Showing posts with label North Miami Beach Senior High School. Show all posts
Showing posts with label North Miami Beach Senior High School. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

North Miami Beach in the World Series -Steve Nicosia makes sure the first time's the charm! NMB High grad Steve Nicosia was the first Charger to play in the World Series, on the victorious Willie Stargell-led "We Are Family" Pirates team of 1979; @Pirates, #NorthMiamiBeach



With the World Series slated to start tomorrow night between the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals, i wanted to share a little bit of information I know and have been keen to post about for quite some time, and that time is now, since it's World Series-related and a local South Florida angle.

The first North Miami Beach High School grad to ever play in baseball's major leagues was also the first former Charger to ever play in MLB's World Series, catcher Steve Nicosia 
of the victorious Willie Stargell-led "We Are Family" Pirates team of 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates in 1979, against my beloved Baltimore Orioles, whom I grew-up loving, and was a mini-season ticket holder of when I was living and working in the D.C. area 20 years later, and going to about 20-25 Oriole home games a year at Camden Yards.

I watched every pitch of those painful 7 World Series games from the packed TV room of Briscoe Quad, while I was at IU my freshman year, back when only the affluent -esp girls- had a TV in their own dorm room. Trust me, I knew exactly which of my friends had a TV and what their favorite programs were, but some things need to be watched in large groups.
Even if they're Pirate fans, as most of the people in that room were.

(Did I ever mention to you dear blog readers how many people from the greater Pittsburgh area went to beautiful Indiana University in Bloomington? 
Trust me, it's huge, in part because it's only about 410 miles east of Bloomington -a day trip. The most-famous IU grad from Pittsburgh this far is Marc Cuban, @mcuban.

Nobody I met at IU from Pittsburgh was a better advertisement for what a great school IU was or better company to be around than my friend, Laura Seitz. Laura was a freshman when I was a sophomore, and she lived on the same floor at Briscoe Quad where I already had a LOT of close female friends, and eventually we met and became friends because our personalities really meshed well. Among my male friends, Laura was renown for always turning so many heads when she combined her sporty good looks with her shiny red adidas IU Swimming sweat jacket whenever we went to see a movie or met in-between classes over at the Student Union, or went to an IU soccer game at the-then new Armstrong Stadium, two blocks away from Briscoe. Laura was such a charmer and so honest and level-headed! The sort of friend you can confide in and trust in any kind of situation, no matter how upsetting or awkward, and genuinely feel a great weight lifted off of your shoulders after you've shared the news with her. I always thought she'd make a great psychiatrist, esp. in Left Coast Hollywood, as opposed to the one here north of Hallandale Beach. Just a great friend to have in good times and bad.)

So getting back to the main point of today's post, just to give you some helpful context, Steve Nicosia, who still lives in South Florida with his family, was about six years older than me when he was in high school at NMB, while yours truly was doing my thing over at Fulford Elementary, in 5th and 6th grade his last two years at NMB, when he was such a phenom.

This was back when NMB High School, on the north side of the street from the then-very prosperous 163rd Street Shopping Center, was spanking brand new and had absorbed kids whose older siblings (and parents) had gone to either North Miami or Norland,
depending upon where in Northeast/Northwest Dade their families lived.

So in a rapidly developing area with lots of well-established family and school loyalties and traditions comes a new school into the mix in NMB with neither, and located in an area of the city that was hard by the side of a huge retail complex and on another side, apartments for mostly senior citizens, a demographic which seemed almost of the city at the time.
Not exactly a target-rich environment to develop school tradition!  

What made it controversial from the start, as if that wasn't enough, was its in-vogue educational approach that most parents weren't so crazy about -no letter grades, just passing and failing.
It's hard to get into really good schools with that siort of subjective thing, obviously, regardless of tests scores, so parents and high-achieving kids were not down with the way things were being done

It's hard to imagine now in 2013, but there was no high school in Dade County north of N.E. 135th Street and east of I-95 -or Aventurauntil NMB showed-up in 1971 and shattered that longstanding reality of life.

Yes, that's the sort of reality I can still recall, since I walked with my mother and two younger sisters on our way to 163rd Street Shopping Center thru the future NMBHS when it was merely a willowy field, from the nice apt on NE 170th Street I lived in while going to Sabal Palm Elementary for 2nd grade.

When it opened and while Nicosia was there, NMBHS was an "experimental" school, a bit of a fad that the Dade County School Board decided to try out with kids from NE Dade as guinea pigs, as if the fact that it was a gigantic two-story building with no windows wasn't enough of a tip that it wasn't a regular high school, though with cool air conditioning and carpeting everywhere.

(I wrote a fact-filled description of NMBHS in the early years about 6-7 years ago on Wikipedia, an entry that really put some meat on what was then present there, which I regarded as a paltry and unappealing description of the school.
Unfortunately, over the years, the "helper bees" at Wikipedia have taken a knife to the facts I added and turned it into a bland stew last time I checked it two years ago, removing about 75% of what I'd posted, though some scraps remain.
I'll try to remember to re-post that Wiki description I wrote here in the future, which you still sometimes find on the Internet when looking for NMB-related news of the 1970's, esp. re the 163rd Street Shopping Center.)

By almost any reasonable measure, Steve Nicosia was South Florida's most-celebrated HS baseball player between 1972 and 1974.
A result of that was that he was regularly featured on the front pages of the Herald and Miami News sports section, back before there was a Heat, Panthers and Marlins to easily distract everyone from the primacy of high school sports, and people actually going to games to support the kids even if they didn't have kids at the school, because that's what you did.
Just as is true in so many communities outside of South Florida right now.

I know about all those newspaper articles because I cut out every article on him that made it into print, since I was already a news junkie then, reading both papers every day, even when in elementary school at Fulford(Cutting out newspaper articles -how very old-school!)

Here's a more recent piece on him, from 13 years ago, though the article greatly undersells how big a deal he was down here.

The first thing about him that jumped out at you when you looked at him was that he was very un-NMB-like in appearance, in that he resembled nothing so much as a miniature Joe Mauer, a catcher who was just more naturally athletic than anyone else on the field, something that was readily-apparent the moment he was in a position to affect the flow of the game.

He was, as I recall it, a "Natural" in every sense of the word, smooth and completely in-charge on the field and quick with a bat in his hands.
To my mind at least, he was the progenitor for everything that happened later with A-Rod in HS many years later in Miami, with the constant media attention.
If the Internet or USA Today or ESPN had existed back when Nicosia played...

Allen Park, the same City of NMB baseball field next to Fulford Elementary that I played Optimist football, soccer, Little League and Pony League on, was also the field where Nicosia played American Legion ball for NMB Post 257, back when that was really huge down here.
The stands would routinely have a half-dozen MLB scouts taking notes, stop-watches at the ready.

Me being me, I'd naturally try to size up the crowd and figure out who the scouts were and then try to matter-of-factly sit near them and eavesdrop on any baseball scuttlebutt, hoping
that one might be with the Orioles. If only...
It never was on the nights I was there.

I dug up this article on the Internet which was THE best article on him for the longest time.

Miami News
May 25, 1973
The scouts can't stay away
All eyes are on NMB's Steve Nicosia
By Jeff Klinkenberg

Make sure you see the great photos above the article!

I must've stared at those photos for 5-6 years in the manilla folder I kept with all his clippings,
plus the one I cut from the extra copy of the paper I bought and then taped on my bedroom wall. 
To me, what made that black and white photo of him awesome was that because in the original that appeared in the Miami News, you could see all the sweat on his forehead and on the tops of his right shoulder coming out thru the jersey.
That was really something and people always commented on what a great photo it was

Back then, because of the novelty of the whole thing, people who didn't even live in NMB, esp. knowledgeable middle-age baseball fans, would routinely come from all over the area to the games at Allen Park.

They'd come over-and-over and even recognize me, because they'd come to gawk at him because of what they'd read, and then seen for themselves, because he was, literally, like a man-among-boys.
Trust me, that was the one-and-only time something like that EVER happened in NMB!

Chaz Stevens at his popular must-read blog, M.A.O.S. recently mentioned me in relation to my knowledge and love of baseball, which was nice of him, but the truth is that I had to reveal to Chaz recently that I was actually able to go the whole 2013 baseball season without watching a single inning of Miami Marlins baseball on TV, or listen to an inning on radio, even though I really do like their announcers.
Yes, my personal boycott of David Samson & Jeffrey Loria has remained in place since last year's team break-up, and I do hereby declare victory.

As I told many people in my original email about Nicosia, my pre-playoffs pick was the Pirates playing the Red Sox in the World Series, a rematch of the 1903 World Series, Pittsburgh vs. Boston, Cy Young over Honus Wagnerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1903_World_Series

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Other NMB grads whom you may have heard of who came after I graduated in 1979 and my sister Linda graduated in 1982, include Facebook COO and recent author Sheryl Sandberg, actress Garcelle Beauvais and best-selling author Brad Meltzer.

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

An embarrassing case of flash mob déjà vu in North Miami Beach - NMBHS students use the pretext of protesting death of Trayvon Martin to steal in plain sight



WSVN-7, Miami video: Student walk-out for Trayvon gets out of control. March 27, 2012.
http://wn.wsvn.com/global/video/popup/pop_playerLaunch.asp?vt1=v&clipFormat=flv&clipId1=6883323&at1=News&h1=Student walk-out for Trayvon gets out of control&flvUri=&partnerclipid=
Article at:
http://www.wsvn.com/news/articles/local/21007056287333/student-walk-out-for-trayvon-gets-out-of-control/
An embarrassing case of flash mob déjà vu in North Miami Beach - NMBHS students use the pretext of protesting death of Trayvon Martin to steal in plain sight  
Per this disturbing South Florida story yesterday that was picked up on The Drudge Report, and thus got more attention worldwide than it would have ever received thru simply local Miami TV newscasts -and which happened just five blocks from where I grew-up in North Miami Beach in the 1970's- it's NOT like this sort of thing hasn't happened before... like last month, as I wrote at the time, below, and mentioned here on the blog because I suspected that this sort of thing has happened previously under Principal Ray Fontana.

So, what exactly did Miami-Dade Schools Supt. Alberto Carvalho do a month ago in the way of punishment? Anything you heard about?
No, nothing.

I know what I saw a month ago, but the Miami Herald, as usual, continues to whistle-past-the-graveyard when it comes to troubling social incidents like this involving school kids, unless it happens in Coral Gables or Pinecrest!

That is, except when someone who knows what's going on like longtime NMB resident, civic activist and blogger Stephanie Kienzle manages to gets a letter into print that somehow escapes the oblivious PC policies of One Herald Plaza.


Like the sort of myopic thinking there that causes them to actually think for even a moment that that initially running an eight-sentence AP story on the incident in NMB is an adequate response -and which doesn't even credit the Miami TV stations who actually reported it yesterday- rather than having one of their own reporters do some actual journalism, since it was demed important or troubling enough that The Drudge Report linked to WPLG-TV/Channel 10's Noon newscast.
As usual, the Herald's performance on a local South Florida news story they should own nationally, is completely inadequate:
How embarrassing!!!


It's exactly the same deluded mentality that causes them to bury negative stories about parent McClatchy Company's earnings reports in their puny little business section, usually without any reference to declining readership and revenue numbers at the Herald, and run 3 or 4 sentence fragments from AP that say, well, nothing. 
Sometimes, they even run those banalities and only credit "Wire Sources," as if that means anything to anyone.

Here's that 2008 Kienzle letter I refer to earlier, which I sent out as an email to lots of folks i know shortly after originally seeing it because it was 100% true, reason enough to send it, but also thus making it unusual to see in the HeraldCarolyn Guniss was the Editor of the Neighbors section for NE Miami-Dade back then, and was apparently a victim of the Herald's many employee purges over the past few years due to declining readership and ad revenue.
Right, chicken or the egg?

I've never met Carolyn Guniss, but from my perspective, based on the essay below, it's unfortunate that she was forced-out, since her willingness to give space in the newspaper to well-informed people in the community who are actively challenging South Florida's establishment's Conventional Wisdom and orthodoxy, is NOT something that's currently replicated in either the Herald under Jay Ducassi or ever seen in the Sun-Sentinel

I suspect that if she were in charge, there'd be MUCH MORE compelling news product for readers -and advertisers- compared to the overwhelming number of articles and columns that I see everyday that seem to largely exist to comfort the powerful thru stenography rather than chronicle thru objective journalism.

That unwillingness to challenge the powerful is perhaps best explained thru the Herald's
constant coverage of MDPS Supt. Albert Carvalho.
Frankly, I'm surprised that the Herald doesn't sell "I heart Carvalho" buttons at their customer service counter, given their weird sycophantic coverage of him, where seldom is heard a discouraging word...


And as I'm always reminding you here on the blog, as blah and uninteresting as the Sun-Sentinel's Education blog has become the past two years, the Herald STILL doesn't even have an Education blog in the year 2012!
That speaks volumes!

If you ask me, there ought to be an entire page in the Herald on Sundays that is full of well-informed contributions like this!

-------
Miami Herald
Soapbox
OJUS ELEMENTARY'S BOUNDARY IS POLITICAL
April 13, 2008 
Enid Weisman, the Miami-Dade Public School Region II superintendent, has changed the boundaries of Greynolds Park Elementary School by moving children who live one block from their school to Ojus Elementary, which is more than two miles away.
Children who now walk to school in less than five minutes will be forced to be driven through extremely heavy traffic twice a day.
Those kids whose parents don't have cars will have to wait for a school bus in unpredictable South Florida weather, hoping the bus even shows up. This ordeal could take up to 30 minutes each way depending on the bus route.
This is not the first time Ms. Weisman has arbitrarily drawn school boundary lines. Take, for example, the boundary line between North Miami Beach and Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High schools.
For some reason known only to God and Enid Weisman, children who live in Eastern Shores and Sunny Isles Beach, a mere hop, skip and jump from NMB, travel well over five miles or more to Krop High.
On the other hand, students who live in Pickwick Lake Estates, less than one mile (or about eight minutes by car) from Krop, are directed to NMB.
Granted, NMB is slightly closer to Pickwick than is Krop, but how on earth can you justify sending Sunny Isles Beach residents to Krop?
Both the NMB/Krop and Greynolds Park boundary lines were drawn purely along socioeconomic or, as the politically incorrect would say, racial lines.
They have absolutely nothing to do with where children live, but everything to do with draining our lower income neighborhood of even more of its much needed funding.
By making sure that NMB and Greynolds don't achieve or maintain status as an "A" school, the bulk of state money will go to Krop, Ojus and the new K-8 school called Aventura/Waterways .
The areas that already have the money will get even more. Ms. Weisman knows where her power base is and she sure knows how to suck up to it.
Weisman must stop tinkering with school boundaries that work only in her imagination. The children of Miami-Dade County would be better served by getting rid of administrators with political aspirations like her and putting the money where it rightfully belongs -- in the classroom.
STEPHANIE KIENZLE
NORTH MIAMI BEACH
It occurred to me when I was watching the videotape at the top that some of you reading this may well recall the mass student walkout at Miami Edison High School a few years ago, which happened LIVE during the local Miami Noon newscasts that day.
That was yet another situation where the adults at the Miami-Dade School Board & MDPS literally cowered in fear of actually having to call-out the behavior of their own students, and admit that, well, maybe... some of them weren't all future brain surgeon/diplomats after all.

Any media types out there reading this blog post might want to try to put on a charm offensive and get the videotape from the NMB Walmart, too.
You don't have to be Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes to know that given the law of probabilities, once you have a large enough sample size, you can make a few hypotheses that are likely to be accurate.


Mine is that at least a few of the kids involved last week were ALSO involved last month, which only further burnishes NMBHS's bad rep the past 15 years, as everyone in NE Dade and SE Broward who pays any attention to these matters sees the entirely predictable results of some very conscious social re-engineering/redistricting at MDPS years ago, when Dr. Krop High School opened.
Bad educational and social policies that continue to have their negative ripple effects to this very day.


See also: http://www.votersopinion.com/  particularly

---------- Forwarded message ----------

Date: Tue, Feb 28, 2012 at 3:45 AM
Subject: FYI: Flash mob of North Miami Beach Sr. High School students attempt to swarm the 163rd Street Walmart with M-D Metro Police in pursuit with flashing lights

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Well, as I said above:
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show details Feb 28
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----- Original message -----

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Flash mob of screaming/laughing North Miami Beach Sr. High School students attempted to swarm the 163rd Street Walmart with M-D Metro Police in pursuit with flashing lights

It's all been downhill since they modified the classic logo...
Monday afternoon was a sad day for a proud NMB alum like me, Class of 1979, when I witnessed so many current NMB students so willingly to make complete asses out of themselves -just because they could. Like there was some doubt?
In my opinion, these kids need to be publicly punished and royally ostracized, but I wouldn't hold my breath that it'll happen now if I were you! 
Former NMBHS Principal Marvin Weiner would NOT have tolerated that one bit, and neither would most of my classmates at the time. Give how new our school was when I first got there in 1975 for 9th grade, just four years-old, my friends and I wanted our school to become well-known throughout the area for the character, smarts, class and sportsmanship of our students and athletes,
NOT become infamous for what the social misfits of no real accomplishment could manage to do. In those pre-Internet days, my friends and I would've put our heads together and figured-out a clever, practical and fitting way to make sure we made real examples of the ringleaders of a stunt like this, so that they'd feel rightly humiliated for embarrassing the rest of us. 
But today, these particular NMB kids feel so emboldened and free to do whatever they want, that they laugh their asses off for wasting the time of the police thru their own intimidation tactics. 

Flash mob of screaming/laughing North Miami Beach Sr. High School students attempted to swarm the 163rd Street Walmart with M-D Metro Police in pursuit with flashing lights



Shades of the Chicago Teen Mobs and the Summer of 2011!
(In case you forgot about that or never heard about it, see the Chicago CBS-TV affiliate WBBM's story from last summer, Mag Mile Shops On Alert After Flash Mob Thefts


I arrived at the Walmart Supercenter on N.E. 163rd Street in North Miami Beach on Monday afternoon around 2:30 p.m., ostensibly to use the Dade County Federal Credit Union facility located inside, since it's the closest branch to me here in Hallandale Beach.

As I was walking from the far side of the parking lot and was about to walk over to the area directly adjacent to and in front of the store -and checking to make sure I had my cell phone on me!- I was startled to hear hundreds of screaming, yelling voices and then turned to my left and saw hundreds of kids walking quickly from the west towards the store like they were marching in a parade.
But a very disheveled mess of a parade to be sure.

And just about the point that the kids were near the front doors, six Miami-Dade Metro Police squad cars with their lights flashing came up quickly behind them from the west, dozens of yelling kids made a mad dash thru the front doors, with more soon following.

People in the parking lot around me were so dumbfounded, they just stood there motionless, almost in disbelief that this was happening on an otherwise boring and hot Monday afternoon in NMB.

One of the officers driving a Metro police car yelled for someone parked in front of the store to move their car, and then he quickly brought his squad car to a quick start in that vacated spot. And then from across the street I watched as probably 6-10 police officers went running into the store, walkie-talkies in hand.

I stayed outside and unfortunately, by the time I thought to dig my camera out of my bag to shoot some video, the students had either already run into the store or had run towards N.E. 15th Avenue, the east border, where the Miami-Dade Metro buses going south and west are located, and where, after school, it's natural that there are lots of kids hanging-around waiting for their bus ride home.
Which is why the video I have for you is NOT so exciting or enlightening.
I guess I was a little more dumbfounded than I originally thought, huh?




(As most of you regular readers of the blog know from my having mentioned it here, I grew-up in North Miami Beach, having lived there from second grade thru graduation from North Miami Beach High School in 1979, and had first come to know that retail area as the original 163rd Street Shopping Center, where I worked at the Burdines in high school. My last six years in NMB, I lived  only four blocks away, on the corner of N.E. 159th Street & 14th Avenue in the 1970's.)

The Metro police seemed pretty intent on forcing anyone who looked like they were in high school to get out of the store, and as I stood out of the way near the packs of interlocked shopping carts, it was like being outside of an arena exit door after a concert, people just streaming out for what seemed like forever.
And Monday afternoon, all very pleased with themselves.

I waited 2-3 minutes to go in and when I finally did, there were still dozens of kids inside
near the front where the McDonald's is located, all waiting to get out as the Metro police
tried to herd them forward like lambs, with some outliers just not interested in going-with-the-flow. 
Surprise!

I would've shot video from inside the store but thought better of it since, among other things, 
a.) my father had been a M-D Metro policeman for 25 years, and,
b.) it was clear that the kids wanted attention and were not the least bit afraid of trying
to provoke something, so why add fuel to the fire and give the kids a forum to act out?
Or give the clearly frustrated police a new target to vent at?

Once I got inside, the rattled Walmart employees and mostly middle-aged and older
customers, many of them Orthodox Jews dressed in their long clothes, still seemed a bit shaken-up, and once I got towards the Credit Union, I could already hear exasperated voices on cell phones extrapolating theories out of thin air about what had just happened and why.

The answer, of course, is that the kids did it because they could.
And because they thought they could either get away with it, or not get punished if caught.

About an hour later, roughly 3:30 p.m., as I was coming out of the store, there were still
six Metro squad cars outside the Walmart instead of the usual one, near the front door.

Definitely would be interesting to see the Walmart security feed of the incident.


By the way, before I forget to mention it, I tried to send this information to Miami-Dade County Public School Supt. Alberto Carvalho via his email, but it was rejected -twice.
Maybe it only accepts positive news.

My previous posts on the explosive subject of flash mobs were on June 12, 2011,
Chicago Trib readers screw w/Trib execs: "The board for this story has been closed because of excessive violations of the Tribune's comment policies"
and June 29, 2011,
While crime and flash mobs roil Chicago-area residents, City Hall, Police, Tourism & Business Establishment act like ostriches. Sounds familiar!


Saturday, October 22, 2011

Who to root for in Rugby World Cup Final b/w All Blacks and France: Unless you're married to Binoche, Doutey, Delpy or Frégé, root for New Zealand


Elodie Frégé -Et maintenant (circa 2004)

Who to root for in Rugby World Cup Final b/w All Blacks and France: Unless you're lucky enough to be married to Juliette Binoche, Mélanie Doutey, Julie Delpy or Elodie Frégé, root for New Zealand
Match starts Sunday at 3:45 a.m. Eastern Time

You can watch LIVE in U.S./U.S. Territories for $29.99 via

Same-day tape-delay on Sunday on NBC-TV from 3-6 p.m,
Repeats Sunday on NBC Universal Sports/DirecTV Channel 625 from 8-11 p.m.;
Monday 12:30 a.m.-3:30 a.m.

I watched most of the France-Wales semi-final match, as well as the third-place match between Australia and Wales.

The question of the day at BFM TV's website, http://www.bfmtv.com/
Mondial de rugby : le XV de France a-t-il une chance de battre les All Blacks?


This was BFM TV's last rugby-related video of Saturday, taken at l’Hotel de Ville de Paris.

Oui, since I mentioned her among other Gallic super-talents j'adore, I went 'old school' up at the top of the blog by posting an older clip of Elodie singing "Et maintenant" on Star Academy seven years ago, the year she won by virtue of her deep emotional connection to TV viewers. They love her!
D'accord!

"Et maintenant" was a song I once knew backwards-and-forwards when I was the top French student at NMB Senior High in the late '70's, and we'd often hear that song on certain Fridays as sung by the immortal Gilbert Bécaud.
That happened when my great teacher, Pearl Chiari, decided that we all needed a change of pace, and needed some genuine French culture and musical immersion while we took turns reading Pearl's collection of Paris Match and Le Point instead of simply using our ALM text books.

It was positively shocking to me once I got to Bloomington and came to realize how very little of consequence the other smart students in my French classes at IU -from all over the country- actually knew regarding French life, culture, politics or traditions -good and bad- much less, how little they knew about how and why the French think and act the sometimes peculiar way they seem to -again, good and bad- at least from an American or British p.o.v.
My insight came from the best French teacher there was -Pearl.

If DVD technology and the Internet had existed then, Pearl's easy manner and charm would've helped her make a fortune selling DVDs and teaching people how to speak French.

Gilbert Bécaud - Et maintenant (1962)
http://youtu.be/hmSBAJdie7E

France has all this, let New Zealand have something to celebrate!

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Elodie's YouTube Channel:


Thursday, July 14, 2011

Now Trending at Hallandale Beach Blog: Nobody -anywhere- is saying, "I miss seeing Katie Couric on TV"; 163rd Street Shopping Center




WTVJ-TV (Miami) video: 1984 Katie Couric report for the-then WTVJ/Channel 4 on increase in crime at South Florida shopping malls, reporting from the-then extant 163rd Street Mall in North Miami Beach,FL, which no longer exists as shown. Above, Couric is standing in the eastern-side mall parking garage next to what was once the Jordan Marsh Dept. store, near the N.E. 15th Avenue entrance to the complex.
http://youtu.be/rbpHgMvM918



In the background above -thru the garage and across the street- is the location of my favorite job as a teen in NMB, Record Shack, on NE 164th Street, the BEST record store in all of northeast Dade County, which I've previously mentioned in a July 9th, 2009 post, viz a viz some news re Benny Andersson of ABBA.
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/abba-geniuses-at-it-again-story-of.html


Now Trending at Hallandale Beach Blog: Nobody -anywhere- is saying, "I miss seeing Katie Couric on TV."
Who's going to watch her upcoming daytime talk show on ABC-TV?

I grew-up in North Miami Beach in the 1970's just four blocks from there -on N.E. 159th Street & 14th Avenue- and worked at a couple of retail shops there while in high school at NMB Senior High, including the Burdine's in the middle of the three-block long facility when it was an outdoor pedestrian complex called the 163rd Street Shopping Center, a name that many people in South Florida recall fondly.

NMB Sr. High and JFK Jr. High were just across the street from the shopping center on the north side, which made it a huge social hang-out, back before the Aventura Mall -or the City of Aventura- existed, something I mentioned a few years back on my 2007 Wikipedia entry for NMB HS and the shopping center, both of which were eventually shorn of their color and context by the Wiki editing police, who only want name, rank and serial number.
I'll post that information full of facts and anecdotes here soon, so people can benefit from my under-appreciated effort then as a griot.


Meanwhile, up in Canada, our neighbor to the north, which lends Hallandale Beach savvy former MP from Ontario Don Boudria for a few months every year...



Robin Sparkles - "Let's Go To The Mall" (full version, from CBS-TV's 'How I Met Your Mother')
http://youtu.be/GF1b1pf9DRY

Cobie Smulders, above, is easily one of the ten most attractive actresses on American TV today, even when she plays a Canadian newscaster -like Peter Jennings.
But then she's not from fashionable Westmount like my smart, savvy, chic and super-cute friend and NMB classmate Tracey was, so I know a thing or two about very attractive Canadian teenagers, in or out of the Mall.

Real Canadians Elisha Cuthbert and Kari Matchett, whom I've mentioned here before, are also on that carefully thought-out short list.
Another win for Canada, eh?


Trust me, you can spend an entire day looking at these old South Florida photos!
Main webpage http://www.pbase.com/donboyd/memories

I'm going to be adding some memories here in the next few months:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mall_at_163rd_Street

http://www.deadmalls.com/malls/mall_at_163rd_st.html

http://www.pbase.com/donboyd/memories_shopping

a. -1960 - Artist's rendition of the proposed Wometco 163rd Street Theatres,
http://www.pbase.com/donboyd/image/80670007

b. -1960's/70's? - a night time view looking west in the 163rd Street Shopping Center
http://www.pbase.com/donboyd/image/125600809


See also, this Facebook page titled, "Teenager's jobs in the '70's in NMB" as for some blog readers finding this site, it will be a blast to the past -like a night out having Figaro's pizza and garlic rolls with Coach Pete Saponaro and the NMB Mens and Womens gymnastics team after a home meet.
http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=46380987521&topic=9655

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Obama's Black & White Cookies in Broward Lack Sufficient Salsa

Was going thru the latest campaign dispatches from our friends at the Central Florida Political Pulse blog of the Orlando Sentinel, and came across the following story on Obama's recent visit to the Deli Den on Sterling Road in next door Hollywood, Breaking news: Obama's off the bus again, posted by Jim Stratton on Oct 21, 2008 4:22:59 PM http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_politics/2008/10/breaking-news-o.html which compelled me to write a response on their website concerning both Black & White Cookies, ethnic voting trends and bad journalism as malpracticed in South Florida in the year 2008, topics which have been on my mind since at least the August primary.
Below is a slightly longer version of that post.
__________________________
Haven't been up to the Deli Den on Stirling Road in two years, but for my money, nobody- but-nobody ever made Black & White cookies as full of sugar-filled delight like the Wolfie's Deli Bakery connected to the Rascal House at NE 163rd Street & NE 14th Avenue in North Miami Beach, across the street from the old 163rd Street Shopping Center. http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/1998-08-13/restaurants/worth-the-wait/

I used to buy those cookies at least twice a week for myself and my friends while walking to my 7 A.M. class at NMB, when I knew we needed an extra bit of energy, especially after late-running Monday Night Football games, back before the VCR changed sleeping patterns of high school students. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Miami_Beach_Senior_High_School

Their kitchen's early morning cooking was like an olafactory alarm bell set for 6 A.M, that enveloped the whole neighborhood with the sweet smell of delicious goodies that were now fresh and available. Not unlike the way the Kentucky Fried Chicken on NE 15th Avenue did in the afternoon on the way home, making it impossible to walk home without thinking of chicken.


Though I lived four blocks south of there on NE 159th Street, on windy days that smell would come wafting down the street and hit me like a hammer the moment I stepped out of the house, as I made my way to JFK Junior High or North Miami Beach Senior High School, and I know it had the same effect on other neighborhood kids.


Though I and the other kids who lined-up inside Wolfie's to place our order would always say we'd wait 'till we got to school to start munching them, I'd usually give in to tempation and start munching while I was walking thru the empty 163rd Street Shopping Center on my way to school, somewhere just past the front of the Burdine's I worked at, along the side of the two-story J.C. Penney's and then down the steps of the back of Penney's and thru the massive parking lot/bus Dade bus depot on the NW corner of the shopping center, across the street from the two schools I was at from 1973-'79.

I think I could still walk that route with my eyes closed if it were there, so many thousands of times times did I walk that route to school, sporting events, plays and concerts.



Even as the national MSM, Miami Herald, South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Miami-based local TV continue their chronic mis-adventures in political mis-representation and LCD reporting, they NEVER ask pointed questions of well-known Broward political leaders like Dem honcho and lobbyist Mitch Caesar, on why Broward Jewish Dems in their condo strongholds CONSISTENTLY refuse to vote and support well-qualified Hispanic-surnamed candidates, as if it's not completely predictable that this'll result in bad social and political consequences for everyone here in Broward in the future.

I've heard Caesar say that Hispanics were supposed to a "growth target" for Broward Dems, but you sure don't make yourself more attractive when you just wink at this troubling voting trend, as if nobody else around notices it.
We do.


Maybe it's yet another manifestation of how truly sorry the South Florida media is down here in the year 2008, that the reporters, editors and news directors are much more afraid of losing access to him and his pithy comments, than they are to subjecting him to the sort of tough questioning they'd give anyone else, especially a businessman.


Meanwhile, the Central Florida Political Pulse continues "keeping it real" by taking names and calling 'em as they see 'em.



Frankly, I get more honest insight from their daily CFPP blog posts on the myriad ups and downs all over the state, than anything the Herald, Sun-Sentinel or local TV mis-reports, since they continue to treat Central Florida and the rest of the state with the worst kind of know-it-all attitude, witness their positively dreadful reporting on the Second Amendment, guns & Walt Disney World story, or their lack of reporting on the many political problems associated with creating a smart, useful and well-managed Central Florida commuter train, along with the CSX Corp. and Trial Lawyers angle tossed in for good measure.


(To refresh yourself on that issue, see my July 3rd post, Where's the Disney story in the Miami Herald?
http://hallandalebeachblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/wheres-disney-story-in-miami-herald.html and the Orlando Sentinel story that got to the heart of the matter, Walt Disney World fires back on guns at work by Scott Powers and Jason Garcia
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/orl-disneyguns0308jul03,0,197883.story

The Herald's first story was an AP dispatch on July 3rd, followed by a superficial six-sentence AP follow-up on July 9th about WDW firing an employee. It wasn't until July 11th, eight days after the story broke, that an actual Herald reporter -Marc Caputo- wrote anything about the story. Disney's gun stance draws fire - Walt Disney World said its employees are exempt from a law that lets workers keep guns in their cars.
So that's how the state's largest newspaper covers the largest private employer in the state!)


For all of South Florida's often valid complaints about the parochial, shallow and and simplistic way the national media misreports the positive and negative realities of social and political life in South Florida to the rest of the nation and the world, their two largest newspapers do their own dwindling number of readers no favors by treating the rest of the state as a neverending source of "oddities" to be mocked, forever painting it with the same broad, stereotype-heavy brush full of condescendsion that their own columnists decry when the focus is on us.



Thank goodness for the Central Florida Political Pulse!http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_politics/