As a new year dawns, reflections on those we lost in 2023 | Steve Bousquet

Life feels a bit more precarious. More precious, too.

That’s because the finality of death hit especially hard this year. It kept hitting, just as older friends told me it would.

With the passage of time, death becomes an ever more frequent visitor in all of our lives, and that makes life more special. In that spirit, we pause to remember some of those who died in 2023.

Frank Loconto brightened up a room. The lifelong musician and his brothers began singing rockabilly in Massachusetts in the ’50s as the Lane Brothers and they played everywhere, but a breakthrough hit record proved elusive.

An inveterate storyteller about those he met along the way (Chet Atkins, Connie Francis, Bob Graham, Jackie Gleason), he loved to sing songs on lazy Sundays at what used to be Mango’s in Fort Lauderdale. A proud Korean War veteran, he died in September at age 92 after a long life deeply woven into the fabric of South Florida.

A short walk down Las Olas Boulevard from Mango’s, Jim Blosser swung big deals for Wayne Huizenga, his boss. He also worked on homelessness and other community problems in a way that’s unheard of today — as a Republican who got along with Democrats.

A charter member of what used to be the “downtown power structure,” Blosser died Aug. 11 at 85. At his funeral, his daughter Gretchen captured his spirit: “Stay positive. Live each day to the fullest.”

The last time Shelly Spivack and I talked, she longed for the old days when condo kings dominated Broward politics and could stand in the way of progress, such as with the Sawgrass Expressway-I-95 connector.

Sure, she said, that system was rife with problems but there was no doubt who was in charge, unlike today. Spivack, 80, of Hollywood, a political consultant, fundraiser and organizer, died in April.

Speaking of politics, a number of those figures left us in 2023.

Former state Rep. Sam Bell was a Fort Lauderdale High graduate whose work as a state legislator made Florida a better place. His career in the House ended before he had planned, so he became a lobbyist and an advocate for children and better health care. Bell, the husband of former state education commissioner and USF President Betty Castor, died in March at 83.

Others from the political world who left us included political consultants Michael Ahearn, 52, and Jeff Ryan, 66; former Broward School Board member Darla Carter, 75; Linda Alley, 71, a Broward circuit judge; and Robert “Bobby” Clark Jr., a Davie cattle rancher and former chairman of the South Florida Water Management District, whose uncle was Broward’s most notorious sheriff, Walter Clark.

Howard Forman, 77, of Pembroke Pines had a four-decade career in public office, fighting for reasonable gun controls and better environmental safeguards. Ken Keechl, 60, was a civil rights lawyer and Broward’s first openly gay mayor.

Brenda Snipes, 80, had a tumultuous run as Broward supervisor of elections, as did Kitty Thibault, 89, as a Pembroke Pines commissioner. Eleanor Weinstock was a fiercely liberal state legislator from Palm Beach County in the 1980s and 1990s who died in August at age 94.

As we say goodbye to 2023, a few final farewells to those who helped to define Fort Lauderdale and to shape its unique character.

Norman Elliot Kent, 73, was a lawyer, an outspoken supporter of legalizing marijuana and gay rights (when it wasn’t popular) and radio host. Frank “Butch” Samp, 75, held court daily at the unpretentious Floridian, the landmark local diner he owned.

JoAnn Walker Smith, 74, was a community volunteer for five decades, 2018 Fort Lauderdale Citizen of the Year, and a long-time leader of the Woman’s Club. The botanical garden at Stranahan Park now bears her name.

How many people live in Fort Lauderdale for seven decades?

Lester Moody III did. He sold Pontiac Star Chiefs, and later Honda Accords, at a dealership on Federal Highway in downtown Fort Lauderdale, one of nine stores his family owned. Moody, 73, was a 68-year city resident.

It’s hard to think of anyone who died this year who had more of an impact on the region’s evolution than H. Irwin Levy, a real estate developer who died in August in West Palm Beach at age 97. Levy often said he didn’t sell real estate so much as a lifestyle, and he’s the man who brought “the Century Village way of life” here in the 1970s.

But as Cat Stevens sang in that same decade, “You’re only dancin’ on this earth for a short while.”

I have a three-year-old granddaughter in North Carolina who wanted me to watch a movie with her called The Secret World of Arrietty. It’s an animated picture about tiny people who live beneath the floorboards of houses, based on a 1952 book, “The Borrowers.” The story is about the love that can never be between Arrietty, who’s four inches tall, and Shawn, a real boy who befriends her and teaches her that death is part of life.

“None of us can live forever, can we? We all have to die sometime,” Shawn tells her. “Sometimes, things happen to us that are just beyond our control. And when these things happen, there’s really nothing you can do about it. You just accept it.”

Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. Contact him at [email protected] or (850) 567-2240 and follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @stevebousquet.