The Bramson Archive Gets Larger and Larger Part II

[AdSense-A]

By Seth H. Bramson

We concluded the last column with a look at the activities going on from the time I left 1/2SU to return to Miami and my activities following including my job at the Fontainebleau, attending UM, and continuing to collect rail and trolleyana and Miami memorabilia unabatedly. Unhappily, though, I really disliked “the U” (which wasn’t “the U” then, but it was “Suntan U” and in my mind, “P U.”) and I was very unhappy there, even though I belonged to a great fraternity, Tau Epsilon Phi.

In fact, I was so down on UM that I was going to quit school when I heard about the new program they were starting at Dade County Junior College (today called Miami-Dade College) in hotel, motel and food service management. I loved working at the Fontainebleau and by Neil (Neil, god!) I loved (for the first time in my college career) the courses I was taking at the junior college and we’ll get back to that in a moment.

As you may remember from our previous column, the FEC went on strike on January 22, 1963 and it would not be until August 2, 1965 that, under Florida Supreme Court order, the railroad would resume a daily except Sunday North Miami—Jacksonville round trip passenger train. Naturally, I was not going to miss it, and, with beloved brother Bennett coming along, we arrived at the North Miami station probably before 8:00 AM for the 9:00 O’clock departure. Bennett is a talented writer, speaker, educator (he is a college professor today in Colorado) and artist and could have had a career in that field, a mention made because a couple of days before that first trip I told him about the sign that I wanted him to make for me, which he did.

The sign had an FEC passenger diesel standing upright with its arms outstretched to greet me upon its return to service. The sign’s caption read “Seth Bramson/Florida’s Foremost Railfan/Says ‘WELCOME BACK/WE MISSED YOU”. I wore my FEC Passenger Agent’s hat with white shirt and tie and other than the buffs who knew me everybody else thought I was an employee. Signs in the stations and in the passenger cars clearly stated that “THE FEC IS OPERATED UNDER STRIKE CONDITION. USE PREMISES AND RIDE TRAINS AT OWN RISK.” The warning aside it was a glorious day, the train being met by news media at every stop, many of them interviewing me along with the train crew. We rode to Vero and then took the southbound train back, that the first of many trips on the nation’s shortest streamliner until its discontinuance on July 31, 1968.

The next day, August 3, 1965, I walked into the Fontainebleau (my daytime attire, as Head Counselor, Program Coordinator and Assistant Director of Entertainment, was white “beach boy” shorts, white socks and sneakers and the white T-shirt with the words “Fontainebleau Social Staff” in blue on the right side; I would usually get in at about ten, make sure everybody was “at their posts,” check for messages and then go to the coffee shop and have lunch, signing an “officer’s check;” I would generally leave about three, go home, study whatever courses I was taking at DCJC, take a nap and get back to the hotel by about 6:30, at which time I would have dinner in the coffee shop (the Chez Bon-Bon) and then run the evening’s activities for the guests) and suddenly I was a real celebrity!

From the moment I got to work that morning it was “Seth, Seth, did you see the Herald today?!!” Indeed, after I got there I did and sure enough, on the front page, in a picture three columns wide and about five inches deep was yours truly at the North Miami station, carrying the sign! (Thank you again, Bennett!) That picture, incidentally, was sent by wire service and appeared in the L A Times, Chicago Tribune, one of the New York papers and dozens of other papers around the country as well as in either Time or Newsweek Magazine. (Perhaps best of all, I still have the sign that Bennett made for me!)

At any rate, earlier that summer the Fontainebleau’s Vice President of Sales, Lou Rogers, told me that he was delighted with how well I was doing both at the hotel and in my course work. (I did my required internship at the hotel) Much to my happy surprise Lou asked me if I would like to go to Cornell’s famous School of Hotel Administration for summer courses and I was floored. “Mr. Rogers,” I said, “I would love to, but I can’t afford to do that,” to which he replied, “you afford to get there, we’ll pay your tuition and your housing.” Suffice to say, I was “walking on air.”

There is a wonderful song by the late, great Sammy Davis, Jr., which is a paean to the also late and equally great Fred Astaire and in that song Sammy sings “I saw Astaire go pitter pat—said ‘I can do that, yeah I can do that’….” and when I got to Ithaca (remember, at 1/2SU and PU I was anything but a student, while at DCJC, loving the classes I was taking, I was earning all A’s and B’s, one term with a 4.0 and finishing there with a 3.769 GPA) I looked around and said to myself, “Man, I can do this.” And I did, becoming the first DCJC student to be accepted at Cornell and the first DCJC student to graduate from Cornell.

Finishing my summer classes in Ithaca I returned to “the ‘bleau” to go right back to work, and while loving almost every minute of it I was determined that I, who had previously been anything but a student (I had the ability but had never applied myself) was going to go to Cornell for my bachelor’s degree. And that I did, more of which, along with the story of the first of only two girls (women) in my life who I ever wanted to marry, next time. And again, thank Neil that I didn’t marry the first one because the second one has been the great love of my life for now 44 years, being married for 41 ½ of those years and I know that some of you know the beautiful and elegant Myrna Bramson.

We’ll be back with you soon, “good people of Locker 378” (Agent J to the inhabitants of the locker in Grand Central Terminal in that marvelous scene from “Men in Black”) and until then, in the words of a great and beloved personage, “live long and prosper.”

[si-contact-form form=’2′]