Joseph Weiss-the "Joe" of Joe's Stone Crab-came to Miami in 1913, when his doctors told him that the only help for his asthma would be a change of climate. Joe and his wife, Jennie, both Hungarian-born, were living in New York, where their son Jesse was born in 1907. Joe was a waiter, and Jennie cooked in small restaurants. Some seventy years later, Jesse recalled the move: My dad borrowed fifty dollars on his life insurance policy, left my mother and me in New York, and came to Florida...He stayed in Miami one night, and he couldn't breathe. So he took the ferry boat that used to go to Miami Beach. Oddly enough, he could breathe over here. So, he stayed here and started running a lunch stand at Smith's bathing casino. That was the beginning of the restaurant that was the seed for Joes. You'd come over and rent lockers to change your clothes to use the ocean or use the pool! The gals used to have the long bathing suits with the stockings...that was 1913. He sent for my mother and myself-she had this brat on her hands. We came down by train; I was six years old when we arrived. Collins Avenue was not really a street-it was sort of a trail with ruts in it. In 1918, Joe and Jennie bought a bungalow near the casino, on Biscayne Street. They moved into the back, set up seven or eight tables on the front porch, cooked in the kitchen, and called it Joe's Restaurant. Jennie waited on tables, Joe cooked, and everything started to grow from there. When it got crowded, they'd spill over into the dinning room. They served snapper, pompano, mackerel, and some meat dishes. "We used to open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner in those days," Jesse remembered, "because we were the only restaurant on the beach. For about eight years there was no competition. And my father made a hell of a fish sandwich."

By this time, Joe's was off and running. "We got the 'in'crowd, the society crowd, Jesse remembered. "At that time, we could seat maybe forty or fifty." But stone crabs were yet to come. In fact, no one then knew that this local crustacean was even edible. In 1921, James Allison, Fisher's partner in the Speedway, built an aquarium at the foot of the bay and Fifth Street. "He got all hopped up on having marine research done," Jesse said. "I used to go up in the lab and watch them work." Allison invited a Harvard ichthyologist down to do research. One of them came down one day and said to my dad, "Have you ever used these stone crabs, these crabs from the water?" We were serving crawfish, all kinds of fish-but not stone crabs. "Nobody will eat them," Dad said. That was at breakfast. That day when the ichthyologist came down for lunch, he brought a burlap sack, full of live stone crabs. He and my dad went around and around about how to cook them. Do you broil them, or what do you do with them? My dad threw the stone crabs in boiling water and that was the beginning of it. The bay was full of them! When we started serving them cracked with hash brown potatoes, cole slaw, and mayonnaise, they were an instant success. We charged seventy-five cents for four or five crabs, twenty-five cents for potatoes and twenty-five cents an order for cole slaw. And this is the way we have been serving them since. We hit the jackpot with that one!

As in the early days, Joe did the cooking, Jennie ran the dining room. "She was a tough old broad," Jesse remembered: She reminded me of some of those old Zane Grey books, where the madam is tough as hell but all heart. If she didn't like you she wouldn't let you in. Let's say a man was married and coming in with his wife. Then, another time, he'd try to come in with his girlfriend-out! She's just as soon say, don't bring your tramp friends in here. Who's going to fight with an old lady? So that was that. Other clients were captains of a different sort of industry. But Jennie Weiss had her own criteria for who belonged at Joe's: Al Capone came in, and he used the name Al Brown. Every day at 5 o'clock (because no one dined 'til about 5:30, 6:00 P.M.), he'd pull up with his entourage and sit down and have dinner and go. One night Jennie walked up to Mr. Capone. She said, "Mr. Brown, I must tell you something. If I don't like somebody, I don't allow them to come in here, but you've always been a gentleman, and anytime you want to come into this restaurant, you can." It touched him. Every Mother's Day, up pulled a truck with flowers, a horseshoe reading, "Good Luck Mother Joe's." She never realized who he really was but she had heard somebody mention, that's so and so.

Anyone well known who came to Miami Beach, from anywhere in the world, would stop in at Joe's. A list of Jesse's acquaintances, several of whom became lifelong close friends, forms a veritable Who's Who of the twentieth century. Will Rogers. ("Will Rogers was Will Rogers," Jesse remembered. "As homespun as anybody could be-I liked him a lot.") Amelia Earhart. ("She was down to earth. You knew where you stood with her. If you'll pardon the expression, there was no bullshit to her.") The Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Gloria Swanson, America's closest thing to royalty. (Jesse: "I thought she was this little doll. She used to come in here with Joseph Kennedy, who was the great love, but I didn't know it then! Hell, I was worried about my own sex life.") J. Edgar Hoover. ("I was closer to J. Edgar Hoover than I was to anyone else. I used to call him Gatling Gun Joe.") Walter Winchell. ("People would say, 'How can you be friendly with that son of a bitch?' And I'd say, 'Because he's my son of a bitch.' ") And Damon Runyon, who helped fan the flames of the Joe's Stone Crab legend.

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