The Trio Diner and Another Close Call
The Trio episode involved a military type. The diner was stainless steel on the outside looking like an airstream trailer, just like all diners used to look. It was at the Douglas Road entrance, 37th Avenue, to Coral Gables, a mediterranean Moorish style gateway, at Eighth Street. It was not yet called Calle Ocho. The […]
Sex, Drugs and Politics: My Life In The Sixties
My working title for this book when I started writing it 20 years ago was Sex, Drugs and Politics: My Life In The Sixties Part of that was scoring, “drugs”. We did not consider marijuana a drug, but yeah, some of what we took were right out of the Sandoz pharmaceutical lab in Switzerland. My […]
Leonard Cohen and Climate Change
I have an overactive mind. One thought races into another in a manic stream of consciousness worthy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Sunday morning, I am finally watching a DVD of Leonard Cohen’s London concert. Where do I begin about him? A few summers ago, ’18? ’17?, the Jewish Museum in NYC had the most mind-blowing […]
The Englishman and The Close Call
Grandpa Sam Goldstein, Mom’s Father, was born in England on the way here. His family was from Rumania. I have his birth certificate. It is an official copy issued many years after he was born. He probably got it for the new social security system in the 1930’s. I know that’s when it was produced […]
How I Stopped Oil Drilling in the Everglades
From 1967 to 1969 I was part of the Hydrobiology Research Team of the Water Resources Division of the United States Geological Survey of the United States Department of the Interior (Thank you John Wesley Powell!). Our mission was nothing less than coordinating and adding to the knowledge and understanding of the complete ecology of Everglades National Park. For two years of my very young life I got to live a real wilderness adventure.
Bones
The worms don’t have an easy time with bones. Bones last a long time. I know because I’m an anthropologist. I worked with the Florida state archaeologist, Calvin Jones, as an undergraduate. He’s gone now, too, a good man, in amongst his own worms. We excavated Spanish missions and Native American sites. While excavating San […]
Holly, Joanne, Edd, Nettie and Bill
The Sixties was about NOTHING if it wasn’t about SEX. You know, one of our anthems of the period by CSNY, “If you’re not with the one you love, then love the one you’re with!” And we did. And the derivation of a human estrogen analogue from a South American yam freed us all up to do so. The Pill!
Gator Wrestling
“You’re Not Afraid of a Little Old 8-foot Alligator, Are You, Phil?” Think what you will, but this really happened… One of our research techniques was sampling the biomass from ten traps (see Appendix for illustration) and from these 500 square feet of net extrapolating the entire biological mass of the Glades! These […]
The African Queen
I was part of a research team in the Everglades National Park from 1967 to 1969 doing the first overall study of the ecology of the ‘Glades. This is one of those stories. During my first visit to Cottonmouth Camp I found out what it was like to be both the new guy on the […]
Henry Beston – The Outermost House
In my professional practice I do not send out the printed Season’s Greeting cards. I think they are hideous and cold. Do the people who send them really think the client thinks they are being remembered? I was an anthropologist. A major subject in the study of cultures is the Rite of Passage. Some people […]