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During a recent luncheon at the Hyatt Regency Coral Gables, the Rotary Club of Coral Gables presented its Annual Martin Hughes Citizen of the Year Awards, one for an individual and another for a corporation, to Michell Kaplan and Nicklaus Children’s Hospital respectively.
Both recipients have made impressive contributions to our community. Kaplan, founder of the Miami Book Fair where he serves as board chair, also is on the steering committee of the Florida Center for the Literary Arts, Miami-Dade College’s literary center. He has served as president of the American Booksellers Association, and on the board of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression and has helped raise more than $60,000 for Ukrainian authors, publishers, and booksellers.
Kaplan, founder of the independent Books & Books, hosts a popular podcast and, in 2012, joined forces with film industry veteran Paula Mazur to form the Mazur/Kaplan Company, focused on bringing books to the screen. As an added benefit to our community, Kaplan’s bookstore hosts 400 events annually with proceeds directed to the Books & Books Literary Foundation whose non-profit status will enable it to secure funding from charitable donations and grants helping insulate the programming from commercial considerations and helping expand programs into communities of need, underserved schools, and prisons.
Nicklaus Children’s Hospital, recipient of the Corporate Citizen of the Year Award, has touched the lives of almost everyone in our community one way or the other. Its story began in the 1940s when an abandoned baby was found in a theater with a note from the mother that resulted in the founding of Miami Tent #33 of Variety Clubs International with a goal of helping indigent children. Variety Club soon joined forces with a new hospital that was being built outside Coral Gables and in need of financial assistance.
With the vision of Dr. Arthur H. Weiland, Variety Children’s Hospital opened its doors on Mar. 20, 1950, just as the polio epidemic was spreading all over the United States. Variety Children’s Hospital was soon deemed the southern center for treating children with polio.
Throughout the years, the hospital continued to grow and offer new services to meet the needs of the community
When Miami community leader Ambassador David M. Walters lost his beloved granddaughter to leukemia, he vowed that no child would ever need to leave South Florida to receive the highest caliber of medical care. In 1982, Ambassador Walters activated Miami Children’s Health Foundation to meet that pledge, making possible the expansion of many programs and, in 1983, the hospital was renamed Miami Children’s Hospital and grew to international prominence.
In 2001, Miami Children’s Hospital began transforming the campus, creating a care setting to match the caliber of its medical programs and when the hospital turned 70, in 2020, they celebrated this milestone by unveiling a new name and logo. They became known as Nicklaus Children’s Hospital, in recognition of a generous pledge from the Nicklaus Children’s Health Care Foundation created by Jack Nicklaus, a polio survivor. No children’s hospital in the region has a longer commitment or more experience in helping children in need.
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