By Thom Smith
For two days in October 1969, several hundred students camped in the quadrangle west of the Florida Atlantic University administration building during the nationwide moratorium to protest the Vietnam War. No incidents save for raising a flag bearing an image of Mickey Mouse instead of the Stars and Stripes.
The next spring, a group of students protested the dumping of waste from Boca Raton’s overworked sewage plant into the El Rio canal. The city scrambled and came up with $50,000 to mitigate the stench until an ocean outfall was finished. Soon thereafter, a new plant was built at the southwest corner of the FAU campus that remained quiet during the years when GEO founder and chairman George Zoley attended.
For most of its half century, the student battle cry at FAU has been “Get a degree, get out and get to work!” Considering the turnout at sports events and the occasional on-campus entertainment, the administration had little reason to expect any opposition to the school’s $6 million stadium naming deal with commercial incarcerator GEO Group, the world’s second-largest for-profit prison company.
But for the first time in 40 years, students actually protested.
And when several dozen actually confronted Florida Atlantic University President Mary Jane Saunders in her office, an “occupation” of sorts, their efforts seemed to bear fruit as she agreed to answer questions a few days later. But that and subsequent sessions with students generated more questions than answers. She preferred to play softball, speaking mainly about opportunity — the opportunity to discuss the pros and cons of commercial prisons, the opportunity to raise much-needed money for the school and the opportunity to cheer for the football team in September.
Her responses left students and some members of the FAU community who attended shaking their heads. The faculty senate voted 25-9 to oppose Saunders for making administrative decisons “without participation or input from faculty, staff, or other FAU stakeholders.” Students, faculty members and fans began canceling season ticket orders.
Finally, on April 1, the deal was scrapped — by Zoley, not by FAU.
So what could GEO have hoped to get out of stadium naming rights? American Airlines sponsors the arena in Miami because it wants people to fly on its planes. The only folks wanting to do business with GEO are state legislators.
Possibly school spirit did play a role. Zoley, the FAU grad, became Zoley, chairman of FAU’s board of trustees — which includes two other GEO board members: Clarence Anthony, FAU alumnus, one-time South Bay mayor and president in 1999 of the National League of Cities, and real estate attorney and Boca Raton Regional Hospital trustee Christopher Wheeler.
Perhaps GEO wanted to tout more about its “innovative programs and ground-breaking treatment approach.” At Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility in Mississippi, the innovation included staffers who were known gang members.
Even TV pundit Stephen Colbert joined the fray, “It’s just like Bank of America Stadium, only this company believes in punishment for crime.”
As reproductions of various news stories about GEO flashed across the screen, Colbert also recounted accusations of “cruel treatments” of children detained in its facilities, “unnecessary deaths of people in their custody,” and a “pervasive level of brazen staff sexual misconduct” at its Walnut Grove facility.
When GEO took over Walnut Grove in 2010, more than half of its inmates, some as young as 13, were doing time for nonviolent offenses. In his order approving a settlement of one suit in February 2012, U.S. District Court Judge Carlton Reeves cited “systematic, egregious, and dangerous practices exacerbated by a lack of accountability and controls,” sexual misconduct by staff and youth-on-youth rapes “among the worst that we have seen in any facility anywhere in the nation” and “a picture of such horror as should be unrealized anywhere in the civilized world.”
GEO and the previous operator and prison managers, the judge wrote, were “derelict in their duties and remain[ed] deliberately indifferent to the serious medical and mental health needs of the offenders.”
GEO agreed in the settlement to move young inmates to more suitable locations. Two months later, the state of Mississippi, with the Justice Department breathing down its neck, canceled all of its contracts with GEO.
GEO facilities in Texas, Indiana, Pennsylvania and even Pompano Beach have come under scrutiny.
We won’t know for a while if FAU will outlive its new nickname — “Owlcatraz” — but of greater concern should be the way the deal was handled before, during and after. Scuttlebutt around FAU’s administration building suggests that Saunders only saw dollars, not sense. Money from the Legislature is scarce, and it hasn’t been discovered in any owl burrows. Zoley, a forceful presence who had run the board, had deep pockets.
Did FAU’s Saunders know about GEO’s reputation and ignore it? If she didn’t know, and no one in her inner circle bothered to check and at least present the pluses and minuses, well …
This is the kind of embarrassment that state officials don’t like. Her predecessor, Tony Catanese, drove away in a Corvette. She might be lucky to find a rail.
Too bad Zoley threw the switch. Think of the possible souvenirs GEO could have given to each fan at the first game — an Owlcatraz license plate or perhaps a “get out of jail free” card.
Judy Collins (left) with CARP luncheon chairwoman Barbara Katz.
Photo by Paulette Martin
***
“I wanted to get this out of the way right now …
Bows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles
in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I’ve looked at clouds that way.”
Her once long brown hair is now a flowing white mane, and the notes floated flawlessly across the room at the Ritz-Carlton Palm Beach in Manalapan as Judy Collins — “sweet Judy Blue Eyes” — began a tender, wrenching, emotional, cathartic hour with guests at the annual spring luncheon of CARP, the Comprehensive Alcohol and Rehabilitation Program.
Collins was the perfect choice. She’s seen both sides of life — as triumphant artistic icon and as desperate drunk. Fortunately, she recognized her problem and dealt with it. The recovery took years, but thanks to her own fortitude, and the concern of others, including her second husband, whom she met a week before she entered rehab.
“I was dying,” she said. “I knew I was an alcoholic. I knew I was drinking myself to death, but somehow the consequences or the connections hadn’t been made.”
The alcohol contributed to a rare tumor on her vocal cords. It was benign, but had she not dealt with it, she “couldn’t do what I was doing here; I could not sing.” Yet the night before her operation, she polished off most of a bottle of booze. In spite of herself, during a year of recovery from the surgery, “somehow, some way, AA began to come into my consciousness. … I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know where to go.”
One day she noticed that a New York actor friend, a fall-down drunk who was notorious for his bar brawls, was no longer making the papers. He’d stopped drinking. They talked. He suggested a doctor, an internist, who was at the forefront of treating alcoholism as a disease. Three days before she began rehab, at a fundraiser for the Equal Rights Amendment, she met Louis Nelson, a designer. They’ve been together ever since, although they didn’t marry until 1994.
“He didn’t know how drunk I was. How would he know?” Collins said. “He was totally not my type. He was considerate. He was thoughtful. You know what I mean … we attract, as we go down, the kind of people that will allow us to behave the way we behave. The next morning I went to Pennsylvania. The 19th of April, 1978, I took my last drink, and since then I have not found it necessary to drink or use drugs.
“On this wedding ring is the date, the 16th of April 1978, that I met him. I’ve been with him 34 years, which I think is a record for a hippie.”
***
Natalie Cole (center) with sisters Casey and Timolin, after her Nat King Cole Generation Hope event
at Lynn University brought in $170,000 for music education.
Derek and Lisa Vander Ploeg of Boca Raton also attended.
Photos by Janet Barth
***
Congratulations? With 2,011 votes, Jerry Taylor was elected mayor in Boynton Beach. Cary Glickstein won 3,212 votes to upset incumbent Mayor Tom Carney in Delray by 254 votes. In Lantana, Malcolm Balfour’s 284 votes was more than enough to win a council seat.
The number deciding Taylor’s victory was only 4.5 percent of the town’s 44,154 registered voters. Delray’s voters were a little more enthusiastic, with a total turnout of 13.7 percent, tops in the county. Of Lantana’s 6,079 voters, less than 550 voted.
Hardly representative democracy. A candidate could tick off one homeowners association and blow the election. Last November, 68 percent of Palm Beach County’s voters cast ballots, yet every municipality now holds its elections in the spring.
Why? Proponents believe strongly those who do vote are better informed about local issues and that local candidates aren’t relegated to the bottom of the ballot, as they would be in the fall.
Proponents of fall elections believe that more votes mean stronger mandates, plus municipalities have to spend tax money for spring votes. Boca’s Chamber of Commerce has been lobbying for a switch to November elections, but in Lake Worth, 1,333 voters (8 percent), was all it took to switch its races to March after voting for November races in 2007. Go figure.
***
Recent expectant visitors: Jenna Bush Hager, soon to be a mother — as Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation’s Book of Hope Luncheon at Boca Raton Resort & Club. Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast Shannon Miller, now a resident of Jacksonville — at the YMCA of Boca’s 11th Annual Prayer Breakfast also at Boca Raton Resort & Club.
***
Boca’s tireless businesswoman and philanthropist Yvonne Boice is among 22 nominees for the Executive Women of the Palm Beaches 2013 Women in Leadership Awards. Boice is nominated in the volunteer division, as is Michelle Poole of the Community Foundation for Drug Free Adolescents in Lake Worth. Palm Beach County Tax Collector Anne Gannon of Delray Beach is nominated in the public sector, Jestena Boughton, owner of Delray’s venerable Colony Hotel, in the private sector. The awards, recognizing women with outstanding achievements, generosity of spirit, and a commitment to integrity and diversity, will be presented at a May 2 luncheon at the Kravis Center. Proceeds from the luncheon support WILA’s scholarships. (684-9117).
***
Happy 25th birthday to the Harid Conservatory, which presents its spring recital May 24 and 25 at Spanish River High School. Founded in 1987 and endowed by the late telecommunications pioneer Fred Lieberman, Harid offers free intensive ballet training for 14- to 18-year-olds. Its dancers have performed with more than 80 professional companies.
***
More total immersion entertainment. To build its latest XD (Extreme Digital) auditorium at its Palace 20 in Boca, Cinemark, one of the world’s largest movie exhibitors, had to raise the ceiling and dig out the floor to accommodate the huge new screen and sound system. The theater contains 285 seats, including 70 in the Premiere Level in the balcony.
XD is Cinemark’s new proprietary projection system, with floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall screen and a new Dolby 7.1 sound system.
It’s a modest technical improvement over Imax, but the big benefit, according to Cinemark’s marketing VP, James Meredith, is flexibility. With Imax, exhibitors are locked into screenings for a fixed period.
With XD, Cinemark can negotiate directly with distributors. “If a movie is a dog, with Imax we were stuck,” Meredith said. “With XD, we can swap it out immediately.”
Blockbuster new releases will have preference, Meredith added, but widescreen classics such as Lawrence of Arabia will also get the XD treatment.
***
Newly retired football star Ray Lewis has again put his Highland Beach bungalow on the market. Lewis bought the seven-bedroom, 10,890-square-foot beachfront in 2004 for $5.22 million, listed it in 2011 for $6.4 million, and last summer for $5.9 million. Now he wants $4.995 million.
A couple of miles farther south, at Boca Inlet, One Thousand Ocean just found local buyers for two units.
The last available two-story, three-bedroom, 4½-bath, 4,538-square-foot beach villa with private entrance, elevator and plunge pool commanded $5.15 million. A designer-ready penthouse, with direct ocean view, 14-foot ceilings, private pool-deck cabana, two-car garage, 4,142 square feet under roof and an additional 1,450 of terrace sold for $5.86 million. Five units remain — $3 million to almost $13 million.
***
All 121 rooms of the Bridge Hotel will be redone and the hotel will move its entrance, expand restaurant space and add outdoor seating and docks.
Photo provided
Just across the inlet, more details are emerging about plans for the Bridge Hotel, which is being completely reworked. The goal is 4.5 stars, with the resort geared to its biggest draw: the water. All 121 rooms, each with a water view, will be redone. The nondescript entrance will be moved and enhanced with extensive art and water features. Restaurant space will be expanded.
***
Boca has a new pizza tosser, with a somewhat familiar name. Spadini Pizza opened in February in Mizner Plaza, just south of Mizner Park offering not only pies but a full menu of pasta, subs and freshly made zeppole. Running the show is Tom Sellick. Nope, it’s not Magnum; that’s Selleck. Tom Sellick hails from Long Island, where he first made pizza 15 years ago.
Thom Smith is a freelance writer and a 1971 graduate of FAU. Reach him at thomsmith@ymail.com.
Comments