Delray Beach has clarified its competitive bidding rules after the county Inspector General said the city bent its rules when it awarded its beach-cleaning contract last January.
    Universal Beach Services, the city beach cleaner for 30 years, got the contract for $94,896 after arguing that low bidder Beach Raker couldn’t provide the service for $57,000.
    JoAnn Peart, owner of Universal Beach, also accused the city of giving Beach Raker an unfair advantage in the bidding process by allowing it to use a different method of beach cleaning that can pick up trash as small as cigarette butts and bottle caps.
    When the Parks and Recreation Department warned that the super cleaner would also suck up seashells, city commissioners paid $37,896 more to keep Universal Beach on the job.
    City Manager Louie Chapman said Delray Beach has complied with the Inspector General’s request to clarify the factors including price that determine who gets city contracts. 

— Tim Pallesen

By Tim Pallesen

    Delray Beach commis-sioners will ask a judge to undo the city’s $65 million contract with garbage hauler Waste Management, arguing that it violates a city competitive bidding law.
    A previous commission approved the no-bid contract last August.
    “Public trust in city hall was fractured by this decision,” Mayor Cary Glickstein said before a 4-1 vote on June 18 to seek a declaratory judgment in circuit court to void the contract.
    “All of this could have been avoided by just following our ordinances, which are crystal clear,” Glickstein said. “This was a terrible decision. It’s important for this commission to right that wrong.”
    Commissioners contracted with Coral Gables government law attorney Jaime Cole to advise whether they could get the judgment.
    “I think we have a very significant chance of prevailing, but that’s not a guarantee,” Cole reported back at the June 18 meeting.
    Cole said he knows of no other city that didn’t seek competitive bids before contracting with a garbage hauler. Competitive bids are required in Delray Beach for any purchase over $15,000.
    “You are required to follow your code,” Cole said. “Therefore, you needed to bid this out.”
    Current Commissioners Adam Frankel and Angeleta Gray had voted to give Waste Management the no-bid contract last August. Sparks flew at the June 18 meeting when Glickstein criticized that vote.
    “I don’t know whether it was arrogance or stupidity,” the mayor said.
    “Mr. Mayor, you just called me stupid,” Frankel shot back.
    “I guess the better word was ‘incompetence,’” Glickstein replied.
    Frankel was the lone vote against in the commission’s 4-1 vote to seek a declaratory judgment to undo the contract.
    Commissioners last year justified the no-bid contract by saying that the city has never received a complaint against Waste Management from a resident.
    Peter Sachs, an attorney representing Waste Management, stood to say the garbage hauler will argue that its contract is valid.
    “It looks like we’re heading toward litigation,” City Attorney Brian Shutt said.    

By Tim Pallesen

    The long-awaited Trader Joe’s shopping center goes before city commissioners July 9, but still with concerns that shoppers might not have enough parking.
    The city’s Site Plan Review and Appearance Board on June 12 finally recommended approval for the Delray Place shopping center, on the southeast corner of Linton Boulevard and Federal Highway, after 18 months of controversy and delays.
    Trader Joe’s is eager to compete with a new Fresh Market under construction across the street.
    But SPRAB Chairman Scott Porten, who studied the demand for parking at other Trader Joe’s locations, warned that the new Delray Beach location might require more parking spaces than the developer is willing to provide.
    “I don’t think the parking works,” Porten told developer Joe Carosella. “If your center is successful, you will have parking problems.”
    Board member Rustem Kupi agreed. “Parking is going to be a nightmare,” he predicted.
    After the meeting, Porten said the highly popular specialty grocer is drawing unexpectedly large crowds wherever it opens.
    “When I researched, I learned Trader Joe’s is having inadequate-parking problems all over the country,” he said.
    But Porten, the incoming chairman of the Delray Beach Chamber of Commerce, joined a chorus of business leaders to praise the overall Delray Place project, which also will have Dick’s Sporting Goods and several restaurants as tenants.
    “This project will kick-start redevelopment on the South Federal Highway corridor,” city Economic Development Director Vin Nolan said.
    “The developer has done what is prudent and then some,” SPRAB board member Jose Aquila said. “I think it’s time to say thank you.”
    “We need to cut to the chase and get this going,” said Kelli Freeman, president of the Tropic Isle Homeowners Association.
    The Tropic Isle neighborhood had been split over the next-door shopping center, with the closest homeowners objecting to it. But Ron Kolins, the attorney for 12 families who opposed Delray Place, reported June 12 that all but one homeowner now favors the project after negotiations with the developer. “Our issues have been satisfactorily resolved,” Kolins said.
    The lone holdout, Nancy Schnabel, appealed to the advisory board. “Please help us. This is a real intrusion on our lifestyle,” she said.
    But her next-door neighbor Steve Michael said Delray Place will improve his quality of life. “These developers are quality guys. This center will be a great addition to our area,” Michael said.
    The advisory board fussed with the developer over the design that motorists will see at the intersection of Linton and Federal Highway, striving to achieve what city planner Ron Hoggard described as an “importance to the site.”
    Everyone agreed a fountain with a colonnade and clock tower will do. Trader Joe’s and other tenants must post their signs away from the corner. 

One of the six buildings proposed as part of the Atlantic Crossing project. This one is seen looking northeast at the corner of Federal Highway and Atlantic Avenue. Rendering provided

By Tim Pallesen
    
A new design plan proposed for Atlantic Crossing eliminates truck traffic onto Atlantic Avenue.
    Coastal residents had feared that the controversial multiuse project would cause traffic congestion near the bridge. Mayor Cary Glickstein had vowed to vote against the developer’s site plan if truck traffic weren’t rerouted to Federal Highway.
    ‘‘We heard loud and clear,” project manager Don DeVere said, as the Atlantic Crossing developer presented its redone design to the city on June 25 for approval this summer.
    Four architectural firms spent the past six months redesigning the project to appear smaller after city commissioners gave density and height approvals in December. Downtown Delray Beach firm Currie, Sowards, Aguila acted as consulting architect on all the buildings.
    “We challenged our design team to return to the drawing board to capture Delray’s authentic look and feel,” said Jeff Edwards, president of the Edwards Companies, the developer in a joint venture with Rexall founder Carl De Santis.
    The new plan proposes six buildings with different architectural styles ranging from Mediterranean to Art Deco.
“Atlantic Crossing will appear to have been built over time, by different hands,” local architect Bob Currie said. Terraces, balconies and canopies have been added to soften the appearance.
    The $200 million project includes 280 rental apartments, 82 condos, 83,000 square feet of office space and 76,000 square feet of shops and restaurants.
    City staff has seven weeks to review the new plan before it goes first to the Site Plan Review and Appearance Board and then to the commission for final approval.                         

By Tim O’Meilia
    
Owners who rent out their single-family homes in Ocean Ridge will now have to register each rental property at Town Hall for $50 annually.
    But some residents say the rental registration will do little to discourage short-term rentals in single-family neighborhoods.
    “It’s not going to do anything to the bad guys,” resident Bernd Schulte told the Town Commission at the June 3 meeting after members voted 4-0 to institute the registration requirement. “The good guys are going to register, but the bad guys aren’t. I think you’re wasting your time.”
    Residents have complained that weekly and even biweekly rentals disrupt single-family neighborhoods and that renters have no investment in the upkeep and security of the neighborhood.
    Town law allows homes to be rented for a minimum of 30 days and forbids homes from being occupied by more than five unrelated persons.  
    The registration law does not apply to apartments or dwellings governed by a condominium association or cooperative.
    Violators could be fined up to $250 for a first offense and $500 for further violations. But some residents pointed out that one oceanfront estate rented for $8,000 a week and that a $250 fine would be little deterrent.
    “I would really like to see something that carries a strong penalty,” said resident Betty Bingham. She also wants the 30-day rental minimum expanded. “The issue is we’re not correcting the problem.”
    In March, Police Chief Chris Yannuzzi said 14 complaints of short-term rentals were made, but most at the same property. He said enforcement typically depends on neighbors filing a complaint.
    “This is still going to rely on our neighbors to complain,” Commissioner Gail Adams Aaskov said. “This all seems a little ridiculous,” said Debbie Brookes, whose husband, Ed, is a commissioner. “It’s only going to be enforced if they register. Basically, this ordinance doesn’t have any teeth.”
    In other business, the Town Commission:
• Edged toward reversing decades-old plans to phase out the town’s only commercial strip, asking Town Manager Ken Schenck to negotiate the cost of a change in the town’s comprehensive plan to allow both commercial and residential uses at the 5011 building on North Ocean Boulevard at the town’s south border. The two-story, five-store and four-apartment property is scheduled to become residential-only in July 2014. Building owner Lisa Sivitilli agreed to bring plans to spruce up the strip for continued commercial use. The building houses a barber shop, real estate office, a triathlon shop, The Coastal Star and an empty store. The plan changes could cost $10,000.
    • Approved spending $213,000 from town reserves for drainage repairs to the Inlet Cay cul-de-sac.
    • Tentatively approved, by a 3-1 vote, a $1,000 bonus to retiring police Sgt. Eve Eubanks. Commissioner Ed Brookes said the bonus violates a policy set by the commission two years ago to give $100 bonuses for each year after 20 years to retiring employees. Eubanks was a 15-year employee.                                   Ú

By Tim O’Meilia
    
Ocean Ridge police will be patrolling the narrow streets of Briny Breezes, checking for unlocked doors and writing tickets for illegal parking at the beach for another three years.
    The Briny Breezes Town Council unanimously approved a new three-year contract June 27 for police services with its northerly neighbor. Ocean Ridge was the only agency to bid on the contract, although the town invited bids from Delray Beach, Boynton Beach, Gulf Stream and the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office.
    Briny will pay Ocean Ridge $203,500 the first year, $18,500 more than under the current contract. The cost will increase 1.5 percent per year plus any rise in the consumer price index. The new agreement goes into effect Oct. 1.
    “I think it’s fair and equitable,” said Alderman Peter Fingerhut.
    “I appreciate your confidence in us for the past three years,” Ocean Ridge Town Manager Ken Schenck told the council.
    In other business, the council:
    • Agreed to a new contract with Hi-Byrd Inspections that calls for an increase in permit review and inspection fee costs. The council asked the town attorney to draft a new inspection fee schedule that increases permit applications from $60 to $85 and sets individual inspection fees of $85. Currently, the $60 fee covers all inspections but the town pays additional fees for multiple inspections that it does not recoup from residents.
    • Set budget workshops for July 11 and 12 at 1 p.m. The July 25 regular meeting was canceled because the council will lack a quorum.       

Delray Beach Ocean Rescue personnel searched for the 17-year-old who drowned recently at Gulfstream Park. From left: Ocean Rescue Officers Raphael Costa and Kyle Stewart, Superintendent James Scala, Ocean Rescue Officers Justin Walton and Justin Rumbaugh and Lt. Luigi Pratt. Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star

By Jane Smith

The scanner crackled: “Possible near drowning” in Gulf Stream.
Delray Beach Fire-Rescue responded about 2:30 p.m. on that last Friday in May.
Soon a battalion chief would interrupt a meeting to summon Ocean Rescue Superintendent James Scala to the beach. He was needed to lead the search for the missing swimmer.
Rodelson Normil, 17, disappeared in the rough surf, in an unguarded area about a half-mile south of Gulfstream Park.
Scala began to conduct the search in a methodical manner, using guidelines from the United States Lifesaving Association. His Ocean Rescue staff belongs to the group known for its high physical membership standards.
First, Scala talked with Normil’s friend.
“I needed to be certain he was in the water and where he went under,” Scala said. He had been part of two other searches where the missing swimmer was found to be alive — and on land. The exact place Normil was last seen determined a starting point for the search.
After speaking with the friend, Scala saw the head of the rip current where Normil was last seen. Not a strong swimmer, the Boynton Beach teen likely panicked when the rip current pulled him away from the beach.
Scala looked to the ocean to check the water’s visibility and the current direction. On May 31, the ocean was choppy, diminishing visibility to zero. The 10- to 15-mph winds from the east created perfect conditions for rip currents.
Ocean Rescue staff would later call the conditions that day “the worst possible” for a search.
Scala next organized his staff to do a grid search. He stayed on the beach, watching his team execute the search. He received periodic updates from his line leader, Justin Rumbaugh.
He put down a marker on the beach, lining up with the spot where Normil was last seen in the ocean. Rumbaugh, with four years’ experience in Delray Beach, then reviewed the grid pattern with the other lifeguards.
The line leader is picked usually because he can talk the loudest to his teammates in the ocean.
The person also knows the USLA hand signals, such as when a guard swims 10 strokes underwater, resurfaces and touches his head: That means the guard is OK.
The poor visibility forced the guards to swim close together when doing the search.
The Ocean Rescue staff had to close one of its beaches to swimming when it sent two guards via an ATV to help with the search, about 3 miles north of the city’s beaches. The other guards who assisted the search in its early minutes were Justin Walton and Rafael Costa, both with two years’ full-time experience in Delray Beach.
When Rumbaugh as the line leader told the guards where to turn, they realigned and swam perpendicular to the direction they were just swimming, using the same grid pattern. Then they switched and swam back in the opposite direction until they passed the point where Normil was last seen, about 250 feet out in the ocean. That way, every area was searched.
“I am really proud of the staff,” Scala said. “Even when there was a break to review the search pattern and a beachgoer brought them some water to drink, no one took it. They just wanted to get back to searching for Normil.”
Despite the precise, coordinated effort, the body of the young swimmer was not recovered.
Turbulent waves and poor visibility made the May 31 rescue efforts especially challenging.  Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star

Training and teamwork
Twice a year for a full month, Delray trains its lifeguards in the USLA search and recovery method, said Eric Feld, an operations supervisor. The guards train in the classroom and the ocean three to four times a week for one hour during that training month.
In May, Ocean Rescue staff had just refreshed their search and recovery skills, he said. Ocean Rescue lifeguards also are emergency medical technicians, said Scala, who has worked at the city division for 10 years.
The May 31 grid search was truly a multi-agency effort, he said.
Delray Beach guards were joined by three from Palm Beach County Ocean Rescue. Mark Rodrick, a 15-year veteran with the county, came down from Ocean Inlet Park to help. Two guards, Cathy Conlin and Michael Soutter, arrived from nearby Gulfstream Park. Both have 29 years of lifeguarding experience.
The poor visibility underwater made goggles useless, Scala said. The guards needed only flippers and buoy markers. When they could no longer feel the bottom, they dived under until they could and then resurfaced, looking back and lining themselves up with the team.
Delray Beach later sent two more guards up to the search effort. They were Luigi Pratt with seven years’ experience and Kyle Stewart with more than two years’ experience as city lifeguards.
“They executed the search and worked as a team. Scala said. “All that training pays off. … It was physically demanding.”
Through an agreement with the town of Gulf Stream, Delray Beach Fire-Rescue handles the town’s emergency calls. Fire-Rescue was in charge of the call when it first went out as a missing swimmer, Capt. Curtis Jackson said.
The department had its entire special ops unit, Fire Station 5 and a battalion chief on the beach, he said. Two of its paramedics, Tyler Adams and Mark Szrejter, aided Ocean Rescue in search, along with Phil Wotton, district captain with Palm Beach County Ocean Rescue.
About 3:15 p.m., when the missing swimmer call became a search and recovery mission, the U.S. Coast Guard took control.
It sent a helicopter from Miami, an 87-foot cutter from the Fort Pierce Inlet and a boat from the Lake Worth Inlet, according to Petty Officer Mark Barney.
The helicopter had a four-person crew: two pilots, a swimmer and a mechanic. One pilot flew the helicopter in a rectangular spiral pattern while the three others visually searched their assigned quadrants, so that no area of the ocean was missed, Barney said.
On an overcast day, the helicopter flies a few hundred feet above the ocean. The crew twice reported seeing something in the water that the Ocean Rescue lifeguards used to redirect their search.
Unfortunately, they never found Normil.
His body probably met with one of two outcomes.
The littoral drift or longshore current comes close to the shore in that area of Florida, according to John Fletemeyer, a lifeguard turned sea turtle monitor and coastal researcher at Florida International University.
“So possibly the teen’s body was carried up the coast,” he said.
When a person drowns, his lungs empty, dropping the body to the ocean floor, he said. After a few days, it fills with gases and the body floats to the surface.
The other possibility is even more grim: “The sharks [may have] got to it,” he said.
Rip currents are the No. 1 problem at the beach, according to Fletemeyer. “One hundred fifty people die annually in rip currents, making them more serious than shark bites or lightning strikes,” he said.
Fletemeyer and the other lifeguards said Normil’s disappearance serves as a cautionary reminder for ocean enthusiasts: Always swim near a lifeguard.       

Margaret Blume is awarded a gift during the opening of the Blume Literacy Center on the Brenda and C.P. Medore Campus. Brenda and C.P. Medore are at left. Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star

By Ron Hayes
    
    As a child growing up in small-town Waxahatchie, Texas, Brenda Medore used to visit the Carnegie library and marvel at the beauty of the building, and the magic of the books.
    “I just thought that library was so wonderful,” she remembers. “I’d go in and look up, and my mouth would fall open.”
    Medore lives in Gulf Stream now, but she brought her love of reading with her. And now she’s put her money where her mouth is.
    On June 20, she and her husband, C.P., were among the happy crowd of donors and friends gathered at 3651 Quantum Blvd., Boynton Beach to celebrate the opening of the Blume Literacy Center on the Brenda & C.P. Medore Campus.
    “C.P. and I have always shared a great love of reading,” she said, “maybe even taking for granted our ability to read. Now we want to help children and adults have every opportunity to learn to read.”
    When Founding President Gale Howden established the Literacy Coalition of Palm Beach County in 1989, its headquarters consisted of a desk and phone in the United Way building. For 20 years, the coalition pressed on from a crowded office in a bank building on Federal Highway in Delray Beach.
    Now, the coalition has a permanent home —12,000 square feet in a brand-new, $3.5 million building just north of Gateway Boulevard.
    At the evening’s open house, CEO Darlene Kostrub told the throng that she’d been cleaning out her files recently, preparing for the move, when she happened on a 2006 email from a staff member. A Boca Raton woman named Margaret Blume had called, wanting to know more about the coalition’s mission. Blume’s pledge of $2 million gave birth to a capital campaign, and the Medores’ major gift of $500,000 financed the campus. In the end, 525 donors have allowed the new center to open debt-free. And they weren’t all grown-ups, either.

Dorothea Zarcadoolas, 8, and other local children were also honored for their fundraising. Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star

    Dorothea Zarcadoolas is an 8-year-old book lover from Ocean Ridge, a third-grader at Gulf Stream School who loves the Diary Of a Wimpy Kid and Dork Diary books.
    “We have to go in at night and tell her to turn off the reading light,” says her dad, Paul.
    When she heard about the coalition’s capital drive, Dorothea started working her phone. “She called me up and asked for money for the Literacy Coalition,” recalls her aunt, Anthea Hancock. “I said, ‘What’s the Literacy Coalition?’”
    By the time she finished calling relatives, young Dorothea had raised $1,000.
    And she wasn’t alone.
    Young readers Caroline Calder, Sophia Dickenson and Maya Kumar also raised $1,000 each. Their names are listed on the donor wall, too, along with Blume and the Medores.
    As caterers moved through the crowd with hors d’oeuvres and young violinists added subdued background music, Kostrub described what a new building will mean for the coalition’s mission.
    “This is going to expand what we can do,” she said. “In the past, we could only tutor children who attended the schools where we had an after-school program. Now we have a place where we can both train our tutors and invite children from anywhere who need some extra help.”
    Since those early desk-and-phone days, the coalition has distributed more than 794,000 free books to poor children. Now they have a “book distribution center,” shelf after shelf of children’s books ready to be handed out in pediatrician’s offices.
    The AmeriCorps volunteers who have tallied 494,000 hours of tutoring over the years have their own training space now.
    There are offices for training adult readers, including the Family Education Program in Belle Glade, where migrant parents and their children gather to learn English together.
    As Margaret Blume said, “There’s something so simple and pure and beautiful about teaching someone to read.”
    And then she asked Darlene Kostrub to step outside once more.
    A shrouded figure had appeared beside the building.
    The cloth was pulled away to reveal a statue of a familiar woman reading to a small child.
    The sculpture, by Delray Beach artist Frank Varga, is called Reading With Darlene, a tribute to the woman who has led the coalition since 1992, helping men, women and children in Palm Beach County learn to read.                           

If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you know someone who can’t, visit www.literacypbc.org or call 800-273-1030.

By Tim O’Meilia

    Budget managers in eight of nine South County coastal communities can exhale.
    Taxable real estate values — the stuff property taxes are made of — continues to creep back toward pre-recession levels.
    Taxable property values in eight towns increased this year and all at a greater rate than last year. Four of them matched or outpaced the Palm Beach County-wide uptick of 4.2 percent.
    Only Briny Breezes — a town of fewer than 500 mobile homes — continued to lose value, dropping 0.75 percent, but even that was a smaller decline than last year.
    “It’s getting a little better each year,” said Ocean Ridge Town Manager Ken Schenck, where values increased 3.87 percent. “It’s never going to get back to where it was, but maybe that’s a good thing.”
    Manalapan and Delray Beach saw the largest increases, both topping 6.4 percent.
    One upside of more property taxes to spend is that towns won’t be forced to dip into their reserves to balance the budget, as some have in recent years.
    “We might have a chance to catch up on capital projects,” said Highland Beach Town Manager Kathleen Weiser, referring to renovating the Town Hall or replacing aging police cars, projects that had been put off because of the bad economy.
    South Palm Beach is not expecting a windfall with its 0.54 percent increase.
“At least it’s better than being down 1 percent” as the town was last year, said Town Manager Rex Taylor.
    Even the increased property values won’t make budgeting any easier.
“We don’t know what the Affordable Health Care Act will do to our health insurance rates (for employees). The quotes are all over the place,” Taylor said.
“And,” he added, “the retirement system rates are going up.”                                 

Ayşe Papatya Bucak, 41, author of The History of Girls, will see her work published in the 2013 PEN/O’Henry Prize Stories and the 2014 Pushcart Prizes: Best of the Small Presses XXXVIII. Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star

By Ron Hayes

    On the wall of her third-floor office in Florida Atlantic University’s Culture & Society Building, the director of the university’s creative writing program has posted a sign she doesn’t need to read.
    Live What You Love.
    The sign is there to inspire all those aspiring novelists and poets Ayşe Papatya Bucak encourages — and criticizes — each term. 
    “Yes, I was one of those,” she says with a laugh. “As a child, once I’d learned to read, I thought, ‘Oh, how do you do this?’ You want to create what you’ve enjoyed so much.”
    Bucak’s love of reading led to a love of writing. And now, living what she loves has led to her upcoming appearance in two of the nation’s most prestigious fiction anthologies.
    In September, The History of Girls, an eerie tale of the living and dead conversing under a collapsed building, will be published in the 2013 PEN/O’Henry Prize Stories.
    And next year, Iconography, a surreal fable of a university hunger striker, can be found in the 2014 Pushcart Prizes: Best of the Small Presses XXXVIII.
    For those unfamiliar with the O’Henry and Pushcart prizes, suffice it to say that Bucak joins such writers as John Irving, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, Saul Bellow and Tim O’Brien, all previous winners of one or both awards.
    “It’s been a nice year,” she says.
    Bucak (pronounced Boo-jack) was born in Istanbul of a Turkish father and American mother and came to Ardmore, Pa., at the age of 4. She earned a B.A. from Princeton University, an M.F.A. from Arizona State, and has been at FAU since 2003. She lives in Delray Beach.
    “The first thing I tell my students is, ‘Tortoise beats hare,’ ” she says. “They’re 23, and they want to be rich and famous and published. But you have to put your time in. It helps to have talent, but perseverance is far more necessary.”
    Bucak knows. An early novel, Wood For Stone, never sold. One publisher was interested but wanted a stronger, more commercial plot. She declined. Since then, her short fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, Glimmer Train and Prairie Schooner, among other literary reviews.
    “I’m lucky,” she says. “I have a full-time job, so I don’t have to be commercial to keep my house. I can write what I want.”
    Right now, she’s concentrating on a series of short stories that draw on her Turkish heritage, while pondering a second novel.   
    “Commercial fiction helps you get away from life,” she says. “Literary fiction makes you want to engage life. I’m interested in writing that’s accessible but also wants to say something.”
    In addition to writing and teaching, Bucak keeps a blog, Reading For Writers, on which she comments on the books she’s read and writers she admires.
    “My favorite novel of all time is Catch-22,” she says. “That’s my desert island book.”
    Even on that desert island, though, she would still write.
    “I tell my students they have to learn how to write any place, under any circumstances, for any length of time,” she says.
    Or, as the sign on her door puts it: Don’t Forget To
Write.                                       

  Bucak’s blog, Reading For Writers, can be visited at http://readingforwriters.blogspot.com/p/personal-favorites.html.

Designed to feel like an old farmhouse, the breezeway of Lantana airport has Old Florida charm.
Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star

By Jane Smith
    
Former Manalapan Mayor Kelly Gottlieb loves flying out of the Lantana airport.
    She points to its Old Florida terminal and the relaxed atmosphere as the reasons she’s used the airport for 15 years to park her Cessna 210.
    “When I have out-of-town visitors,” she said, “I take them to the terminal to show them a piece of Americana.”
    The terminal, built in the style of an Old Florida farmhouse with a breezeway through the middle, has an office with wooden benches and model planes hanging from the ceiling. The office also is filled with other bits of Palm Beach County aviation history, including old flight maps on the wall.
    That homespun history probably will change next April when a new company takes over operations at the county’s general aviation airport, officially known as Palm Beach County Park Airport. It sits at the northeast corner of Congress Avenue and Lantana Road.

Bids due this month
    Bids were originally due June 21, but that was extended to July 19. They will include proposals from companies that attended a mandatory pre-bid meeting in May. The leading contenders are: Landmark Aviation, based in Houston, which operates the Pahokee and Palm Beach Gardens airports and three other Florida airports; Galaxy Aviation, with operations at Palm Beach International and Boca Raton airports and three other Florida airports; and Sheltair Aviation, based in Orlando, which operates the Executive Airport in Fort Lauderdale and 13 others in Florida. No representatives from these companies could be reached for comment.
    The county airports department also has requested bids to develop a corner section of that airport property. The airports department wants to rent the vacant land. At the end of the lease, it would take control of the buildings.
    Most of the companies that attended the pre-bid meeting to run the Lantana airport also sent representatives to the pre-bid meeting to build a hotel, restaurant, gas station with retail or other commercial project.
    Bids for that project also are due on July 19.

Owen Gassaway III photographed at his Florida Airmotive building at the Lantana airport. Suspended above Owen is a Beech 18 with a tail number ending in LG.  Up until the 1990s, LG was the aircraft registration tag that refered to Lantana Gassaway. At the right is a photo of Owen’s father, Owen H. Gassaway Jr., and his mother, Alice Gassaway.  Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star

Airmotive spent millions
    For the current Lantana airport operator, Florida Airmotive, it’s the end to the company’s lofty place in Palm Beach County aviation history. Owen Gassaway Jr., a fixture in the local aviation community, started that company in 1941.
    Since 1975, Florida Airmotive, with the older Gassaway at the helm, has had the ground lease with the county airports department. In 1986, his company secured a 20-year lease with a five-year renewal option.
    His company spent millions to turn the airport — oft-described as “the junkyard” because of its decrepit buildings — into a homey showcase that pilots, student pilots and visitors would enjoy.
    He died in 2007, and now his only son, Owen Gassaway III, operates Florida Airmotive.
    Asked why his company isn’t a bidder, he said, “The county was not interested in extending the lease.”
    That might be the only common ground between the county’s department of airports and Florida Airmotive.
    “Florida Airmotive has had the lease for 25 years — an extensive time — now it’s time for someone else to get the contract,” said Bruce Pelly, the county’s airports director. “It was advertised; anybody who qualifies can put in a bid.”
    The county is looking for a good, competent operator, he said. “We’re not looking to make changes, we just want to improve it.”

County seeks more revenue
    The Lantana airport, with 125,000 takeoffs or landings in 2012, is restricted to fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters; jets are not allowed to land there. It does not have an aircraft control tower, and aircraft follow a voluntary noise-abatement plan. It also does not charge landing fees.
    Most of those aircraft operations are touch-and-go landings practiced by student pilots at the three flight schools based at the Lantana airport, Gassaway said.
    The county airports department makes money from the Lantana airport in several ways: ground rent, share of the rent charged to tenants in the hangars, a share of the tie-downs and a 5-cent surcharge on fuel used by aircraft.
    That totaled $120,000 in the most recent financial year, said Mike Simmons, finance director for the county airports department. (The airports department budget is not part of the county’s general fund.)
    Starting in April, the department is looking to make $200,000 annually from the hangar rentals, plus an additional $9,487.50 for ground rental of the 14.63 acres, and an additional $10,000-plus from fuel sales (204,430 gallons were sold in 2012), according to its proposal.
    It is offering a $2 million rent credit to the new Lantana airport operator to fix or replace the hangars. It had originally offered $1 million but doubled the amount after potential bidders said more money was needed to do the repairs.
    The hangar ownership became a contested issue between the county and Florida Airmotive. The county won in court because it had included a standard clause in its lease with Florida Airmotive, saying at the end of the ground lease the improvements would revert to the county.
    Gassaway concedes that his company was on the losing end of that litigation, but he adds that the county can’t take control of the hangars until his lease runs out in 2014.
    His company also contested the designation of the non-airport-use parcel more than 10 years ago, when his dad was still alive. They have a collection of letters from local and government officials saying the land should not be developed in case the airport needs it.
    “We might not need it today, or tomorrow, but in the future,” the son said. It’s the last piece of open land near the coast that could be used for airport expansion, he said.
    The airports department will put a standard clause in the land lease for that 5.99-acre parcel, according to Laura Beebe, deputy director. The clause would state that the parcel may be needed by the Federal Aviation Administration in the future, but she thinks it is unlikely to happen.

School is part of plan
    Also at the airport, plans are in the works for a new magnet school, operated by BASA Aeronautics Inc. The nonprofit runs its Aerospace Academy now at the Boynton Beach High School.
    It needs work space for high school students and adults to train to be certified jet engine mechanics and airframe technicians, said Paul Hershorin, director of the magnet program and assistant professor at the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach. The foundation has commitments from two people to pay for the $2 million facility, he said. The school still has to work out its lease with the county.

Pilots hope charm remains
    Many pilots who use it, including Gottlieb, the ex-Manalapan mayor, and Gary Kosinski of Ocean Ridge, love the Lantana airport.
    Since 1999, Kosinski has parked his plane there. The airport’s “old charm and simplicity make it one of the nation’s wonderfully unique fields,” he said. “The crew at Florida Airmotive and the aircraft and maintenance at Palm Beach Aircraft are second to none.”
    Still, he sees the need for significant renovations and upgraded hangar space.
    He and the other pilots are hoping the new operator will maintain the old charm while updating the facilities.
    As to what Gassaway will be doing next April when his Florida Airmotive turns over the keys to the Lantana airport, he plans to “get in the unemployment line. I hope it still exists.”                                                     

Summer delights at the Sundy House prepared by Executive Chef Lindsay Autry and Pastry Chef Sarah Sipe.

Libby Volgyes/The Coastal Star

By Mary Thurwachter

Sure, it’s sweltering outside. But good news can be found in local restaurants where easy-on-the-wallet summer specials abound. Here are some examples:

Boca Raton/Deerfield Beach
Jazziz (201 Plaza Real, Boca Raton, 300-0730) offers live music, prime steaks and seafood with a summer prix fixe menu for $27.
A three-course prix fixe summer menu for $36 (dinner) or $23 (lunch) is available at Kathy’s Gazebo Café (4199 N. Federal Highway, Boca Raton, 395-6033) through July 20.
Stephane’s Steak & Seafood (2006 N.W. Executive Center Circle, Boca Raton, 893-8838) has a three-course summer menu for just $49.95 per person. It includes entrée-size portions, and is available through the end of September, seven days a week from 4 p.m. to closing.
Celebrating its 10th anniversary, Oceans 234 (234 N. Oceans Blvd., Deerfield Beach, 954-428-2539) rolled out several new menu items and some are being offered as summer specials. Lobster, shrimp and crab omelets with goat cheese and spinach are $18.99; Oreo cheesecake is $8.99; spinach artichoke dip with crostini, $12.99; baby spinach salad, $12.99; Cobb salad, $14.99; Shrimp Fra Diavolo (clams, mussels and marinara over linguini, $31.99: and Grilled Bronzini (roasted potatoes, spinach, lemon) is $28.99.

Boynton Beach
At Cafe Frankie (640 E. Ocean Ave., Boynton Beach, 732-3834), diners can save 50 percent on appetizers between 4:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. and half off on any bottle of wine between 8 and 10 p.m. Other summer savings include $8.99-$9.99 dine-in pizza special from 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, or takeout pizza for the same prices Monday through Wednesday. There also are $5.99 lunch specials every day.

Delray Beach
75 Main (actually at 270 E. Atlantic Ave., 243-7975 or 266-3687) is offering a three-course prix fixe dinner for $37.99, Monday through Thursday, through September.  The dinner includes a choice of any two items on the dinner menu plus dessert.  
If you select from the seasonally inspired prix fixe menu for a three-course dinner for two (Sunday through Thursday) at the Atlantic Grille at the Seagate Hotel (1000 E. Atlantic Ave., Delray Beach, 665-4800) for $33 per person, you also get a bottle of wine. The promotion runs through September. Also new this summer is Blues Night, featuring Orson Whitfield, Andrew Brennan and Joey Gilmore, every Thursday from 8 to 11 p.m.
All-day happy hour (11 a.m.-7 p.m.) is back at Deck 84 (840 E. Atlantic Ave., Delray Beach, 665-8484). The waterside restaurant also features a “five for $10” lunch menu, which includes your choice of one of five lunch entrees and a drink for only $10. New this summer is the launch of a company-wide loyalty program which will earn diners a $30 gift card when they spend $300 at any of restaurant group’s locations: Henry’s, Deck 84, E&J’s Sandwich Shop, Bogart’s Bar & Grille and Burt & Max’s.
A chef’s tasting menu ­— three courses for $35 — is available at 50 Ocean (50 S. Ocean Ave., Delray Beach, 278-3364) from 5 to 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday.

Interpretation of a banana cream pie by Max’s Harvest in Delray Beach. Photo provided

In Pineapple Grove at Max’s Harvest (169 N.E. Second Ave., Delray Beach, 381-9970) you can bring your receipt back within 30 days to receive 10 percent off your next meal. Like wine? Go there Monday nights and get 50 percent off. The restaurant has been offering brown bag lunches  ($10-$20) available through the Delivery Dudes (900-7060 or www.deliverdudes.com). Dinner is available for delivery, too. (Lunch is only available through the Delivery Dudes.  Dine-in lunch is not available.)
A summer comfort menu with a twist is a draw at The Office (201 E. Atlantic Ave., Delray Beach, 276-3600). Chef Joe Coletto’s menu provides the option of choosing two courses for $25 (either an appetizer and an entrée, or an entrée and a dessert) or three courses, for $35 (one appetizer, one entrée and one dessert). This menu is available for lunch and dinner, Sunday through Thursday, through Sept. 30. Tax and gratuity are additional.

Local Shrimp Salad on a brioche bun with butter lettuce at The Sundy House. Libby Volgyes/The Coastal Star

The tropical gardens at Sundy House (106 S. Swinton Ave., Delray Beach, 272-5678) are lovely any time, but summer offers a special treat for diners. They can create their own tasting with “A Taste of Summer.” Just select one item per category. Pick two items for $16 or pick three items for $20.  Starters, main courses and sweets are available. Menus change throughout the season. Garden strolls are always free.
Vic & Angelo’s (290 E. Atlantic Ave. in Delray Beach, 278-9570) has a summer tasting menu where diners may customize their choices. On Sundays through Thursdays (through September), two, three-course Summer Tasting Menus, for $25 and $35 per person, excluding tax and gratuity are available. A bottle of Coastal Vines Pinot Grigio, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon or Pinot Noir may be added for $15.

Lake Worth
Lake Worth is 100 years old this year, and two restaurants there are offering summer specials to commemorate the anniversary. At Callaro’s (717 Lake Ave., 588-9730) diners will also find a three-course menu for $19.13, with 11 entrees including an 8-ounce strip steak, crab cake and a double-cut pork chop. The menu is available for lunch and dinner.
Couco Pazzo (915 Lake Ave., 585-0320) has a summer prix fixe menu, which is three courses for $19.13.  
 
Palm Beach
Palm Beach eateries roll out the specials this time of year. All the restaurants at The Breakers (1 S. County Road, Palm Beach, 659-8488) have special menus for the summer. The Italian Restaurant offers family friendly cuisine with a three-course dinner menu for $35. The Seafood Bar, for casual oceanfront dining and cocktails, offers a three-course menu for $39.50. At The Flagler Steakhouse Prime Steaks & Seafood (2 S. County Road) a two-course lunch menu is available for $20.13, a three-course dinner menu starting at $49.50; and a three-course Sunday brunch for $35.

Octopus a la plancha from Boulud Sud, the pop-up at Cafe Boulud. Photo provided

Cafe Boulud Palm Beach at the Brazilian Court Hotel (301 Australian Ave., Palm Beach, 655-6060), is serving up some tantalizing and wallet-friendly dining  deals. Through Labor Day, from noon until 2:30 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, a three-course prix fixe luncheon menu is offered for $20.03, commemorating the restaurant’s opening year, 2003. Three-course prix fixe dinners, also are available at $35 seven nights from 5:30 p.m. until 10 p.m. BYOB Tuesdays are under way until Oct. 7. Bring your own bottles to pair with Executive Chef Jim Leiken’s cuisine. Corkage fees are waived and there is no limit.
Café Boulud Palm Beach also invites diners on a culinary journey to the Mediterranean with the return of its popular pop-up restaurant, Chef Daniel Boulud’s Manhattan-based Boulud Sud. The pop-up operates as a stand-alone restaurant on Café Boulud’s air-conditioned terrace within the fountain courtyard through Sept. 2, for dinner seven days a week. The pop-up will serve à la carte dinner menu daily from 5:30 to 10 p.m., and a three-course prix fixe menu for $35 per person on Saturday and Sunday.

The Four Seasons Resort will offer Friday clam bakes at its Atlantic Bar & Grill. Photo provided

Friday night clam bakes at the Four Seasons Resort (2800 S. Ocean Blvd., 582-2800) are becoming a coastal tradition at the resort’s Atlantic Bar & Grill. Lanterns illuminate tables just steps from the seashore. The menu features a family style traditional clambake including clams, lobster, chicken, Italian sausage, potatoes and corn-on-the-cob and desserts such as s’mores, and strawberry shortcake jars. There is one seating at 7 p.m. Cost is $45 per person ($20 for children 12 and under). Reservations are required.
Sunday family style dinners are served up in another Four Seasons restaurant, Graze. There, Italian- and French-inspired fare meets the local flavors by the pool during family style dinners weekly through September. The menu varies monthly to feature the seasonal ingredients. Cost is $40 per person ($15 for kids 12 and under). Reservations are required (533-3740).

Trevini Ristorante is offering 20 percent off food and beverages through September. Photo provided

    Trevini Ristorante (290 Sunset Ave., Palm Beach, 833-3883) gives diners 20 percent off of all food and beverages through September.                              

The Plate: Ceviche de la Casa
The Place: Ceviche, 116 N.E. Sixth Ave., Delray Beach; 894-8599 or ceviche.com
The Price: $10
The Skinny: It’s amazing how something so good can be good for you.
We’re talking about ceviche, that raw seafood that cooks in citrus juices.
But we also could be talking about Ceviche, the tapas bar and restaurant that has opened an outpost at the former Falcon House just north of downtown Delray Beach.
Inside, the space is charming and cottage-like. After all, it is a former cottage.
But one cannot imagine the original residents dining on this mix of shrimp, sea scallops, squid and market fish marinated in a mix of lime juice and garlic, tomatoes, Spanish onions, peppers, cilantro and jalapeño.
The seafood in this dish was marinated to al dente perfection.
The menu focuses on ceviche and Spanish tapas items, but there also are full entrees.Those with heartier appetites may enjoy the Morrillo de Cochinillo ($18.95), a roasted pork shank in Rioja red wine.
— Scott Simmons

Journey Church is raising the roof on the former Grace Community Church. Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star

By Tim Pallesen

    The arrival of the Journey Church in East Boynton is raising the roof.
    The original $2 million project announced last year to accept Grace Community Church’s gracious gift of church property at 715 S. Federal Highway has grown into a $3.5 million renovation project.
    The 12-foot ceiling in the original sanctuary will double in height to 24 feet so it also can be a large gymnasium when the new Journey Church opens in November.
    “The scope of the project got bigger,” the Rev. Scott Baugh said. “It has moved from being just a place to worship on Sundays to become a seven-day-a-week community center.”
    About 1,300 people attend the congregation’s Sunday worship services now at Park Vista High School. Many are young families with children.
    The elderly members of Grace Community Church were so impressed by the Journey Church’s spiritual energy last year that they gave their church to the younger congregation.
    Journey Church members have contributed $1.2 million to prepare their new church home since then. Another $400,000 fundraising drive is under way now.
    “They’re really pumped,” Baugh said. “A lot of people have made sacrifices.”
    This won’t be the typical church when it opens.
    “When people enter our lobby, they will feel like they are walking into a giant Starbucks,” the pastor says.
    Journey Night Out on Wednesdays will be open to the community, with food trucks and access for children to the gymnasium and giant indoor play area.
    Recovering alcoholics and drug addicts in Celebrate Recovery will have the church for fellowship on Thursday nights. Food will be given to the poor on Mondays.
    “We feel there is a huge need in this area,” Baugh said. “It is exciting to see all the lives that are going to be touched.”
                                              ***
    Volunteering to be a sheriff’s chaplain has rewards for the chaplain, too.
    “It rekindles what originally drove them to give their life to God,” said Bill Gralnick, the sheriff’s officer who schedules the volunteers.
    Chaplains bring spiritual comfort to families after someone has died in a murder, suicide or tragic accidents where the sheriff has been called. They also ride with deputies, who often turn to the chaplains when they need spiritual guidance.
    “When you come out of seminary, all of a sudden there is this world of administration — how to pay for the new social hall, the parking lot needs to be paved. Clergymen say this is not what I originally signed up for,” Gralnick said.
    Rabbi Robert Silvers of B’nai Israel in Boca Raton agreed his religious training focused on improving the lives of others.
    “I don’t think we learned how to run a synagogue,” said Silvers, one of the first sheriff chaplains. “We learned how to minister to people.”
    Gralnick is looking for retired clergy to volunteer for daytime calls. Active clergy, with jobs during the day, cover the night shifts.
                                               ***
    An Air Force chaplain from Operation Iraqi Freedom has landed at St. Lucy Catholic Church in Highland Beach.
“My heart has always been in the South County. I’m so happy to be here,” the Rev. Daniel Horgan said.
Horgan, 41, graduated from Lynn University in Boca Raton and St. Vincent de Paul Seminary in Boynton Beach. He served at St. Vincent Ferrer Church in Delray Beach for five years before joining the Air Force. He will assist longtime St. Lucy senior pastor Rev. Gerald Grace. “I’m excited about learning from a true Irishman,” the Irish-born Horgan said.
                                              ***
    First United Methodist Church of Boca Raton is preparing for what it says will be “the largest food collection drive ever in South Palm Beach County,” in September.
    The congregation’s annual Weekend of Service began two years ago with 450 volunteers in a variety of charitable projects.
    Last September, more than 600 volunteers packaged 40,000 meals of soy, rice, vitamins and protein for delivery to children in Third World countries. Another 60,000 meals were packaged by the First Methodist congregation after Easter this year.
    Church leaders were hard-pressed to top that when they gathered to discuss a food drive for this year’s Weekend of Service.
    “Out of my mouth came the words that this will be the largest food drive ever,” said the Rev. Tom Tift, who admits to being a bit amazed by the magnitude of his proclamation.
    To gather a record amount of food, First Methodist is partnering with the Palm Beach County Food Bank, Boca Helping Hands, C.R.O.S. Ministries and the Jacobson Family Food Pantry. The congregation is rallying schools, businesses, other congregations and neighborhoods in both Boca Raton and Delray Beach to participate.
    “My dream is for this to become an annual community event where nobody realizes that First Methodist started it,” Tift said.
                                              ***
    The new associate pastor at First Presbyterian in Delray Beach began her ministry on the early morning shift at Starbucks.
Jessi Higginbotham grew up loving her Jacksonville church. So ministering came naturally as she served coffee to her 5 a.m. regulars.
“It taught me about pastoral care and taking care of people,” Higginbotham said. “They became my family.”
    After three years at Starbucks, her boss suggested she quit and go into the ministry, which she did.
    Higginbotham, 31, becomes the associate for youth and young adults at First Presbyterian. She spent the last four years as youth pastor at a church in Fayetteville, Tenn.
She replaces Rev. Aaron Janklow, who resigned last September to pursue a doctorate degree in Scotland.

Tim Pallesen writes about people of faith, their congregations, causes and community events. Email him at tcpallesen@aol.com.

Janine Tiede instructs students in the SloBody method, which she pioneered with partner Kirk Slobody and recently brought to Delray Beach. Photos by Paula Detwiller/The Coastal Star

By Paula Detwiller

When you’re dedicated to helping people stay fit and your last name is Slobody, it can be problematic. The name, which is Russian and pronounced “sla-BOH-dee,” looks a whole lot like “slow body.”
But former NCAA Division I athletes Kirk Slobody and Janine Tiede have changed the way people look at that name, turning it into a clever trademark for their fitness business.
    They teach SloBody, a type of hybrid yoga in which the S-L-O stands for strengthening, lengthening and opening. And the body, obviously, is where it all happens.
    After growing their business in Seattle for 13 years, the couple decided it was time to live in the sunshine (he had spent part of his childhood in Boca Raton). So they moved to Highland Beach earlier this year and opened a SloBody studio last month in Delray Beach.
    “We are striving to create a welcoming space that is fun but also educational,” says Tiede, 42. “We want to educate people so they can continue to do what they love to do, and have a better sense of their body and how to work with it.”
    SloBody classes combine the postures and deep breathing of yoga with other strength-building maneuvers. Each student uses a yoga mat, but instead of East Indian music or chanting in the background, you hear a steady stream of instruction from Slobody and Tiede. They move around the room, helping people in and out of postures, interspersing their narrative with humor, analogy and helpful examples.
    “A lot of people want to practice the physical postures offered in yoga, but they don’t want all the other stuff that’s wrapped up with it,” says Slobody, 43.
    Slobody and Tiede met while attending George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He was on the swim team. She was a gymnast who later became a professional modern dancer. Both are lifelong body trainers, certified by the National Association of Sports Medicine.
    No strangers themselves to athletic injuries, the pair excels at finding safe ways to alter their training to accommodate physical limitations.
    “We’ve worked at health clubs and with corporate fitness programs, and we’d get people who sit eight hours a day,” says Tiede. “They’re not athletes, they’re not dancers — so we learned how to amend the yoga postures for back problems, shoulder problems, joint replacements and overweight individuals.”
    “And they got so much benefit from it,” Slobody adds. “These folks are completely underserved, and often ignored by the yoga community.”
    Gary Abel, a 63-year-old retired teacher from Boynton Beach who usually works out on a treadmill and stationary bike, was never interested in traditional yoga because “it just didn’t seem like exercise.” He decided to try SloBody at the suggestion of his daughter.
    “You really do get a workout,” Abel said the day after class. “I left there sweating. You wouldn’t think it would be challenging because it’s just poses and things, but my rear end is telling me about it today!”
    Abel and fellow SloBody rookie Eddie Vega, also 63, said they were happily surprised to see other men in the class.
    “I like some of the traditional yoga with the ‘om’ and all that,” says Vega. “But Kirk and Janine have Americanized it. They cut to the chase, use the techniques, the breathing, and they’re funny. I think they found a successful formula.”
    SloBody is at 209 N.E. Fifth Terrace in Delray Beach. Learn more at www.slobody.com.

Paula Detwiller is a freelance writer and lifelong fitness junkie. Find her at www.pdwrites.com.

Ann Marie Chiste gives one of the teachers a goodbye hug. Not only did she attend St. Mark, so did her three children. Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star

By Tim Pallesen
    
Word that St. Mark Catholic School was closing came one day after the last of Candy Killian’s five children completed their primary education there.
    “A lot of people tell me I’m lucky because my last child graduated, but I don’t feel lucky,” Killian told the audience one week later at a Mass for the east Boynton Beach school. “I feel a huge sense of loss, like a family member has passed away.”
    The 44 percent drop in enrollment that forced the sudden closing left parents, students and teachers confused and upset.
    But together they focused on words from the Bible at the May 31 Mass to accept their loss.
    “To everything there is a season, a time to be born, a time to die, a time to plant and a time to sow,” Ann Marie Chiste read from Ecclesiastes.
    Chiste, her brother and a dozen cousins were students in the 1960s through the 1980s. Then, her own three children received their K-8 education at St. Mark in the 1990s.
    “I am sad. I am disappointed,” Chiste said at the Mass. “Yet negative feelings would serve no useful purpose, and I will try to push them from my heart.
    “Instead, I chose to be thankful for having had St. Mark School in my life for over four decades,” she said. “We move forward as we must and cherish the memories that were made here.”
    Killian also encouraged parents to remember the Catholic education that their children received.
    “St. Mark School and parish has been our home, an extension of our family,” she said.
    “St. Mark has taught, nurtured, loved and raised my children in our holy Catholic faith. They’ve been given an excellent education, they’ve been taught to love, to serve and to honor God — not just for one hour a week, but by the lives they lead.”
    Factors that prompted the school to close weren’t discussed at the Mass.
    But the Diocese of Palm Beach said the parents of 60 former St. Mark students had enrolled their children at the new Franklin Academy that will open on South Military Trail in Boynton Beach this fall.
    Franklin Academy said many families were attracted by single-gender classrooms in which boys and girls are taught separately.
    “Girls learn differently from boys,” spokesman Scott Szitken said. “We do it for academic reasons, but parents also like it from a social standpoint because it reduces distractions, particularly in middle school.”
    Franklin Academy expects more than 1,000 students for its first year. Only 126 students enrolled for next year at St. Mark, which had 225 students during the 2012-13 school year.
    St. Mark Principal Kelly Ruiz was frustrated, saying the charter school hired away five of her teachers before St. Mark was forced to close.
    “Pop-up schools are a novelty,” Ruiz said. “We need to get back to the roots of our faith. Any society that removes God as its leader has chaos and no compassion. I will go down fighting for my faith.”
    Some St. Mark families also were attracted away by the newly rebuilt Galaxy Elementary School. Public and charter schools are tuition-free, compared with the $6,000 a year that St. Mark charged.
    Changing demographics also played a role to explain in the departure of students.
“Some families don’t live near the school anymore,” diocese spokeswoman Dianne Laubert said. “They moved west.”
    But the reasons that St. Mark School closed weren’t the focus of the Mass, where students gave the offertory petitions.
    “For all of us, as members of the St. Mark family, may we treasure the past with fondness and good memories, and build a future based on faith, hope and love,” third-grader Samantha Shortley prayed.
    The diocese is helping the remaining 126 students transfer to other Catholic schools. Eighth-graders will remain together in a classroom at Pope John Paul II High School in Boca Raton.
    Sixth-grader Kyle Felter gave the prayer for the departing St. Mark students:
    “May we show that we value the academic knowledge we received here at St. Mark and give testament to the education we received by studying hard at our new schools, exhibiting exemplary behavior, and making our parents and teachers proud,” he prayed.  

Jerry Lower contributed to this story.

Landscape chairwoman Carol Rice leads a tour through the Boca Raton Garden Club during the club’s 60th anniversary celebration, which included an open house and garden tour. Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star

By Deborah S. Hartz-Seeley
    
Marking its 60th anniversary, the Boca Raton Garden Club invited the public to a celebration on June 8. About 100 people attended an open house at the club’s newly redecorated Garden Center. They came to tour the club’s garden, hear proclamations from Boca Raton Mayor Susan Whelchel and learn about the club’s activities.
    “It is our chance to welcome the public and educate them about what we contribute to the community,” said club president Carol Brown, who likes to show off the clubhouse’s recently redone interior. It includes a new drop ceiling and lighting, white ceiling fans, a coat of interior yellow paint and drapes colorful with fruits and vegetables.
    “Before we had exposed light bulbs and the ceiling was a mess,” said Brown, who credits club members as well as community businesses such as Home Depot and Lowe’s for contributing to the redo.
    Sipping iced tea and nibbling cookies, visitors enjoyed a display of green, purple and red potted bromeliads that demonstrated the variety of plant life these members propagate.
    Wreaths made from shells, lavender sachets and a tabletop Christmas tree decorated with butterflies offered a preview of the crafts to be made for November’s Holiday House fundraiser.
    Photo displays let attendees see how the club helps children learn to garden. And leafing through a scrapbook of club members working with the elderly, you could see the joy that flowers bring to Alzheimer’s patients at the Louis and Anne Green Memory and Wellness Center at FAU.
Members stood out because they wore peach golf shirts embroidered with the club’s flower, the yellow piriqueta caroliniana.
    “I joined the club and have made a lot of friends,” says Lise Baklid, who moved here from Switzerland in 2008. “I have two sons, and I’m always chasing them around to soccer games. Joining this group was just for me. It’s a beautiful bunch of women.”
    A table of scrapbooks filled with photos and newspaper clippings showed a sense of the club’s history.
    The group was founded by Mrs. Willard (Florence) Machle in 1953. At the first meeting, 34 showed up, and by the end of the year the group included 119 women.
    “There wasn’t a lot to do in Boca Raton at that time, so I think that helped,” said Brown, who says the group now has almost 150 members.
    One of the first club projects was beautifying the town. They got $2,000 from the city to help them spruce up the Florida East Coast Railway Station as well as plant parks and approaches to the city on Federal Highway. They planted 30 trees along the street, including palms, ficus exoticas and royal poincianas.
    They bought the Garden Center in 1964 for $6,000. It included three city lots and a building that was either a boiler room and coal bin or a mess hall left over from the Army Air Force base built in Boca Raton during World War II.
    The building was gutted and sectioned into an office, horticulture room, kitchen and restrooms, all of which exist today. The mortgage was paid off in 1968. And in 1971, they added the auditorium where today’s activities are centered.
    Brown is proud to display a photo of the current membership taken by photographer Ben Hicks. He posed the women on a lawn similar to how the women were seated in a black-and-white photo that was taken of club members in 1953.  
    “Without this and other beautification organizations, Boca Raton could not be the landscaped tree city that it is today,” said Whelchel.  Her remarks were followed by a tour of the garden led by landscape chairwoman Carol Rice, who is in charge of the Dirt Gardeners, about 10 club members who maintain the grounds.
    After meeting under a 20-year-old gumbo limbo tree, Rice ushered attendees to the fairy petticoat, a tree donated by Gardino Nursery in Delray Beach to honor the club’s anniversary.
    This Australian native gets thousands of pink and white flowers on it. Those flowers resemble Hawaiian skirts and smell like honey, explained Sid Gardino.  
    Guests strolled through the club’s butterfly garden, yellow garden, Japanese garden, succulent garden, bromeliad garden and rose garden.
    “A garden requires a lot of work, but provides peace, quiet and joy,” said Rice. “It gives back so much more than it ever takes.”                                       

The male great Southern white butterfly is easy to identify because of his aquamarine-blue tipped antennae.
Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star

By Cheryl Blackerby

    The great Southern white butterfly is having a great year, as thousands flutter along the coast in much larger numbers than usual.
    The butterfly population explosion is a result of an uncommonly wet spring with drenching rains before and after Tropical Storm Andrea.
    The Southern white is one of South Florida’s prettiest: The males are bright white with aquamarine blue-tipped antennae, and the females are generally light to dark gray. They are normally found on coastal dunes and in coastal gardens, but recently they seem to be everywhere.
    “After rains, the Southern white butterflies can build up huge numbers very quickly, and become very visible. It really shines in the sunlight,” said Dr. Jaret Daniels, associate curator of lepidoptera at the University of Florida’s Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.
    The butterflies, one of five white butterflies commonly found in Florida, stay near the coast. Found year-round in southern Florida, they don’t migrate like other butterflies such as monarchs, but they do travel — generally 20 to 40 miles in two days or less.
    “Once those large numbers of butterflies reach a certain point, they move out and will go from island to island following the coast,” he said, adding that the butterflies will be active well through the fall until the temperature drops and their numbers dwindle.
    “They can disperse hundreds of miles depending on the resources available,” he said.
    The Southern white, which is in the family of Pieridae/white and sulphurs, has a lifespan of a few weeks. The eggs are pale yellow and are not harmed by saltwater.
 The caterpillars are yellow/green with dark gray longitudinal stripes and are covered in small black spots.
    Host plants are Virginia pepper grass, saltwort, beach cabbage, limber caper and sea rocket.
    Saltwort, lantanas, verbenas, and spanish needles are their favorite nectar plants.
    Good luck trying to photograph one of the energetic Southern whites. “They don’t sit around very much,” said Daniels.             

Kevin Crawford as Coriolanus and Zach Myers as Aufidius in Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival’s production of Coriolanus. Daniel Gordon/Photo provided

By Greg Stepanich

The Roman soldier Caius Martius, later called Coriolanus, is one of William Shakespeare’s least empathetic heroes.
    “He’s just a machine,” said Kevin Crawford, who will portray one of the Bard’s most enigmatic roles in the Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival’s production of Coriolanus, which debuts this month at the Seabreeze Amphitheater at Carlin Park in Jupiter. “He can’t fathom the thought of being who he is aristocratically, and having to deal with these common people.”
    Crawford, a professor of English and theater at Reinhardt University, a small Methodist school in Waleska, Ga., north of Atlanta, helped found the festival in 1990 and has played many of the lead roles in its productions. He’s also directing the show.
    “Coriolanus is often considered one of the finest of the tragedies, even though it’s not lumped with Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello and King Lear as one of the Big Four greats,” he said. “It made actors’ careers in the 19th century and the late 18th century. If you went to London as a young actor, and you were really going to make it big, you had to do the Big Four, and you had to do Coriolanus as well.”
    Set in the early days of the Roman Republic, roughly 500 years before Julius Caesar, Coriolanus tells the story of a city in turmoil, with famine among the people and threats from a neighboring tribe, the Volscians. Caius Martius defeats the enemy at their city of Corioles, for which he is given the name “Coriolanus” on his return in triumph and asked to run for consul.
    But he cannot ally himself to the ruling system, in which the voice of the people is expressed, and he is banished from Rome. He defects to the Volscian side and allies with his old enemy, Tullus Aufidius, and they lay siege to Rome. Coriolanus’ powerful mother, Volumnia, brokers a peace treaty between the cities, setting the scene for the final tragic denouement.
    Its most recent film adaption, in 2011, starred the British actor Ralph Fiennes in his directorial debut (also featured were Gerard Butler, Vanessa Redgrave and Jessica Chastain). Fiennes’ gritty movie, shot in Belgrade and set in contemporary times, complete with TV reporters spouting verse, brought fresh focus to questions about the organization of civil society.
    Crawford, who said the Fiennes film was one inspiration for choosing the play this year, said the Palm Beach Shakespeare version will be among the most stripped-down of all its productions, with a bare stage, monoliths in the middle, and a Road Warrior dress code. In addition to its reflection of Crawford’s love of dystopias, the setting in an undefined “world elsewhere” adds timelessness to concerns that interested Shakespeare at the dawn of the 17th century and that likely will interest us for centuries to come.
    “The people are fighting for their lives. Their anger is based on the food shortage; they have no grain. Which I think is very timely for what’s going on in the world right now, and what’s going to be, probably, the major crisis. … It’s food. What are we going to eat?” he said.
    Retired drama teacher Karen Chandler saw the festival’s 2012 production of Twelfth Night just after moving to Juno Isles, Crawford said, and then came out for auditions this year. As Volumnia, “she is magnificent. It is a major, major older-female role,” he said. “She’s a beautiful woman, she speaks well … she’s just fantastic.”
    Crawford is no less enthusiastic about his Aufidius, a Florida International University theater student named Zach Myers who has appeared in the festival’s productions of The Tempest and Twelfth Night. Myers’ parents read Shakespeare to him when he was a boy, and that has helped him become “the most amazing verse speaker,” Crawford said. “He’s got this natural rhythm to it … and most important, he makes sense.”
    Crawford has cut the play, which is the fourth-longest in the Shakespeare canon, to about 85 minutes, not counting the intermission. His cast of 16 will perform the work eight times, at 8 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays July 11-14 and July 18-21.
    Coriolanus is not the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays, and its cast of mostly unlikable people makes it hard for audiences to warm up to it. But it draws an urgent political energy from its subject matter, and that makes it almost painfully contemporary.  
    “It just seems to speak to whatever generation you’re talking about, because it’s about people wanting to eat, and people killing other people to have power to dictate who gets to eat whatever they want to eat,” Crawford said. “And you just can’t get around that.”
    Admission to the festival is free; doors open at 6:30 with entertainment from “the court jester.” For more information, email pbsf@bellsouth.net.
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    Music: The 22nd edition of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival gets under way July 5-7 with the first series of programs in its four three-concert weekends.
    This durable festival, which began in 1992 when flutist Karen Dixon, clarinetist Michael Forte and bassoonist Michael Ellert decided to give an off-season concert at the Duncan Theatre, has spawned six recordings, provided work for area musicians, and kept local classical music culture at a high, serious level, despite the absence of the visiting luminaries who come in thick and fast during the tourist season.
    That’s no small feat, and this year’s selection of unusual but rewarding repertoire continues a hallowed festival tradition. Also this year, the festival will be expanding, with a fall series in September, October and November of six concerts at Lynn University in Boca Raton and St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Lake Worth.
    Ellert said in May that the players are looking to the future with the fall concerts, but they also are responding to audience demand, a point he emphasized in the group’s annual funding-appeal letter to its patrons.
    “I made a big deal out of it,” Ellert said. “I said, ‘You asked for these concerts, you want to come — now you have to support us.’ ”
    While ticket prices and venues for the summer season are staying the same as last year, there is one big change this time around: The Friday night concerts, which will take place at Palm Beach Atlantic University’s Persson Hall in West Palm Beach, will now start at 7 p.m. instead of 8 p.m.
    The July 5 concert, which will be repeated at 8 p.m. July 6 at the Eissey Campus Theatre in Palm Beach Gardens and at 2 p.m. July 7 at the Delray Beach Center for the Arts’ Crest Theatre, features as its major work the Serenade No. 1 (in D, Op. 11) of Johannes Brahms, in an arrangement for nine players by Alan Boustead. The concert opens with the Fantaisie for violin and harp (Op. 124) of Camille Saint-Saëns, followed by the Trumpet Sonata of the contemporary American composer Eric Ewazen.
    The second series, set for July 12-14 at the same three locales, offers the Piano Quintet (in F-sharp minor, Op. 67) of the early 20th-century American composer Amy Beach, a beautiful and important work by this pioneering woman composer. Another female composer, France’s Claude Arrieu, is represented by her Dixtour (Dectet) for 10 winds, written in 1967; opening the concert is the Serenade in D (Op. 25) for flute, violin and viola, an early work by Beethoven.
Dvorak’s great second String Quintet (in G, Op. 77) is the big work on the third series, planned for July 19-21. Rounding out the program is a Scherzo for wind quintet by France’s Eugene Bozza, an arrangement of Rosina’s cavatina (Una voce poco fa) from Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville for trumpet and wind quintet, Clifford Shipp’s Six Variations on a 13th-Century Minnelied, for the same sextet, and the Clarinet Trio of the Russo-Armenian composer Aram Khatchaturian.
    Closing out the festival July 26-28 will be Ernst von Dohnanyi’s big, powerful Piano Quintet No. 1 (in C minor, Op. 1). The concert will open with the Duo No. 1 (K. 423, in G) for violin and viola of Mozart, and includes the Quintet in the Form of  a ChÔros for wind quintet (English horn substituting for French horn), by the prolific Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, and Pastorale, composed for a similarly unusual ensemble (violin instead of the flute) by Igor Stravinsky.
    Tickets for each concert are $25; a four-concert subscription is available for $85. Call 800-330-6874 for more information, or visit www.pbcmf.org.
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    Film series debuts: Also premiering this month at the Crest is a new eight-episode film series, set for consecutive Wednesdays starting July 10 and running through Aug. 28.
    Art Cinema at the Crest will screen each film twice, at 6 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. The second screenings will be introduced by local radio personality Caroline Breder-Watts, now the midday host on Miami’s WRLN-91.3 FM, and the pilot of her own show, Cinematically Speaking, on Arts Radio Network.
    Six of the films are of very recent vintage, including the Dustin Hoffman-directed Quartet (Aug. 14), Price Check (July 31), starring the always engaging Parker Posey and the Keira Knightley-Jude Law remake of Anna Karenina (July 24).
    But the series opens with two classics, the Coen Brothers’ 1998 film The Big Lebowski (July 17), and on July 10, the most beloved melodrama in the canon, Casablanca (1942), with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, plus a host of European refugee actors whose careers and lives had been upended by the Nazis.
    Tickets for each film are $8, and a cash bar and concessions are available. For more information, call 243-7922, ext. 321.
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    Outsider art: A traveling exhibition featuring work by artists with developmental disabilities arrives July 27 at the Boca Museum of Art and lasts through Sept. 22.
    Create, organized by the University of California-Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive along with New York’s Independent Curators International, presents more than 100 pieces by 20 artists who have worked at three nonprofits for disabled artists.
    The exhibition is being presented in tandem with a summer art class for teens with mild to moderate autism. The weekly classes, organized with help from Florida Atlantic University’s Center for Autism, began July 2 at the museum’s art school on Palmetto Park Road and continues through July 26. (For more information, call 392-2503.)
    The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, and noon to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. Standard admission is $8. Call 392-2500 or visit www.bocamuseum.org.

Tammy Ross of west Boca Raton couldn't contain her excitement as she greeted her new love, Sampson, a 3-month-old white lab mix she renamed Stormy. 'He was so sweet and calm and so good with the kids. I just knew it (he was the one) Ross said.

Photos by Libby Volgyes/The Coastal Star

By Arden Moore

Boca Raton is about 1,400 miles away from Moore, Okla. It takes about 23 hours to drive this distance.
Neither the miles nor the hours deterred Suzi Goldsmith and her staff at Tri-County Humane Society.
Within minutes of seeing televised accounts of the EF5 tornado that struck Moore on May 20, Suzi Goldsmith, founder and director of this no-kill shelter based in Boca Raton, was in action mode.
And, within 24 hours, she had dispatched two Tri-County Humane Society vans with five staffers and stocked with food/medical supplies to help the displaced pets and overflowing animal shelters in the path of this tornado that reached winds in excess of 200 miles per hour.
“Although our service area is Palm, Broward, Miami-Dade and Martin counties, when a disaster strikes, we don’t have boundaries,” says Goldsmith. “We immediately contacted the shelters in Oklahoma and told them we wanted to help. It’s what we do.”
The team of Matthew Gaquer, Anthony Jackovich, Kim Spencer, Paul Motz and Vladimir Delva stopped only to eat and re-fill their gas tanks.     
Their mission: to bring back dogs and cats housed in four Oklahoma shelters to make room for pets displaced and injured by the tornados in hopes they could be reunited with their worried owners.
“This was a life changer for me,” says Delva, a veterinarian technician of 15 years from Fort Lauderdale. “Seeing what I saw there really helps put life in perspective. I walked by cars flipped upside down. I saw people walking in the middle of fields with trash bags, trying to gather some of their belongings like car keys and family photos. There were distraught and lost looks on the faces of so many people we met there.”
At each shelter they visited the Tri-County team in their yellow logo-shirts worked with shelter staff to assess the medical conditions and temperaments of the cats and dogs they were planning to transport back to South Florida.
By the time the team was ready to leave, their vans contained a priceless cargo of 80 cats and dogs, ranging in size from 8-day-old puppies to the aptly named Mr. Big, a harlequin Great Dane. Oh yeah, and unwanted passengers — far too many ticks.
“I’ve never seen ticks this big — except in photos in my veterinary books,” says Delva. “We bombed the vans and sprayed before and after, but it was rough. When we stopped midway home at a pet-friendly hotel, we had to give medicated baths to all the puppies and some of the other adult pets. Thank goodness for the understanding hotel staff. They gave us a hose to clean and donated about 500 towels and blankets to care for all the pets we were bringing back.”
The vans reached Boca Raton at 10:30 p.m. on May 29 in the middle of a downpour — naturally. Goldsmith and her staff that stayed were waiting, and after exchanging hugs, began unloading the rescued pets. The first one to depart from a van was Mr. Big.
“We were thrilled — there were tears coming from our eyes because we realized we just saved 80 animals from death,” declares Goldsmith. “We assisted during Hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters, but this was our biggest rescue ever — 80 animals at one time.”
Now, Goldsmith and her team are busy finding homes for these pets who survived one of the nation’s nastiest tornados.
“This trip definitely brought us together,” says Delva. “It’s always been like a family environment for us at Tri-County, but after working 24 hours together day after day in Oklahoma, it definitely has made us even closer. We did quick assessments on all the pets we brought back, then gave them food and water and showed them that they were coming to a place of love.”
Love — now that’s something Goldsmith and her Tri-County team never have in short supply when it comes to reaching out to animals in need.

Jeff Stuck reaches down to pet his new dog Gretchen, at Tri-County Humane Society. Stuck and his wife, Carol, drove down from Sebastian with their dog Rosie, to adopt a new dog. Gretchen came from a shelter in Oklahoma. ‘We just fell in love,’ Carol Stuck said.

Arden Moore, Founder of Four Legged Life.com, is an animal behavior consultant, editor, author, professional speaker and master certified pet first aid instructor.  Each week, she hosts the popular “Oh Behave!” show on Pet Life Radio.com.  Visit www.fourleggedlife.com.