These are some of my memories of Hialeah in the late 's, 60's and 70's. Please feel free to leave yours in the comments since I can't remember everything due to Heineken-damaged memory cells. There is a theory, that I saw in a film in a Coast Guard training session back at Yorktown, Virginia in the 70's, that what you are now is significantly dependent on what you were when , that you are affected by who you grew up with and that you have a lifetime bond with those people whether you like them or not because you all went through the same life-learning experiences together.
No wonder we are all messed up! I'm joking, because most of us turned out just fine despite growing up in Hialeah. You know you grew up in old Hialeah if you remember: time frame The farm fields west of W. We would hide in the unmowed hay and hop aboard the tail end of the hay wagons and ride around for a long time bumping through the farm fields.
I painfully learned never to jump off the hay wagon when the farm hand was driving south on W. The tractor and hay wagon train was moving about 20mph and I didn't want to walk that far home so I lowered myself from the last wagon in the train and ran as fast as I could while holding onto the wagon. I let go of the wagon and immediately fell forward onto the rough pavement for a few feet causing a serious case of road rash and ripping my shirt and pants. The road was old rock road south of 53rd Street and unpaved north of 53rd Street.
John G. There was a tall roofless silo west of 12th Avenue and 54th Street - you weren't a man if you couldn't climb all around the top of the silo's perimeter without falling to your death.
We discovered some guy's hidden partially buried smut collection in a box one time near that silo and we all turned into big fans of women. We put the box back because we didn't dare take that stuff home and we revisited it a few times later until some other scoundrel took it. It was barely more than an old paved rock road south of 53rd Street running south to the farm house south of 49th Street. The Palmetto Expressway being built on the western edge of Hialeah, with grade level crossings at numerous intersections such as W.
