All Kinds Of Extraordinary People

A city magazine, good or bad, adds character to a place and reflects its personality. It’s rewarding to contribute to the finest of the genre in Vero Beach, a publication of substance that shuns pointless gossip and has a genuine soft spot for the community it serves. It’s nicer still that the words are printed in a colorful, attractive package that gets treated like a favorite coffee-table book.

I’ve been blessed by the opportunity to pen more than 40 feature-length articles, plus periodic Vero Beach Viewpoint columns, to Vero Beach Magazine since my serendipitous introduction to publisher Beth Moulton in the summer of 1998. Beth gave me a trial run with an assignment about the late musician Parke Frankenfield, whose “bands-to-go” were playing more than 200 gigs annually in and around Vero Beach. Parke, then a 69-year-old Colonel Sanders look-alike, was the youngster among the 70- and 80-something, multi-instrumentally talented band members. I left the interview newly educated on the giants of jazz, with a kick in my step and a stack of Dixieland swing-time CDs in my hand.

Read the entire article in the April 2013 issue