Early in the morning of the third of July, Luis Valdes and a team of three engineers from the Bank of America Tower in downtown Miami changed a few hundred tower lights for the Fourth.
SOUTH FLORIDA, U.S.A.
Henry Triana was retiring, after 57 years, from his job in passenger service at the airport. A party was thrown Tuesday morning in the restaurant on top of the Miami International Airport hotel. Given the hour, eggs and bacon and coffee were served. There were gifts: a clock, a plaque, promotional material from 1946 suggesting to newlyweds that they Honeymoon in Miami!
SOUTH FLORIDA, U.S.A. | BY NICHOLAS SPANGLER
A West Little Havana block was under mosquito siege. The complaint came into the county's 311 call center, was routed to the Mosquito Control Division of the Public Works Department and from there to Kenneth Garib, an inspector whose job it is to seek and destroy the insects, their young and their breeding grounds.
SOUTH FLORIDA, U.S.A.
The dentist's office was parked, for the moment, in the lot behind the Homeless Assistance Center on Northeast 15th Street in downtown Miami, with Dr. Lawrence Margolis in it and his patients waiting outside on plastic chairs.
SOUTH FLORIDA, U.S.A.
School was almost over and with it the Edison Park Rooks' season, which had, all things considered, been pretty great. The trophy corner in the elementary school's upstairs library is stuffed: one national title, a couple district and regional championships that paved the way for fifth place at the Florida Invitational Super Stars tournament and sixth place in the Open Division at states.
SOUTH FLORIDA, U.S.A. | BY NICHOLAS SPANGLER
The jai-alai player Benny Bueno was back at the Miami fronton recently, along with what seemed like 400 kids but might, in fact, have been only 50 or so fifth-graders from Zora Neale Hurston Elementary.
SOUTH FLORIDA, U.S.A.
It had been a beautiful ceremony. A dozen men of the William Alexander McAllister Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1608 drove out to Shenandoah's Woodlawn Park Cemetery and laid the wreath at McAllister's grave -- McAllister, who survived gas and bombs and trench war in a strange land to die of appendicitis in his hometown in 1925.
SOUTH FLORIDA U.S.A.
He was a young man who fished alone in a custom-built inner tube raft in the Gulf Stream and he had gone three hours now without taking a fish.
TRANSPORTATION
Rosco O'Neal, a 78-year-old great-grandfather, drove to the Winn-Dixie one recent afternoon for a couple of steaks. He got the steaks but walked straight into a county sting operation that left him with a $1,010 fine and a minivan in the impound lot.
SOUTH FLORIDA, U.S.A.
Japanese television show producers recently called the Wolfsonian Moving Image Archive, desperate for footage of French poodles trained to bark simple words (the footage exists, and it is every bit as unsettling as you think).
SOUTH FLORIDA
The best birthday Emery Copeland ever had was a couple of years ago. He celebrated with one friend, two beautiful women and an incredibly huge amount of crack cocaine that kept the party going for approximately two weeks.
SOUTH FLORIDA, U.S.A. BY NICHOLAS SPANGLER
A few days before the Carnegie Hall debut of the Barry University Chamber Ensemble, some sopranos stayed after rehearsal. ''Not only have I never been to Carnegie Hall, but I've never been to New York,'' said Elizabeth Garrard. ``I got the smallest camera I could find and the smallest purse, so I can just slip it in my back pocket.''
SOUTH FLORIDA, U.S.A. | BY NICHOLAS SPANGLER
It may come as a surprise to you that Miami is the cleanest city in the United States. It came as a surprise to readers of the Forbes.com article where this was reported.
SOUTH FLORIDA, USA
Trucker school, also known as the Commercial Drivers' License School Inc., abutted a Honda repair joint on Northwest 27th Avenue. The walls were lined with pictures of S-cam drum brakes, clutch brake squeezes and a giant portrait of I-95. The highway was utterly traffic-free and any Floridian would call that sublime.
SOUTH FLORIDA U.S.A.
Twenty cadets of the Civil Air Patrol's Tamiami Composite Squadron sat in front of flying ace Lt. Col. Don Blakeslee at Wings Over Miami, the air museum at Kendall-Tamiami Airport.
