Growing Up Grove

I spent my early childhood in Coconut Grove, the oldest permanent settlement in the greater Miami area.

Born in 1963, my earliest recollections of The Grove are idyllic but spotty: Our low-slung mid-century modern house at the dead end of Tigertail Court, indigenous vegetation creating a canopy over it. The length of the home seemed to go on forever.

I’ll always remember our friend Jorge exclaiming “you have a long house” when he visited for the first time.

We met Jorge at Silver Bluff Elementary School in Coral Gables, along with a group of kids I can’t forget, some of whom we reacquainted with at St. Hugh Catholic School after we returned from Los Angeles for seventh and eighth grade.

I remember walks across Bayshore Drive to the area my dad called “The Bay” – long before it became David T. Kennedy Park. We threw pebbles into the water and explored this “wilderness” with abandon and for what seemed like hours.

It probably wasn’t hours.

The people on Tigertail Court: Mrs. Tobin next door, the Hensley kids on the other side – Mark, Jay, Johnny, Dougie. Somebody down at the corner of Tigertail Court and Kirk Street I only knew as “Mister ‘O’” because I heard my older brother Paul call him that once.

The crab holes in our backyard always scared the shit out of me – and the crabs themselves with their creepy sideways walk.

There was a weird sinkhole-looking thing back there too – you could look down that hole and its darkness implied that the chasm went on forever.

The collection of plastic plants in a rectangular planter as you got down the hall from the bedrooms at the precipice of the sunken living room. The rarely used dining room on the far side of the living room, with elegant and sleek table, chairs, china cabinet and a heavy liquor cart on wheels that I once pushed off the step into the living room…

I don’t remember who saw this debacle first, but I hid under the dining room table and repeated – “It wasn’t me. It was somebody who looked like me.”

I might have meant my twin brother, but it could have been that I wasn’t referring to him at all.

Just somebody that looked like me.

I remember the plaster shark spinning around in an enclosure just before heading onto the Rickenbacker Causeway on the way to Key Biscayne

I remember Pinocchio’s Pizza in the Grove, in the same complex as a convenience store called The Cold Spot. Walking barefoot inside the old A&P and coming home with filthy feet.

Royal Castle’s little square hamburgers…

The Five-and Ten.

The Florida Pharmacy in the Engle Building and a barber on that side of the street named Joe who used to cut our hair…

The old Texaco station.

I’m priming the pump, and the memories are coming.

If you grew up in The Grove, what memories stand out for you?

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Father English and Father Slow

Photo: Archdiocese of Miami

When I was 12, my family lived for a time at my sister’s home in Bay Heights, a community in Coconut Grove, Florida.

We had just made the trek back from Southern California with our mom, a trip we were sort of used to by then. We were yanked back-and-forth across the country several times. My mom and dad stayed married, but I have yet to understand why. Dad remained in Los Angeles, and my brother and I eventually stayed with him permanently.

Bay Heights was a quiet, walled development – with a variety of mid-century modern homes and some with a decidedly Spanish flair. Across Bayshore Drive was Mercy Hospital (now HCA Florida Mercy Hospital) and Immaculata-La Salle High School. So much Catholicism a stone’s throw from the house…

Mom made us go to Mass regularly. We were parishioners at St. Hugh, also in the Grove – and we attended St, Hugh for the seventh and eighth grades.

I don’t know who found out that there was a chapel inside Mercy Hospital – with priests who celebrated Masses – but this was a boon for us. When we gained a bit of independence, Mom would let us run across for Mass, sometimes with our friend Billy, who lived close by.

I don’t recall if our niece Cathy was allowed to go with us. She’s three years younger than us, so she may have been under closer scrutiny. But as long as we kept our word and went to Mass, all was good with Mom.

At the time, there were two priests on rotation at the chapel. I don’t think we ever knew their real names, but they live in my memory by their nicknames – likely coined by Billy: Father English and Father Slow.

Father Slow was a very deliberate and methodical priest. He might have been Cuban, but I am not sure. He had a very thick accent, which made his approach a little harder to sit through as a boy. He also dragged out the Mass somehow – as we fidgeted and laughed at random sounds in the chapel – perhaps someone coughing, a baby crying or the inadvertent drop of a kneeler.

I’m sure Father Slow was a nice and good man. But we were never excited to see him.

Father English could have been Australian for all I know – but his Masses were quick and to-the-point. Probably a good thing for folks who might have had sick loved ones to visit. But it was like – in-and-out. No nonsense.

We got excited when we saw Father English stroll down the aisle. This meant we could be up to our preteen shenanigans in record time.

The Enduring KISS

Original KISS Sticker on My Brother’s Old Suitcase (Photo: Chris Yale)

When I was thirteen, I started to see kids with KISS shirts for the first time.

This was at McMillan Middle School in an area of Miami called Kendale Lakes. I think it was called McMillan Junior High School when we attended in the seventies.

I had no idea what those shirts were, but the kids who wore them seemed proud of them somehow.

I’m sure my twin brother noticed those shirts too.

I can’t speak for him, but I didn’t like my time at McMillan. In retrospect, some of the classes were really cool, like photography class (I learned how to develop film there) and a comedy class that was part of the English curriculum – but I didn’t like the kids. I found this horde on the whole to be mean-spirited and cliquish.

But I digress, kind of.

We had moved to Kendale Lakes from Coconut Grove, and it was logical that we’d go to a closer school. But we made it abundantly clear that we hated it. We also missed our small group of friends from seventh grade, some of whom we knew from the third grade before we moved to California for a time.

It wasn’t until our mom allowed us to go back to our previous school, St. Hugh, that we discovered the meaning behind the shirts.

Our friend Ramon was already listening to KISS – and if memory serves, had at least the Rock and Roll Over album, which included the song, “I Want You.”

I don’t know how we came to hear it. Maybe it was during the coolest detention ever, where we were allowed to play records and eat lunch in Mr. Shemp’s air-conditioned classroom – a way better deal than eating outside in the sweltering Miami heat.

And so it began – the KISS indoctrination.

It continued when our now long-dead older brother Paul took us into a record store and told us we could have any album we wanted. Our choice was obvious: KISS’ Alive!.

“That’s for kids,” Paul judged in his opiate-addled voice. But we pressed him and he relented. After all, that choice counted as “any album we wanted.”

KISS fans have long suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous judgment, and Paul’s criticism wasn’t the last time we’d hear that KISS was for kids.

We didn’t care.

Later, when we saw KISS for the first time, our dad was with us. He said something like, “Boys…that’s Kabuki Theatre.”

Yes, Dad – if you add pyrotechnics and Marshall stacks. You had a point.

That show was at the Los Angeles Forum – a stop on the Love Gun Tour with Cheap Trick opening and portions of Alive II being recorded at the venue.

Cheap Trick deserves more love in a future blog post.

We finally got those (no longer mysterious) T-shirts that night, along with “I WAS THERE” badges – and down the KISS rabbit hole we went.