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.
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| Rendering: Marina Lofts/BIG |
The case of Brennan of The Tree is getting a lot of publicity, mostly in favor of Brennan and The Tree. The tree is the famous rain tree that sits on the south side of the New River in downtown Fort Lauderdale. It sits where a developer wants to put up another high-rise building in a section that already has too many. The tree is in his way. Brennan is Chris Brennan, the chap who lost his job with the Water Taxi because he refused to stop advocating for the tree. This happened after the developer, who happens to be Water Taxi’s landlord, complained about him. He is now a bartender, according to Sun-Sentinel columnist Mike Mayo. Judging by his quotes in the paper, and a video he posted online, Brennan should make a good one. He’s exceptionally articulate and bartending is one profession where advocating for almost anything will build a loyal following.
The rain tree may be the largest of its kind in the country. It received a protected designation from Fort Lauderdale some years back. The developer bought the property with the tree on it. Now he wants it gone to make room for two big buildings, including Marina Lofts (pictured here). He wants to move it. Many tree experts say the tree would not survive.
Does this situation remind you of people who move in on top of an airport and then complain about the noise of the airplanes or expansion of runways? Or souls who buy houses near railroads – railroads that were there 100 years before them – and then clamor for ordinances to prevent the trains from shattering their sleep with horns, horns designed to warn motorists at crossings that never should have been allowed in the first place?
This fight comes at a strange time. Those in favor of the project say it will provide needed jobs. There were plenty of jobs 10 years ago, and the buildings they went into now are filled with foreclosures. Do we really need another high rise on the New River, with thousands of units already approved and underway not far away in downtown Fort Lauderdale? And with traffic, at least in season, getting so bad that you actually have a hard time at rush hour getting out of your office parking lot?
We confess to a bias on the subject of trees. Our neighborhood, a famous hammock, is defined by its old oaks. You do not get such neighborhoods by cutting down the oaks. Enough go away naturally, and one, which sat on our property line behind the house, was uprooted in Hurricane Wilma. It was an unnatural natural event. There was an ancient mango tree in the yard behind us. The storm blew a huge section from the top of the mango down on our smaller oak. The oak was not ancient, but it wasn’t a kid, either. It was a foot thick when we moved in 42 years ago. Anyway, the oak was uprooted. Trees were uprooted all over the area that year, and many of them were propped back up, took root and are still there and growing.
In the frantic effort to clean up (we also had a major oak snap and land on our roof) we chose not to raise the tree on the property line. Had we done so, a builder would not have been able to put up a big (and currently unoccupied) house that replaced a cottage on the property behind us. The oak tree could not have been legally removed, especially with much of it on our property, and the swimming pool that goes with the big house would not have been built under the branches of an oak. The builder, by the way, cut down the old mango, which we guess was legal. We were just learning to like mangos.
So add one more voice in support of Brennan of The Tree. We may even run up to the joint where he is working to lend moral support.
At this point the lady of the house returns. She confirms that they are indeed working there, and the cops, who had not been the masters of charm up to that point, immediately become the nicest fellows in the world, apologizing to the workmen for the misunderstanding. They even put their guns away.
Now some people in these circumstances would call a lawyer, sue for false arrest or some other silly claim and maybe get some money, at our taxpayers' expense. But these workmen are not that type. But they do wonder what made the cops so hyper.
What made the cops so hyper is that sometimes in similar circumstances, the burglars are real, and armed, and sometimes a cop, wearing a bulletproof vest, takes a slug in the face. They are still looking for people who killed police around here in recent years.
And in Washington there are people who are bought by the National Rifle Association, which pays big money to people who represent it, and even bigger money to the politicians who obligingly oppose anything that has to do with interfering with commerce, meaning selling guns. They don’t want to keep assault rifles out of the hands of law-abiding people, and they say criminals will always get them, so what’s the point of laws that will be only be broken, and might result in the loss of a gun sale? You heard the hired gun for the NRA make that argument before Congress.
The cops, of course, heard this more clearly than anyone, and they know that any time they confront a suspect, they might be faced with a gun. And that gun might have more firepower than the combined lead of several cops. And the above mentioned workmen, after coming down from the high associated with having guns pointed at them, can appreciate the challenge facing police in such cases.
They will get over the scary event, but it doesn’t make their jobs more fun.
There are a lot of books written that nobody reads. There are a few that everybody reads. It is not always the best book that gets the readers. As often, it is the book that gets the best promotion – the one whose author appears on television shows, or better still, has his or her own TV show and can promote the book with shameless frequency. Thus Chris Matthews and Bill O’Reilly are pretty much doomed to best-sellers when they write books on John F. Kennedy.
However, if you don’t have your own TV show, it never hurts to have your own magazine. Thus, for the last year we have been promoting a book, off and on, on the history of regional magazines, such as this one. We had hoped that with sufficient mention, someday we would actually publish it.
That day is now. The book is a history of a remarkable time when a group of which we were lucky to be a part, invented what is basically a new media – the city/regional magazine. It happened in Philadelphia in the 1960s, or even the 1950s, if you want to pick a date when the present publisher joined his father in what was then a little-known business magazine. Many people think New York Magazine was the first of its kind, but it did not come along until the late 1960s.
There have been other regional magazines – Palm Beach Life, dates to 1906 and there are a few other magazines devoted to lifestyle or travel which go back years. But they were not city magazines as we know the form today. They did not, as Philadelphia did in the 1960s, put the city’s top newspaper investigative reporter in jail for extortion. They did not so embarrass his publisher to the extent that one of the most powerful men in American newspapering, Walter Annenberg, decided to sell to Knight Ridder (who then published The Miami Herald) and leave town.
And most significantly, they did not begin the challenge to the Warren Commission that has resulted – 50 years later – in the widespread acceptance that a conspiracy of U.S. government figures was behind the murder of a president. That story has long been close to home, for it followed Gaeton Fonzi to Florida when he was a partner in this magazine in the 1970s. He later worked five years as a federal investigator when the JFK probe was reopened. His conclusion was that if our CIA did not orchestrate President Kennedy’s murder, it certainly did its best to cover it up.
His book, The Last Investigation, originally appeared as two long pieces in our magazines. It influenced so many subsequent researchers that upon his death last August, The New York Timescited it as one of the most important among hundreds of books written about the assassination.
Fonzi and others wrote such powerful stories, over a 10-year period, gained national recognition and made Philadelphiaa powerful influence in its city. They also inspired people in other cities to imitate the success of Philadelphia. Today there are hundreds of local magazines, including our company’s six in Florida, which all do the kinds of things that began in Philadelphia. That’s all part of the book.
While it is mostly about that pioneering era in the north, it will hold some interest in places such as here, Boston, Texas, California, even Denver, where people formerly associated with Philadelphia magazine got their inspiration.
Not all traditions need be traditional. One that fits that rule is the traditional rebuttal speech after a presidential State of the Union address. Traditionally, it is delivered by a distinguished member of the party opposite from that of the president. It therefore ensures that the speaker will be a loser, so to speak.
The purpose, of course, is the American sense of fairness. If you give a president an hour to hurl propaganda, it only seems right that a propagandist from the other side gets a few minutes to say the guy you just heard is full of propaganda. The other purpose is to hold the audience looking in on the State of the Union for another 20 minutes or so, in which the networks might sell some more advertising. Now as traditions go, this one is not very old. It doesn't compare, for instance, with the recent decision of the U.S. Army to go back to the traditional two-tone blue uniforms the Yankees wore in the Civil War.
The problem, as most people sense when they switch the channel immediately after the president gives his or her friends a good photo op, is that the rebutallist will have had virtually no time to prepare remarks because he or she has no idea what the president was going to say. This is the reason that the president, if a good sport, will get down on his knees and crawl out of the room, hugging and kissing every dude or dudess who wants to get on camera with him. This gives the rebuttalist a few more seconds to make sure he doesn’t rebut something the president did not say. Clearly, that is a challenge, and the rebuttal must be prepared in advance, pretty much guessing that a tiger won’t change its stripes. Or a zebra for that matter.
So we had, just last week, our own Sen. Marco Rubio trying to put down President Obama on various points, even if he did not know what points the president made, and even – as some have noted – if he agrees with some of the points that he is by tradition compelled to disagree with. A candid speaker might begin:
“Good evening, my fellow Americans. I don’t know what the other fellow just said but believe me, he’s out to lunch…”
Now Marco Rubio did not have a good night, what with the water thing and all, which only made him look sillier than he makes himself look when he rewrites his family history and tries to poor mouth his current status when everybody knows that anybody who wins an important office in Florida quickly becomes upper-middle class without doing anything actionable. It just goes with the territory.
That said, the evening did not make Rubio seem presidential, and it might even do him a favor by stopping the talk about him running for the big job in four years. The bigger favor, however, would be taking the whole notion of the rebuttal speech and throwing it in the traditional wastebasket.
