So long.
Not that it hasn’t been fun chronicling Florida’s descent into a waterlogged, python-infested, uninsurable, hurricane-pummeled, book-banning, gay-bashing authoritarian dystopia, but I’m outta here.
Unless Mad Magazine lures me out of retirement, my 56-year journalism career, (seven newspapers in four states) ends with this column.
I’m not quite sure what convinced me the jig was up. Maybe old age. At 76, my arthritic fingers no longer dance along the keyboard.
Maybe I’ve been worn down by so many hours staring at a blank computer screen, deadline looming, desperation building and inspiration lagging. Shouldn’t I be playing shuffleboard, or pickleball, or bocce ball, or other pastimes favored by ancients?
Yet here I am, chained to a word processor searching for a less brutal self-description than decrepit. (Defunct? Outmoded? Anachronistic? Superannuated Fred?)
Maybe an actuary has commandeered my former cheery self.
Since turning 60, I’ve suffered a morbid, involuntary habit of going right to the age in celebrity obits, presuming they were of a privileged class that had enjoyed much better health care than us peons, cursing any of them with the temerity to exit at an age less than my own.
Of course, the pathology worsens every year. So far, in 2024, Bill Walton, Carl Weathers, O.J. Simpson, Toby Keith, Richard Lewis and a passel of aged rock stars have violated my don’t-kick-before-76-soon-to-be-77 rule.
Maybe my journalism career has suffered the cumulative effect of chronicling so many awful disasters. Editors in want of the big, big story sent me in frantic pursuit of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts and floods.
I’ve written frightening stories about AIDS, Zika, COVID and the opioid epidemic. I’ve covered the python invasion of the Everglades, toxic algae clogging Florida waterways, riptides sucking tourists out to sea, pit bulls mauling children, effluent spewing like geysers from Fort Lauderdale’s broken sewers, oil spilling out of a damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico.
Newspapering has been a five-decade adrenaline rush, covering civil-rights marchers in Mississippi, the prison uprising in Atlanta, drug wars in South Florida, gang killings in Liberty City, Haitian refugees arriving on tattered wooden sailboats, sex offenders forced to live rough under the Julia Tuttle Causeway and riots in Miami.
That was when I discovered that my bosses issued bulletproof vests to photographers, while reporters were sent into the inferno armed with skinny notebooks and Bic pens. I’ve trudged through the charred ruins of Black churches during a spate of cowardly Ku Klux Klan arson attacks in Mississippi hill country.
In 1983, I covered a conference at the Holiday Inn in Monroe, La., where law enforcement officers from across the South brought their unsolved murder files to match up with stream-of-conscious confessions from serial killers Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Toole, whose fiendish wanderings included Broward County. The hotel marquee announced: “Welcome homicide task force.”
I’ve stood atop bales of seized cocaine on a Coast Guard cutter. Accompanied a narcotics strike force raiding Appalachian marijuana fields. Spent a couple of weeks in Africa, writing about the confounding elements of the Angolan civil war.
I’ve covered KKK rallies in Davie and Stone Mountain, Ga., exposed farm-worker peonage in Florida, reported on violent coal strikes in West Virginia. I’m still haunted by memories of bodies piled like discarded trash along the streets of Port-au-Prince after the 2010 earthquake.
My byline has appeared atop stories about car wrecks, train wrecks, boat wrecks. I’ve covered construction accidents, coal mine cave-ins and too many mass murders. I’ve written about wildfires, police brutality, two space shuttle explosions and the 2001 anthrax scare that gripped Broward.
Fifty-four years later, I still remember the menacing regard I encountered covering a wake at the Outlaws’ beery clubhouse in Davie, as gun-toting motorcycle gang members filed by an open casket, each pausing to kiss the corpse’s face. Makes me weary just recounting this stuff.
Another factor has sucked the joy out of journalism.
A nasty, mutant strain of populism has taken hold of Florida and the rest of red-state America. Facts don’t matter. Medical science is rejected. Literary masterpieces are banned. Abortion is outlawed. Teachers are persecuted. Disney is villainized. MAGA pols, up to their shins in sunny-day flooding, deny that we’re in the throes of global warming.
Meanwhile, MAGA heroes’ lies, sexual misdeeds and financial shenanigans are dismissed as media inventions. Jury verdicts and fair elections are disparaged as leftwing conspiracies.
Violent insurrection has become OK. Vladimir Putin is a role model. hom*ophobia, racism and xenophobia provide the subtext of the new politics. And a majority of white, working class Americans, including most of my relatives back in West Virginia, embrace politicians who promise to pummel elites and demean minorities.
When journalists report the unseemly doings of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, their campaign operatives instantly repackage media criticism into fundraising appeals. Some days, it was as if I was working for the DeSantis campaign.
A columnist needs to balance his dark musings with optimism, but Trump is leading in many polls, freakishly high water temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico portend a hellish hurricane season and LeBron James isn’t returning to South Florida. I’m all out of optimism. My reservoir of adrenaline has gone dry. Time to leave this space to writers of the glass-half-full kind.
Goodbye. Good luck. I’ll miss you.
Fred Grimm, a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a journalist in South Florida since 1976.
