“Pleasure to meet you,’’ Mickey says. “Heard you name-dropping me. Gotta say, good comedy.’’

I know what you’re thinking:

Mickey Rooney? The Hollywood heartthrob from the Andy Hardy movies of Tinsel Town’s black-and-white glory days?

What in the name of TCM did Mickey Rooney mean to Kevin Kaminski?

Big laughs. Self-deprecating humor. A nod to Kevin’s endless one-liners referencing old TV shows and actors spanning the lists from A-to-B.

Kevin was married and divorced four times, remaining friends with all four exes. Still, he couldn’t resist the comedic material, always joking about his quest to catch legendary marrying man Mickey, a six-time divorcee.

Nobody made me laugh harder than Kevin. Humor was a special gift he gave to his many friends. You couldn’t get enough of his one-liners and amusing observations, treats more delightful and delicious than a Whitman’s Sampler.

Kevin not only loved a good time, he was a good time. He lived life the way we all swear we should, but rarely do, always making time to travel and explore with family and friends.

He was an award-winning journalist, including his work over seven years as group editor for Lifestyle magazines, a devoted dad to his three amazing children, a world traveler, avid concert-goer passionate about the deep, meaningful lyrics of his favorite bands, Rush and Pearl Jam, and an excellent golfer.

Kevin never lacked for conversation topics related to his accomplished life, but if you knew him, as I did over nearly 40 years of friendship, or just met him at a cocktail party, he wanted to know about you.

He was a laser beam of positive energy piercing even his darkest moment. So it was that in the weeks after he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, he never stopped reveling in all the good going on in my world.

Thrilled about my wife’s new job. Ecstatic that I’ll soon be blessed with a third grandchild. Relieved and happy to hear that my sister’s own cancer condition is under control.

Kevin’s genuine care and concern for people and his upbeat attitude explains his devotion to writing about those who strive to serve their communities. He always wanted to salute special folks, like the philanthropists profiled in this issue.

Kevin knew his time was slowly running out, like a macabre hourglass. Self-pity was not an option. Celebration and reflection was.

He looked back on a lifetime of experiences he had packed into the last year or so. There must be a reason, he thought, that so much joy came along so fast.

At the top of the list, a surprise 60th birthday celebration trip to Europe with daughter, Jackie, and son, Jake.

Another adventure – a Florida Gators football weekend in Gainesville last September with my three sisters, my wife and me. Kevin attended Florida with my youngest sisters, Gloria and Carol. None of us had been back to Gator Country in years, and this was the first time Kevin, Gloria and Carol were on campus together since graduation.

During the game, a cherry-on-the-top win over rival Tennessee, my wife took a photo of Kevin gazing at the field from our end zone seats.

He looks intense, but at ease, his hands clasped, almost as if in prayer.

Kevin was soaking up the atmosphere, feeling blessed for the opportunity to be with friends, who meant as much to him as family, in a meaningful place, reminiscing about fun times from the past and grateful to be making more memories to cherish in the future.

Thank you, Kevin, for all the gifts from a beautiful life. The big laughs. The kindness and care. The spirit of sharing so many magical moments.

Miss you, my friend. Yuk it up with Andy Hardy.

The post Editor’s Letter: Saluting a Good Friend appeared first on Lifestyle Media Group.

Those rings from three consecutive regular season conference championships as an assistant at Louisiana Tech? Maybe check his sock drawer.

The game ball from his first win as Florida Atlantic University’s head coach? Lost it.

Game ball from his 100th win? Isn’t that what players were chucking at the rim in a recent pickup game?

But surely May is treasuring keepsakes from last season, when his Owls made an astounding, inspiring—cue the hysterical sports announcer—“Are you kidding me?” run to the NCAA Tournament’s Final Four. Suddenly, improbably, basketball was all the buzz in Boca Raton—bigger than Botox, trendier than the Town Center mall, hotter than happy hour at Mizner Park—as FAU came within a buzzer-beating, heartbreaker-of a-loss from reaching the national championship game.

There were appearances on the Today show, Good Morning America, ESPN’s Get Up, The Dan Patrick Show, The Jim Rome Show. T-shirts emblazoned with “In Dusty We Trusty” flew off the campus store shelves.

Some four months later, on a blazingly hot August afternoon, May is sitting in his FAU arena office, one best described as functional. That is, if he were the manager of a used car lot along U.S. 441 and not one of the hottest young coaches in all of collegiate sports.

May’s makeup is grounded in humble, hard-working, grateful Midwestern stock. No flash, no looking back, no resting on laurels and, no surprise, he’s still not into mementos.

He gestures to a shelf lined with accolades and tributes from the Owls’ mind-blowing March Madness success.

“I just ordered tubs to get rid of all this stuff,” he says. “I don’t like looking at it. I don’t like seeing it. I’m not very sentimental.

“I’ll probably regret it when I get old.”

It’s not that May, 46, hasn’t taken the time to appreciate how FAU crafted one of the most gripping chapters in the 84-year-old tournament’s storied history. It’s just that it’s time to look ahead to a new season. Besides, while the sports universe and all of South Florida were going gaga over the Owls, they were just going about their business as usual.

“Our guys were offended by the Cinderella tag,” May says. “We won 20 straight games. We were nationally ranked from a top 10 league. We felt like clumping us with those other Cinderella teams from the past … that was a slight.”

That might explain May’s expressionless reaction as FAU fans erupted at Madison Square Garden in New York when the Owls beat Kansas State 79-76 to clinch the Final Four berth. May walked along the sideline after a game-saving steal like an indifferent Manhattanite would if The Naked Cowboy was on bended knee proposing to Elmo in Times Square.

Before the game, May had written a specific message to his team on a locker-room whiteboard filled with routine game strategy reminders:

“WE ARE BUILT FOR THIS MOMENT’’

After that upset, May walked from the Garden to the team hotel with two of his assistant coaches. He went straight to his room and was munching on pizza when a few school officials suggested that he come down to join the postgame pandemonium.

“It was like an FAU home game,” May says of the crowd that had overtaken the Marriott Marquis’ massive atrium.

If May’s wheels already were spinning toward the Final Four weekend in Houston, his biggest supporter was caught up in more than a New York minute of emotions.

“I did cry after that one,” says Dusty’s wife, Anna. “I know how special it is to reach the Final Four. There are so many great coaches and teams that never made it, so I know how difficult it is to get there.”

Unlike her husband, Anna did hang on to at least one keepsake from the postseason—a pair of Owls-red pom-poms she brought to the Conference USA tournament in Frisco, Texas and kept on shaking through the Final Four.

“Every weekend was magical,” she says of March Madness, “and it was a complete family affair. We had all of our families there, friends from college and cities that we had lived in previously, even old neighbors.”

Knight Stand

Dusty and Anna met in first grade, became boyfriend and girlfriend in fourth grade, dated through high school, floated apart for a brief period, reunited before graduating from college and were married about a year later. They grew up in a rural area outside of Bloomington, Indiana, home of Dusty’s alma mater, Indiana University. Greene County, an old coal mining community, is so rural that the only signal light in the area is flashing.

“When I was growing up, it was maybe the poorest county in the state,” May says. “I wouldn’t say we were poor because we were never hungry, but it was the mid-[1990s] and my mom drove a 1984 Chevette. Not a Corvette. A Chevette.”

May’s parents divorced when he was a child, and his mother moved Dusty and his older brother, David, into a trailer. She worked as a secretary at a small engineering firm. “She’s my idol,” May says of his mom, Sandy Garrett.

Anna says her husband is “definitely the same person” she’s known since first grade. “He was always very competitive and into sports,” she says. “He loved basketball and spent all his time at the gym, and he’s always been very outgoing.”

Growing up in the hoops crazy Hoosier State, May had one goal—to be a high school basketball coach in Indiana. To that end, a lucky bounce came his way before he graduated high school, but he let the opportunity dribble by. May was doing yard work for Larry Rink, Indiana University’s longtime team doctor and best friend of legendary Indiana coach Bobby Knight.

“If you want to be a coach, you need to go to work for Bob,” the good doctor prescribed. Meaning, apply to Indiana and get involved in Knight’s program. Instead, May, a four-year starter at point guard at Eastern Greene High School, went off to play Division II ball at Oakland City University in Indiana, where he struggled on the court as a freshman, lost confidence in his game and realized he needed to make a fast break to IU.

By the following fall, May was one of about 12 to 15 team managers reporting to the coach respectfully and fearfully nicknamed the General.

“As a freshman manager, he doesn’t even know who you are,” May says of Knight. “You’re terrified. You’re always on your toes. After four years of that, you kind of need something different because it’s exhausting.

“But it does prepare you for anything and everything.”

The payoff was a daily crash course on Knight’s relentless pursuit of perfection. “He had systems for everything,” May says. “As a manager, it was a towel over a shoulder, ball under your arm. You have three-by-five notecards with Flair pens in your pocket. Everything is a checklist and systems … everyone is alert, anticipating problems, always hustling.’’

May threw himself into Knight school as if he was diving for loose balls. He even volunteered for extra shifts around the basketball offices whenever secretaries took vacation time. Knight was growing fond of the kid a fellow team manager called “the alpha manager.”

“He called me ‘Rusty Dusty,’ ” May says, still tickled after all these years over his gruff mentor’s affectionate nickname.

Within two years, one of Knight’s assistant coaches convinced May that he should skip high school coaching gigs and work his way up the ladder through college assistant positions to become a head coach. Orders from the General ultimately landed May his first job. Knight reached out to then-Southern Cal coach Henry Bibby, who was considering hiring May for his vacant video coordinator position. May was sitting nearby when he heard Knight talking him up to Bibby. When the phone call ended, Knight glanced at May. 

“You didn’t think I was talking about you, did you?” he growled.

May chuckles over his follow-up conversation with Bibby. “He said, ‘Unless you’re the village idiot, the job is yours. If you can work for that guy, you can work for anyone.’”

Knight, of course, is as renowned for his temper and ill treatment of some players as he is for his extraordinary success, including three national championships in 29 years at IU. May understands and accepts the criticism, especially from players who later spoke out against Knight.

“Every day he wanted to put players in an equally stressful environment as they would see in a game,” he says, acknowledging that it did break down some players. “It wasn’t for everyone. Those standards and expectations are hard to live by.”

May didn’t hear personally from Knight during FAU’s tournament run; the 82-year-old was hospitalized during Final Four weekend with what was described as an “acute illness.’’But, May says, his sons did reach out.

“He was amazing, and I hate that the media perception is a lot different than how I knew he was on a daily basis,” May says.

For May, the Southern Cal job tipped off a series of assistant coaching positions at Eastern Michigan, Murray State, Alabama-Birmingham, Louisiana Tech and Florida.

Anna, a Purdue University graduate and occupational therapist, says their three sons came to understand that “when we said we needed to have a family meeting, they knew Dad had been offered a new job.”

Welcome to Boca

May certainly wanted a head coaching position, but he had enjoyed three seasons in Gainesville under then-Gators coach Mike White, who also had May on his staff at Louisiana Tech. Anna says the plan was to have the boys graduate from high school in Gator Country before moving on. 

Then, in March 2018, White’s brother, Brian, became FAU’s athletic director. It wasn’t long before he reached out to May to make his first hire. Florida had just lost in the second round of the NCAA Tournament and May was walking from the team bus into the team hotel when Brian White called.

A few days later, Dusty and Anna were driving to his interview in Boca Raton and the GPS took them on the scenic route, the last miles stretching down lush and luxurious AIA through Delray Beach. This was their second trip to South Florida, the first being a couple of years earlier for one of their son’s basketball tournaments. They stayed at FAU’s campus in Jupiter and fell in love with the area, thinking, at the time, that they were on the main campus.

“We thought Gainesville was heaven,” Dusty says, “but everyone up there was like, ‘No, this is nothing. South Florida is heaven.’”

Now, as AIA paved their way to the actual campus like some sort of Yellow Brick Road to Dusty’s first head coaching Oz, May realized he wasn’t in Indiana anymore. “It’s a perfect day, I’m looking at my wife and I’m like, ‘Wait a minute. We can live here?’”

FAU booked the Mays at the storied Boca Raton Resort & Club (now called The Boca Raton) and Dusty interviewed with then-President John Kelly and other school and athletic officials. By lunchtime, there was an offer on the table. May, who describes himself as “relatively impulsive” about all of his decisions, needed input from Anna, who was cruising around Boca.

“I stepped outside to call her and said, ‘Hey, they want me to do this,’” May says. “She said, ‘Whatever you think. I trust you when it comes to your career.’

“So, I signed it.”

What happened next became a viral storyline as reporters scrambled to introduce May and the Owls to a nationwide audience during March Madness. After signing the contract on one side of campus, May was brought to the basketball arena for the first time where, as he recounted to media members last spring, he panicked. Looking over the spartan, smallish (his high school gym capacity is 100 fewer than FAU’s), somewhat shoddy arena, weight room and locker room, May thought he had “committed career suicide.”

Later, when he was dropped off at the resort, Anna had to console and reassure her tearful husband. May doesn’t regret telling that story, but he would like to add some context.

“Look, the new AD had been on the job about a week,” he says. “The basketball coach had basically been let go a week or two earlier. There was no order whatsoever. The gym was a mess.”

FAU has since made improvements to what’s now called Eleanor R. Baldwin Arena or “The Burrow’’ to the growing legion of Owls fans. Still, May doesn’t use the arena to sell the school to recruits, wooing them instead in the swanky suites atop the football stadium, where the ocean glistens a short distance away.

Gym conditions aside, May saw an opportunity to soar as a coach and get the program off the ground in his first solo flight on the bench. “I knew the expectations weren’t great, so that’s the perfect first job,” he says. “You can learn and grow without the pressure.

“There are a lot of built-in advantages here. Let’s not discount that the university is booming and blowing up. We have a lot to sell, especially when it comes to this area and this community.’’

A Season for the Ages

May has not had a losing record in five seasons at FAU, becoming the winningest coach (101-60) in the school’s 34 years of basketball. His thoughts heading into last season?

“If this team doesn’t win 23 to 25 games and be in position to win a conference championship, they should fire me.”

Talk about job security. The Owls won the conference regular season championship at 18-2, beat UAB 78-56 for the conference tournament title, then knocked off Memphis, Fairleigh Dickinson, Tennessee and Kansas State in the NCAA Tournament before losing to San Diego State 72-71 in the Final Four semifinal. FAU finished 35-4 overall, the most wins by all Division I teams for the season and three short of the all-time record.

It was hoot-hoot-hurray for the Owls from all corners of the country. May heard from Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra, Orlando Magic coach Jamahl Mosley and Los Angeles Rams coach Sean McVay.Brendan Hunt, who plays Coach Beard on the hit comedy series Ted Lasso (May is a big Lasso fan), sent a video message:

“From the inquisitive bird community, this is coach Beard. We have enjoyed watching the Owls play.’’

Carrot Top, the FAU graduate and king of props comedy, took time out from his Las Vegas shows to text his own props.

Twenty-two years ago, the late Howard Schnellenberger hoisted FAU onto the collegiate sports landscape by building a football program from the ground up, a passionate project for the mustachioed, pipe-smoking, showman of a coach that led to construction of the campus football stadium whose field now bears his name.

Now, May and his hoopsters have taken the school’s athletics and overall exposure to another level. “It shows you the power of the NCAA Tournament, especially the Final Four,” says May, who received a message from Schnellenberger’s wife, Beverlee, telling him how proud she was of his team.

Says Katrina McCormack, FAU’s associate athletic director, who’s been at the school since 1991: “I’ve been here through Obama speaking [on campus], the Dalai Lama speaking here, Coach Schnellenberger and his huge impact, especially initially.

“But I don’t think there’s one thing in the history of this university that’s had more impact.”

FAU number crunchers figure the media coverage generated by the tournament frenzy amounted to nearly $2 billion dollars in free advertising for the university.

May’s accomplishments earned him a princely sum as well—a new 10-year contract that pays $1.25 million this season with 5 percent increases through 2033. He also can earn a $100,000 bonus for returning to the Final Four and $250,000 for winning the national championship. (May reportedly made $545,000 in base salary last season.) 

While he certainly got a nice bump, consider this for comparison’s sake. Last March FanBuzz.com posted the top 25 salaries among college basketball coaches with Louisville’s Kenny Payne clocking in at No. 25 with $3.494 million and Kentucky’s John Calipari on top of the heap at $8.533 million.

Conventional wisdom has May eventually leaving for a bigger program and a lot more dough, perhaps as soon as next season. Of course, many figured May already would be gone. May doesn’t dismiss the possibility of another family moving meeting, but he set the stage early last season for a later, not sooner, departure.

“I never thought of entertaining an offer,” he says. “I try to make all of my decisions well in advance, when there’s no emotion attached to it. So, once we started winning, you start getting calls from search firms; I knew I’d have options to be in the mix for jobs. But I don’t believe in trying to leverage this or leverage that.

“My wife says I’m a terrible businessman and I don’t disagree. I’ve never chased money. I always felt if you do a great job, money finds you.”

Besides, the Mays are having a ball in Boca. Their two oldest sons, Jack and Charlie, graduated from Saint Andrew’s School, where they played on a state championship basketball team. Jack is a walk-on guard at Florida, entering his final season while working on his MBA; Charlie is a redshirt freshman walk-on guard at Central Florida. The youngest, Eli, is a senior guard at Saint Andrew’s.

“This is home to our sons,” Anna says. “That’s another reason we wanted to stay.”

Anna works for a home health care company, giving her flexibility to concentrate on her main job: Basketball Mom/Wife. Four schedules fill out her smartphone calendar as she jockeys to shuttle between Saint Andrew’s, FAU, Gainesville and Central Florida to catch as many games as possible.

“I don’t have an athletic bone in my body,” Anna says. “I’m not competitive, never been into athletics. But Dusty appreciates that because I’m kind of his escape. God definitely knew to give me three boys to grow up in gyms, be around their dad and support his career.”

Keeping It Simple

The Mays live close enough for Dusty tosometimes ridehis bike to campus, where the sports motto is “Winning in Paradise,” a sentiment Dusty embraces every sun-splashed day.

“I love Boca,” he says. “It feels almost like a small village in the middle of all the hustle and bustle of South Florida. Boca’s quiet, closes early. Even during spring break, you’ll have all the college and high school kids here, just five minutes away in each direction. But we’re a little bit insulated from all that.”

Perhaps it’s his small-town roots or maybe exhaustion from always being on the road, but May prefers hanging at home more than hanging out around town. Date night for the Mays usually includes ordering in, playing board games, maybe catching Jeopardy.

That’s Dusty May, keeping things simple. He even cuts his own lawn, push mower, of course. As for the extra zeroes freshly attached to his bottom line? He isn’t exactly making it rain.

“My wife wanted to look at other houses, but I don’t really want to move,” he says. “My car is fine. Bike is fine.”

Anna disagrees, especially about the bike. “It’s in bad shape,” she says.

Nothing worth a splurge?

“I buy hardback books now,” May says. “I used to buy just paperbacks.”

The Mays did make two trips to Europe this summer. The first was to celebrate Anna’s father’s 70th birthday in Germany; Dusty took a side trip to Monaco to see NBA No. 1 pick Victor Wembanyama in the French league championships. The other was to watch Charlie and the UCF basketball team play a series of exhibition games in Italy.

By late summer, May was full-on shifting his focus to the upcoming season when the Owls will return all five starters from their Final Four team. One early ESPN preseason Top 25 had FAU ranked No. 9. 

He’s eager to get back on the court and into the heads of his players with tools he’s sharpened under the guidance of IU alum Doug Lemov, an expert in academic and sports teaching techniques whose books include The Coach’s Guide to Teaching and Teach Like a Champion.

May doesn’t agonize over the last-second loss to San Diego State in the semifinal. Truth is, the coach and teacher says, the Owls didn’t play up to the standards they set for themselves from the first time they stepped on a court last season.

“It’s painful because we didn’t make the plays we made every other night of the year since our first game,” May says. “We got beat to some loose balls and had some uncharacteristic mistakes. That one didn’t hurt as bad because I didn’t feel like we deserved to win like we did every other night.”

If he did play the woulda-coulda-shoulda game over the defeat, what stings just a bit is that May had watched eventual champion Connecticut beat Iona in the first round and “I felt like we really matched up with them better than I thought we would have.”

Two moments stick with Dusty May from the Owls’ remarkable and enchanting season. The first came in late February, before the actual Madness even began. FAU beat UTEP to clinch at least a tie for the conference regular-season championship. Two more games remained, but this was the Owls last home game so administration officials urged May to proceed with the basketball championship tradition of cutting the nets.

“I thought it was a bad idea,” he says. “We still had to win another game and I didn’t want to share the title. But I figured it was good for the guys, a good moment … we needed to do it.”

So, right there on the court and in the building that had reduced him to regretful tears just five years earlier, May and his players joined coaches, parents, wives and children in celebration.

“You’re in the spot where you’ve spent thousands of hours with all of these people … everyone is here in one spot, a familiar area,” May says. “It was surreal to celebrate that conference championship because we’re right where it all started, and it had culminated in this.

“That was the only moment that gave me goosebumps.”

May pauses and touches an outstretched arm that’s suddenly as pebbled as a basketball. “Still does thinking about it today.”

The other cherished memory?

“Jim Nantz,” May says, referring to the CBS play-by-play icon who has called 32 Final Four weekends, announcing before last season that 2023 would be his last one. When May finally sat down to watch the replay of the semifinal, the voice he first heard as a kid mesmerized by March Madness delivered a thrilling call.

“And there’s Anna May …” Nantz said as the cameras zoomed in on Dusty May’s wife.

“To hear Jim Nantz say my wife and my family’s name … it’s like, wow!”

Now that’s a memento worth keeping around.

Original photography by Eduardo Schneider

Special thanks to FAU’s Katrina McCormack

The post Hoop Dreams appeared first on Lifestyle Media Group.

There’s the thwack-thwack of piston-like jabs, followed by the thwack-thwack-thud of powerful jab-jab, right-cross combinations. In between rounds, Shepard drops on his back for sets of ab-burning moves. This grueling series is the opening bell of an hour-long workout that would have brought fitness guru Jack LaLanne to his jumpsuit-swaddled knees back in the day.

During the past 30 years, Shepard’s been a familiar face and authoritative voice to thousands of South Floridians through investigative reporting and anchor work at NBC 6 (WTVJ-TV) in Miami that earned him six Emmy Awards. His on-air segments often referenced a 28-year military career that included 52 missions as a Gulf War fighter pilot. Along the way, he also earned a law degree.

Shepard, 65, retired as a broadcast journalist last April, but hold the early-bird specials. As this particular morning’s sweat session attests, Willard Shepard isn’t slowing down anytime soon.

Aside from his daily gym routines, Shepard is now able to focus full time on his own legal practice (Willard Shepard Law & Media) as well as teaming with personal injury and maritime law attorney Brett Rivkind at Rivkind Law in Miami. While Shepard says he had other opportunities in the legal field, he was drawn to Rivkind’s compassionate approach to clients often in desperate need.

As a reporter, Shepard witnessed all-too-many people whose lives were blindsided by tragedy.

“Unfortunately, in my line of work, I got a lot of experience in that,” he says. “The important thing for them is to have someone that they can believe in and that they can trust. That’s why I decided to help people in this area and do it with Mr. Rivkind.”

His commitment to clients is to “bring them as much peace as I can.”

One thing is certain. No matter the endeavor, Shepard is driven by an all-in attitude. Take his short-lived, but successful swing in the boxing ring. Nearly a decade ago, after doctors warned Shepard that his regimen of running, biking and pickup basketball would guarantee that his surgically repaired knee eventually would be replaced with an artificial one, he decided to condition himself through boxing workouts.

Shepard learned the nuances of the Sweet Science under Dwaine Simpson, the former boxing director for Miami-Dade County. But it wasn’t enough to pound bags, and slip and deliver punches in sparring sessions. A hallmark of his many lifelong accomplishments, Shepard craved a challenge and competition.

At 58, he had his first bout in the USA Boxing Masters Division (ages 35 and over). Though the three-round bout resulted in a split-decision loss, the Atlanta fight was so competitive that the tournament directors still awarded him a title belt with the winner’s blessing. He fought six more times in the Masters Division, always against opponents with vast boxing experience—and in all but one bout against younger fighters. He did achieve a literal crowning moment, earning a title in the 172-pound class in a tournament in Las Vegas. He was 62.

“One of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done,” he says. “My purpose was to prove to myself that I could do it.”

Shepard chokes up at the memory. He chokes up a lot while talking about mentors and critical junctures of a life driven by a passion to prove himself.

Inspired Examples

Growing up, Shepard had to look no further than across his family’s kitchen table for daily doses of motivation and inspiration.

His father, Samuel, attended the University of Michigan on an academic scholarship, earning a degree in physical education. He returned to teach at his Kansas City, Missouri, high school alma mater, where he coached the football team to a state championship.

He rose to the level of superintendent in St. Louis, earned master’s and doctorate degrees, and later became a superintendent in suburban Chicago. Samuel Shepard developed programs to boost educational opportunities for urban area students, efforts honored by President Lyndon Johnson during a trip to the White House.

Shepard proudly points out a framed black-and-white photo of his father with LBJ, then ushers a visitor to another wall frame in the office of his Biscayne Park home, this one featuring his maternal grandfather, Pope Leo Harrold, the only Black player on the University of Iowa’s 1903 football team. (In 2003, Shepard emceed a luncheon for the Iowa-Southern Cal Orange Bowl and made sure to show the photo to Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz, who gathered his Hawkeyes around to make the point that their school was indeed a pioneer in diversity.)

In his day, Shepard’s grandfather was a groundbreaker off the field, as well, becoming a physician catering to poor Black families. Says Shepard: “My mom’s dad would treat people and sometimes just barter for payment. ‘You got a rabbit?’ ”

Harrold later became the doctor for Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, featured in the 2007 Denzel Washington film The Great Debaters, which told the story of the historically Black college’s 1935 debate team win over Harvard. Shepard’s mother, Lois, earned a degree in education at Wiley.

“So, I was taught that there was no such thing as too much education,” Shepard says. “On that one, I made out fantastically.”

After graduating from Rich South High School outside of Chicago, Shepard attended Temple University on an academic scholarship and played football as a walk-on. An undersized defensive back, he broke a finger near the end of his freshman year. Shepard soon decided that he’d be better off focusing full time on academics and a career in broadcasting.

He ended up calling football and basketball games for the campus radio station; upon graduation, he landed a job as a TV reporter in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Shepard knew law school was in his future, but he took initial aim at a goal he sought since first obsessing over flying while traveling with his father on business trips.

He wanted to be a fighter pilot.

Willard Shepard is choking up again. He’s standing in front of a framed poster of the 1995 movie, The Tuskegee Airmen, which told the story of the Army’s first Black combat pilots who overcame racial barriers to play an essential role in protecting U.S. bombers during World War II.

The poster is signed by the late Tuskegee pilot, Leo Gray, who became friends with Shepard when he lived in Hollywood. Another member of the Airmen, Harry Stewart, signed Shepard’s wings. Shepard is a member of Tuskegee Airmen Inc., a group devoted to keeping their legacy alive.

He points to the distinctive red markings on the tails of the Airmen’s P-51 Mustangs, earning those pilot squadrons the nickname Red Tails.

“Those bomber crews were all Caucasians,” Shepard says, “but they saw those Red Tails, and they knew they were gonna make it home.”

Man on a Mission

Nearly four decades after the Tuskegee Airmen soared through racial turbulence and into history, Shepard didn’t expect as much adversity of his own in attempting to get his aviation career off the ground. But it was a bumpy ride before finally landing in a cockpit.

While working in Harrisburg, he applied for a Pennsylvania Air National Guard spot to learn to fly C-130 planes. His reference letter came from someone he covered as a reporter, Sen. John Heinz, whose family owned the Heinz food company.

He passed his physical and eyesight tests and aced all but one portion of a general comprehensive written test, questions dealing with specific airplanes and instruments. Shepard said he wasn’t aware that there would be questions about planes and aviation, but he later found out that the fathers of the other nine applicants were all Pennsylvania National Guard pilots.

“Naturally, they knew about the test,” says Shepard, adding that he was the only minority candidate.

After taking a job at a TV station in New Orleans, Shepard applied to fly F-15s through the Louisiana National Guard. This time he prepared for the aviation questions and passed the test. However, he was rejected on a medical technicality. While Shepard had no health issues, he marked on a form that both parents were diabetics. His father was. His mother, who was borderline Type 2, wasn’t.

After his mother’s doctor confirmed to the flight surgeon that she was not diabetic, Shepard’s appeal was nevertheless denied by the lieutenant colonel in charge of the unit. Shepard suspected discrimination and favoritism were again in play.

“I went home and cried my eyes out,” he says.

Soon after, a Black fighter pilot and Vietnam War veteran suggested that Shepard apply to learn to fly A-10s with the Air Force Reserve in New Orleans. This time, Shepard was accepted and by June 1985 he had completed officer’s training in San Antonio and pilot training in Lubbock.

Survival training took him to the ocean off Homestead and into the woods of Washington, where he ate bugs that he barbecued with a Bic lighter. While in the Air Force Reserve system training to be combat qualified, he went back on the air in New Orleans and then took another TV position in Cleveland.

As tensions grew in Iraq, Shepard’s dream became a sobering reality in 1990. His unit was deployed, settling into a base in Saudi Arabia to fly sorties across Iraq.

“I was by far the youngest guy in the squadron,” he says. “Many of the older pilots had been shot at in Vietnam. That was their advantage. My advantage was that they could pass on their knowledge to me.”

Units of two or more A-10s would fly every other day with missions sometimes lasting six to eight hours, including refueling on the ground or in the air.

“We would fly, refuel, rearm and go back in,” Shepard says.

He’s standing before another frame in his home, this one the actual map he used for missions over Iraq, the country divided into boxes of potential targeted bombing zones.

“Our main job was protection,” he says. “We were supporting the Army and Marines. We’d go after tanks, artillery sites, munitions storage facilities, and provide cover from being shot at.”

Two sorties stick with Shepard to this day, The first, his initial precision-targeted bomb drop.

“You’ve seen Top Gun. You roll in and roll out,” he says. “That’s the real deal.”

Shepard and another pilot, a Vietnam vet, had one shot to drop clusters of 200 to 240 bombs the size of tennis balls on an artillery site.

“It was my first set of live, no-kidding-combat ordinates,” Shepard says. “When I came off the target and looked back and saw the destruction, it was unbelievable the way they all went off on time.”

Willard Shepard is choking up again.

“I’m very proud of what I accomplished,” he says. “When the moment arose, I really rose to that [occasion].”

His other most memorable sortie speaks more to the great fortune of surviving 52 missions over a two-month span. Shepard and his flying mates were often shot at, but one particular day “we could see the plumes of anti-aircraft rounds going off all around us.” He earned six Air Medals flying over Iraq.

Before leaving Saudi Arabia, Shepard took aim at a group with some not-so-friendly fire. During an exercise at Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf’s control center, he was one of several military unit specialists assigned to give immediate responses to hypothetical situations derived from intelligence.

Also in the room that day—pilots from the Pennsylvania National Guard, the first group to deny Shepard’s shot at becoming a fighter pilot. Shepard didn’t know if any of them had anything to do with the rejection he received years earlier, but he wanted them to know his story and that “now I’m flying my fighter plane.”

After returning from the desert, he had an opportunity to settle another score. During flying exercises with the New Orleans National Guard, he was assigned to an F-15 with none other than the lieutenant colonel who years earlier had rejected his medical appeal.

“We were flying out over the gulf and he said, ‘Captain Shepard, you have the aircraft,’ ” Shepard says. “And I said, ‘Sir, now I’m gonna take you for a ride’ and I pulled some Gs and jostled [him].”

Shepard joined NBC 6 in 1994 and continued to fly in the Air Force Reserve nearly four more years, including several combat sorties over Bosnia. But devoting himself to journalism and earning his law degree in 2010 at Florida International University didn’t exactly ground this decorated pilot.

Heart of a Warrior

First, he became an Air Force Academy Liaison Officer, focusing on potential future cadets in area high schools. Later, he worked for the U.S. Southern Command for more than 10 years, helping to improve aviation operation and maintenance initiatives in South and Central America, and the Caribbean. He also joined the Civil Air Patrol and remains active with that Air Force auxiliary organization, where he’s assisted FEMA after hurricanes and played the part of enemy aircraft in exercises with the Louisiana National Guard. Plus, he works with youth interested in aerospace careers through the cadet program.

Flying with every unit means staying in excellent shape—no sweat for gym rat Shepard—and undergoing an extensive cardiovascular exam every year.

Last August, Shepard churned through his annual treadmill test like he was auditioning for a remake of The Six Million Dollar Man. Then he got a strange call from his cardiologist.

“He said, ‘I think the machine is busted. I see some waves in there that don’t make any sense,’ ” Shepard recalls. A second stress test revealed the same irregularities and a cardiac catheterization performed at Hollywood’s Memorial Regional Hospital showed two blocked arteries and one partially blocked.

Despite his conditioning and strict diet, Shepard knew genetics weren’t on his side; his maternal grandfather, the doctor, died at 42 after a cardiac event at his own office. Dr. Juan Plate, cardiac surgeon at Memorial Regional, offered Shepard two options: Insert stents as temporary solutions or go all-in, Willard Shepard style.

“He said, ‘We can build you new highways. You might not like us for a day or two, but you’ll never have to deal with this again. We know that you don’t eat fried chicken and mac-and-cheese and you go to the gym every day.’ ”

Shepard’s reply: “You can put me to sleep now.”

He lifts his T-shirt, revealing a thin, pinkish scar slicing from his abdomen through his upper sternum, a badge of honor from the six-hour, 24-minute surgery.

Willard Shepard is choking up again.

“Boxing wasn’t just for me to win a tournament,” he says. “At the end of the day, all of that time that I invested in exercise kept me alive. Had I not done what I did all of those years, especially the last decade, something might have happened to me.”

He’s beaming now, showing videos shot by his wife, Tainna, as she accompanied her husband on walks through hospital hallways in the first days of recovery.

The Shepards’ son, Gianmarco, a former Marine who recently graduated with a degree in communications from FIU, lives with them. So does their German Shepherd, Kairo, and Goldendoodle, Lilly; both lounge around their bright and stylish home like a couple of FAO Schwarz plush toys. The Shepards’ daughter, Francesca, is a paralegal at an immigration law firm in Boston.

Paying It Forward

Over the years, Shepard’s military career gave him an edge on a number of stories he reported for NBC 6. He already was a certified diver when he approached the Miami-Dade Police department about attending their dive school. Aware of his background, he got the green light, along with then-cameraman Mike Zimmer, and their training resulted in stories such as diving to inspect cruise ships for potential detonation devices and illegal “parasites” such as drugs attached to vessels.

The military connection pulled Shepard directly into a breaking news story on Veterans Day in 2013. Fredy Gutierrez, a 59-year-old Vietnam veteran, shut down traffic for hours on a ramp off Interstate 595 in Davie, threatening to commit suicide.

Gutierrez, a Colombian native who came to the U.S. at age 4, was distraught over a pending deportation. He also said he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. He did not know Shepard personally but was aware that he was a veteran from seeing him on TV and told police that he only would talk to the journalist.

Police contacted Shepard, who immediately came to the scene. He was handed a phone to connect with Gutierrez, who was able to see Shepard from his truck. “My message to him was, ‘Look, I’m here. I’m going to stay with you through the whole process. The best thing now is to not have this conversation on the turnpike with a weapon and the traffic shut down and the police worried that you might start shooting.

“ ‘Why don’t you come over here, and we can sit in the police department and start the process?’ ”

Gutierrez relented without a problem and true to his word, Shepard, along with immigration attorneys, helped him work through the legal matters over the turnpike incident and resolve the deportation issue.

Shepard remained friends with Gutierrez until he died in 2017.

“He was shot at for his country,” Shepard says. “He clearly was upset with the way he was ultimately treated. But it all got worked out, and he was doing much better. I used to go watch basketball and football games with him.”

Through his law practice now, Shepard plans “to help as many veterans as I can.”

While fellow service men and women always will be a focus for Shepard, he particularly enjoys working with Civil Air Patrol cadets, especially when nervous but curious future pilots are from two groups still lacking in military flight schools—women and minorities.

Willard Shepard is choking up again.

He pulls up a photo of a young Black girl, her face silhouetted by endless blue skies, eyes wide and fixated to the distance, mouth slightly open, a snapshot of pure awe and joy, like a child’s first Christmas tree lighting.

“Her mom didn’t want her to go,” Shepard says of the day the girl was scheduled to take her first cadet flight. “I said, ‘Look, Mom, my government says I’ve been over Iraq 52 times in a war. I’m gonna bring your daughter back.’ ”

Shepard guided the Cessna over the Everglades, then allowed the cadet to slowly turn the plane to the right, then back to the left.

“I took that photo and had to compose myself,” he says. “I thought, ‘This girl may really do something with this.’

“[And then] I thought about [Tuskegee Airmen] Col. Gray and Col. Stewart and all they did to make it possible for a person like me.”

Photos by Eduardo Schneider

The post From Local TV Reporter to Legal Crusader: Willard Shepard’s Career Has Had Many Rewarding Moments appeared first on Lifestyle Media Group.

Or her TikTok account with more than 110 million views and 850,000 followers.

Or the concoctions she’s developed to revive private parts and reignite pleasure.

Or the couple she’s helped transform into the geriatric Pam and Tommy Lee of sexual escapades.

Indeed, Dr. Kanwal Bawa, aka Dr. Sex Fairy, has a lot to say about her meteoric rise in the relatively uncharted world of sexual medicine and her ground-breaking techniques at Bawa Medical in Boca Raton to rejuvenate hair, skin and, well, ways to make for better whoopee.

But she’ll always embrace her roots as a physician—deep, sturdy and still emotionally charged from 13 years as an emergency room and trauma center doctor.

She doesn’t fight the tears in recounting one of the many moments—of survival and tragedy—she thinks about to this day.

Bawa had arrived for her evening shift at the ER of a Houston-area hospital and was briefed about a woman who had been there for several hours after hitting her head in a fall. But to Bawa, the woman did not look like a typical concussion patient.

“She looked gray,” Bawa says. “She looked like death.”

Bawa figured that something made her faint and fall. She quizzed the woman, who only had one thing on her mind.

“All she cared about was how soon she could leave because she had a disabled daughter, and she handled her meds,” Bawa says.

Bawa sensed that the woman’s condition was worsening and quickly pushed her gurney to the CT scan room, telling a stunned tech to take a stable patient off the table and immediately scan the head-injury patient.

Bawa thought the culprit was a blood clot in her chest, and her fears were confirmed in the most horrific way—a code blue signal while the woman was on the scanning table.

“I intubated her through the donut of the CAT scan,” she says. “We worked on her for two hours.” Despite Bawa’s spot-on instincts and painstaking efforts, the woman died. Bawa then pulled herself together to meet the family.

“I’m talking to them, and the daughter waddles into the room and says, ‘Momma,’ ” Bawa says. “I cried, the family cried … we all cried together.”

Bawa pauses, blinking back tears.

“Emergency medicine can really wear on your soul after a point,” she says. “I never lost my humanity … to this day I think about those people.”

So, how did this Nova Southeastern University College of Osteopathic Medicine graduate and Cleveland Clinic-trained emergency medicine physician transition from matters of life and death to podcast episodes with titles like “How to Get a Porn Star Penis”?

Well, as Bawa discovered throughout her career at ERs from Cleveland to Houston to South Florida, sex can trigger plenty of trauma.

Erection issues. Penis fractures. Assorted items stuck in orifices.

“In between saving lives and heart attacks and strokes and trauma helicopter rides,” Bawa says, “I was like the pied piper of sexual [incidents].

“If I showed up, the universe was just sending them to me.”

Long before—wince warning!—draining her first erectile-dysfunction-pill-induced, multi-hour erection or her inaugural expedition to retrieve a missing sex toy, Bawa already was considering a shift in her medical career.

She was inspired at age 17 to consider becoming an ER doctor after sustaining a concussion, broken collarbone and a leg injury when a truck hit her school bus in her native New Delhi, India, killing the bus driver and a student. Bawa marveled over the miraculous efforts of the physicians that day.

A not-as-tragic but nevertheless disturbing situation led her down the path to a career in what she has coined “rejuvenation from the inside out.”

No Turning Back

Years of tying her hair back tightly in hospitals resulted in a receding hairline. Bawa’s initial hair transplant procedures did not go well. Frustrated, she decided to train in hair-transplant surgery. From there, she started taking courses in skin-care procedures, but also on her mind were the sexual problems she encountered in emergency rooms.

“I got into rejuvenation, and it was a natural transition from there to helping people with their sexual needs,” Bawa says. “Now they had great hair and skin, but they wanted to have great sex, too.”

Bawa expanded her medical horizons while still working in the ER at Florida Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale before leaving her longtime career to open Bawa Medical in 2019.

Her rejuvenation education included a course with Dr. Charles Runels, whose name and Alabama practice went viral after no-less-a-cosmetically-created-queen than Kim Kardashian revealed details—and a pretty gruesome photo—about her “Vampire Facial” performed by Runels.

The “Vampire” involves injecting Platelet-Rich Plasma from a patient’s own blood into the skin. Runels taught Bawa a similar procedure to improve function through a priapus shot for the penis and orgasm shot for the vagina. The objective is to use a patient’s own bodies to stimulate their stem cells.

Now, Bawa is in the process of trademarking her own brand, BawaShots, to rocket-boost stem cell growth. Her breakthrough formula combines Dysport, a Botox-like toxin, with exosomes harvested from umbilical cord tissue and platelet-rich fibrin matrix from a patient’s blood. Imagine fortifying your morning caffeine jolt by adding a shot of espresso and vial of Red Bull to your Starbucks venti Veranda Blonde Roast and you get the idea.

She’s also been successful in developing custom-made shots that include facial fillers to address a common request from clients—penis enlargement.

Bawa offers a list of services the size of a Cheesecake Factory menu on her website with treatment names like BawaLift Labial Rejuvenation, images of drop-dead gorgeous male and female models, and before-and-after photos of actual patients forewarned by a nudity warning. She estimates that 70 percent of her practice is now devoted to sexual medicine with the rest divided between facial aesthetics and hair restoration.

She was tickled when several satisfied customers praised her for an ability to spread sexual “fairy dust.” Then one day, as her orders for PRP kits grew, her PRP representative wanted to know, “just how many facial, microneedling treatments are you doing?”

“Haven’t you heard, darling?” Bawa replied, “I’m the Sex Fairy … No, I’m Doctor Sex Fairy.”

Bawa immediately spun around to her computer, locked up the domain name and nailed down a number of social media handles. Dr. Sex Fairy was in the house and, shortly afterward, she launched the Dr. Sex Fairy podcast from a leased studio in Boca Raton (she now produces it from her office). The podcast ranks in the top 1 percent globally for most popular shows across all categories, according to Listennotes.com.

“What made me unique was that I was a Cleveland-Clinic-trained doctor talking about sexual issues that were very scary to people, profound and very embarrassing,” Bawa says. “But I was saying those things and discussing those topics with dignity.”

To be sure, while Bawa might inject a touch of humor into a discussion of, say, injecting penises and vaginas to improve performance and appearance—her How Fast Does Semen Fly Out Of Your Penis? segment on TikTok features background music from Top Gun—she avoids the kind of off-color jokes or rim-shot innuendo used by other sex-help hosts.

“I’m funny. I joke about stuff,” she says. “But I have maintained my dignity in a field that doesn’t always lend itself to that. Also, I never want people to think that I was ever making fun of them.

“I’m more likely to make fun of myself than to make fun of somebody else’s physical problem.”

Bawa, who as a teenager modeled for Cosmopolitan magazine, also is careful to maintain a professional appearance, shooting her TikTok videos in a traditional white lab coat.

“I know I could get more TikTok views if I sexualized myself,” she says. “I refuse to make it racy. Sexual medicine does not need to be sexualized.”

Still, you do want to grab an audience’s attention, so the titles of her podcasts and TikTok segments are hardly anything you’d find in the American Journal of Medicine: The Sex Position Most Likely To Break Your Penis. Shocking Sex Secrets of the Amish. Loose Women: How to Tighten Your Vagina.

Bawa’s podcast guests sometimes include patients eternally thankful to once again be active in the bedroom or, in the case of Jim and Cindy of Boca Raton, anywhere or anytime they get the urge. Jim, then 69, and Cindy, then 70, both took BawaShots, and Jim also was treated with soundwave therapy to improve blood flow to the penis.

“They say they’re having sex twice a day and sometimes nooners,” Bawa says with a laugh.

Bawa points out that not all patients will receive successful results from treatments that have had clinically proven effects and might still be in the experimental stage.

“I’m not going to do anything that I think will hurt my patient,” she says, “but I am willing to take a chance. We have an honest discussion that this is not something that there’s any FDA approval for, but I would like to try it on you.”

Trading Places

Two years ago, Bawa became a patient herself—and it was far more serious than anything encountered in her practice. She discovered a lump in her breast in 2017, but doctors kept assuring her—even after two mammograms confirmed the mass—that there was no need for a biopsy or concern.

Bawa was skeptical of the diagnosis, but between going through a divorce, adjusting to life as a single mother of twin boys, still working in the ER and taking courses toward opening her practice, she trudged on.

Then, another mammogram revealed growth in the lump and cancer was confirmed through a biopsy. Bawa sought treatment at the University of Miami’s Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center. More than three years had passed since she had first noticed the lump.

“I truly think my doctors at Sylvester saved my life,” she says. “I was Stage II, but Grade 3. Very aggressive cancer.”

She began chemotherapy treatments, and by then Bawa Medical had been open for a year. Bawa would go for a treatment and return to the office, “puking, everything, but never sitting at home,” she says. “I never gave myself a chance to be a cancer patient. I didn’t have time. I was working.”

She also was preparing to achieve a major goal in her quest to summon strength for herself and others.

Sometime before her diagnosis, representatives of the Ms. Florida beauty pageant for women ages 28-and-older reached out to Bawa about participating. No thanks, she replied.

But during her first oncology appointment, she had an off-the-wall question for her doctor: “Would it be entirely crazy if I signed up for a beauty pageant?”

Cancer was not going to crash her pageant party. One day, Bawa’s chemo nurse approached her in tears.

“That’s not a good sign when your hardened chemotherapy nurse is crying. My labs were not good. I was so sick. But I said to her, ‘I’m not sure why you’re crying. In just two or three months, I’m going to be on stage—and I’m going to win Ms. Florida.’ ”

She had her mastectomy in early May 2021; a month later Bawa was crowned Ms. Florida in Stuart, taking the stage long after chemo had reduced her flowing, jet-black mane to a cropped cut. She wore a gown purposefully plunged just enough to reveal the scar of her intravenous port.

Her best friend had to zip her dress, and her boys buckled her shoes.

Bawa savors the memories of that evening and, despite her skin-reviving skills, has no plans to erase her scar.

“I’m keeping this,” says Bawa, who turns 45 in May. “It’s my battle wound.”

Flying High

“My goal was that I wanted to inspire people to not be limited by adversity,” Bawa says. “It doesn’t matter what the adversity is; it’s the concept, not just cancer.”

Bawa became an ambassador for the American Cancer Society’s ResearchHERS initiative, and she devoted podcasts to life after breast cancer and testicular cancer.

“I want to have those tough conversations, too,” she says. “Those are not sexy conversations.”

Bawa lives with her sons, Arjun and Akal, in Boynton Beach. The twins turn 13 in May, and they’re aware of Dr. Sex Fairy. In fact, they’re the ones who encouraged her to expand her reach through TikTok.

If only Mom would stop trying to have the ewww factor talks with them.

“I have conversations with them about sexuality, and they’re not always enthralled,” Bawa says.

These days, Bawa’s schedule is filled with office appointments—she estimates that 80 percent of her patients are from elsewhere in Florida, around the country, and across the world, including Southeast Asia, England, Italy, Australia, South America and the Caribbean islands.

She also produces at least two podcasts and a couple of TikTok videos each week. In addition, she’s ironing out plans for a line of supplements and a second office located in Miami. Oh, and she’s working on designs for a penis pump.

Side note to potential engineers—you’re gonna need a bigger pump.

“I make men bigger,” Bawa says, “and so the average Amazon pump is not really big enough for my guys.”

Will there ever be time for her other childhood dream? Bawa’s paternal grandfather was a general in the Indian army and her maternal grandfather was a Boeing-trained aeronautical engineer.

Hence, her desire to become a fighter pilot. It may seem a little late for takeoff, but never say never to Bawa. She’s determined to reach for the sky.

“My goal now is to get a pilot’s license,” she says with the kind of exhilaration that likely precedes Jim and Cindy’s daily afternoon delight.

“How crazy would it be to have Dr. Sex Fairy on the side of a fighter jet?”

No crazier than a veteran ER doctor becoming a worldwide phenom in the field of sexual performance.

“I felt like I was saving lives, but I wasn’t enhancing them,” Bawa says. “I had a great, noble career, but what are you doing to make lives better?”

She continues, but not before a smile and laugh.

“This is a whole other realm of making lives better.”

Photography by Eduardo Schneider

Makeup by Gaby Ojeda

The post Dr. Kanwal Bawa: Fairy Tales Come True appeared first on Lifestyle Media Group.

Settling into her new home during an Ohio winter, Rita Case went to the mall seeking cold-weather outfits. She was sticking with her business suits, but this California girl needed heavier material for the harsh Ohio winters.

She noticed a rack of hats, tried some on, and a fashion statement was born.

“It was so classy looking,” Rita says, “and I thought, ‘This is going to be my brand.’ I wanted to stand out, show that I had confidence and was my own person. I wanted people to recognize me as Rita Case instead of Rick Case’s wife.”

Since then, she hasn’t looked back without a distinctive lid perched atop her head.

“I wear them to black-tie events. I have cocktail party hats. I’m always switching up,” she says. “Pill box for meeting with bankers. Hats with parrots for fun. Formal hats. Hats with bows, ribbons, brims.”

Her most flamboyant and expensive hat? A $380 creation featuring aqua peacock feathers worn for a party to celebrate the late Wayne Huizenga’s first game as owner of the Miami Dolphins.

Rita will sometimes invoke her hat game in her ongoing mission to empower women, throwing down a chapeau gauntlet to make a point.

“I’ll say, ‘You don’t think a hat looks good on you? I say you won’t wear a hat because you don’t want to stand out. Once you decide that you want to be the one who everyone is looking at in the room, you’ll start to wear hats.’ A very tailored business suit with a classy look always stands out in a room. But a hat just finishes it.

“You can’t be the best if you don’t have the most confidence and the best work ethic.”

Rita won over her husband’s Ohio team of men with more than her hats. She told them that she’d run the ‘’back end” of their businesses, dealer slang for parts and services, and allow them to focus on the sexier side—the “front end,” or showroom sales.

“I took over parts and services,” she says. “Me and my hat, business suit and my pumps walking through the service department. That’s how I earned respect from his group of people.”

In 1985, Hyundai was looking to launch in the United States and Honda was adding Acura to its lineup. Considering growth and demographic diversity, the Cases saw opportunity for both brands in South Florida and Atlanta and moved south to open dealerships, setting up headquarters in Fort Lauderdale. Rick Case Automotive Group continues to make its mark in the auto industry with highest sales volume performances and, perhaps more important, operations honors covering service, facilities and employee training.

Charitable work is a longtime passion for the Case family and company, leading with the Boys & Girls Clubs of Broward County and the American Heart Association. The Rick Case Habitat Community is the largest affordable housing project in Broward County.

The Show Must Go On

In December of 2019, husband Rick, who never smoked, rarely drank and generally was in good health, suddenly was struggling to breathe. Scans and X-rays revealed spots on his lungs and doctors quickly determined that a rare cancer already had advanced to his brain and diaphragm.

The diagnosis was grim; treatments would only hold off the inevitable. Rick told Rita he wanted no one to know about his condition, including their son, Ryan, and daughter, Raquel.

“He was unbelievably brave,” Rita says. “Rick was always so positive. He did not want anyone worrying about him. He didn’t think that would be productive. He thought it would be draining. He thought it would be negative.

“The man was a machine.”

In April 2020, Rita and Rick decided to retreat to their vacation home in northern Idaho.

“OK,” Rick said, “this is my last chapter. I’m putting my book on the shelf. Let’s talk about how this is going to go down.”

Rita says his only wish for her was that she be happy.

“I told him, ‘You don’t have to worry about the business. Your name will not be sold. We are going to continue the quest. He said, ‘That’s great. You can do it.’

“He always knew I could do it.”

Rita and Rick worked remotely from Idaho until he got sicker later that summer. They called Ryan to tell him about the cancer. Worried that Raquel wouldn’t take the news well over the phone, they asked her to fly out for a visit and told her in person.

Rick died a few weeks later at the Hillsboro Beach home where they lived since 1985. He was 77.

“His legacy will always live on,” Rita says. “No matter how much time it takes for me, Rick Case, the car dealer, will be the No. 1 car dealer in the United States as long as I’m able to keep us there.”

Still, she knew that Rick’s marketing genius was a void and a talent not in her tool kit. She would need others to create the strategies necessary to consistently draw customers. Less than two months after Rick’s death, Rita gathered general managers in the corporate office conference room and did exactly what she had done at the 20 Group meeting decades earlier—ask for help.

“When Rick was alive, it was the Rick and Rita show. Period,” she says. “We did everything, and we delegated down and we dictated. When he passed away I knew I was going to make a big change. I was going to rely on our associates to have more responsibility, more decisionmaking, more independence as far as the daily operations.”

At the GM meeting, she began by sliding a blank piece of paper to the center of the table.

“I said, ‘We’re going to sit here together and figure out our marketing plan. It’s not going to be Rita’s plan. It’s not going to be what Rick told Rita for the last 40 years. It’s going to be your plan. Because guys, without Rick, I’m going to count on you to sell the cars.’”

Two years later, Rita Case isn’t exactly on cruise control, but she is happy and having fun. She’s up early to watch the sunrise over the ocean. Her days are meticulously planned to maximize every hour and ounce of her boundless energy. Her charity work is in maximum overdrive. She pilots employees to dealer meetings and conferences several times a month in her personal jet. And she carves out “Mimi” time with her three grandchildren.

Last April, she was one of 16 recipients of the 2022 Horatio Alger Award saluting perseverance, integrity and commitment to excellence.

Rita recalls an afternoon during that emotional summer at their Idaho home, Rick was grinding away at his desk in his lake-view office. His days were winding down like a foreboding hourglass. Rita appeared, at a loss with how to provide comfort.

“What can I do?” she said. “What would make you the happiest?”

Rick smiled and looked up from his computer screen.

“Nothing in the world has ever made me happier than being with you.”

Rita wipes away tears at the cherished memory.

Photography by Eduardo Schneider

Creative Direction by Melanie Geronemus Smit

The post The Road Less Traveled, Part 2 appeared first on Lifestyle Media Group.

As usual, she’s dressed to kill in any boardroom: sleek skirt and jacket. Power pumps. And her trademark hat. Today’s choice, a classy pink pillbox number, is plucked from her collection of more than 250.

She welcomes a guest to corporate headquarters at Rick Case Kia, hard by the Sawgrass Expressway, and immediately launches into a tour of the lobby and hallways filled with trophies and plaques honoring Rita and her late husband for their many achievements in the auto industry and devoted work in charities.

The conference room glitters with more awards and testimonials, earned through 60 years in the business and 40 years of marriage. When it comes to shiny hardware accolades, the Case collection makes the New York Yankees’ haul look like it could be stored in an overhead bin.

Rita Case smoothly slipped into the driver’s seat of Rick Case Automotive Group as CEO and president after her husband, an automotive legend, died of cancer in September 2020. Truth is, she always had a hand firmly gripping the wheel.

“We had an amazing business relationship,” Rita, 67, says. “Rick knew how he wanted it done, and he told me to get it done.”

Given her day-to-day role running the operational side of the 14 dealerships in South Florida and Atlanta, Rita was surprised at some of the reaction from the public after Rick died. A sort of “Poor, Rita. Whatever will she do now?”

Some saw Rita as the dutiful and devoted wife alongside the ultimate entrepreneurial husband in TV commercials. Everyone in the business, including Rick Case dealership general managers, knew better.

Still, her first mission was to visit every general manager in person and pledge her commitment to the company.

“I told them, ‘We’re not selling,’” Rita says. “I told them that they could count on me. I said, ‘We are going to find ways to fill in for all the holes that Rick has left. It’s a lot, but don’t worry. Keep selling cars the way he taught you. Keep running your business the way he taught you. Keep treating customers as your best friends the way he taught you.’”

One thing Rita Case wasn’t worried about: Rita Case.

Like Mother, Like Daughter

If they measured gumption by the gallon, Rita could circle the planet without a fill-up. Her ambition and energy has always been fueled by motivation from her mother, Lori Manly, who at 90 still stops by the Santa Rosa, Calif., dealership she opened in 1970 with her late husband, Bill, as the first Honda auto dealer in the United States.

“My mom is amazing,” Rita says, beaming like a schoolgirl whose mother just interrupted first-period math class with a tray of freshly baked cookies. “From the moment I can remember, she always was doing things that nobody can believe.”

Lori Manly raced motorcycles, piloted vintage planes with her husband, competed in ice skating and gymnastics, performed in ballet and at 15 modeled for a local department store.

The Manlys owned a motorcycle sales and repair shop during Rita’s childhood and, unlike her two brothers and sister, she took a keen interest in the business. By age 8, she was sweeping floors, answering phones and polishing bikes. At 16, she obtained two licenses—driver’s and pilot’s. Like a chip off the old hubcap, she also was racing dirt bikes, competing in gymnastics and playing a variety of other sports.

In 1968, when Honda asked California dealers who had been selling their motorcycles if they were interested in pioneering their venture into U.S. auto sales, the Manlys bought in. Two years later, their teenaged daughter was introducing curious but skeptical motorcycle customers to the tiny foreign cars sitting in a makeshift showroom.

“No one wanted to buy this car,” Rita recalls. “They’d say, “Oh, my God. It’s so small. Is it safe?’”

Rita was their test driver, tooling around town in what she describes as an “air-cooled, 600cc tin can with two seats.”

“Some bikes had larger engines,” she says. Her selling points leading to the first Honda automobile purchase in the country were gas mileage and maneuverability alongside the boxy, two-ton gas-guzzlers of the day.

One thing Rita was sold on—her passion for the auto business and her desire and determination to take over her family’s dealership. Her father didn’t get it. For one thing, he told her, “This is really for guys. Men are the ones who are car dealers. Let your brothers do it.”

Rita revved her engine in reply.

“Why? I can be better than them.”

Lori Manly was all in for her daughter.

“You can do it,” she told Rita. “But you have to be the best. If you’re going to be a woman in this business, you have to be the smartest one in the room.”

After graduating from University of California at Davis with a degree in economics, she took over her parents’ dealership. Early on, her position was met with quizzical looks from male counterparts.

“I’d be at a meeting, and someone would say, ‘Where’s your dad?’” Rita says. “I’d say, ‘I run the business now.’ And they’d say, ‘Well, good luck.’ ”

Behind the scenes, they assumed, Dad was still running the show. Rita jokingly referred to herself as “D.D.” in reference to behind-her-back whispers of “She’s just the dealer’s daughter.”

Turns out, D.D. had a pretty sharp business IQ. Realizing that most Honda auto dealers were more well-versed in selling the Japanese brand’s motorcycles, she turned to the National Automotive Dealers Association for help in branching out to car sales.

Dealer’s Choice

The NADA’s 20 Group program brings 20 dealers together for several days of brainstorming. Rita managed to round up 18 dealers to meet in Hawaii to talk about Honda cars, including Rick Case, who had made a name for himself with innovative, wacky and lucrative sales promotions at his dealerships in Cleveland and Akron.

At 22, she was the youngest in attendance and the only woman.

“I stood out and he stood out,” Rita says. “I stood out because I didn’t have any fear. I was a small-town girl in the room with people from Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland and Dallas. I said, ‘Guys, I put this deal together because I need to learn the car business, and I’m asking all of you to help me.’”

She arrived prepared because she remembered her mother’s strong words of advice.

“They didn’t discount me because I was the smartest one in the room,” she recalls. “I knew my financial statement inside and out. I knew the business. I understood the math of it.”

Rita and Rick were the only single dealers at the conference, so they sat side by side at breakfast and lunch, and when wives joined their husbands at dinner.

Rita quickly realized that they shared a drive to be the best.

“It was pretty much love at first sight,” Rita says. “He was so energetic. He was so enthusiastic about being great. He would say, ‘I’m going to be the No. 1 volume dealer in the world’ and I would be over here saying, ‘I want to be a great dealer, too.’

“That was the attraction.”

After the meetings, they kept in touch, exchanging ideas and the usual starts and stops of running businesses. In 1979, Rita invited Rick to spend time with her in California. If you’re imagining a Hallmark Channel script of picnicking in the park and strolling hand-in-hand as the sun sets over the lapping waves of the Pacific Ocean, think again. Gearheads will be gearheads, so Rita and Rick set off on motorcycles to visit Honda dealerships up the Pacific Coast, and on to Portland and Seattle.

Despite the exhausting itinerary and a chaperone—Rita’s father insisted a third wheel accompany the fledgling couple, so a dealer friend of Rick’s tagged along—“We fell in love on that trip,” Rita says.

The next year they married. Rita handed back the family dealership to her parents and joined Rick in Ohio. By then, he had reached celebrity status in Cleveland and Akron, partly because of his successful Honda auto and motorcycle dealerships but more through creative, some might say, crazy, advertising gimmicks.

Rick promised to buy back your car if it didn’t get 50 miles per gallon. Bring you a tire if you had a flat. He leaped off the roof of a dealership (and into a cushion below), and got motorcycle daredevil Evel Knievel to jump 10 Mack trucks at a Memorial Day promotional event. (Knievel then hired Case as a promoter, including for his infamous Snake River Canyon rocket-powered jump in 1974.)

Meanwhile, for Rita Case, D.D. was now D.W.—dealer’s wife.

“It was burning inside of me,” she says. “What am I going to do to be noticed? I am not just Rick’s wife. I am his business partner, and we’re married, and I want you all to see me as his business partner, not as cooking his oatmeal in the morning.

“I had to do something different.”

Photography by Eduardo Schneider

Creative Direction by Melanie Geronemus Smit

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