Holidays at the Rod and Gun Club!

When I was growing up in Miami, we always used to go at some point during the Christmas holidays to the Rod and Gun Club in Everglades City for a day or two to enjoy the cool weather on the west coast of Florida, eat stone crabs and do a little boating through the Thousand Islands. In later years my best friend in High School and I used to organize an improptu day-long rally down Alligator Alley, with lunch at the Club, usually punctuated by someone's old british roadster breaking down along the way! It's amazing but this bit of Florida history is still around and kicking after all these years. Still as lovely as ever and great fun to visit. Less than a 2 hour trip from Miami, I am surprised so many Miamians either don't know the place or have never been to it. Everglades City was a pretty ramshackle town of the kind you saw many of in the old days. While its been somewhat modernized, it still retains that old Florida Cracker style and look.

Prior to 1923, Everglades City was called Everglade, a name given the settlement along the crooked little Allen's River in 1893 by Bembery Storter after the U.S. Post Office refused the request for the name Chokoloskee, which is now the name of an old outpost just to the south at the western entrance to Everglades National Park. Flamingo, the third of the old original towns, still marking the end of the main park road, is now a park community with a campground, ranger station, marina and lodge. Farming was the primary occupation of people living in the area and included sugarcane, bananas, and vegetables. George T. Storter is considered the true founder of the town. He and his family were prominent in Everglade's growth and activities and owned much of the land around the town until the arrival of Baron Collier in 1923. It was under the Storter stewardship that the Everglade began to draw visitors and sportsmen. The Rod and Gun Club was built around the Storter home.

Barron Collier is primarily responsible for the foundation of Everglades City as you see it today. In 1923 he and his company purchased most of the land in and surrounding the town. Within five years the sleepy trading post and farming community was converted into a bustling industrial-based company town replete with roads, a railroad, a bank, a telephone, sawmills, a boatyard, churches, a school, workers' barracks and mess halls, and even its own streetcar at one time. It served as the county seat of Collier County until 1960, when prosperity waned and county offices were moved to Naples. Neighboring Chokoloskee did not have a road until a causeway was built from the mainland in 1956.

The Grove........Now and Then

Funny, but what got me going on this riff was a Friday afternoon stopover to the Titanic Brewery by the University of Miami fopr a brew or two with my buddies the other day. It just hit me that this was the old Flick coffeehouse that I used to go to in the 60’s to see all the great musicians that lived in Coconut Grove back then. Back in the late 60’s I lived in a duplex apartment complex on Aviation Avenue in the Grove. It was owned by an old doll that had been a bit player in the movies back in the 20’s and 30’s and was a ringer for the Norma Desmond character in “Sunset Boulevard”. As with everyone else in the Grove she was a lovable eccentric. The complex was a big one acre property with four duplexes surrounded by beautiful vegetation that sat just above the bay looking down on Monty Traynor’s old place and the Dinner key marina. I shared the flat with a college buddy from UM that worked selling buttons for his uncle in New Jersey. I had just gotten a job for the county government as a photographer that barely paid me enough money to live but included a car so I was set.

Back then, the Grove was a pretty funky old fishing village and all the old Miamians would warn you not to drive through it lest you got shanghaied by some shady character. In the center of town was the Peacock family ship’s chandlery where Cocowalk now stands and the Florida Pharmacy catty corner to it where we all went to the luncheon counter to have breakfast. Peacock Park and the old Public Library stood just south of the main drag as it does today, running down to the bay. If you had a few extra bucks you went to have a few drinks at the Old Grove Pub, got dinner at the Taurus Steakhouse on Main Highway and went to see “Hair” or “Equus” at the Playhouse just down the street. Scornavacca had his art studio down the alleyway between the Pharmacy and St Stephen’s school which I attended for one year when it opened in 1959. Except for these landmarks, the Grove was a series of heavily vegetated little streets lined with old Florida slash pine bungalows built by the original Bahamian settlers back in the 1920’s. Most of these which ran along Oak Avenue were converted to “head shops” where the high school kids would go to buy psychedelic posters, pot paraphernalia and tied dyed anything. The town was patrolled by “Bob the Cop” on horseback and all official duties, including weddings, were performed by “Joe Bicycle” the local notary public and merchant.

The guy who really “discovered” the Grove in the 60’s and made it a favored haunt for the musical community was Vince Martin. Martin at the time was a folk legend and considered one of the great folk singers of his day by Bob Dylan Joni Mitchell, John Sebastian and many other contemporaries. As Vince tells it, he was here doing a gig in the early 1960’s when he found himself driving down South Bayshore Drive and happened upon this beautiful little village. There was a full moon and he could smell night blooming jasmine in the air. He was struck and eventually moved down here from Greenwich Village. He lived just down the street from me on Aviation Avenue. As his friends visited him and were struck by the natural beauty of the Grove, many moved here or spent a big part of their time here. One of these was the great Fred Neil who died here in 2001. Inspired by the Grove, in 1969 Vince wrote and recorded with Fred Neil “If the Jasmine Don't Get You ... the Bay Breeze Will”. John Sebastian was a close friend of Martin and Neil and spent a lot of time in the Grove at Vince’s house. If you’re old enough to Remember Spanky and the Gang, they got their start here in the Grove when Oz Bach and Nigel Pickering were showing Elaine “Spanky” MacFarlane around the Grove and a hurricane hit. They spent the next eight hours hiding out in a chicken coup jamming and that’s how the group eventually got together!

All these artists and so many more played the circuit here in Miami back in those days, including the Flick and the Gaslight Coffee House in the Grove. Joni Mitchell was discovered at the Gaslight by David Crosby who was passing through on his sailboat the Mayan which was docked at Dinner Key. In fact, Jimmy Buffet was then an unknown young kid who was the opening act for many guys like Martin and Neil at these coffeehouses. Besides Martin’s song, the Grove was immortalized by John Sebastian after he left the Lovin Spoonful and wrote the song “Coconut Grove”. As the song says “its really true how nothing matters, no mad, mad world, no mad hatters. Nobody’s pitching, cause there ain’t no batters in Coconut Grove” When I think back to those days, I can truly say it was a magical place. No resemblance to the crass commercial locale it has become. I know in many ways it is a “better” place today, but I can honestly say that what it was will never be rivaled by what it may become.

Monkeys with Hand Grenades!

By David Evans Nov. 28 (Bloomberg) -- Florida local governments and school districts pulled $8 billion out of a state-run investment pool,or 30 percent of its assets, after learning that the money-market fund contained more than $700 million of defaulted debt. Orange County, home of Disney World, removed its entire$370 million from the pool on Nov. 16, two days after the head of the agency that manages the state's short-term investments disclosed the defaulted debt in a report delivered to Governor Charlie Crist. ``Our primary goal is to protect our funds,'' said Jim Moye, Orange County's chief deputy comptroller, from his office in Orlando. The county's school board withdrew $388 million this week, following other local governments that pulled funds, including Dade County and Pompano Beach. The withdrawals, made since Nov. 14, were disclosed to Bloomberg News in a response to an open-records request. The State Board of Administration manages about $42 billionof short-term investments, including the pool, as well as the state's $137 billion pension fund. Almost 6 percent, or $2.4 billion, of its short-term investments consist of asset-backed commercial paper that has defaulted. Those holdings include $425 million in Axon Financial, a structured investment vehicle, or SIV, according to state records. About $19 billion remained in the pool this week after the unprecedented wave of withdrawals, which came after the State Board of Administration reported its holdings of downgraded debt to Crist at a Nov. 14 public meeting of his cabinet inTallahassee. The disclosures followed a month of inquiries by Bloomberg News to Florida officials.
Word Spreads
``Knowing other people were pulling out, and that word was spreading, we looked at the potential for a run on the pool,'' said Orange County's Moye. Coleman Stipanovich, the State Board of Administration's executive director, declined to comment. Should the withdrawals continue, Florida's pool may have to consider filing for bankruptcy protection, says John Coffee, asecurities law professor at Columbia Law School in New York. ``A bankruptcy could handle these kinds of problems if they feel they'll become insolvent,'' he said. Coffee predicts the pool will likely file lawsuits to recover losses. ``I'd expect the pool is going to sue the people who sold them the commercial paper, saying the risks were hidden,'' he said. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. sold Florida most of its now-default-rated asset-backed commercial paper. Lehman spokesman Randall Whitestone declined to comment.
Schools, Water Districts
Thousands of school, fire, water and other local districts across the U.S. keep their cash in state- and county-run pools. These public accounts, modeled after private money market funds, are supposed to invest in safe, liquid, short-term debt such as U.S. Treasuries and certificates of deposit from highly rated banks. The Florida pool, which was the largest of its kind in theU.S. at $27 billion before the recent spate of withdrawals, has invested $2 billion in SIVs and other subprime-tainted debt, state records show. Connecticut, Maine, Montana and King County,Washington, are among other governments holding similar investments, in smaller quantities. The Florida pool's $900 million of defaulted asset-backed commercial paper now amounts to almost 5 percent of its holdings. The paper, which carried top ratings from Standard &Poor's, Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings as recentlyas August, was downgraded after declines in the value of collateral affected by the subprime mortgage slump.
SIVs
SIVs are typically offshore companies created by banks and other firms to sell short-term debt to buy mortgage securities and finance company bonds with higher yields. They profit on the spread between the two. Banks such as New York-based Citigroup, which manages $83 billion in SIVs, collect fees for running SIVs while keeping their contents off the bank's books. SIVs finance themselves by selling asset-backed commercial paper, or short-term loans backed by collateral such as mortgages. When the subprime debt market blew up in August, investors stopped buying SIV commercial paper. As a result, in Septemberand October, some SIVs didn't have the cash to pay debt holders. At Crist's Nov. 14 cabinet meeting, Stipanovich said that while there was ``disappointment'' over recent downgraded investments, no local government had ever lost money in the pool since its creation in 1982.
Investor Confidence
Stipanovich also assured Crist and Florida Chief FinancialOfficer Alex Sink at that time that the pool maintained the confidence of its depositors. ``There are a lot of rumors flying around,'' testifiedStipanovich. ``I'm not aware that there have been any material outflows.'' Moye said Orange County pulled out of the pool this month because the State Board of Administration failed to provide adequate or timely disclosure to pool participants about its troubled investments. On Nov. 20, Pinellas County yanked its entire $300 millionfrom the pool. ``My first job is to safeguard principal,'' said Ken Burke,Clerk of the Pinellas Circuit Court. A certified public accountant, Burke controls the county's cash. He said a quarterly newsletter for pool participants, published Nov. 1,which mentioned downgrades but not defaults, wasn't candid aboutthe pool's predicament. ``If some bad news comes out, the first thing I'd do is contact my customers and give them my side. The newsletter didn't tell us the full story,'' said Burke. ``It made it sound like a bump in the road.''
Countrywide Investments
Neither the newsletter nor Stipanovich's testimony disclosed that the pool owns $650 million of certificates of deposit from Countrywide Bank FSB, a unit of CountrywideFinancial Corp., that now amounts to more than 3 percent of the pool's assets. The bank's rating was cut to Baa1, three levels above junk, by Moody's on Aug. 16. When local governments withdraw funds from the pool, the state must sell off holdings to raise the cash. Because Florida's pool has been forced to quickly raise billions of dollars to meet withdrawal demands, it won't get top dollar for its asset sales, says Joseph Mason, professor of finance at Drexel University. ``When funds like this are liquidated, the Street will take advantage of their desperation. They don't care if you're a hedge fund or a school district,'' said Mason, who completed an18-month appointment as a scholar in residence at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in January.
First in Line
Mason, who has studied the history of bank failures, understands the rush by Florida municipalities to pull their money from the pool. ``The first people in the withdrawal line get 100 percentof their money,'' he said. ``The loss is suffered by the people behind them in line. Since nobody wants to be at the end, you get a run on the pool.'' Mason says while the state of Florida has a moral duty to cover any losses suffered by the pool participants, its own shaky finances will make that difficult. The fourth most-populous state, hurt by the housing slump, cut its revenue projections by 3.9 percent for the fiscal year ending June 30,and 5.2 percent for the following year. ``The state appears to have breached the trust of the investors by putting money in new kinds of debt its managers didn't fully understand, in their search for higher yields,''Mason said.

Subprime Mortgage Mess Explained!

For all of you struggling to understand the current subprime mortgage mess, herewith is a perfect explanation provided by our British cousins across the pond. While it may make you laugh it is all perfectly true! Be sure to call your local securities broker and thank him for making this all possible.
http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ_qK4g6ntM

Rat Pack Role Playing- Cruise the Old Strip

Remember cruising north of downtown on Biscayne Boulevard in the 50's and 60's? Passing "Motel Row" from the 50s to the 79th Street Causeway? Those brightly lit and gaudy motels made you feel like you were cruisin the strip in Vegas with Frankie and the boys!. Officially designated by the City of Miami as a historic district in 2006, the Miami Modern (MiMo)/ Biscayne Boulevard (BiBo) is Miami's sole commercial historic district. The district's shining stars are the motels along this major thoroughfare: a distinctive group of buildings illustrative of the 1950s hey-day of motor culture and the optimism and sense of prosperity that characterized the era. The MiMo/BiBo district is also home to some notable examples of other styles of historic Miami architecture, such as Art Deco, Streamline Moderne, and Mediterranean Revival. So hop in your cruiser, convertible or bike, tune to the oldies station, and put your best shades on. Enjoy the shopping in the area's distinctive fashion-minded stores, look for a new Eames era coffee table in the antique shops, and grab a bite to eat in the many restaurants. For more information on restaurants and shops in MiMo/BiBo, please visit this website: http://www.mimoboulevard.org/index.php.mimoboulevard.org/index.php

Arch Creek Park- for a nice weekend stroll!~

One of my favorite parks in Dade County is a little and little known park in North Miami called Arch Creek Park. It's a wonderful place to go and take a weekend stroll and feel transported to the Miami of days gone by. Arch Creek has had many narrow misses with the encroachment of civilization over the years but thanks to the efforts of many community folk it has survived and flourished as a natural site and not just one more mass entertainment area like so many other parks in the County. Historically, it is far more important than the Tequesta Circle on the Miami River. Arch Creek, and the area surrounding it, was one of six Tequesta Indian occupation sites built along Dade County estuaries. The Tequestas established other campsites at the Oleta River, Surfside, Little River, the Miami River, and Snapper Creek. Arch Creek, however, was unique. It had a natural limestone bridge spanning 60 feet, from which the Indians could fish and which provided a raised, dry highway to the Everglades. Over the years, the Army Corps of Engineers wanted to blow up the bridge and Chrysler Motors wanted to pave over the entire park to build an auto dealership. Today, Arch Creek is an eight-acre site at the junction of N.E. 135th Street and Biscayne Boulevard, and offers many opportunities for botanical, historical and archaeological study. It has a museum/nature center modeled after an early Florida pioneer home, displaying Indian artifacts dug from the grounds, and live animals from the nearby hammock. Remains of the first settler's original coontie starch mill are still visible across the creek, and the Park exists as the only preserved archaeological site in the County. To me it's like a microcosm of what Florida looked like to the original settlers at the turn of the century. Treat yourself to a weekend visit, you'll be glad you did!

Jimbo's Place- A Genuine, Original Florida Establishment

Jimbo's Place is one of the few old fish shacks left in Miami. It is located on Virginia Key at the entrance to Key Biscayne. James "Jimbo" Luznar opened his bait shop there in 1954 and is still going strong. Jimbo started selling beer and delicious smoked fish shortly thereafter and has been a preferred stop for boaters and beachgoers alike. As a kid, we would go to the beach on the little stretch of beach on the west side of the bridge and then cross over to the Virginia Key side to enjoy Jimbo's smoked fish for lunch. The Virginia Key side was the only beach set aside for the black community in the era of segregation. There were many old fish shacks like Jimbo's in those days, usually located near a popular beach location catering to hungry boaters and beachgoers, but today they are all gone and a distant memory to most old Miamians. Jimbo's is unique in that he offers a great old bocce ball court where visitors can engage in a game while sippin beer and munching on awesome smoked fish fillets! I always worry that sites like Virginia Key will eventually be "gentrified" out of existence. Fortunately, the black community is actively involved in preserving the area's history through the Virginia Key Beach Park Trust to oversee the development of the historic Park property. The Trust has been working diligently to restore and preserve this historical treasure. In August 2002, the site was placed on the National Register of Historic Places and given a Florida Historical Marker. You can visit the Jimbo's PLace website at http://www.jimbosplace.com/JimbosHome.html Better yet, get in your car an take a trip there. There is nothing better on a hot sultry weekend day than a visit to Jimbo's!