David Wallack Interview

David Wallack Interview

Kathy Hersh:

Today is the 3rd of October 2017. We are interviewing David Wallack in Mangos for the Miami Beach Visual Memoirs Project. Okay, so this is going to be very conversational. You're going to tell us the story of Mangos starting with the beginning.

David Wallack: Do you want it from Mangos or do you want it from 1955?

Interviewer: Wallack:

Start at 1955. Is that the year you were born? No I was seven years old at the time and that's when we came to Miami Beach.

Your whole family came? Yes, my parents, my two sisters and I. We moved down from New York. We lived in Queens, in Yorktown heights-- had the Wallack family home, I will say--my grandmothers estate, and then came down to Miami Beach and we lived at 952 Collins Avenue. One block over and one building in. My father in the same year bought this building 900 Ocean Drive and so we had both 852 Collins Avenue and then also 900 Ocean Drive beginning in 1955.

What brought them down there? What made them decide to move down there?

My mothers' family all of a sudden migrated a couple of years before that, and my father's business in Yonkers--a jewelry casting business--went under. Certainly I was only at that time five, six years old, seven when we actually moved, but my father had even come down on an exploratory kind of a trip with my grandparents--my mothers' mother and father, and fell in love with Miami Beach. Certainly at that stage I was just along for the ride. I was not part of the decision process.

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What did you think of that change? It's difficult to go back, but we packed up the car and we got to eat hard-boiled eggs and tuna sandwiches and we were happy as a lark because we were traveling. It was all very very exciting for us. Probably the scariest part was it was the latter part of first grade that I went to school on Washington Avenue and now it's Feinberg Elementary. Then it was called Central Beach. Probably that was a little bit of the most difficult but we loved Miami Beach. We came Miami beach was our home.

That began in 1955 and we were playing tether ball on the stop sign on the corner. That was our tether ball thing and roller skating to Flamingo Park. Every Friday night at Flamingo Park was big rollerskating and that was for years and years. I even competed against North Beach in rollerskating races. It was Flamingo Park and North Beach in the competitions on Miami Beach in rollerskating and every summer we spent it in the programs in Flamingo Park. Baseball, football, tennis, and then you know the years rolled on.

Interviewer:

Somebody was telling us --I think it was help me here Carl, the baseball game changed when the Cubans started coming.

Carl:

Mitch Kaplan.

Interviewer:

- was telling us that the baseball games that they would play in Flamingo Park, it was rare anybody hit a home run-hit a ball out of the park until the Cubans came.

Wallack:

Well the hardball field--the big hardball field that they built there I mean I know I played on it. In my age, we never even came close, and on occasion we would go to a ball game that was a much older--I don't even know if they were kids or young men, but on rare occasion, we would go to one of those and those fences were a long ways on the big ball field.

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Interviewer:

He said after the influx--the Cuban exodus--around 1960, around then, that suddenly the balls were flying out of the park all the time.

Wallack:

[laughs]

The Cubans were so good at baseball. At that point, we lived on 10th and Michigan Avenue right across the street from where now the Police Athletic League Building is and it was a small building. I went to a Stamp Club in that building which was then torn down and made into the Police Athletic League. We lived on 10th and Michigan in those years because the way I recall that is it was a duplex and we had the whole upper floor. On the ground floor, one of the leaders of the Cuban Exiles moved in--lovely family-- and of course I didn't know anything about anything in terms of the politics of it. Amazing enough, my parents visited Cuba when Castro marched into Havana.

They were there on that day? When Castro marched into Havana they were visiting. One of the souvenir gifts that they brought back for me was a revolutionary hat, go figure. All of a sudden, I remember there was fear, fear and my family all of a sudden was worried that the Cuban government may be going after that family that lived below us and so all of a sudden, there was fear. We still lived there a while because then we moved to 37th and Royal Palm into Mid-Beach. I lived then in Collins Avenue, then by Flamingo Park which was South Beach, then Mid Beach at 37th and Royal Palm, and then North Beach in high school at Biscayne Point. I spanned the whole beach in my childhood.

It's quite different from one end to the other end. Very different. In 7th grade I went to Ida Fisher. Eighth grade I went to private school, Leer School. In 9th grade, I went to Nautilus. When we got to Beach High, I knew the

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South Beach kids and from Nautilus the North Beach kids, so I crossed you might say the party lines a little bit and knew both North and South Beach.

Beach High has been described by many people as being a really extraordinary experience in terms of quality of education and the close knit aspects of being the lone high school for the whole beach. What was your experience like?

I was not a good student in school. I guess I was just bored by it probably, but very good friends, and then I began surfing at first street. My grades were very very low. Yet my mother would take me to University of Miami to do tests on me and they were please bring him back to be retested because it's too high. Somethings got to be miscalculated and so I went back several times to be retested. It was interesting you know the way that it was explained to me, but I just went and did it. That didn't mean a whole lot to me either but I did it. What my parents did was, they didn't want me to become a surf bum the way they put it, and so I went to military school in my senior year of high school. I went to Admiral Farragut Naval Military School in St. Petersburg, Florida, which was very cool because it got me into more discipline. My grades went shooting up. I became number one on the golf team and also representing the school in citywide oration competitions, and I excelled in every area when I got away from home and went to Military School.

I did two years at Beach High so really I always go to the reunion of the Class of '66 because all my friends, and so they look at me as the Class of '66 even though I actually graduated at Admiral Farragut Naval Military. [Crosstalk][10:35]

[Inaudible][10:35]

Wallack:

Beach High was as you say, it was a very very small community and we had our football team which did not do well. We had our basketball team which just happened to

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have three superstars- two great tall guys and one great ball handler and we went to the state competition so that was really cool then. We had great tennis players and great swimmers. That was the strength of Beach High. I enjoyed Beach High, but my grades were not where my parents wanted them nor where I wanted them to be and to be proud of them at all and so I went away to military school in my senior year and then I lost interest, even when I went to college at the University of South Florida, I really kind of actually failed out twice, got married, got into Real Estate in Miami, had to go to court--I was still not 21 years old--had to go to court to have my minority waived so that I could sign contracts in real estate. The court granted me that and I was working.

Then all of a sudden I wanted to go to Law School - [laughs]

Which as I put it sometimes, it was sort of like Jethro wanting to be a brain surgeon to the outsider, but I wanted to go to law school, which was actually my fathers dream. I was married and I had even I think my first child Janna at the time and I wanted to reenter and applied to Miami. I had already gone to Miami and I failed out of Miami. I just wasn't even going to classes. I just really signed up but had no interest. I reentered and what they did was they said in this school, if you change your major into a different school, then you get a new grade point average and we just take credits that you have - that apply credits and not grade point average and then you start a new grade point average and come on in.

I did that. I graduated with Honors in Arts & Sciences, Political Science. I guess they had Phi Kappa Phi which is there Arts & Sciences National Honorary. That's like their Phi Beta Kappa and so I was Phi Kappa Phi and then early admission to law school Miami Law which was very very cool because that was when they really stepped up the quality on Miami Law School and they brought the Dean of

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the Chicago Law School down. Her name will come to me. Sixty-eight years old.

[laughs] I'm right behind you. They brought her down who was really being looked at nationally, as could be the first woman candidate to the Supreme Court at the time and I hit it off with her very well and did Miami Law. It was interesting. After my first semester there, we were in the middle of a condominium deal on Alton road, and my father had a heart attack at the time and so I withdrew in the second semester, and took care of family business that semester and did that condominium deal and then got back into Law School, but I audited and went at night also to some classes. Some very nice professors allowed me to do that so then I could also kind of keep pace. Then I graduated Law School in 1977, passed the Bar in 1978 and I still am an active member of the Florida Bar. I don't practice law as a living, but everything is law.

Right, it comes in handy when you're a Real Estate person. All business. All business.

Especially dealing with the city of Miami Beach. Everything is law, lawyers, lawyers these days.

You can speak the lingo. It's come in handy all along the way in business. Should I just continue on?

Interviewer:

Yes, your father you said owned this building and it has an interesting history, the building itself. Could you tell us a bit about that please?

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Wallack:

This building? This building is to me a shrine you might say. It's very very special. As a child I folded towels for our hotel rooms and I guess that was my contribution.

This was a hotel? Yes through my early years and right up until the year before graduating law school.

What was it called? It was two separate buildings--The Parksy and Surfsy Apartments. These were - in fact - even in this room was four apartments. They were 400 square foot units which were actually very big compared to hotel rooms on South Beach. [Music in the background] [16:50] It was daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly rentals--a mixture--and now you're talking about also the years where Miami Beach was going down down down down down in the late 60's, the 70's.

That was pretty scary wasn't it, in terms of having investments?

I remember I was then away at school and then I moved. In my schooling years I lived at Kendall Drive and Sunset, way down south, so I was at that point, in those real rough rough business years, not living here. I was at school in the University of Miami— I mean that's a lot of years— finishing undergrad, being married, and then going through law school with an extended year because of when I had to pull out for family business, so I didn't actually see part of that.

When I got back here, I was a very good golfer in those years, and this is while I was in Law School, I got into a golf tournament, and I played at Dorral and I got paired up with three guys who were in a Law firm out on Kendall Drive that represented only hospitals in Miami and Ft. Lauderdale. I drove a 340 yard par four, hit it to the back of the green--the back fringe--and they hired me. They

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were golfers, avid golfers. They hired me right there on that hole to be a clerk for them.

I was in my Senior year of Law School --in the beginning of my senior year. I began clerking with them and I was doing legal research one day and I came upon a brand new law and that was in 1976, and it was the Adult Congregate Facility statute that they passed in 1976, because in residential areas, people had started taking in five, six, seven elderly people into private homes and I guess that kind of problems, whatever, filtered up to Tallahassee and now they wanted to control that license and get minimum standards going for those things. I don't know why but I came across that law and I read it. I looked at it and I looked at it and I looked at it and I then thought about this building that was going down down down down. I think the annual income for this building in '76 was under $100,000 for the year, which was you know a new all time low. This was all desolation row down on South Beach and all of Miami Beach.

Nobody was - [Crosstalk] [20:17] Even the Fountain blue was desolation row, but what happened back then, well we can get into that, what I think caused or added a great deal of fuel to the depression. I was doing legal research and I came up on the ACLF statute and I looked at it and I discussed it with my sister who was very much into holistic health, and I was then all of a sudden in my life evolving towards holistic health and a more eastern philosophy of life. You might even say a more Buddhist thought of life and philosophy and so we began creating a new concept which I named the Eastern Sun. I then created a whole business plan and along with my sister and my mother and my father's blessing, I said this is what I think we should be doing here and I think we can pioneer an entire new form of healthcare. Remember, I grew up with the elderly on South Beach so I was very very comfortable with the elderly. Then I said now, I believe we can do this. We would need a mortgage.

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Now all of South Beach for sure was redlined by the banks. No mortgages--zero for years. I went and brought this plan to Jefferson National Bank. I forget this woman's name by Barton Goldberg--I don't know if you've spoken with Bart, but Bart was the President of Jefferson National and another beautiful heart, wonderful family, wonderful man. He looked at this, looked at me, and I think I had long hair at the time, but even so, he saw through that and went, we're going to go with you on this. I think you've got something here and he gave us the first mortgage that was granted on South Beach in years.

We redeveloped the property. Everyone said I was crazy because the pricing, when you give all the care, I looked at the law and I said that's a minimum. Let's go the other way and give a lot, and let's really really make this something special. Everybody said you're crazy. No one's going to pay that. I forget exactly what the rates were but I can certainly show you the brochure which we have in a box along with pictures, but I believed in it. We believed in it. That was when I did the first redevelopment of a South Beach building, the first holistic care facility for the elderly, the first commercial sized ACLF because they were all for homes and residential communities, I worked with the city attorney and the city manager, in what's the zoning going to be. We picked retirement hotel. It was the closest thing they had because there was no zoning in the code. I was the first. All of a sudden, then we brought all our friends -- all my friends were musicians. I was on stage recording then, so my friends were musicians and artists - start bringing in artists and musicians and it grew and grew and within five years, we were grossing $850,000 from under $100,000.

We were the rage of Miami Beach. People were coming from all over to see what's going on here. He's the only one doing business on Miami Beach. We opened in 1978.

Interviewer:

How many people did you house?

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Wallack:

Up to the low fifties. It ranged because it changed depending on how many private or semi-private. Anywhere from forty eight to fifty two right in that zone is where we were and a lot of innovation, a lot of firsts. We innovated hospice care. I had one man die in a lot of pain from cancer and it was a horrible thing. We began reading up on hospice out of England and Bronthan's Cocktail and what that was because here it was all about morphine, morphine, morphine for pain, and it still is really. With morphine for pain the pattern is more, you're in pain, you then are out of pain and go to sleep, and then you wake up and the pain starts again and it was that kind of cycle. When we read up on Bronthan's cocktail out of England that they were using there, it was a mixture of a base of cherry syrup, heroine, morphine, and cocaine mixed in which was really the innovative thing in the mixture because that kept the person up.

We said well, within our research it was that was the more enlightened approach so that a person could still be with their family, and go into the dining room and be with their friends, and be out of pain. But you couldn't get that even prescribed at Walgreens. That could only be made at Mount Sinai Hospital. We had to have their doctors also come aboard and the family first and their doctors come aboard and okay, let's try that. Some didn't. Some did, but nobody ever lived in pain like that again.

If they took the Bronthan's cocktail. Bronthan's cocktail was like a miracle thing and here they were then, in the dining room, and being with their family, at parties.

Having some quality of life. At quality of life and so that was innovative. Back in those years, nobody had ever and even in these years, it's always a scandal really. Nobody had ever evacuated an entire care facility. My rule back then was if a hurricane comes anywhere 72 hours from us, we evacuate

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everybody, I evacuated even though they didn't hit us directly, I evacuated everyone three times. It made me the leading expert in evacuation of the elderly, so they had me lecturing hospitals, nursing homes, and care facilities, at the Hurricane Center each hurricane season. We're talking about evacuation of everyone. full staff. We had nursing for their medications --nursing, care--full care staff and-

During the evacuation? For the whole movement. You're talking about multiple-- you know to get set up--two floors, upper floors with a generator kind of a place, so it was a process.

Interviewer:

Did you have an impact on now do people use your methods?

Wallack:

All of that I think disappeared into the past.

Interviewer:

Because we've just had these what nine what's the latest count ten people die at the Hollywood Nursing Home?

Wallack:

It's become scandalous. We looked at thing differently. Seventy two hours was my red line because then it would get too difficult. Because remember I had to also make arrangements for the families of my care staff. We had to move full care staff--nursing, entertainment. We were going to be there for days--food, water, medicine, everything logistically had to be attended to.

Interviewer:

There was continuity for that —less traumatic.

Wallack:

It's almost military. You have to move personal and supplies, and then move back. Amen we were never hit so hard that we couldn't move back within a couple of days, but it made me an expert in evacuation of the elderly in those days and so that was another kind of a thing.

Interviewer:

Quite different than this business.

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Wallack:

Interestingly enough, I'll explain to you, people say that, but not so. When you start to put the two and two together. The other thing that became innovative was just the entire stockpile of care. The Japanese government got wind of my work here and all of a sudden, eight limousines pull up filled with professionals from the Japanese government complete with translators. The Japanese--the way it was explained to me--is in Japan at that point--and now we're talking about the early '80s. The early '80s and what happened was in Japan women were starting to go out to work, and they were having their own cultural revolution. Who was going to take care of mom and dad? All of a sudden they needed a solution, and they heard about my work. Now other people were coming here and opening up ACLF's even on Miami Beach as well as Miami. I was the first commercial-sized ACLF.

Interviewer:

Did you consider expanding from just the one building?

Wallack:

That brings me to how this because Mangos Tropical Cafe. That intersection -

Interviewer:

[laughs]

Wallack:

- When I was in that intersection, but the Japanese government would come multiple times then and have me lecture to multiple groups on holistic care for the elderly, which was more in harmony than the allopathic form of nursing homes. They wanted a more home-like [music in background] [32:48] atmosphere and that's where they caught on to what I was doing.

That was a very interesting time. The Miami Beach government came running over --all the commissioners, and gave me my first key to the city for my work internationally. Then I studied with Elizabeth Kubla Ross, many of the great gurus in meditation of the day and age. Elizabeth Kubla Ross was deaf and dying and I had many great great teachers --Pavalar Rol [Inaudible][33:32] in nutrition, and it was an amazing, an amazing time. I was

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President also of Ocean Drive with the old owners of Ocean Drive when they rebuilt it --did the serpentine walkway and rebuilt the little corral rock wall back then, but that whole group of owners, everything was for sale on Ocean Drive. Everything was offered to me. I was the only one doing business, but I gave so much back in services and amenities that while I made a living, I lived here in the building most of the years. Every once in a while I would rent a place for a year--probably I think twice out of the twelve years that I did that--twice I rented a place to be able to just sleep and get away from it, and quite frankly I had the demand even to rent out the room that I was staying in here, so everyone was like David get out of the way a little bit so - but they were amazing amazing years and I believe in my heart that the miracles that happened here in those years with those people are miraculous and that's a story in itself, but created blessings on this property. They're still going on and on.

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