The Achiever: The Story of Mayor Norman S. Edelcup and the City of Sunny Isles Beach

By Steven Boyer

The Achiever: The Story of Mayor Norman S. Edelcup and the City of Sunny Isles Beach chronicles the life and contributions of a small Florida beach town’s longest-serving and most-impactful mayor. A former Chicago native who moved to Sunny Isles Beach in 1968, Norman S. Edelcup witnessed a slow decline for decades as tourists moved on to greener pastures. With a lifetime of knowledge and experience as a successful accountant, businessman, banker, and philanthropist, Norman became determined to turn his adopted hometown into a grand coastal city. One of Sunny Isles Beach’s founding fathers, he served first as a city commissioner, and then as the city’s second mayor, ushering in spectacular citywide transformations. A meticulously researched biography and historical record, The Achiever is an inspiring testament to the visionary power of genuine civic leadership.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Oct 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781662927775

Book preview

Part I

Personal & Professional Life

Chapter 1

Early Years

Rudely awakened for the first time one fine Chicago morning, Norman Scott Edelcup immediately set about making his objections to the disquieting change in circumstances known to all those in earshot.

It was a Wednesday morning — 9:41 a.m. on May 8, 1935, to be exact — when his parents finally welcomed the littlest Edelcup to the family. Although they were young and very much in love when they got married in 1926, Pauline and Irving Edelcup had decided to wait a bit to start a family until the circumstances around them were better suited for that proposition.

***

During the years of Prohibition, when the importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages were criminalized by the Eighteenth Amendment from 1920 to 1933, Chicago was the virtual epicenter of gangster life. The era has been painted into the American imagination over the decades in theater, cinema, and television: well-heeled speakeasies, accessible only by a password spoken to the guard at the door; police raids and car chases; tough guys in fedoras with Tommy guns ablaze, hanging onto the running board of a flivver with spectacle headlights and spoked wheels. Gangsters like John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, and Ma Barker became household names. Bootleggers like Al Scarface Capone, co-founder and head of the Chicago Mob, seized Prohibition’s golden opportunity and amassed fortunes amid brutal acts of violence such as the St. Valentine’s Massacre and the Beer Wars.

Despite the fervent hopes of its temperance movement backers, Prohibition grew increasingly unpopular, losing more and more public support every year of its existence. That great American experiment finally ended with the ratification of the Twenty-first Amendment, which repealed the Eighteenth Amendment on December 5, 1933. For Chicago, as for the rest of the country, Repeal meant a return to normalcy and the virtual eradication of a newly popular genre of crime with the stroke of a pen.

Superseding even Prohibition’s problems was the economically cataclysmic Great Depression, which was triggered by the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The Depression was especially onerous in Chicago due to the city’s reliance on manufacturing, the hardest hit sector nationally, with fully half of Chicagoans in that sector losing their jobs by 1933. The ranks of the unemployed nationwide, which swelled to an estimated high of nearly 25%, kept body and soul together by queuing in long bread and soup lines. Proud veterans of the Great War sold apples in the street for a nickel in lieu of seeking handouts, while boys augmented their family’s meager incomes by hawking newspapers on street corners. The many thousands of newly homeless lived in encampments of Hoovervilles, ramshackle structures of cardboard, cloth, and wood named after the president whose policies were blamed for their residents’ misfortunes.

In 1932, Herbert Hoover lost the presidential election by the widest margin to date, with Franklin Delano Roosevelt winning by 68% of the vote. FDR’s economic recovery plan, the New Deal, instituted a series of historic programs for relief, recovery, and reform that helped the economy rebound beginning the following year, leading to a four-year stretch of economic growth and revitalization.

***

By May 1935, the city of Chicago was finally on an upswing from the one-two punch of crime and poverty inflicted by Prohibition and the Great Depression. Optimism was in the streets, spring was in the air, and joy reigned supreme in the Edelcup home.

As the first (and only, as it turned out) child of two loving and adoring parents who had waited nearly a decade for his arrival, Norman did very well for himself in the birth lottery. Ask him now about his youth, and he responds with a broad, cherubic smile, blue eyes sparkling with the recollection, It was a very happy childhood; I couldn’t have asked for a better one. Clearly, his parents were the source of much of that joy.

While his folks came from different backgrounds, they did have one major point in common: both of their families had recently immigrated here from Europe, making the United States their adopted home. One of three brothers, Irving Edelcup was born to Rose (née Albert) and Morris Edeclup in Chicago in 1903, his family having arrived only a year or two before from Russian-controlled Poland. His bride, Pauline Bolz, was born to Severin and Catherine Bolz in 1904 in a German spa town with the descriptive name of Bad Kreuznach (meaning Cross-Stream Bath), eventually moving to Chicago in 1913 with her parents and two brothers.

Irving’s parents were both Jewish, and Pauline’s family was Lutheran/Catholic, but they considered themselves progressive rather than religious. As a result, they raised their son with a sense of dual citizenship, honoring holidays of both religions and allowing him to experience both cultures with family and friends from each without dictating the terms of his faith. Christmas Eve was celebrated with his mom’s family, Christmas Day was spent with his dad’s family, and on New Year’s Day the family would go over to his cousin Phyllis (because it was also her birthday) and her family, while Jewish holidays were generally spent with his dad’s family. Likewise, while his folks did not go to prayer services themselves, he had Jewish and Christian friends that he would accompany to their respective temples, churches, or Sunday schools.

Ever the loving wife, Norm’s mother embraced her husband’s heritage and made it an integral part of her world. A consummate homemaker, she mastered the recipes learned from both her mother and mother-in-law, with the dinner table as likely to be laden with gefilte fish (from scratch, of course) and chopped liver as bratwurst and German potato salad. And while she generally didn’t speak Yiddish, she still understood it quite well and was always amused when folks would speak about her right in front of her, wholly unaware that she knew exactly what they were saying.

In addition to holding a monopoly on the love and attention of his parents, Norman basked in the adoration of both sets of grandparents as well. On his father’s side, he shared his grandparents with three cousins: Uncle Sam (known in the family by the affectionate Yiddish diminutive Shmili) and Aunt Gertrude’s daughters, Phyllis (one year older than him) and Ronna (eight years his junior), as well as Uncle Martin and Aunt Rose’s son, Bruce (four years younger). As with his parents, however, Norman was his maternal grandparents one-and-only, and as you can imagine they lost no opportunity to spoil him with affection.

As Norm grew out of the toddler stage, his folks realized that their small apartment was insufficient for the three of them, so the family moved to a larger apartment conveniently located right across the street. Their new home would remain the Edelcup headquarters throughout young Norman’s childhood until he completed high school.

***

As every wonder drug has its side effects, so does every forward leap in technology have its drawbacks. The invention of planes, trains, and automobiles also gave us smog and accidents, the plastics revolution led to the pollution of our environment, while the television brought with it a loss of imagination and an increase in indolence.

Although the television was first invented in 1927, its prohibitive expense during the Great Depression ($200-$600, when the average annual salary was $1,368) and even afterward meant that a TV set was affordable only to the wealthy. By 1946, nearly two full decades after its invention, there were only 6,000 sets in the whole country. However, with a booming economy and tumbling prices came a huge surge in ownership, with 12 million sets found in American homes by 1951.

Television’s predecessor, of course, was the radio, which was itself the technological marvel of its time. As with television, it took decades for that innovation to become widely utilized by the American public. Invented before the turn of the century, the wireless radio only began appearing in American homes in the 1920s, reaching its peak during the late 1930s and throughout the ‘40s, during young Norm’s formative years. By 1940, fully 83% of U.S. homes had a radio, which served as their primary source of entertainment and connection to the world at large, be it classical or big band music, comedy or drama, sports, or news.

Coinciding with radio’s heyday was the golden age of another medium: comic books. Beginning on April 18, 1938, with the publication of Action Comics #1 (a copy of which recently sold for a whopping $3.55 million), when Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster’s legendary Superman captured the hearts and imaginations of American schoolboys, reading comic books became a national pastime.

Year after year, comic books featuring new heroes were introduced, their publishers hoping to cash in on the Kryptonian’s popularity. Drugstores throughout the country displayed circular racks of dozens of comic books for sale. While some featured novel characters and animation favorites, most of their colorful covers sported muscular do-gooders in themed costumes, capes, and masks battling lurid, maniacal villains. Young Norm and millions of other youngsters bought, traded, and imagined themselves in the heroic worlds of iconic creations such as Superman, Batman (who debuted in May 1939), Captain Marvel (late 1939), and Green Hornet (December 1940), and enjoyed the comedic antics of Bugs Bunny (August 1941) and Archie (December 1941).

Always reflective of the popular culture of the day, radio programs began to broadcast their own serialized versions of comic book heroes, with each episode generally ending in a cliffhanger that would ensure young listeners like Norm would tune in to the next episode, hoping to find out if their hero had escaped their ordeal and made it out alive yet again. Unlike television, however, which requires little or no conscious mental effort on the part of the viewer to enjoy, radio shows required young Norm to actively employ his imagination in mentally translating the narration into locations, backgrounds, characters, furniture, vehicles, action, and virtually every other element of the story.

Some of his favorite radio programs, like The Green Hornet and The Lone Ranger, followed the crime-fighting ‘masked hero’ comic book conventions closely, with shows like The Adventures of Superman (where Kryptonite first appeared) and The Shadow (Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!) being lifted directly from the comics themselves. In other cases, more wholesome and traditionally heroic protagonists were sponsored or even invented by a single company, intertwining the product and the character in the minds of their youthful audience. Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy was a hugely popular creation of General Mills that ran from 1933-1951; the globe-trotting hero was sponsored all eighteen years by that most wholesome breakfast cereal of champions, Wheaties. Similarly, the Captain Midnight radio program featured a brave, adventurous pilot who sang the praises of show sponsor Ovaltine (malted chocolate milk powder) throughout most of the show’s eleven-year run. Memorably, each episode closed by giving young listeners like Norm coded clues to the events of the next episode, decipherable only with the aid of a Secret Squadron Decoder Badge purchased through the mail.

In addition to growing up with entertainment that required him to exercise his imagination, young Norm also lived in a friendlier and far less fearful world than we have today. Front doors remained unlocked as a rule, while neighbors chatted with one another and visited each other regularly. If his mom wasn’t home after school, he could go visit his friend’s house; if his buddy wasn’t home yet, he could wait for him at the child’s house while reading his comic books.

Norm and his friends often used ingenuity and materials at hand to entertain themselves, making scooters out of old orange crates and roller skate wheels and selling lemonade for a few cents a glass in a homemade stand. Much of their time after classes, on weekends, and during the summer was spent playing unsupervised throughout their street, sidewalks, or backyards with other kids on or around their block until it was time to eat dinner and listen to their favorite radio shows.

Although he didn’t have television growing up, young Norm and his friends enjoyed going to the movies for a double feature (a standard industry practice begun during the Great Depression to increase flagging audience numbers) when they had the 35 cents or so for admission. Unlike today’s theater experience of several previews followed by the main attraction, moviegoers of that time were treated to a variety program consisting of trailers, a newsreel, a cartoon, and/or a short film preceding a lower-budget second feature, with the big-budget main feature shown following a short break.

From the 1910s until 1948, when the Supreme Court ruled in U.S. v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. that Hollywood studios’ ownership of theater chains constituted a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act, movie production companies such as Warner Bros., Paramount, RKO, MGM, and others competed to build the largest and most ornate showcases for their big-budget blockbusters. In contrast to today’s relatively spartan movie theaters, Norman and other moviegoers of his generation enjoyed the cinema in grand ‘movie palaces’ decorated in a wide array of styles, including Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Aztec, Mediterranean, French Baroque, Spanish Gothic, and Egyptian Revival.

As a youngster, Norm frequented the Paradise Theater in Chicago’s West Garfield neighborhood. Billed as the world’s most beautiful theater, the lavish, 3500-seat cathedral of cinema was exquisitely designed in Oriental fashion and so intricately decorated and embellished that it made him feel like he was on the set of a film production. However, due to the less than favorable acoustics in the Paradise, which had been built in the silent era of filmmaking, he and many others also went to the nearby 3,391-seat Marbro Theater, an impressive edifice decked out in sleek, well-chromed Mid-Century Modern style. These and other theater palaces had well-appointed basements with elaborate restrooms and swanky lounge areas, where patrons could sit and chat on plush sofas while waiting for their companions or upcoming performances.

***

Four days after the infamous December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service, the United States entered into World War II. Millions of young American men joined the military, and virtually the entire country mobilized to do their part.

Prior to Pearl Harbor, the Roosevelt administration realized it was only a matter of time before they were drawn into the war. Faced with the enormous costs of engaging in a ‘total war’ (in which the entire country’s resources are devoted to a military conflict) and the prospects of rising inflation due to a prosperous wartime economy, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. advised President Roosevelt to create a voluntary loan system rather than imposing additional taxes on the populace. Initially called defense bonds (later changed to war bonds following Pearl Harbor), they were sold for as little as $18.75 and were worth $25 to the bondholder after they matured in ten years. Norman watched his parents and their friends fill Treasury-approved stamp albums with 10- and 25-cent savings stamps until they had enough to buy a war bond with the completed album.

As a substantial part of the country’s domestic production had to be devoted to the war effort, everything from food to nylons to gasoline was rationed for the folks at home, resulting in each citizen being issued a series of