like W.C. did.
We trained with W.C. in artillery at Fort Sill, Okla., and then went through jump school at Fort Benning. We were on active duty at a time when the army was giving people six months active and eight years in the reserves. So, if you count four years ROTC, we both were associated with the military for 12 years, but the truth is we did nothin’. Had we not slipped in between Korea and Vietnam, we might have been forward observers, which can be dangerous business, but W.C. went ahead with plans to be a farmer and we wandered into this business.
The high point of that wandering was our reserve time. Our unit was civil affairs, a pretty safe post even in time of war, but our outfit, headed by a Pennsylvania state senator, and loaded with officers who were also college teachers, doctors, lawyers, Mercedes-Benz dealers and such, was so much fun that nobody ever quit. It was the other way around. In 1966, as Vietnam was heating up, the army threw us out. It considered us useless, and disbanded the whole unit. Some of the guys, mostly Korean War vets, were trying to get their 20 years in for retirement benefits, and most of them transferred to other units. But our eight years were up, so we put the uniforms in the closet and only bring them out some times for Halloween. However, it was in that unit that came the contact that led to Philadelphia Magazine, which, as our recent book details, was inventing the kind of magazines we have in Florida. Far from serving the nation in any meaningful way, we were remarkably well-served by the military.
So standing there in church, feeling silly with our military secret, we thought of Tommy. Tommy McCormick was a cousin, considerably older, and he died at Iwo Jima. He was a Navy pilot, flying an observation float plane (pictured above) catapulted from the battleship Tennessee. Recently, through Paul Dawson, who runs the USS Tennessee Museum in Huntsville, Tenn., we learned of a “confidential” after-battle report in the ship’s files, suggesting that Tommy was killed by friendly fire. The Navy suspected that his plane, at low altitude over the beach, was struck by an arcing long-range shell from one of our own ships. Something hit his plane, and without exploding, broke it in half and sent it immediately into the sea.
For obvious reasons, a man who deserved recognition on Memorial Day was not there to receive it. So those of us who did nothin’ accepted it in his memory.
Proof that somebody up there (in Tallahassee) is starting to take rail transportation seriously was the word this week that the Department of Transportation is considering a new rail line along U.S. Route 27 from Miami to Lake Okeechobee. The idea is to make this a freight line. The Sun-Sentinel reported that the concept of an inland distribution center in the Lake Okeechobee area would generate considerable new freight traffic from points south. If the new track could handle that traffic, as well as freight now using the CSX and FEC corridors along the coast, it could free those tracks to accommodate passenger trains being planned for commuter, intercity and long-distance service.
It would enable the passenger trains to move at speeds necessary to make them successful, and greatly reduce traffic holdups at the numerous grade crossings, especially on the FEC. A long freight holds up traffic for tedious minutes, especially when it decides to stop for no apparent reason. A passenger train clears the crossings much faster. There is also a safety factor. A freight takes a long time to slow down. When an engineer sees a vehicle stuck in his path, there isn’t much that can be done short of sounding his horn. But a passenger train could stop quickly and avoid disaster.
A foamer like this writer (a foamer dreams about trains) could see even farther down the new track, which being built from scratch, could potentially be useful beyond the contemplated purpose. It would enable the state to build a multi-track, high-speed line along an open corridor, largely free from grade crossings and with no need for stations for many miles. Freight could therefore go much faster and, if used eventually by passenger trains, it could be a high-speed line. Not 200 mph as in Europe and the Orient; that would require expensive electrification. But certainly speeds above 100 miles an hour would be realistic with current equipment. Trains we recently rode in Ireland (pictured above) could be a model. They are not electric, but routinely hit 90 mph and could go faster if track conditions permitted. Such a train could make the trip of about 55 miles from Miami to Clewiston inside an hour, largely because the last 37 miles from I-75 north would have no stops at all.
At that point the track could connect to existing lines circling Lake Okeechobee to the west. Those tracks are not modern, but they run through sparsely populated towns where improvements would not be nearly as expensive or disruptive to the communities. That would provide a rail link to Tampa - an intercity railroad that really makes sense. Today, it is a jerky connection, but still much shorter than using existing CSX tracks which run to West Palm Beach and then slant to the west – Amtrak’s current long-distance route. The connection to Tampa north of Lake Okeechobee takes more than five hours.
Ultimately, if the state wanted to be ambitious, another new rail line of about 40 miles could run from near Moore Haven to existing CSX track closer to Tampa. Again, this is largely open agricultural country and a very fast track is feasible. The route would not be exactly a straight line from one end to the other, but it’s close. It should make a trip from Miami to Tampa less than three hours. Florida would be in the 21st century.
Excuse us if we foam a bit.
Are we ready for a new industry in South Florida? As we speak, a Dania Beach firm is building a horseless carriage, a type of vehicle that only goes back a hundred years or so. That was a time when it took awhile to come up with a better name for the machine that replaced the horse-drawn carriage. But a horseless carriage is what is taking form in Dania Beach, where Jason Wenig’s Creative Workshop is building an entirely new car.
Wenig has gotten pretty well-known for restoring classic cars. He’s been featured in a number of publications, including Gold Coast. We’re even quoted on his website. But this project has taken him to the serious big time – New York – which is where he started out. His firm has been selected to build the prototype of an electric vehicle, but here’s the catch. If he does it to his usual standard, his new car will be hard to tell from classic luxury cars that go back more than a century. As reported in Sunday’s Sun-Sentinel, the car is based on a 1909 Pierce-Arrow (pictured above) and a Packard of similar vintage, but unlike those famous cars it will not have an internal combustion engine. It is being purposely built for use in New York, as a replacement for horse-drawn carriages that escort tourists around the city, including in Central Park. The organization that hired Wenig thinks a replica from that era will capture the nostalgia of the times without the hazards (and fertilizer left in their wake) of horses in a busy city. And it’s electric to reduce pollution.
Wenig says his car will not be an exact reproduction of the original cars. He explains:
“My favorite mark was the Pierce-Arrow. But this car represents a genre, a seven-passenger touring car of 1909. We can look back on these great iconic ideas and combine them into our own entity. There are so many panels to fit, and figure out how the frame integrates into the body. And how to make it legal for modern roads.”
And build something strong enough to stand up to constant use.
Wenig, who gave up a successful marketing career in the Big Apple to open his restoration business in 2001, is also an automotive historian. He points out that although the Pierce-Arrow had an internal combusion engine, at one time there were more electric cars than gas. World War I ended that.
“The war put a stake in the heart of the electric vehicle,” he notes.
The company’s contract is for $450,000. That seems attractive, but Wenig calls it “a mid-sized project, almost at cost. Another bigger company might have doubled the price.”
However, if the prototype is successful, dozens of cars may follow. That could create a space problem for the company, which operates out of a former granary near the FEC Railway tracks.
Sidecar:
Building a car from the ground up has precedent in South Florida. As Jason Wenig observes, auto racing legend Briggs Cunningham had a plant in West Palm Beach where he built his race cars, and later some 25 street machines.
Building a car from the ground up has precedent in South Florida. As Jason Wenig observes, auto racing legend Briggs Cunningham had a plant in West Palm Beach where he built his race cars, and later some 25 street machines.
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| The Miami Herald columnist Fred Grimm |
The intention today was to comment on the hypocrisy and inconsistency of the morons in the state legislature. They recently took the position that by rejecting federal money for health-care coverage for Florida’s poor people, they were asserting their right to judge what’s best for Florida. At the same time they were asserting their right to tell Florida’s communities what is best for them when it comes to local gun-control laws, and other matters which affect our quality of life.
The only problem is that we just discovered that The Miami Herald’s Fred Grimm had already written almost exactly the same thing, in some of the exact words, in a column last week. Grimm is an excellent writer. We usually read him, but missed this one. We suspected that Grimm, who lives around the corner from our joint, had somehow sneaked into the house and stole our idea from our computer.
Well, you know he didn’t do that, and since the Herald seems to have little readership from the audience of this blog, we will steal Grimm’s thoughts which deserve wider distribution. Writes Grimm:
“The locals-know-best governing philosophy lies at the steely heart of conservatism and it can’t be bought off. Not in this legislature. Not even with $51 billion in federal dollars.
Except that philosophy only runs in one direction. These same legislators dearly love passing preemption bills that undercut city and county governments and water management districts.”
Now here’s a Fred Grimm line that is close to what we planned to publish, including the quote from one National Rifle Association’s lobbyist whose salary has been reported close to $300,000. Now there’s a hired gun if ever there was one.
“The NRA’s famous and feared lobbyist Marion Hammer explained that the preemption statute was needed because upstart local governments were acting like 'disobedient teenagers.'”
That is an insult that can’t be ignored. This woman is trivializing the concerns of urban communities, where gun violence is epidemic, where mayors and police overwhelmingly want gun sanity. What has happened in this state is that the rural rednecks, who don’t have nearly the murder problem, are telling those of us in the larger cities that we have no right to local authority over life and death.
And on the subject of the NRA, does anybody else think this organization’s behavior is borderline criminal? When this group, largely funded by the arms industry, incites its following by claiming the government is out to destroy its freedom, and speaks in terms of a looming war in which real Americans need to own maximum firepower, is this not like shouting “fire” in a crowded theater?
Oh, maybe they don’t mean it that way – just having a little fun while selling guns. But it is the kind of reckless talk that started the Civil War. Hey, that could be what Florida needs – a civil war between the redneck north and beleagured south. But this time, with the cops on our side, the south could prevail.
Well, we knew pretty fast. The police work was superb – and just a few days later the questions were not who, but why? We still ask them today. But during these tense hours waiting for answers, our mind drifted back 50 years ago, to the day when an even greater crime occurred, when a president of the United States was murdered and there was no delay in announcing who did it.
The problem, a half century later, is that despite the almost immediate identity of the bad guy, we still don’t really know who did it. At least we don’t know the trigger men, although the highly placed government officials behind it are known. And one of the first hints of a conspiracy, to those few with the perception to grasp it at the time, was the incredible speed with which the alleged assassin was identified, complete with motive, and soon rubbed out. His name was Lee Harvey Oswald and his only recorded defense, which now echoes loudly with the passing years, was a shouted, “I’m just a patsy.”
We now know that Oswald’s identity was broadcast so fast, and the alleged motives for his act were so quickly promulgated, that this obscure “lone nut” as described, was anything but. The cover-up apparatus was out of control; it stole a start. But there was no referee at the time to call it out. It clearly was pre-arranged that so much detail on a supposedly unknown figure was made public almost before the act.
It took 15 years before Gaeton Fonzi – at the time on the government payroll – and others linked Oswald to the intelligence community, and learned that the first people to attempt to portray him as a Castro agent were a Florida group financed by the CIA.
They confirmed why in 1975 Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. Richard Schweiker described Oswald as having “the fingerprints of intelligence all over him.” He meant the ease with which Oswald, who had been stationed at a CIA base in Japan and had a top security clearance, was able to defect to the Soviet Union, return to the U.S., engage in high-profile pro-Castro activities, and still be made to appear as an obscure figure whose sick mind led him to commit the crime of the century. Sen. Schweiker’s committee reopened the investigation into the death of JFK, and now, bit by bit, we know the truth.
Can you imagine the public reaction had we, within days of the 1963 assassination, learned that the Secret Service and Dallas police relaxed security for the president’s motorcade? It was decades before that was revealed.
We expect to learn more this year. Some of the most respected researchers are working on books, geared to the anniversary, and new information is anticipated as they discover documents and connections that were classified for years.
So, the next time we question the slowness of police activity in a major event, it is well to remember the past, and be wary of information too quick afoot.
Chris Wren is not to be confused with the famous British architect of yore (“If anybody calls, say I am designing St. Paul's.”). This Chris Wren is executive director of Fort Lauderdale’s Downtown Development Authority. If you want to get his attention, criticize the Wave, the street car planned for 2.7 miles of busy center city streets. We did that a few weeks ago, and Wren took the trouble to visit our office yesterday with Elizabeth Van Zandt, Planning & Design Manager.
Wren is an exuberant salesman and Ms. Van Zandt backs him with stats. The Wave is also his baby, and he fully understands the concern we expressed, for he has had the same argument with his own board and most entities who have eventually supported the project.
It seemed to us that running a street car without a dedicated lane is a step forward to the past. When street cars, or trolleys as we called them up north, were introduced about 100 years ago, there were few cars on city streets. In fact, there were still horse-drawn carriages. We have old Philadelphia photos of trolleys running on unpaved roads. Those vehicles were vastly useful. Everybody rode them.
But as traffic increased, the utility declined. The tracks were usually in the middle of streets. When the trolley stopped every block or so, cars on the inside lane had to stop to avoid hitting people getting on and off. Trolleys wound up slowing traffic, offsetting their basic intention, and except for a few preserved as tourist attractions, they were eventually replaced by buses. In recent years, however, light rail has been introduced in several cities. These are vehicles that run on tracks on city streets, but in dedicated lanes and with traffic lights geared to give them a right of way. They don’t go at breathtaking speeds, but they sure beat traffic jams. When feasible, these tracks connect to mainline railroads, where the street cars become commuter trains, racing at good speed for 20 miles or more to serve all those suburban towns that sprung up along the original railroads.
It is such a system we hoped for Fort Lauderdale. Wren would agree that would be ideal, but then makes a series of points that could be grouped under the heading “think long term.” The Wave is being built now because the money (50 percent federal) is available, but it is not designed in isolation. It is intended as part of a much broader plan that would include the FEC railroad corridor, Tri-Rail and virtually all other forms of transportation short of the Goodyear Blimp. The DDA obviously controls only a small section of South Florida real estate, but it is coordinating with Broward County and other agencies.
Wren produces a map envisioning the expansion of the Wave west on Broward Boulevard to U.S. 441, and south to the airport and then west to Davie and even as far as University Drive. Once free from the intense downtown traffic, a street car could make pretty good time. And he points out the initial line will have traffic lights prioritized, meaning it won’t have to stop every block or so.
He thinks the Wave will have good ridership from the beginning because it will originate in the heart of downtown with high-traffic destinations such as the county and federal courthouses and Broward General hospital. And he cites statistics to show that such transportation leads to development all along it. He throws out an amount of $6 in return for every dollar spent.
But the real value, he says, would come when the FEC completes its train between Miami and Orlando (scheduled for next year) with a stop in downtown Fort Lauderdale; and when, as seems invevitable, Tri-Rail switches some commuter trains to the FEC tracks. The Wave will make the connection from the station to places where travelers want to go.
Chris Wren does not think the Wave is perfect.
“But it’s a good first step,” he says.
It does not seem such a long time ago, but is at least 20 years since people who wanted to know what was happening in Broward and much of Palm Beach County relied mainly on The Miami Herald. The Sun-Sentinel had some very good writers but they seemed to get lured away to bigger papers. Bernie Lincicome went to Chicago, Pete Dexter to Philadelphia, then Washington state, and Mitch Albom wound up in Detroit, writing successful books. Others, Michael Connelly and Dexter are the best examples, made it big as fiction writers.
But anybody in the journalism business knew that on a day to day basis, the Herald set the agenda for most of the Gold Coast. It had a large bureau in Fort Lauderdale, a presence in Palm Beach, and even a staffer in Vero Beach. Head to head against the Sun-Sentinel, then known as the Fort Lauderdale News, the Herald usually won. It also won numerous prizes, including 20 Pulitzers.
That has changed. Year by year the Herald retreated toward its base in Miami. It closed its Fort Lauderdale office and its coverage reflected it. Today its influence is only strong in south Broward. Its local section often features Miami stories, of limited interest up here. And even though it – and all daily papers – has also been under circulation pressure, the Sun-Sentinel has become dominant in Fort Lauderdale and much of south Palm Beach County. Its overall quality has clearly improved, but it never won a Pulitzer Prize.
Until yesterday. There was much joy in the city room when the announcement that reporter Sally Kestin and database specialist John Maines earned the paper the prestigious Pulitzer Gold Medal for public service journalism. Their story was based on a three-month investigation of speeding cops. Through clever innovation they showed that up to 800 police officers reached speeds of 90 to 130 miles per hour.
Pulitzer Prize-winning stories are supposed to get results. This one sure did. According to today’s paper (Sun-Sentinel, of course), police departments in South Florida have disciplined officers and instituted reforms, actually adopting the reporters' database to track their own people. The results have made the roads safer for us all.
Well done, Sun-Sentinel.
There seems to be some excitement around here for a bad idea. We refer to the Wave – a streetcar planned for downtown Fort Lauderdale. What we are doing here is going forward to the past – to an idea discarded in most major cities 50 years ago. The idea is a trolley that runs on the same space used by cars, bicycles, drunken pedestrians, etc.
The idea of a vehicle running on tracks is not bad, but it was decided years ago that having the vehicle on the same space as other traffic did not work. You just had a trolley filled with people moving as slowly as everything else, even slowing traffic while it discharged and loaded human cargo.
Now, into the 21st century. In many places there are still streetcars, but they run on dedicated lanes, usually the one closest to the curb. Anyone who has been to Denver, New Orleans, Sacramento, or Portland, Ore., needs no explanation. Those cities have streetcars that have their own alley, so to speak. They stop every four or five blocks, and streetlights are geared to give them a right of way. In Denver those streetcars connect to the railroads, carrying passengers 20 or more miles away, quicker than a car can make the same trip, especially at rush hour. Thus a fast, efficient way of moving large numbers of people.
The price paid for this luxury is giving up a lane of traffic. So the idea won’t work on say, Las Olas Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale or Atlantic Avenue in Delray Beach. Those streets are too narrow. Where it would work, however, and Florida has many examples, are broad, three-lane highways. U.S. 1 is a prime example, up and down much of the Gold Coast. Major east-west arteries also have room to add a dedicated lane on the inside. You could run a streetcar, also known as light rail, from Plantation to downtown Fort Lauderdale, and connect to the Florida East Coast Railway tracks, headed north or south (think airport), and that would be a most useful line.
It is surprising, with so many examples to copy, that our planners come up with an idea that history has negated. The Wave is a good idea on the wrong track. Wave it off.
Time was running out in the first half.“Shoot!” somebody shouted.
You were open and you shot from the right corner, a jump shot from what today would be three-point range. The ball went in, all net, just as the buzzer sounded, the only buzzer beater in more than 20 years of playing disorganized and organized basketball, beginning in grade school and continuing through a pretty good Philadelphia adult league that had some former college players and even one ex-pro from the old Eastern League. He was on our team and technically should not have been allowed, but nobody complained because our team clearly needed some help.
Anyway, the thrill of that buzzer beater was compromised by the fact that as your feet landed, an ankle gave way. You could hardly walk in the second half, but after using ice on the swelling and having a teammate, who was also a football coach, tape the bad ankle, you were able to play a few days later.
It was the only buzzer beater and the only injury in all those years of playing basketball. The memory comes alive this time of year when college basketball winds down, as we watch the NCAA tournament. It is always fun to see some of the old-time film when schools and players with glory in their past are recalled. You see a much slower game, with players wearing shorts that do not resemble prom gowns and often shooting outside shots without leaving their feet. You also see a game with far fewer injuries than today – a game that was designed by Dr. James Naismith in 1891 to be played indoors and in safety.
The fundamental premise was to reward skill rather than brute strength – a sport in which a clever little sharpshooter could compete with a larger person. Until the 1950s, and even into the '70s, his concept stayed intact. Basketball was a pretty safe game. It was unusual, at least on the college level, for a player to miss a major part of a season because of injury.
Over the last several decades Naismith’s game has become almost unrecognizable as the rules have relaxed to permit much quicker movement and physical contact that would have appalled the game’s inventor. The result is that almost every team in the NCAA tournament has been affected by injuries, some of them, as in the case of the Louisville player over the weekend, shockingly severe.
It is a rare team that does not have at least one key player out, or playing hurt. The team closest to home is our La Salle, whose tallest player at 6-11 missed almost the last month of the season after spraining his foot. La Salle managed to win three tournament games without him, but was crushed under the boards in most of its final games, even while winning.
Our main gripe is all the contact, much of it intentional. Players driving to the basket are taught to make contact, and what once was charging now mostly goes against the defense. Size and strength (which translates to speed) are rewarded – just what its founder did not want. Injuries are inevitable. Sorry, Dr. Naismith.
We see it all the time. Heavy traffic on I-95, but at least it's moving. Everybody doing 65 to 70. Suddenly some maniac comes racing by at a much higher speed, changing lanes like a juking running back, recklessly cutting in front of other drivers, often followed by another car or two doing the same thing. We suspect these people drive like this all the time, and we wonder how they get away with it.
Well, we are learning most of them don’t. News reports last week explained that many drivers involved in recent serious accidents had terrible driving records – suspended licenses, DUIs, multiple unpaid tickets, no insurance – sometimes all of these. And they keep driving until the kill themselves and maybe somebody else.
That’s what happened to a 26-year-old man last week. He and a passenger died in a high-speed crash in Hollywood. He had racked up 12 traffic violations since 2007, including five speeding incidents and driving with a suspended license and failing to pay traffic fines. Because he had a lawyer in court, most of those incidents were not officially on record.
Another case separately reported by the Sun-Sentinel involved a driver who has a 13-year record of infractions, was involved in a fatal 2010 crash, and continued driving and getting six more tickets.
Bottom line: It is very hard to keep people with terrible driving records from continuing to drive terribly. One way to do that might be to impound vehicles of habitual offenders or anybody caught driving illegally with a suspended license. It has been reported that thousands of such people are driving our roads every day. They simply ignore the law until the day they kill themselves or somebody else. Note the stats reported by the Sun-Sentinel. In 2012 there were 195,467 Florida drivers – including more than 15,000 in Broward and 16,000 in Palm Beach – cited with criminal violations for driving with a suspended or revoked license. If that doesn’t scare sober people off the road, what will?
Cars can be impounded, but it doesn’t happen often. Suppose a bad driver had his car (or whosever car he was driving) taken away immediately, and required to pay a stiff fine - $1,000 sounds nice – and clear up all outstanding tickets, just to get it back. Perhaps that would send a message. It is not that this situation has been totally ignored. Some judges and legislators have been pressing for stiffer penalties, and penalties that can be enforced. But like gun control, such efforts manage to be thwarted in Florida’s legislature.
It does not seem to matter that such drivers, like crazy people with guns, kill people. They just choose a different weapon.
