Plans call for picnic areas, walking trails and a scrub preserve but construction is years away.
EVERY OTHER WEEK or so, the driver of a brown Honda Pilot performs a peculiar ritual while motoring north along a certain stretch of U.S. 1 in Jupiter.
On cue, as the vehicle passes a metal blue sign with the words “Future Site of Karen Marcus Ocean Park Preserve,” the driver taps a friendly beep-beep of the horn.
“People in the cars next to me are all looking around like, ‘Who? What?’” says the driver, former Palm Beach County Commissioner Karen Marcus, for whom the 154-acre site is named.
“And if the grandkids are with me, they are absolutely mortified: ‘What are you doing?’ I tell them, ‘It’s my park!'”
It’s not a park yet, which is why Marcus performs another whimsical ritual, this one every other year or so in the days leading up to or following her birthday.
Oklahoma Seminoles in Jupiter retrace initial footsteps their ancestors took on the Trail of Tears.
DEEP INSIDE A lush South Florida hardwood hammock, leaders of the Great Seminole Nation of Oklahoma gathered Sunday morning for an emotional journey.
As some washed their heads in the smoke of burning sage, others wandered through a patch of cypress knees off the main trail at Jupiter’s Loxahatchee River Battlefield Park.
Standing at the edge of the Loxahatchee River, they soaked in the scenery, a view that must have been similar to what their ancestors saw 184 years ago when U.S. soldiers drove them off their homeland.
Minutes later, they bowed their heads in prayer and began walking through the mud and sawgrass, retracing the initial footsteps their ancestors took on the Trail of Tears.
“We know this is a hollow and sacred place amongst our people,” Chief Lewis Johnson said later to 100 people who gathered beneath the branches of a majestic oak after watching the Oklahoma Seminoles march along a roughly mile-long route.
“Even though this was a short walk for us,” he said, “we realize what took place upon these grounds.”
For two of his children, who live in Palm Beach Gardens, Cooperstown ceremony ‘a dream come true.’
FIFTY YEARS AGO, on the eve of the 1972 season, Major League Baseball players went on strike for the first time in modern history.
The strike lasted just two weeks but wiped out the final two games of spring training, including the Easter finale at old West Palm Beach Municipal Stadium between the Atlanta Braves and the visiting New York Mets.
Nearly every Mets player left town a day earlier, when the strike washed out Saturday’s game in Fort Lauderdale against the New York Yankees. With no game on Sunday, Mets manager Gil Hodges and most of his coaching staff decided to head to West Palm Beach, anyway. They wanted to take some final spring swings of their own.
Brooklyn Dodgers first baseman Gil Hodges prepares a new bat before the 1952 World Series. (Associated Press)
At the time, Hodges was among baseball’s living royalty, the Brooklyn-born “Miracle Worker’’ less than three years removed from guiding the “Amazin’ Mets” to a World Series upset over the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles. The 1969 championship only brightened the glow of his Favorite Son status around the five boroughs, a torch lit in his playing days as an All-Star first baseman who led his hometown Dodgers to six World Series.
He loved to swing a golf club, too.
On April 2, he played 27 holes at Palm Beach Lakes Golf Club, a modest course just across Congress Avenue from the ballpark. After the final round, he made his way across the parking lot toward his room at the oldRamada Inn on the Green.
“Hey, Gillie,’’ coach Joe Pignatano yelled. “What time do you want to meet for dinner?”
“7:30,” Hodges replied.
Moments later, he collapsed in front of Room 158, his head slamming against the concrete sidewalk. He’d suffered a massiveheart attack.
At 5:45 p.m., he was pronounced dead on arrival at Good Samaritan Medical Center. He was just 47, two days shy of what would have been his 48th birthday.
He left behind a wife, a son, three daughters and millions of admirers.
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Two of Hodges’ children, Gil Jr. and Cindy, are neighbors in Palm Beach Gardens. As the 50th anniversary of their father’s death approaches, they have a far more inspiring moment awaiting them: Their father’s long-awaited enshrinement into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
An inaugural trip takes hikers off-the-beaten path north of Jupiter’s Riverbend Park.
INTO THE WILD they marched, explorers of all ages — from adventure-seeking seniors to the young mother with the 18-month-old strapped to her back — hiking across mud through towering cypress forests and lush green gullies of fern.
Occasionally, they swatted away giant grasshoppers, tripped over cypress knees, slipped in sugar sand, and cursed the heat.
