months. I had made a serious mistake. Miami in the late ’40s and early ’50s was a seasonally oriented destination resort city, heavily trafficked during the winter months and woefully quiet during the rest of the year. February happened to be the peak of the winter season. Many of the restaurants I had eaten in at during my February visit were closed and boarded up for the summer. The locals would say that during the summer months, a person could “fire a cannon down the middle of Flagler Street and not hit anybody.” I developed a real fear about the chances for having a successful opening for my new restaurant. The thought of a possible failure weighed heavily on my mind. This considerable worry was aggravated by the fact that Nancy and the children weren’t with me. I was very lonely, and I knew that it was an equally lonely experience for Nancy. I had put the whole family in a very difficult position, and I was terribly annoyed with myself. The only good that came out of the situation was that it taught me a valuable lesson.
While living alone in Miami, I had plenty of time to think about the mistake I had made in acting so impulsively about this restaurant project. Long before the restaurant began to take shape, I knew that I was going to have some real problems. The surrounding market and the location itself left a lot to be desired. I was located in a small building with fewer than sixty people employed there. Most of the tenants were doctors whose patients were generally older and not very interested in eating in a restaurant. Most of these people were sick and had other things on their mind. The building would be empty by the time dinner came around, and it would be closed on Saturday and Sunday. The other problems were that I couldn’t expect very much business to come from the surrounding neighborhood. There was a real question as to whether or not fast-moving traffic would stop at a commercial restaurant located in an office building. These ended up being valid concerns.
I determined that if I survived this crisis I would be more careful and analytical in making any business decisions in the future.
Fortunately, Nancy was able to sell the farm even though it took several months to do it. I flew to Wilmington and drove the four of us back to Miami in July after making arrangements with a moving company to transport our personal effects to Florida.
The Mackle Company was building new and inexpensive homes by 1951 in the range of $12,000 to $13,500. Purchase of these modern, attractive homes only required a minimal down payment, with very attractive mortgage financing terms available to the purchaser. Nancy and I didn’t even have enough cash to make the low down payment, but we were able to lease one of these new homes and moved into the subdivision in July. We had only a few weeks to get settled before the Brickell Bridge Restaurant opened for business in August.
All of the fears and worries that had troubled me since May proved to be completely warranted. When the restaurant opened, there was very little business and my early promotions were unsuccessful in attracting customers. Faced with very high rent, the fact that my sales were only averaging three thousand dollars per month during August, September, October, and November was enough to keep me in a state of deep concern. I was seriously questioning whether or not I could make a go of the place. There wasn’t much doubt that if business didn’t pick up soon I was going to go broke. I remember one particular Sunday when we only took in eight dollars for breakfast, twelve dollars for lunch, and ten dollars for dinner. It was a long ride home that night. I was burdened with paying the salaries of two cooks, two dishwashers, and six waitresses. I had made a mistake of monumental proportions, and this began to erode my self-confidence. I was not ready to give up yet, but with a tarnished ego, I looked disaster in the face.
My typical day started by getting up at 5:00 a.m. so that I could be at the restaurant by 6:00 a.m. I cooked the breakfast and typed the luncheon and dinner menus during the morning hours. Acting as the host, I would seat customers during meal hours. As manager, I ordered the food and trained the employees. After the restaurant closed at 9:00 p.m., I stayed alone to mop the floors and wash pots, pans, and kitchen utensils before driving home because I couldn’t afford to hire anyone to do these jobs. The high point of my day was relaxing on the screened-in porch of our little house, enjoying a bottle of beer, and talking with Nancy about her day and the children, whom I rarely saw. I was able to relieve some of the pressure by talking to Nancy about anything that came to mind, but mainly sharing my concerns about the restaurant and the problems we were facing. We needed to talk things out, as we were in this together and our survival as a family business was very much on the line. These quiet but late evenings together gave us the chance to do that.
It was the same routine every day, seven days a week. I didn’t take a day off for over a year and a half while I was struggling to make the restaurant a success. Nancy told me that our neighbors thought she was a young divorcée with two small children because they never saw a man around the house. The good news was that, although the Brickell Bridge was losing money steadily, we still had the Colonial Inn making enough money to keep us going. Meanwhile, I was trying to figure out a strategy that would stimulate sales and get us on the road to profitability.
Every day we offered two luncheon specials—one we sold for sixty-five cents, and the other for ninety cents. In each case the customer had a choice of soup or juice, an entrée, two vegetables, rolls, butter, and a beverage. I learned that the price was a big factor in attracting new business, and I did my best to offer reasonable prices and innovative menu ideas. At dinner, the menu had items such as “Golden-Fried Jumbo Key West Shrimp,” and “Succulent Fresh Gulfstream Pompano, Broiled to Perfection,” which I insisted should be as good as the menu promised they would be. The restaurant was always kept immaculately clean, and I spent hours training waitresses in the subtleties of providing the right kind of service. I did all the purchasing and worked closely with the chef on all aspects of food preparation. The dinner menu was changed daily. The highest price for a complete dinner, which included dessert and beverage, was only $1.80. A large fresh-shrimp cocktail with four jumbo shrimp cost only forty cents when it was ordered à la carte, and for only fifteen cents extra it could be included when a customer ordered a complete dinner. The value was there but new customers were slow in coming in.
The “season” arrived December of 1951; it brought in the first wave of our long- and eagerly awaited tourist traffic. It lasted through the month of February and brought with it some badly needed sales and profits to help shore up my sagging balance sheet. This was just enough financial support to get me through the winter and into the spring and summer months. When April and May of 1952 arrived, I was faced with the same low sales and the same devastating results that I experienced when I first opened. The summer business was simply terrible, and I began losing money all over again at a rate I could ill afford. I had to do something soon.
That something arrived in the form of a little boy named Charlie Cooper. Since opening the restaurant in August of the previous year, I employed a young boy named Henry Cooper as a dishwasher. Henry was about fourteen or fifteen years old, and I probably paid him no more than the minimum wage, which was around fifty cents an hour. Henry was a very industrious and dedicated employee who had an eleven- or twelve-year-old kid brother named Charlie who accompanied him to work every night. Charlie had an engaging way of approaching me. He usually began with a big smile, tugging at my sleeve trying to coax me into giving him a job. My only response was usually “I can hardly afford to pay your brother, Charlie. I’m terribly sorry but I just don’t have anything for you to do.” Invariably, Charlie would come back the next day and every following day inquiring if I had found a job for him to do.
One evening when Charlie walked into the restaurant, I called him over and said, “Charlie, I think I have a job for you. I’m going to give you a clean starched-white chef’s uniform, a tall chef’s hat to go with it, and a dinner bell. I want you to get out on Brickell Avenue, right in front of this restaurant, and ring this bell.” I didn’t stop there. “Be sure to smile at everybody going by. I want you to ring that dinner bell as loud as you can. I want people to hear it ring.” I told Charlie that I was going to shine two spotlights on him so that everyone passing by would see him. This brought out a big grin that lit up his face. Charlie was delighted to get this job even though I could only afford to pay him fifty cents an hour.
He came every night, got into his white chef’s uniform, and with that wonderful smile of his, rang his dinner bell for several hours in front of the restaurant. “Dinner Bell Charlie” became a happening in Miami. He