Richie Gerber

Richie Gerber is a musician, performer, comedian, and impresario. Over the years, he produced hundreds of jazz concerts that featured his band The Free Radicals, playing straight-ahead jazz, bebop, and swing with jazz greats like Eddie Higgins, former Count Basie alumnus Pete Minger, five-time Grammy nominee Ira Sullivan, and Buddy DeFranco. Gerber is the former owner of the Bread of Life Natural Foods Market, which merged with Whole Foods Markets in 1997 to form the Whole Foods Florida Region. Leveraging his knowledge as an organic farmer and natural foods store owner/operator, Gerber became a licensed nutrition counselor and went on to produce and host The Natural Grocer Radio Show for ten years, the longest-running health talk radio show in South Florida at the time. In 2014, Gerber and his wife, Julie, were included in Natural Prophets, a book about the pioneers of the health food industry.

Illustrator Miguel Covarrubias (November 22, 1904–February 4, 1957) can arguably be called the chronicler of “The Jazz Age.” Moving from his birthplace of Mexico to New York City as a nineteen-year-old in 1923, carrying his pen and sketchpad, he instantaneously took the Big Apple by storm. He shared a studio on 42nd Street with Al Hirschfeld, a caricaturist greatly influenced by “El Chamaco” (“The Kid”—Covarrubias’s nickname). Covarrubias’s original, unique, and innovative style of drawing celebrity caricatures catapulted him into a teenage/twenty-something storied celebrity artist, landing him gigs at top-tier magazines such as The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. In 1933, Covarrubias was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he used to study the Island of Bali and write and illustrate a highly celebrated book by the same name. In 1940, he was awarded a second Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as numerous other awards.