During the waning years of the heyday of Miami's Hialeah Park, when many of the powerful stables in the East and most of the horses prepping for the Kentucky Derby still wintered at Hialeah, we sent our more modest string of horses to Hialeah as well, under the care of trainer LeRoy Jolley. During that era, LeRoy trained a number of champions, won two Kentucky Derbies (including one with the filly, Genuine Risk, for Diana and Bert Firestone), and became the youngest trainer to be elected to racing's Hall of Fame.
Hialeah, with towering Royal Palms, wonderful tropical gardens, and spectacular flights of pink flamingos (imported from Cuba), was once Florida's leading tourist attraction. Eventually, it faded and closed. While it was still renowned as arguably the most beautiful racetrack in the world, we frequently visited our horses and went racing there in the winter. On Sunday mornings, LeRoy and I, and usually Susan, would fly in the dark on a rented helicopter roughly 100 miles north, to what was then called the St. Lucie Training Center, to watch the "babies" (the yearlings or two-year-olds, depending on whether it was before or after New Year's Day) work. In LeRoy's program, the riders worked the babies in fast times. Nowadays, Thoroughbreds seem more fragile, and trainers don't push young horses. LeRoy was aggressive, even by the standards of three decades ago. He would pair the babies off against each other. After a few Sundays, you had a pretty good idea of what you had.
We still send horses of various ages to that same training center in the winter. It is now called Payson Park. Our horses are trained there and elsewhere primarily by the very successful Christophe Clement. As Payson Park, the training center is much better maintained, but lacks the occasional thrills, in the form of rattlesnakes and alligators, that it offered as the St. Lucie Training Center.
On the way back from the St. Lucie Training Center in the daylight, sometimes we detoured to fly along the Atlantic coast from Palm Beach south, looking at the mansions along the shore and at the swimmers in the ocean, who were blissfully unaware of any sharks circling nearby. The pilot was the son of a horse veterinarian; he had flown helicopters in Vietnam and been a killer-whale trainer at the Miami Seaquarium. (He had quit his job at the Seaquarium after a male orca, that later turned out to have a fatal brain tumor, grabbed his head and held him underwater until, in desperation, he punched it in the eye.) One day I talked him into buzzing the pool twice at the Key Biscayne Hotel and Villas when I saw Susan and our children, Elizabeth and David, sunning themselves there. They didn't even look up! Key Biscayne was still undeveloped enough to permit the pilot to hover over a vacant lot across the street from the hotel and let me hop out. (Someone got the number of the helicopter, and he did get in trouble for that little adventure.) We stopped going to Key Biscayne when the hotel's ocean-front property was acquired for replacement by a much grander Ritz-Carlton resort.
During the five days that we just spent on Key Biscayne, staying at the Ritz-Carlton, we found the residential areas in the center of the island to be unrecognizable. Now there are huge condominiums clustered along the beach, on either side of the property occupied by the Ritz-Carlton; and multi-story mansions stuffed into lots on the island's bays-- lots originally occupied by modest bungelows, some dating back to the island's development in the early years following the construction of the causeway in 1947.
We were delighted to find that one of Key Biscayne's two large public parks, Crandon Park, which occupies the entire northern end of the island, is still the attractive playground that we remembered. Crandon Park has ample free parking spaces and features not only extensive beaches, but also playing fields, picnicking areas, an eighteen-hole golf course, and tennis facilities that host a professional tournament each year.
The best surprise for us was the Bill Baggs Cape Florida State Park at the southern end of the island. Not only is its early 19th-century lighthouse now meticulously maintained, thanks to a private foundation, but also the park service was able to replant the park in indigenous vegetation after Hurricane Andrew denuded the island in 1992 of the hardy, non-native, Australian pines that for years had cut off sunlight and pulled the water out of the thin soil. Andrew, one of three Category 5 hurricanes to come ashore in the United States in the 20th century, struck the mainland south of Miami. Key Biscayne, always the first area of Miami to be evacuated when a hurricane approaches, was hit hard. "It's an ill wind that blows no good!"
