OK, NOW It's Mother's Day

The third part of a trilogy is supposed to be the best. Yeah, right.

I saved the third entry in the trilogy about my mother for after Mother's Day. Somehow, it seemed appropriate because now we'll talk about her when I knew her. The previous two posts were about her life before her marriage and my brother and I coming into the picture.

Sophia Pawlak married Leon Kleylein on April 15, 1944 in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. There don't seem to be any wedding pictures that are identified as such, but here's one where Mom has a hibiscus flower in her hair and my father has one of those short 1940's ties on. (Hmmm, I wonder if they'll come back?) Anyway, This could be it for all I know. Just for fun, let's say it is - OK, here's their wedding picture! They seem happy.

Here's another one where they seem happy. I like this one because it's so well worn that I presume they liked it as well. My father is wearing his auto mechanic's uniform and Mom is wearing the type of housedress that I remember her wearing all the time. That insignia on my father's shirt LOOKS like the old Amoco logo before they went red white and blue, but I can't quite make it out. Maybe I should use that special software that the cop shows have that clarifies an image even when there are NO PIXELS available. Oh, wait, there isn't any such software.

Here she is with my brother Dave in January of 1946. Look how handsome my brother is, my mother can't believe her eyes.

As I mentioned before, my mother was a maid all her life. She worked at the Holiday House on Biscayne Boulevard and NW 117 St. in Miami and at the LuRu Motel at Biscayne and NW 145 St. operated by Lou and Ruth Bruno (LuRu). Interestingly, the back of the Holiday House property was on the Dixie Highway (East Dixie - see previous posts) and the LuRu was situated right on what was once the Dixie Highway and the Florida East Coast railway ran behind it. She could walk to the Holiday House, but she had to take a bus to the LuRu and when we moved to Carol City, it was a long trip.

And then, here she is three years later with me at five months. She looks like she's been through the ringer, but I guess that's what happens when you have a ten pound baby.

As much as she loved my brother and me, I think she had a special love for my daughter Leah. The family never had more than two nickels to rub together, but Mom would have given everything she had to Leah with no hesitation.

I'm sorry Mom never got to meet Heather since Heather wasn't born until a year and a half after she died. I'm sorrier still that Heather didn't have the opportunity to meet her grandmother Kleylein. Imagine how hard it must be to miss memories you never had.

My mother was a good mother. Our clothes were clean, there was always enough food and neither my brother nor I ended up in prison for any considerable length of time. Sure, my parents smoked and drank beer, but so did everyone in those days, there wasn't any television to numb our brains. My brother and I learned how to work and you can blame it on genetics or culture, I don't care, it worked out for me.

Thanks, Mom.

A Little More Sixty Years

How's that for a title? I wrote earlier that English is such a rich, variable language that people can still write a sentence today that NO ONE may have every written before. Like this title for instance. What it means is that I'm going to show you some more photographs of matching locations separated by sixty years or so.

But first a bit of history. Back just after the Civil War, in the days of Fort Dallas (before there was a 'Miami', Florida) Dade County was pretty quiet except for the Indians. Along the stretch of Biscayne Bay coastline from NE 80th Street to 95th Street was a settlement named Biscayne and for quite a while it was the county seat for Dade County. The post office, court house, etc. were all there. Now it's all gone, any remnants are under the houses of Miami Shores. Military Highway ran right through town on what is now NE 10th Avenue. In later years, that would be East Dixie Highway. The only commemoration left is a small park (a park-let really) with a plaque and some benches. That's a little sad, but time passes, you know? Here's what the park looks like now. Here's my wife, Deb, sinking into the luxurious grass.

When we were there in 2002, I had no idea that I had been there before, but my Sherlock Holmes-like detective work has proven otherwise.

Here's a set of photographs taken by my mother of my father and brother in this park. Sure, there were changes, but once I figured out where to look, it all became very clear. I must say, it was very satisfying to figure out these locations.

Sherlock Holmes, my foot.

Of Photographs and Fool's Errands

I inherited some photographs after my father died.

These were albums put together by my mother and judging from the albums themselves, she began this project during World War II and stopped making additions just a few years later. The pages were just cheap, blank black construction paper and any photographs were attached by the placement of large stickers glued to the corners of the photographs to hold them in place.

Consequently, one could place the photographs however one wished. And that's just how she placed them: however. She clearly had a methodology in the placement of the snapshots. Over the years I have come to refer to that methodology as the ninja spaghetti style of photo placement. My vision is that at some point, all of her photographs, all the way back to her childhood, were stuffed in a envelope or box. Then, when the time came to mount them, she reached into the box with her eyes closed and whatever came out was the next thing mounted. Years, locations and subjects were jumbled willy-nilly until you got a glimmer of what dying people must view as their whole life passes before them in a collage of random images. I know many of you are snickering to yourselves all comfortable in the comfort of your comfy chairs. "He exaggerates!", you say. Oh, no - no, I don't.

Well, they were no good to anyone in those albums, so I took it upon myself to scan them, identify the people and locations and date them to the extent possible. So, I removed the photographs from the albums, removed the glue and stickers and went about the process of sorting. I was as careful as I could be, after all, the stickers had been licked and put in place by my mother, even if a lot of them did intrude pretty dramatically into the photograph images themselves.

Although the photos only had some written identification in perhaps one out of a hundred instances, I was helped by circumstance. Since there was no standardization of photo prints early on, I could group the images by shape, size, edging, contrast, bordering and frequently a code that had been stamped on the back by the developer. Then, there are the usual photograph dating tools like clothing, age of children, etc. I also used the Kleylein Chronicle (see the previous blog entry) to confirm where someone might have been at the time in question. So, I got them scanned, cleaned them up, identified them to the best of my limited ability and then I entered the Fool's Errand part of the story. Some of these photographs were taken when my brother and I were babies. Actually, many more of them were of my older brother Dave, you know how that goes.

But I became very interested to FIND the locations where these photos were taken and see what was going on there now. When you're motivated, you find a way, here's an example. In this photograph, notice the sign to the right of my brother. Well, when you blow that up sufficiently and analyze the heck out of it, it says:

Boat for Hire
F. J. Reppenhagen
1030 NE 90th. St.
Phone 73088

This is just around the corner from a little man-made inlet called Lake Ward. Mr. Reppenhagen's (what a cool name) back yard was waterfront property on Lake Ward, right where his boat was parked. Now I knew exactly where these photographs were taken and as you can see on this map, it's only a block from NE 10th. Ave otherwise known as East Dixie Highway (see previous blogs). There's Lake Ward in the upper right. I have no idea why they called it 'Lake' Ward. It's clearly not a lake and Leave it to Beaver wouldn't be on TV for years.

This spot was a favorite with my parents for some reason. There were wide open grassy areas there in those days, it wasn't completely built up like it is now. We were living in a place only a couple minutes drive from there and I presume they took us kids so we could run around and look at the water. We didn't have television in those days. I took a trip down to Miami and drove to the locations I had determined in my research and took some photographs.
Here, for example, is the spot where I sat in the grass as a baby and where my brother and I ran around. I imagined that everyone was happy in those days. At least, that's what the photographs seem to imply, I'll take them at their face value. So, it all turned out to be not that much of a Fool's Errand after all.

What fun.

Dixie Highway

In my last post I brought up my connection to the Dixie Highway, so you'll have to read it to know what I'm talking about here. Sorry. Sometimes complete thoughts don't fit into a neat little box, sometimes they're sloppy and flop all over the place, you know, like life.

So, the Dixie Highway was a route connecting south Florida and Illinois and Michigan. This was no interstate highway, it was mostly two-lane as many roads were in the early days of US Roads. This was 1915 or thereabouts when it was conceived. Many roads didn't even have a route number, so the Dixie Highway was marked with a DH sign like this. I guess if you didn't see one for a couple of days, you were off the route.

The real 'interstates' in those days were the railroads and that's really what opened up Miami. Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast (FEC) railroad brought people down to his hotel and towns were built around the stations he peppered along the way. The house I grew up in on 118th Terrace was very near the FEC track and I used to walk along it as kid. The big boom in Miami was a direct result of the railroad. But as cars proliferated, more and more people came down the Dixie Highway.

As I discovered recently, there was an East Dixie Highway and a West Dixie Highway. They called them that because one road was on the east side of the tracks and the other on the west. I knew all about West Dixie, because it went right through North Miami, right through the center of town, right by one of the Royal Castle restaurants (No. 24) I used to work at. The North Miami Theater was on West Dixie, the Carvel's, the People's Gas plant, the Ancient Spanish Monastery, all the big attractions.

And it was an odd road, because it was not north-south or east-west. It was on an ANGLE. I know now that it was designed that way to dump people onto NE 2nd Avenue and then south to downtown. Coincidentally, I also worked at a Royal Castle (No. 2 which was really the first one) in Little River right on the West Dixie Highway (see below).

But when I was growing up, much of the East Dixie had been overlaid by Biscayne Boulevard, but not all of it as I discovered. The East Dixie (just the Dixie Highway for a while, since it was the first) followed the path of the old Military Highway originally cut to allow troops to fight in the Seminole Wars. Well, this road was pretty joggy because it followed a limestone ridge along the coastline. One of the jogs took it down NE 16th Avenue right where I lived on 118th Terrace.

The main house of our neighbor there, Kobe's Trailer Park, turned out to be one of the first houses in northern Miami. It was built by the Burr family in 1907. Now it's part of a condo complex. Northern people sit on the grounds and drink gin and tonics and don't realize they're on the site of one of the first farms in northern Miami. They grew pineapples and fruit trees and tomatoes and shipped them on the nearby railroad. All without air conditioning.

Farther south on another still existing jog of the East Dixie, my parents used to take us to an undeveloped part of what is now Miami Shores so we could run around (nice socks, Dave). I was able to track locations by means of photographs and we were right on the East Dixie. How about that! Another of my Royal Castles (No. 112) was only a couple of blocks from there and I never knew it.

So, two places that I lived and many events in my life are tied to the Dixie Highway. But you know, information like this doesn't always jump out at you. Sometimes you have to go and dig it up.

History at Your Feet

I was born in Miami, Florida.

When I was growing up, everyone I knew, except my brother, had moved there from somewhere else. Comparatively speaking, south Florida is 'new' compared to other parts of the United States. Maryland, for example has had English-speaking people there for four hundred years. Of course the US has no history at all compared to Europe or the far east. In Europe, you can bump into two thousand year old structures with no trouble at all. It became a joke that whenever we were driving on a very straight road somewhere in Europe, it had probably started as a Roman road and often it was true. When the Romans built a road, it was straight!

Many of the roads in Miami are straight, too. The land is relatively flat and the grid pattern worked there. It's not like Philadelphia at all, where there is NO DISCERNIBLE logic to where roads go. Many go in circles and since signs are expensive and rare, you can be lost for days.

But the roads were not always straight in Miami, the first ones followed a low shelf of limestone that follows the coast a bit inland. You see, most of what is now Greater Miami (Dade County) was just Everglades when the first non-Indian settlers arrived in the mid-1800s.
By 'Everglades', I mean swamp. Swamp with gators and rattlers and water moccasins and cotton-mouth snakes and coral snakes and scorpions and mosquitoes and land crabs. Oh, my. South Florida is semi-tropical which means it has two seasons, the dry season and the wet season. During the wet season, before the canals were dug, you could canoe around most of the Miami area. Houses could only be built on the small pine-covered islands that would jut up out of the water every now and again.

Before the Civil War, a road was commissioned by the military to allow troops to reach South Florida overland to fight the Seminoles in the Seminole Wars. This 'Military Trail' was the first road all the way to south Florida and it connected Fort Pierce, Fort Lauderdale and Fort Dallas. See, the kids going to Fort Lauderdale on Spring Break just think it's a cute name, but it was actually a fort. That's a cool word - fort. Fort, fort, fort. We don't use it enough nowadays.

Oh, didn't recognize the name 'Fort Dallas'? That's because it's called Miami now. But what's left of the fort is still downtown and you can visit it. The Military Trail became the County Road and later became part of the Dixie Highway. Long before there was an Interstate Highway System, the Dixie Highway was a marked route that ran all the way to Michigan.

Which brings me to the 'history at your feet' part of this story. When we were growing up, the only Dixie Highway we knew was West Dixie which ran on the west side of the Florida East Coast (FEC) railroad tracks. But the Military Trail route was actually East Dixie Highway. We never heard of it because it was decommissioned when Biscayne Boulevard was built. The Boulevard was built on part of the route but was straightened because it no longer had to follow the limestone shelf.

It wasn't until I started my research that I discovered that the house my parents were living in on NE 82nd Street when I was born (see the road to the left) was located right on the Military Trail/County Road/East Dixie Highway. When I visited there recently, in my mind's eye I viewed the Barefoot Mailman who walked the trail every week to bring the mail to Miami. I saw the covered wagons bringing the folks who would develop this swampy mess into farms and homes and schools. I saw the women in their long Victorian dresses and blouses buttoned to the neck (bikinis didn't come along until later). Covered head to toe in that heat! What suffering did they endure so we can sit in our condos and sip a gin and tonic?

But growing up, I was oblivious. The history is there at our feet, we just have to look down.