November 10-13, 1974: My First Trip to Fort Worth, Texas
	October 11-14, 1974: My Mom Visits Chicago
	Return to Index for 1974

In November, another first- a trip to Miami. My family and I had been as far south as Ormond Beach, Florida, when I was growing up, but that area is 250 miles north of Miami on Florida's East Coast. This will be my first trip to "South Florida" as the area is known.

Now that I have been working for Cullinane for a few months, I am already comfortable with the work, and I am quickly getting used to the travel. It is, in fact, kind of exciting. But arranging travel then was not at all like arranging travel in the Internet age.

For the first few months, our in-house travel coordinator in Boston would make reservations for me- flights, hotels, and rental cars. She already knew my travel schedule, so I would just call her and give her my preferences on flight times and such, and she would do the rest. For this trip, for example, since I'd never been to Miami before, I asked if I could go down on Saturday rather than Sunday ahead of the Monday installation and training.

When I did something like this, I always said I'd pay the extra hotel night myself, but usually Cullinane was fine with paying that themselves; the rest of the expenses were charged to the client, as we sold the software with training expenses extra. But pretty quickly, I started going to the same places over again, so the "bloom was off the rose" for that location, and it became simply a business trip. Actually, most times I just used evenings to do my sightseeing- like I did in New York City on my first trip there.

Later on, I just started doing my own travel arrangements, operating within the guidelines set by the Boston office (e.g., First Class travel was usually only authorized for very long-haul trips; hotels and cars should always be "mid-range", etc.). One nice thing was that we always asked the client to recommend a place to stay, and they most often picked a nice place, and one closest to their office so that commuting was minimized.

Even later on, when on of my friends in the apartment building became a travel agent, I had him do all the arrangements so he could earn a commission. But travel agents and commissions are probably foreign to you who are reading this page online; when you want to travel, you do everything on a website or two, and tickets and reservations are all electronic.

This time, our client, Southeast Bancorporation, was headquartered right downtown, and they recommended a nice Holiday Inn (as I recall) over on Miami Beach. To get to the downtown HQ, they recommended that we just get a rental car at the airport, which we did. For this installation, I met another Cullinane employee, Bob VanAndel, originally from Michigan (not close to Muskegon), but now living in Boston. He was quite a character (or so I thought), but as it turns out, people who've been in computers all their lives are a little different from everyone else.

Miami Beach and the Intracoastal

During the four days we were here, I learned a good deal about the geography of the Miami area (and of South Florida, for that matter). Let me see if I can explain what I learned. Take a look at the picture at left. Bob and I found that if we left our hotel and walked west across Collins Boulevard, we were in an area of private homes and a few small hotels. Most of the high-rise hotels are right on the beach, and they form a wall that runs a couple of miles north and south. There's gaps between the buildings of course, the the houses on the west side of the street don't have ocean views, for the most part.

But if you walk another block or two west, you come to more water; what's up with that? Well, Miami Beach is actually on a long island that stretches mile after or mile up the Florida coast. The folks at the bank told us that this "barrier island" goes pretty much all the way up to Cape Canaveral- a hundred and fifty miles or more. West of this island there is a long waterway, and on the other side of that is the actual mainland.

As it turns out, this waterway is mostly natural, but in some places artificial or at least widened. It's called the Intracoastal Waterway and it provides a sheltered waterway for all but the largest boats to travel up and down the Florida coast without having to go out into the ocean. The waterway has spurred development, and typically, the highrise hotels and condominiums are on the beach side of the barrier island while the Intracoastal is lined on both sides by homes. This isn't always true, as sometimes the barrier island is very thin, and there is only room for the row of hotels on the beach and the avenue (which is usually called "A1A" for "Alternate route 1 Alternate")- as is the case here. But I should point out that in major metropolitan areas like Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Palm Beach, other, smaller canals have been constructed along the Intracoastal, creating more waterfront for more expensive homes.

Miami Beach Homes Along the Intracoastal

I took the picture at right from the same spot as the earlier one, but we are looking across a "canal" that was created when a natural island in the Intracoastal was enlarged, stabilized, and had road access built to it. There are lots of these islands along the Intracoastal here in South Florida, and they provide more waterfront for more homes. And we certainly learned that waterfront homes are expensive homes.

Those are some pretty big homes over there on whatever island that is. There may be yet another island beyond it, but then you will eventually come to the broader, open water of the Intracoastal itself. One thing about all this waterfront is that it provides space for lots and lots of boat docks for the incredible number of boats, large and small, that one sees around here. My guess is that many of these homeowners also have boats that they dock right behind or in front of their houses (a guess that turned out to be quite right).

NOTE:
I had no way of knowing now, but in due time I would come to be intimately familiar with the Intracoastal Waterway, South Florida, and, most particularly, Fort Lauderdale. Indeed, I would come to be one of those people who had a home (small condo) on the water (not the Intracoastal but the New River in Fort Lauderdale) with a boat (a 20-foot runabout). But that's way in the future now.

We spent most of Sunday soaking up the sun on the beach. As a matter of fact, I soaked up too much sun and on my return to Chicago found that I had minor burns on my face, which caused no small amount of discomfort for about a week afterwards. Miami was hot, humid and sunny, even in mid-November.

The Cape Florida Light

Since we had a rental car, we did a bit of driving around as well, just to see what the area was like. We'd both heard of Key Biscayne, where Nixon's "Winter White House" is, so we drove down there. There are two parks and some very nice homes on the island, which is reached via a causeway just south of downtown Miami. We tried to get to see the Presidential Compound on the Key, but, even though this was after Nixon had resigned, we could not even get close.

We did drive down to the south end of the key, just to see what the view was like, and there we found the Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park and the Cape Florida Light. Constructed in 1825, it guided mariners off the Florida Reef, which starts near Key Biscayne and extends southward a few miles offshore of the Florida Keys. It was operated by staff, with interruptions, until 1878, when it was replaced by the Fowey Rocks lighthouse.

The construction contract called for a 65-foot-tall tower with walls of solid brick, five feet thick at the bottom tapering to two feet thick at the top. It was later found that the contractor had scrimped on materials and built hollow walls. The first keeper of the lighthouse was Captain John Dubose, who served for more than ten years. In 1835 a major hurricane struck the island, damaging the lighthouse and the keeper's house, and flooding the island under three feet of water.

In 1878, the lighthouse was decommissioned when the new Fowey Rocks lighthouse was completed. From 1888 to 1893, the lighthouse was leased (for the princely sum of $1) to the Biscayne Bay Yacht Club for use as its headquarters. In 1898, the lighthouse was briefly made a signal station to provide an early warning of the approach of the Spanish fleet. The land around the lighthouse was privately-owned, and in 1903 the land's owner bought the lighthouse from the Government for $400. The land passed to James Deering, the heir to the International Harvester fortune who owned Vizcaya (the mansion near the beginning of the modern causeway out to Key Biscayne).

Deering did restoration work on the lighthouse- most importantly giving it a new, better foundation, which enabled it to survive the eyewall of the 1926 Miami Hurricane. Finally, the southern third of Key Biscayne, including the lighthouse, was bought by the State of Florida in 1966. It established the land as Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park, named for the editor of the Miami News, who had urged protection and helped arrange the deal for preservation of the land. The state restored the lighthouse tower, and in 1969 constructed replicas of the keeper's dwellings.

Our installation and training went well. Bob was there to both install the software and do some custom programming that the bank wanted. While he was doing that, I was teaching a three-day class on using both the standard software and the new programming. I enjoyed the work and Miami immensely, but on Wednesday evening caught a flight back to Chicago.

From Miami International Airport, I took off to the east, passing first over some of Miami's western suburbs. The population of South Florida is growing quickly, and lots of new expressways are being built to serve the burgeoning suburban communities.

This flight's path took us out over the coast over Miami Beach itself (shown below). The plane then turned to the left and came around to head north-northwest on its course for Chicago. As we did so, we stayed out over the water for a while before coming back over land north of Palm Beach. At left you can see that same stretch of coast from out over the water.

My first trip to Miami was pretty neat, but it would be just the first of many.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	November 10-13, 1974: My First Trip to Fort Worth, Texas
	October 11-14, 1974: My Mom Visits Chicago
	Return to Index for 1974