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<\/a>By Seth H. Bramson<\/strong><\/p>\nWe 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 \u201cthe U\u201d (which wasn\u2019t \u201cthe U\u201d then, but it was \u201cSuntan U\u201d and in my mind, \u201cP U.\u201d) and I was very unhappy there, even though I belonged to a great fraternity, Tau Epsilon Phi.<\/p>\n
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\u2019ll get back to that in a moment.<\/p>\n
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\u2014Jacksonville 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\u2019clock 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.<\/p>\n
The sign had an FEC passenger diesel standing upright with its arms outstretched to greet me upon its return to service. The sign\u2019s caption read \u201cSeth Bramson\/Florida\u2019s Foremost Railfan\/Says \u2018WELCOME BACK\/WE MISSED YOU\u201d. I wore my FEC Passenger Agent\u2019s 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 \u201cTHE FEC IS OPERATED UNDER STRIKE CONDITION. USE PREMISES AND RIDE TRAINS AT OWN RISK.\u201d 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\u2019s shortest streamliner until its discontinuance on July 31, 1968.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cbeach boy\u201d shorts, white socks and sneakers and the white T-shirt with the words \u201cFontainebleau Social Staff\u201d in blue on the right side; I would usually get in at about ten, make sure everybody was \u201cat their posts,\u201d check for messages and then go to the coffee shop and have lunch, signing an \u201cofficer\u2019s check;\u201d 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\u2019s activities for the guests) and suddenly I was a real celebrity!<\/p>\n
From the moment I got to work that morning it was \u201cSeth, Seth, did you see the Herald today?!!\u201d 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!)<\/p>\n
At any rate, earlier that summer the Fontainebleau\u2019s 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\u2019s famous School of Hotel Administration for summer courses and I was floored. \u201cMr. Rogers,\u201d I said, \u201cI would love to, but I can\u2019t afford to do that,\u201d to which he replied, \u201cyou afford to get there, we\u2019ll pay your tuition and your housing.\u201d Suffice to say, I was \u201cwalking on air.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201cI saw Astaire go pitter pat\u2014said \u2018I can do that, yeah I can do that\u2019\u2026.\u201d 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\u2019s and B\u2019s, one term with a 4.0 and finishing there with a 3.769 GPA) I looked around and said to myself, \u201cMan, I can do this.\u201d And I did, becoming the first DCJC student to be accepted at Cornell and the first DCJC student to graduate from Cornell.<\/p>\n
Finishing my summer classes in Ithaca I returned to \u201cthe \u2018bleau\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019t marry the first one because the second one has been the great love of my life for now 44 years, being married for 41 \u00bd of those years and I know that some of you know the beautiful and elegant Myrna Bramson.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll be back with you soon, \u201cgood people of Locker 378\u201d (Agent J to the inhabitants of the locker in Grand Central Terminal in that marvelous scene from \u201cMen in Black\u201d) and until then, in the words of a great and beloved personage, \u201clive long and prosper.\u201d<\/p>\n
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[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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[18786],"class_list":["post-74801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boxing-news","tag-the-bramson-archive-get-larger-and-larger-part-ii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=74801"}],"version-history":[{"count":-1,"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74801\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=74801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=74801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ringsidereport.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=74801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}