The Man Who Wrote Too Much

Before dawn, while the rest of the nine-to-five world huddles in bed, Harvey Slavin is up and ready for action. He doesn't jog, fish, or schlep himself to the sandy beach outside his oceanfront apartment building for an early swim. Slavin writes. Every day. And more often than not, his words offer a hearty thrashing for anyone or anything Slavin sees as unjust, dishonest or just plain slimy. His regimen begins each morning at 5:30. After he brews himself a pot of Publix Colombian decaf, he sits down at his glass-topped dining room table to read three newspapers: The New York Times, the Orlando Sun-Sentinel and the Miami Herald. Once a week he'll add local weeklies like The Digest, City Link and New Times Broward/Palm Beach to the mix, and he always flips to the editorial pages first.

Then, clad in gym shorts and a T-shirt, with pen in hand, he abandons his beachfront-bourgeois life for a few hours. As he scratches his cramped longhand missives onto the yellow pages of the legal pads he buys in 12-packs at Office Depot, Harvey Slavin, mild-mannered entrepreneur, becomes Harvey Slavin, the undisputed king of unsolicited opinion, the scourge of letters-to-the-editor pages in South Florida and beyond. And when Harvey Slavin – who lived in Tampa in the late '90s – writes, the media listen. Sort of. They also roll their eyes, groan and laugh out loud. For the past 30 years, Slavin has shot off letters covering every topic imaginable to Florida newspapers.

He's written about how Ronald and Nancy Reagan paved the way for America's downfall and how the U.S. Postal Service is in need of a collective lobotomy. He has labeled Miami "the rudest city in the entire universe" and branded many local politicians as scumbags. He writes about the evils of the Republican Party and the Palestinians' quest to destroy Jews and the state of Israel. He slams sports commentators and restaurant columnists for banal observations and myopic reviews. He feels The Herald is good only for wrapping fish and the Sun-Sentinel reeks of hypocrisy.

Yet he keeps on reading — and writing. "If something sticks in my craw, I write about it," says the 53-year-old Slavin. "It's good for the adrenaline, and it gets the blood flowing. It's better than taking speed.

"And it's good therapy," he adds.

A regular reader might find a thin sprinkling of praise within his letters, but only rarely. Most of the time, his tone ranges from critical to insulting to bombastic. Yet he writes with the passion of an iconoclastic monk jailed in a castle tower, and his letters are never snoozers.

"Stupidity and hypocrisy are always things I take stabs at," he avers. "I don't try to be politically correct in what I say. Why should I be? I don't want to be, and I don't have to be. I say what I think."

While his scribbled rants might conjure an image of the writer as a wild-haired, frothing-at-the-mouth maniac, Slavin looks more like a pediatrician. He's a portly man, today wearing a charcoal dress shirt and matching slacks. A pattern of tiny blue roses adorns his black tie, and his thick silver hair is brushed neatly back from his forehead. When he orders a cup of decaf and a bran muffin, his voice is even, his intonations quiet enough that at times the clatter of the diner drowns out his sentences.

"I believe everything that I write. It's not theatrics. I'm a passionate A-type personality," Slavin says. His small eyes shrink further behind the hexagonal expanse of his brass-and-green-rimmed glasses. Slavin slices a chunk of muffin with his butter knife before explaining the disparity between his sedate demeanor and the often raging tone of his letters. "I don't see any purpose in sitting here with you yelling and screaming," he says. "I just believe in freedom of speech."

Much of Slavin's writing touches upon local, national and international politics, with Israel leading his pack of pet topics. Yet his background is steeped in neither religion nor politics. After his family moved from New Jersey to Miami Beach when he was two years old, Slavin's parents owned and operated a drugstore for 35 years. He was bar mitzvahed when he was 13 years old, but his family had already opted for the more relaxed worship of Reform Judaism. "We didn't keep kosher," he says. "It was a liberal Jewish upbringing; my parents were typical Jewish Democrats."

But they didn't talk politics. Slavin says he became attuned to current events in 11th grade after hearing about JFK's assassination during study hall and watching the ensuing television coverage. At the University of Florida, he graduated with a double major in political science and journalism before marrying into the garment industry.

But his true political awakening didn't arrive until a full 12 years later, during a 1985 trip to Israel. Slavin visited Jerusalem, offered prayers at the Western Wall, and hoofed it all the way up to the centuries-old fortress of Masada. He toured the Lebanese border and drove through Golan Heights, where he saw the burnt-out shells of Syrian tanks left over from one of Israel's wars.

What struck him most was the proximity of Arab nations. "When you see how close everything is …," Slavin begins, then trails off. He's finished with his muffin and picks up his butter knife to help expound his belief that the last thing Israel should do is give up one inch of hard-won land. "If you know people are sworn to wipe you out, and they live over there," he points the knife out the plate-glass window, "and you own the parking lot here," he swings the tip of the knife to the diner's adjacent lot, "why would you let them live here? Why would Israel give back such strategic strips of land?

"I'm not a very religious person, but it sure says in the Bible that God gave that land to the Jews. And you know what? Even if He didn't, they won it through defensive wars," he continues. "Israel can give back the land it won in wars the day after the United States gives back Southern California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona to the Mexicans."

Slavin's guerrilla career in letters began in the early '70s. Living in Kendall at the time, he read about a local Christian organization sponsoring a business fair. "You know, come and meet your Christian plumber, insurance agent, this, that and the other thing," he remembers. "I was offended. I thought that was absolutely obnoxious. I would never do business with someone because of their religion. I think I wrote, "Are you not good enough at your profession that you have to use your Christianity?'" Slavin recalls.

He's good at quoting himself and can recite lines he's written as recently as last week or as long as decades ago. He's saved only a few hundred letters from what would most likely tally up to thousands, and after he clips one from a newspaper, he dates it and throws it inside an old satchel. "It's too bad I didn't keep them over the years," he says. "I could really have written a great book: Hate Mail from Harv."

Originally published by New Times Broward-Palm Beach.

This article appears in Jul 5-11, 2001.