Jim Sackett, a 33-year veteran anchor with WPTV, jokes with a friend and opponent between innings during a Royal Palm Beach senior softball league game. (Brandon Kruse/The Palm Beach Post)

To the guys on the Royal Palm Beach senior softball league, where the players sport knee braces and take frequent bathroom breaks between innings, number 34 isn’t Jim Sackett, local TV news icon.

He’s “Jimmy,” the stocky fireplug who bats left and throws right. Whose famous face doesn’t earn him a break from trash talk.

“I’ve had three heart attacks, and I’m still running. You only had one!” a teammate yells when the anchorman, who’s had a knee replacement, calls for a pinch runner. Read the full story

Buccan's elegant beach house look cost less than the industry standard, according to restaurant co-owner Sam Slattery. (Photo by Pamela Jones Photography)

People have to eat but they don’t have to dine out.

To persuade them otherwise in a tough economy, restaurant owners are cooking up creative ways to lure diners from their newly rediscovered kitchens.

One idea is the proliferation of casual, less-expensive bistro-style restaurants.

Another might be called "cheaper chic" – restaurants that look like a million (or more) bucks but don’t cost it.

"The extravagant times are over," said Dennis Max, the dean of South Florida restaurateurs who once had 17 highly regarded restaurants from Boca Raton to Miami. "Now it’s more austere times and restaurant designs reflect that. People don’t want to walk into a restaurant that costs two or three million and have to pay the prices to support that."

Last spring, Max, the entrepreneur who brought California-style dining to South Florida more than 30 years ago, opened Max’s Harvest in Delray Beach, an elegantly simple farm-to-table restaurant in a minimalist setting to match.

That doesn’t mean décor is unimportant. Diners are insisting on a value package of good food, service and interesting atmosphere.

"If you have the wrong design, even with great food and service, you’re not going to get written about or talked about. You won’t have the buzz," said Max, who is opening two new Italian restaurants in Boca Raton this fall.

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This postcard depicts the first passenger train to Knight's Key in January 1908. Knight's Key (Marathon today) was the southern terminus for the Florida East Coast Railway until 1912, when the rail line to Key West was completed. (Photos courtesy of the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum)

Henry Flagler was 75, with a wife 37 years his junior, when he built a railroad not to, but over the sea.

He could have spent his last years relaxing with his new wife, Mary Lily, at his homes, in Palm Beach and in New York, or visiting the string of luxury hotels he built from Jacksonville to Miami.

Certainly, “the man who invented Florida” as a second career had earned the right to retire.

Instead, this ferociously ambitious septuagenarian plowed more than $20 million of the fortune he earned as a co-founder of Standard Oil into the country’s largest privately funded construction project.
Some dubbed it Flagler’s folly, but when it was finished, many called the Overseas Railroad the Eighth Wonder of the World.

Jan. 22 will mark the 100th anniversary of the day Flagler rode his “iron” from Miami 156 miles across tiny islands and miles and miles of blue ocean to Key West.

How and why he spent the last years of his life on a quixotic enterprise as complex as the construction of the Panama Canal is the subject of First Train to Paradise, an exhibit that opened last week at the Flagler Museum in Palm Beach.

“I want people to walk away with a sense of the enormity of the project, of the expense and the extreme difficulties of building there 100 years ago, and of the natural disasters,” said Tracy Kamerer, the museum’s chief curator.
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2011-12 season preview: Art | Pop music | Theater

SEASON UPSIDE: Newly commissioned works and old favorites from Miami City Ballet, plus more modern dance at the Duncan Theatre.

SEASON DOWNSIDE: We still miss Ballet Florida, and are worrying early about a Miami City Ballet without Edward Villella.

'Come Fly Away' takes the music of Sinatra and adds jazzy modern dance to it.

COME FLY AWAY
March 13-18, Kravis Center, West Palm Beach

That’s Life and also, love, when eye-popping ballroom dance meets Frank Sinatra in the hands of Tony award-winning choreographer, Twyla Tharp, in this hit Broadway musical.

PROGRAM II
MIAMI CITY BALLET
Jan. 27-29, Kravis Center, West Palm Beach

The world premiere of a new ballet by the Royal Ballet’s Liam Scarlett, along with In the Night, a Jerome Robbins piece set to Chopin and Ballet Imperial, with Balanchine choreography and Tchaikovsky’s music.
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Houston, we have a problem … at the cineplex.

Apollo 18, which opens at area theaters today, is the second film this year to hijack the United States’ proud history of space exploration and claim we went to the moon only to investigate aliens.

Complete with blurry gray images and scratchy audio, Apollo 18 is supposed to be "found footage" shot by two astronauts during a doomed, secret 1973 moon mission to investigate extraterrestrial sightings on the lunar surface.

Using a mix of fake and real images, it posits that ETs, not government budget cutbacks, are the reason we stopped going to the moon, essentially doing for space what The Blair Witch Project did for the woods at night.

It’s a story Apollo astronauts and space program junkies will hate, right? After all, the real Apollo 18 mission was canceled at the close of the moon program.

One commenter on The Huffington Post argued that these types of revisionist movies do a danger to history: "Isn’t this a slap in the face to all the brave men who risked their lives and those who passed away to get us to the moon, let alone all the men and women who worked on the Apollo project? Bad enough you have the fools who think it was a hoax and that we never really went, is this really necessary?"

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The picture of the dancer on the cover of the Kravis' brochure.

Will a bottom put bottoms in the seats during the upcoming Kravis Center season?

The photo on the cover of the center’s new 2011-2012 season brochure just might.

The dramatic photo of a young ballerina poised on a staircase is shot from below, showing the curve of the dancer’s well-toned tush beneath the tulle of a white tutu.

It’s far less skin than a balletomane would see at almost any performance, particularly by a modern dance troupe. Still, it’s a tad more suggestive than the arts organization’s normal ads, which tend toward staid pictures of orchestras and close-up shots of musicians.

Kravis Center Executive Director Judy Mitchell said she didn’t know where the photo was taken or who the dancer is since it was bought from a stock photo agency.

As for it being risqué, she said she and the staff never considered it. They just liked the play of light and shadow featuring a beautiful dancer.

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What is it about Kelley Dunn?

The good-hearted earnestness?

That spark in her eyes?

Channel 5 Anchor Kelly Dunn with her daughter, Christina, 15, husband, John Perez and son, Jonathan, 17, at their home in Palm City. (Allen Eyestone/The Palm Beach Post)

An emotional transparency that reflects viewers’ own concern or outrage?

Or the infectious belly laugh that regularly convulses everyone within earshot?

Whatever “it” is, Dunn, who celebrates 25 years at top-rated Channel 5 next week, has it.

“It’s a quality that can’t be manufactured,” said her boss, station manager Steve Wasserman.

Said Jim Sackett, her co-anchor for four years and the retiring dean of local broadcasters, “It’s one of those intangibles that comes across in TV. With Kelley, you look at her and you want to watch.”

Dunn isn’t a newsbabe in the hyper-blond, Botox-ed Fox News mode or a tough, big-city sophisticate like major-market anchors.
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Laurel Sauer has found a new niche on local public television, alongside her former competitor, Alan Gerstel.

Sauer, a long-time Channel 5 anchor until she was fired in 2008, is pairing with Gerstel, who left Channel 12 the same year, to host a 10-week series of South Florida history documentaries on WXEL-TV. Called Heritage, the half-hour series begins airing next Thursday at 7:30 p.m.

Laurel Sauer and Alan Gerstel will host Heritage, a 10-week series on South Florida history, beginning July 28. The half-hour program will air on WXEL-TV on Thursdays at 7:30 p.m

The award-winning programs were produced by Gerstel, who works for T.E.N., the Palm Beach County School District’s education TV network. The shows range from tales of early Florida to area residents’ memories of the Holocaust.

After a short-lived stint doing ratings-month special reports on Channel 25, Sauer had been searching for a new television job in the area. She and Gerstel are also the new faces of WXEL’s pledge drives.

Gerstel says the two broadcasting veterans have an easy camaraderie.

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At the turn of a page, an alligator raises its head to gaze menacingly at the tourists at Alligator Joe’s reptile farm in the Palm Beach of 1904.

A group of women and children pose near cottages on a desolate beach path in the 1890s, their pastel dresses popping out in sharp relief against a dangerous-looking hedge of Spanish bayonet.

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If Florida’s

endless summer

had a soundtrack,

what would it be?

Buster Poindexter’s song Hot, Hot, Hot gets my vote.

(The video should include middle-aged women dancing with those fan misters.)

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