The rain came so hard that traffic barely moved getting out of Fort Lauderdale. It had slackened by the time we reached Boca Raton, but Florida Atlantic was prepared, with canopies stretching from the valet to the entrance of the gala. The gala was the 50th anniversary of FAU’s founding. That stretch was considerable, zig-zagging for a block or more, for the building was no ordinary gala site. This was the new campus football stadium, the dream of Coach Howard Schnellenberger ever since he started the program more than 10 years ago. Schnellenberger had retired from the University of Louisville, where he built a new stadium while building Louisville from mediocrity to a bowl-game team. When FAU decided to go with football, they found maybe the best man in the world to start its program, and he lived just up the road in Delray Beach..
He is stepping down after this season, an unfortunate one so far for his team, which had set records for progress from a start-up to a successful mid-major program. The school that lost its first game, and badly, to Slippery Rock, matured to play schools such as Michigan State, Florida and Auburn, sometimes giving them a good game. And all along his goal was to have a campus stadium which he viewed as an inevitable step to becoming a national power. This year he got it, and it was a perfect place to celebrate the school’s 50th anniversary. The new ball park is a fitting symbol for that milestone, for its state-of-the-art facilities keep pace with a school that grew from a handful of original students in the 1960s to nearly 30,000 today on a number of campuses.
Its academic reputation has come from nowhere to respected in specialty fields such as marine science. For those who recall those start-up years, on an overgrown World War II bomber training base with only a few buildings, the school and the new stadium evoke a line from The Great Gatsby, on a setting transformed by Gatsby’s mansion, providing something commensurate with man’s capacity for wonder. Even on classically dreary night, the stadium glowed like Gatsby’s mansion on a party night. The place has gotten rave reviews, but all expectations were met. It is supposed to hold 30,000 but looks more like a 40,000 to 50,000 place, with all the modern touches, such as broad covered spaces behind the stands where one can sip drinks and dine while watching the action on television – part sports amphitheater, part entertainment palace.
The gala showcased that versatility, with guests roaming between three floors of the stadium’s tower, while glancing admiringly at the new field. All this between rain gusts, which caused the roof to leak in some places. That probably relates to the rush to open for this season, and can obviously be cured. That roof is not likely to endure many such a weather-beating night as this one. It ended, at least for us, with an anniversary presentation on the big end-zone screen, and a performance by the FAU band.
Beating the crowd to the valet, we paused, looking upward to catch the fireworks display. The damp night air sparkled and exploded in triumph, silhouetting the statue of Howard Schnellenberger, which we had totally missed on the way in. He is in his familiar sideline pose, jacket and tie, arms folded, seemingly pleased with what the night had wrought.
You see a lot of books like this one, oversized coffee table decorations, but not many are so well done and readable as Pioneer Parish – the history of Saint Anthony, Broward’s first Catholic Church. It has been in the works for two years, but it just came out this week, and the effort that went into this project is obvious. The photography and graphics, a combination of old-time stuff and contemporary shots, are an artistic contribution to the historical record of South Florida.
One senses the touch of a pro, and that pro is Chauncey Mabe, former book editor and contributor to the Sun-Sentinel. He is listed as editor. In fact, he wrote most of the book. It was designed and printed by Middle River Press in Oakland Park, co-owned by Judy Borich; Judy Borich also did most of the considerable research.
“It’s amazing what she accomplished in getting things for our archives,” says Sharon Lynch Murrah, who is development director for St. Anthony Catholic School, a historic essential component of the parish. That research is reflected in Mabe’s opening sentence.
“Looking back from the twenty-first century, it’s hard to appreciate how much hatred against Catholics existed a century ago in South Florida,” he writes. That is indeed hard to appreciate, especially since, as the book notes, the first family of Fort Lauderdale was brought here by Philemon Bryan, a converted Catholic. And by the 1920s, Catholic families such as Bryan, Gore, Lochrie and Camp, all enduring names to this day, were beginning to dominate the city’s business and politics.
Mabe recounts the story of Julia Murphy, who had come from Nebraska in 1915 to take a job as a public school teacher, and was almost immediately dismissed when community leaders, including the owner of what became the Sun-Sentinel, learned she was a Catholic. You wonder what religion they thought a woman named Murphy would be. Anyway, it was a controversy which divided the public for a number of years, and in that time of religious tension St. Anthony was founded. The original church in 1921 was on Las Olas Boulevard. When the present larger church was built decades later, the old church was moved to become the present First Lutheran Church of Northeast Third Ave.
This kind of candid writing appears throughout the book, especially in a chapter dealing with the 1970s transition from the longtime but aging pastor, Monsignor John J. O’Looney, to Father Laurence Conway. The parish had lost some of its luster. School enrollment was down, lack of vocations to the religious life required hiring lay teachers who needed to make a living. The surrounding neighborhood was out of favor with young families who were moving to western suburbs. Financial pressures surrounded the job. Father Conway would have preferred his former assignment in Naples.
Several priests, including Conway, who died recently, are quoted on the subject. It was a difficult time. O’Looney, a builder priest if ever there was one, had started what is now St. Thomas Aquinas High School, helped start Holy Cross Hospital and had a hand in establishing other Catholic parishes throughout the county. He was by then a community legend, but a strong willed man who resisted the modernization of the Church. He also wanted his successor to be another native priest from Ireland (as so many in South Florida still are) and was disappointed when Conway, from Philadelphia, was named by the Archbishop. It was a difficult time for the diplomatic Fr. Conway, but it is the truth and handled with a deft touch.
The book has a happy ending, as such books should, with a description of the renewal of downtown Fort Lauderdale and the east side neighborhoods which feed St. Anthony School. The 2011 church and school are now under the leadership of Father Jerry Singleton, a native Irishman, and stronger than ever. Monsignor O’Looney would be pleased.
The closing chapters deal with St. Anthony’s generous and recent support for a Catholic parish in Africa, and a salute to the numerous families who have supported or attended its school. Their names define a county. Among them are U.S. District Judge William Zloch, Brian Piccolo, Dr. Dan Arnold, Chris Evert, Tim Gannon, Mike Stanley, Michael Connelly, E. Clay Shaw Jr., Major Gen. Ervin C. Sharpe Jr., Mike Mularkey, R.H. Gore, Susan Hayward, Rear Admiral Garland P. Wright, Jr. – and last, but hardly least, Fort Lauderdale Mayor Jack Seiler.
Philadelphia is not the oldest regional magazine. As a chamber of commerce product, it goes back to the 1940s. Palm Beach Life, which still publishes occasionally, goes back decades farther. But it was always a social magazine, focusing on the lifestyle of the wealthy, much as do our magazines. Philadelphia Magazine was a different sort of animal, taking on the important issues of a city with a good many issues. It published the first article challenging the Warren Commission’s finding that a lone nut killed President John F. Kennedy. That was a 1966 article based on an interview with Arlen Specter, then an assistant district attorney in Philadelphia, later and until recently the U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania.
That interview, in which Specter fumbled all over the place trying to explain the unexplainable, the “magic bullet theory,” was the beginning of research, much of which later appeared in Gold Coast, and continuing to this day, which points to a government conspiracy to murder a president. Philadelphia Magazine also exposed a crooked Philadelphia Inquirer reporter who used his position to shake down businesses, including what at the time was the largest bank in Philadelphia. Such stories appeared month after month in the 1960s, creating national attention and in the process inspiring people in other cities to launch magazines. The Washingtonian was an early one, as was New York. Then came Boston (owned by the same company as Philadelphia) and the enormously successful Texas Monthly, whose founding publisher sold advertising in Philadelphia and was inspired to take the city magazine statewide in his native Texas. And soon any place where people could read had a local magazine, all doing stuff Philadelphia invented. Top Docs, Best and Worst, etc. But very few magazines did the nervy pieces that distinguished Philadelphia Magazine.
Even as newspapers struggle to survive, local magazines continue to appear, and many thrive. Thus the book. It is part of the history of the written word. This involves contributions from a dozen writers and others who were part of the birth of a new media. Such books need photos and art, and that is the reason for this trip, finding old magazines which are increasingly rare, and raiding the files of those who were here at the time. Many are not. Three people who would have been part of this book a few years ago are gone. Others are ill, or have no memory of the events in which they took part.
***
Which brings us to transportation. Getting around this city, and I have been all over the last few days, is amazingly easy. From where I am staying in Chestnut Hill, on the edge of the city’s northwest border, I can take two trains into center city. One station is a block away, the other four blocks. Once the tracks belonged to the Reading and Pennsylvania railroads. Today both are part of a transportation authority. Either ride is about 30 minutes to downtown. But more important, these lines connect at underground stations to tracks which serve the airport and other routes in every other direction. Today I will travel into the city and out to the famed Main Line, a boomerang route which barely takes an hour, and that’s allowing 10 minutes in case a train is late.
Thursday I will visit another source, and contributor to the book, who lives in a totally opposite direction, almost in Trenton, New Jersey. In this case others are traveling, so we go by car, but I could get there by train, again connecting in center city. This is possible because so many commuter lines have served Philadelphia for more than a century, on tracks that are either elevated or depressed and have very few grade crossings of the kind that slow traffic in South Florida. Depending on the timing, I may get a train from Trenton which goes back through Philadelphia and directly to the airport, a distance of about 40 miles, without changing trains at all.
Other northern cities have good commuter rail, but even New York, Boston and Chicago with extensive networks in all directions, do not have Philadelphia’s convenience. Forty years ago the city had two terminals just a few blocks apart, much as Boston and New York have today. Tracks leading to both terminals were once in the air, creating ugly Chinese walls. But the city undertook ambitious projects to connect the two stations underground. This involved burrowing under the City Hall, with the statue of William Penn atop. It was a huge construction job, but the result is that 10 commuter lines connect, simply by walking across a platform in underground stations protected from hard weather. They also connect to Amtrak for longer travel, and with a walk of a few yards to the city’s two subways.
One cannot use this old, and yet remarkably modern commuter rail system, and not compare it to our neck of the sand, where a single commuter line can’t even find the right track. It could be switched to a much more useful track with a fraction of the cost of what Philadelphia did years ago. When will it ever happen?
New ethics rules proposed for Broward County officials are drawing complaints that they are too burdensome. These new rules are the result of a series of arrests of local officials who, after years of doing bad things, had the bad luck to get caught by authorities who, after years of ignoring the problem, suddenly discovered ethics existed.
This misfortune is not limited to Broward. Palm Beach County came first, with a series of prosecutions a few years before. And just Sunday we read that the Feds are looking into the privatization of prisons, involving contracts for a lot of money that may lead to highly placed state officials. This at a time when the Scott administration seems bent on privatizing other prisons, and everything else it can think of. If the Feds find wrongdoing, and they always do, it could ruin the state economy by depriving other officials from their God-given right to steal.
In fairness, there is nothing to suggest wrongdoing in the prison situation, except a mysterious meeting in Boca Raton and a discovered memo in which it states that everything about this meeting is “confidential.” Now, when state business involving big dollars is meant to be confidential, that is often a sign that the Feds may have to do some work.
What about the human cost of ethics rules? We decided to interview an official who does not like ethics rules.
Gold Coast: Commissioner, thanks for having us. What’s wrong with ethics
Commissioner: There’s nothing wrong with ethics, as long as it don’t affect my life. These rules say I gotta tell who I work for and what I make. I don’t think it’s right.
I mean I can’t lobby any other governments, or anybody in my family, or I can’t vote for a garbage company in which I own stock, though nobody knows it, and my brother-in-law can’t be a lawyer and count on my vote to rezone a golf course, and I can’t take a free box at a sports event, or a car, or a condo on Miami Beach. …. I mean you can’t do nothing. How can you expect me to make a living? What do they want me to do as a public servant? Really be a servant?
Gold Coast: Good point. I can see why you couldn’t take a condo on the Fort Lauderdale beach. That would suggest a conflict. But Miami Beach has nothing to do with Broward.
Commissioner: Right. These new rules is two onersome. You can’t even accept a bottle of water.
Gold Coast: I saw that in the paper. Maybe you could accept a plastic container. Most people think of bottles as glass. And if there’s no rule against plastic containers, you could always get them to put gin or vodka in it and pretend it's water.
Commissioner: You gotta understand politics. What’s politics for if it’s not to help your friends. And make a few bucks on the side. That’s why I got into it. With this new stuff nobody’s gonna run. And people in office will quit.
Gold Coast: Don’t we wish. Well, thanks for your time. And your service.
Commissioner: Wait a minute. Don’t I get paid for this?
Gold Coast: We never do that. It wouldn’t be ethical. But we can offer you a container of water. Just don’t drink it when driving.
You know what an Aggie is? That name has been in the news recently, thanks to presidential candidate, Gov. Rick Perry, who went to Texas A&M. That’s the school where the military unit wore high boots, and probably still do, that were fashionable in George Washington’s day. It is also the school that adopted the theme from the film “Patton” as a sort of football fight song.
Now, in Texas, everybody knows what the term “Aggie” means, even though, like God, it is a difficult thing for anyone, poet or farmer, to wrap words around. It is a matter of pride, like the Fighting Irish, and you know it when you see it. Texans just know, and the other people who know, but are equally incapable of defining, are military people who have met Aggies. We did, at Fort Sill, Okla., and besides Aggies we met guys from a dozen other schools, varying in fame and style from Princeton to RPI to Iowa State. But this is not about Aggies. Let’s change speed.
***
Then came the rain, at three o’clock in the morning, the time that Scott Fitzgerald, a Princeton man, called the dark night of the soul, and military memories came back, first, like the rain, a gentle patter on the roof, and then a more insistent downpour of names and places, such as Benning and Meade and Lee and Campbell and Indiantown Gap. And then, in a reverse chronology, Fort Sill, where the Aggies, and much more, came to mind in the soothing confusion of a summer storm.
Anybody in the army, or any service, has met people from military schools. They put out a lot of officers. You were always meeting Aggies or VMI people. In general, we did not admire them. They took learning to shoot guns far too seriously. They should have been at Little Round Top. They were the people who got up at 4 a.m. to get ready for a 7 a.m. inspection, clanking around in the bathroom and bounding down hallways, waking up the rest of us slobs in the process. But there were always exceptions, like Harry. He was from Ennis, Texas. He was an Aggie, and from a town that was probably named after Ennis, in Ireland. Towns get named after each other, like Philadelphia, where the Iggles play, named after a town in Mississippi.
Harry was a casual guy, friendly with a pleasing drawl, who did not take himself or the army too seriously. And over the years the name Texas A&M, and the theme from "Patton," brings his memory to mind. We may have stayed in touch briefly, but like most such long distance friendships, they become memories. We all know that feeling. I wonder whatever happened to…? Any man who hasn’t tried to look up an old high school love ain’t really trying. Women are not much better.
Harry’s name comes up today as the first among many, when you realized, stupid as it sounds, that a guy from Texas is little different from a dude from Philadelphia. The military neutralizes the arrogance of neighborhoods, and the examples of that truth line up like soldiers on parade. Tom from Montgomery, an Auburn man, who grew up on the same street as Zelda Fitzgerald (his parents knew her); W.C. from North Carolina State, who said he’d resign his commission before he would get somebody else’s dumb ass killed; Hugo from Iowa State, who dated a pretty girl from Dallas; Pete from Iron Mountain, Mich., a Michigan State product. They were from all over the country, dispelling the notion that big city guys from the northeast were in some way culturally superior. The southern and Midwestern boys took people as they came. It seemed that the closer you were to the center of our country, the more open minded you were.
But then there were Princeton guys, and that was another shattered misconception. You expected them to be rich and elite. Some were rich, but as a group, they were just like the rest of us. There was Bert from a western Pennsylvania town that his family allegedly owned, but you would never know it from his modest, almost shy demeanor. And Birch, with a Philadelphia name that was known to all from that area. And Tom, forget where he came from, but we had great fun writing a satirical skit for the party ending our training.
And there was another Tom, from Gulfport, Miss., who married a beautiful girl from Alabama. I am not sure about his school, but it was probably Alabama. Her family was from Tuscaloosa. One night at a party at the O Club, a black officer (actually he was beige, like our President) and his wife sat down at a table. A guy from Auburn, one of the very few arrogant men we met from the south, and his wife promptly got up and moved to another table. Tom and his wife saw that, and quickly rose and took the empty seats beside the black couple. One way or the other, and it was the army reserve that got us in the magazine business, our military experience lasted 12 years, but that night at Fort Sill was the classiest move we saw.
We don’t know what happened to those men, and the few wifes we met, but we were, in a strange sense, a band of brothers, distant but the same. Which has nothing to do with Aggies. But maybe, on a rainy night, it does.
The great governor of Florida, and many of his ardent supporters, are for getting rid of regulations that retard growth. He is also against wasting tax dollars on things such as Tri-Rail, and is lukewarm about continuing to restore the Everglades, which was screwed up years ago by politicians who wanted to promote growth in the state.
The only kind of regulations people in Tallahassee seem to like are those favoring gun uncontrol, such as penalizing medical professionals who ask crazy or suicidal people if they have a gun in their house.
And so we see in the news that progress to clean up of the Everglades may stall. So what? Government should stay out of the water business. If we run out of water, people can always buy it in bottles. And as for today’s report of dangerous levels of lead in Dania’s drinking water, there would have been no report if there were no testing of water, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s requirement to report that in 30 days. Without that report nobody would know the difference, unless people died. And if that happened they could move. There are still good deals out there.
Also in today’s news, traffic in South Florida is not only the worst in the state, but we are actually tied for 15th in the whole country. The papers say people spend a huge part of their lives tied up in traffic jams. So what? People in Los Angeles spend their entire lives doing the same thing. And who comes up with these statistics, anyway? The papers cite a study by the Texas Transportation Institute. That may not be a government agency, but we still don’t need it making people anxious.
If we didn’t read how bad traffic is nobody would know the difference. And we all know what causes traffic jams. Government builds too many roads. And has two many rules. If government got off our backs and we could drive anywhere we wanted without traffic lights, stop signs, speed limits and lanes dividing traffic into two parts – one lane going one way and the other lane the other way – traffic would move a lot more smoothly. And we wouldn’t need state troopers writing tickets. Only undertakers.
And we wouldn’t have pressure to improve mass transit, and put Tri-Rail on the Florida East Coast track where it could actually relieve congestion.
It isn’t just Florida. As this is being written, the Internet is carrying Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s refusal to support a measure to improve federal safety standards for oil and gas pipelines, even though a pipeline rupture occurred last week in his own state.
You have to like a guy who keeps government off our backs, and our pipelines. Look at the good side. Maybe the whole state of Kentucky will blow up and that will mean one less patsy on UF’s schedule.
Many police officers have not earned Ph.D.s and it is therefore understandable that they do not understand the purpose of stop signs. There is a difference between the purpose and the effect of stop signs. The effect is to compel people to come to a complete stop behind the white line, if visible, wherever a stop sign, if visible, appears at an intersection.
But the purpose behind that effect is to keep drivers from smashing into other cars, speeding bicycles, joggers or people walking small dogs in the dark. In other words, slow down traffic by forcing it to come to a complete stop every few blocks, thereby discouraging people from driving 50 miles an hour in a 25-mph speed zone.
This is in protest to an obvious police crackdown in some Fort Lauderdale neighborhoods on people who do not come to a complete stop at stop signs that should never be there in the first place. It is particularly noticeable in the Victoria Park section where several sober people with excellent driving records have been stopped for not quite stopping at intersections where the only reason for stop signs is to slow cars down.
Now Victoria Park, and other Fort Lauderdale neighborhoods, have many intersections where the cross streets are offset, meaning they take a little jog as they meet the busier street. The effect is that a driver can’t see what is coming in both directions, so he or she literally has to roll through the intersection. This is especially true at many corners where foliage prevents drivers, notably those is sports cars or other low vehicles, from seeing in both directions until they are partially into the intersection. One of the recent police stops was made because although the driver came to a complete stop, she did not stop behind the white line. That is absurd nitpicking because foliage and parked cars at that intersection prevents drivers from seeing anything on the cross street from behind the white line.
There are other stop signs on streets where the intersection is a “T.” One street ends. In a sane society there would be no stop sign needed because a car can’t go speeding through an intersection where the street ends. It must slow to make a turn. The only purpose of stop signs at such intersections is to slow cars, by making them stop. There are several such situations around Holiday Park. One might argue that the stop signs are justified to protect pedestrians, especially kids, entering and leaving the park, but that would only apply during certain busy hours, such as soccer Saturday mornings.
The explanation for the strict enforcement is obviously traceable to a strong civic association, and Victoria Park has one of the strongest, which protests to the police about speeding cars on residential streets. Thus all the speed bumps in addition to stop signs. Now that’s exactly the point. If reducing speed is the objective, why not use the police time to do exactly that – use radar guns or other technology to crack down on those who flagrantly, and dangerously, roar down 25-mph streets, or go 60 in 35-mph zones, as they do all the time on Las Olas and Broward Boulevard. Do what police now do in school zones, where surveillance is strict and fines severe.
But if the present mode must continue, we should add the word “almost” above STOP, and the police should be guided by observing if a driver is careful and vigilant at intersections, rather than nitpicking if a car slows to a mile or two an hour and only proceeds when the course is clear.
It began with David Bressler, Esq. who represented us in Philadelphia when we made the deal to come to Florida to invest in what was then Pictorial Life, the magazine now known as Gold Coast. We obviously would soon need a Florida lawyer. Dave had contact with an Orlando attorney, who, oddly enough, had been a classmate of my partner, Gaeton Fonzi, at the University of Pennsylvania. But the Orlando attorney felt he was too far from Fort Lauderdale to represent us. He suggested a Fort Lauderdale lawyer named Elliott Barnett.
Now I had relatives named McCloskey, and Don McClosky did not look terribly Irish, and I had never seen that spelling of the name. I soon learned, because he joked about it, that his Jewish grandfather had come from eastern Europe with a name like Mikalofski, or something like that, and the Irish clerk at Ellis Island could not understand his accent and finally said, “You look like an Irish man to me," and wrote McClosky on the immigration papers.
I was also soon to learn that Elliott Barnett, who was from Columbia Law School and had impeccable academic credentials, had founded a law firm with Si Ruden in 1959 after he was turned down by an old line Fort Lauderdale firm when they learned he was Jewish. It was a prejudice common in the community at the time, one that Barnett would help demolish. Don McClosky joined the firm soon after and by the time we met them, both men were well on their way to becoming legal stars.
During the early 1970s Elliott Barnett and Don McClosky exploded the religious barrier that had confronted both a decade earlier. Barnett became a leader in the arts community, helping establish the Museum of Art | Fort Lauderdale, and leading the Downtown Development Authority through a legal minefield after a number of properties had been illegally condemned. Don McClosky, at the same time, was making a name as a premier land use lawyer, at a time when Broward County was growing in every direction. He also got press, some of it in our magazine, for, while pushing 50, playing basketball with a group of high-powered attorneys. Their small law firm was growing fast to become one of the largest in Florida, moving several times to increasingly prestigious offices and spreading throughout the state. At one point it had more than 150 lawyers.
There was a major difference between the men, and that was personal. Don McClosky was married for 59 years to the same woman, Judy, with whom he often traveled and 20 years ago survived a plane crash off Chile. Elliott Barnett had four wives, which can cause economic pressures, and those pressures led to a tragic ending. In the 1990s, when his reputation could not have been more glowing, he was accused of embezzling from his firm, which those who had known him for years could not fathom. I always wanted to believe that it was not as bad as the papers made it seem. His health had broken and he died in disrepute. The firm people had always called Ruden, Barnett, etc. became Ruden, McClosky, etc.
Don McClosky, on the other hand, lived more than another decade of fulfilling years until his death last week. He was increasingly regarded as one of the best in his business, a friend to many, including this magazine, and his obituaries were filled with accolades from those who regarded him as land-use expert, friend, mentor, devoted husband, father and competitive basketball player.
Two brilliant careers, launched almost together, both born in a certain adversity, and ending as differently as if the men had never known each other.
With all the commotion caused by the hurricane that wasn’t, but then became a disastrous storm, an interesting transportation story did not get a lot of notice. As Irene faked at Florida, then veered north to a place in New England history, The Palm Beach Post reported that some talks were going on between the Florida Department of Transportation and the Florida East Coast Railway about the possibility of the railroad taking over Tri-Rail.
The paper reported that it came as a shock to Tri-Rail’s board, which knew nothing of such discussions, and wasn’t very happy about what seemed some kind of sneak attack. An FEC official told us off the record that too much was made of a very preliminary approach to what could be a major transportation development for South Florida.
Whatever. The reality is that, after more than 20 years of a pretty good commuter train on the wrong track, there is serious effort to move Tri-Rail to the FEC tracks and overnight turn a marginally useful commuter service into a very valuable one which would not only serve many more workers but also holds promise of an economic charger for much of Florida’s east coast. The cities from Jacksonville south to Miami owe their locations primarily to the FEC. Its tracks bisect the business districts of every town along the route. The tracks Tri-Rail and Amtrak now use are on the more westerly CSX tracks, which miss the downtowns by just enough to make it an inconvenient commuter railroad.
Illustration: A commuter from Palm Beach County to Fort Lauderdale recently times a morning trip. It took about 32 minutes to travel the 19 miles from Boca Raton to the Tri-Rail station on Broward Blvd. Then it took almost exactly as much time waiting for a connecting bus, then crawling for 17 minutes for just one mile through morning rush hour traffic to the heart of the Fort Lauderdale office district, then another eight-minute walk to his office.
That Tri-Rail is on the wrong track was obvious from its inception. Ironically, it was forced to use the CSX tracks because at the time the FEC wanted no part of a commuter system. It had given up passenger trains in the 1960s and, with a busy freight railroad, wanted nothing that would interfere with their money-making mode. However, the railroad was sold and it has been apparent for several years that the new owner actually wants passenger traffic. Thus, Amtrak has been flirting with the idea of switching its long distance trains to the FEC. On paper that makes sense, for its track is a straight line along Florida’s east coast, whereas the present CSX track veers from Jacksonville to the middle of the state before returning to the coast in West Palm Beach.
The problem is that FEC’s track has many crossings, especially in the cities along its path. To have efficient Amtrak service, or Tri-Rail, that railroad needs extensive improvements. They would include, eventually, either a high bridge over the New River in Fort Lauderdale, or an expensive tunnel. In either case it would eliminate grade crossings that slow traffic on busy downtown streets. Therein lies opportunity, and the FEC certainly realizes it. A fast commuter service, with Amtrak as a bonus, would generate real estate development near every station. Air rights above the tracks would be valuable, just as they are in northern cities which long ago put railroads either up or down to avoid traffic. Long term, the economic benefits to South Florida, and the FEC, could be enormous.
Now, after years of staring at the obvious, it appears the 21st century is on the brink of happening.
Anyone following the news recently has been reminded that the gap between the very rich and the very poor is growing. That’s as it should be. The rich are rich because they are prudent, go to Harvard, buy Wayne’s stock, marry well and have the good sense to inherit money. And never spend a dime.
The poor, not all but a lot of them, should never have been born, from parents who should never have been born, grow up without fathers and have brains like a scrambled egg. I stole that last image from Jimmy Breslin, who would not agree with anything else in the sentence.
Part of the “rich are richer and the poor are poorer” story is the alleged disappearance of the middle class. We are told we have no more middle class. Why? Pondering that great mystery, I go back to roots in Philadelphia where my family was middle class. Maybe even not that good. Maybe lower middle class. We were never utterly broke. We had the most expensive Lionel set in 1950. But my dad did not have a car, was always in hock to a loan company (although I did not know it then) and my mother was one of the first working moms of that era. She took surveys, going around door to door, asking people what they bought – and why. Market research. One Saturday she hired our whole neighborhood to stand in front of Thom McAn shoe stores and count the people coming out with packages. I did that from 9 to 5, at the store near Germantown and Chelten. My buddy Miles went to a store near Broad and Erie, and counted for an hour and then went home and made up the numbers. He was close.
We were middle class, and what happened to my middle class is that we became the mildly rich. And we thus disappeared from the statistical radar. Examples: My two brothers were Ph.D.s. Both had college scholarships. I was the dummy of the family. One brother was a consulting civil engineer and teacher at an Ivy League school. He bought stock, and wisely, and back in the 1970s when our company needed help he sent $25,000 overnight. The other brother also taught college – economics – and is not hurting.
These guys are typical of my middle-class friends. In those days the term “millionaire” meant something. Today it means two houses, even in a depressed real-estate market. Looking back, I can think of almost no friend who is not far, far better off than their parents. Almost all could ship you 25K overnight; most, if they had to, could raise $200,000 for an emergency.
One buddy grew up in a row house with five siblings. He became a Ph.D., taught college, and has been retired 10 years. Another row-house product organized a division for a major company. He had two houses, one in suburban Philadelphia, the other on the beach at one of South Jersey’s better addresses. Another friend, whose dad, like mine, sold life insurance, and not too much of it, became publisher of an important trade magazine. He has been retired for years and splits time between a tony north Jersey suburb and Long Beach Island.
These are just the Philly connections. Closer to Florida, I can’t list the number of people who came from ordinary circumstances, from all over the country, people whose family income a generation or so back never exceeded $15,000, and who today could lose that in the morning market and hardly notice it. By Florida standards, they are not super rich, merely comfortable.
They are the former middle class. They have not disappeared. Just moved up in class.
