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James Pilafian Oldsmar, FL Coral Gables, FL Richmond, VA QCWA # 10495 Chapter 12 |
PILAFIAN, James, a longtime attorney in Miami and resident of Coral Gables, Florida, and recent resident of Richmond, Virginia, passed away on January 1, 2009.
In 1918, his parents escaped the Armenian genocide in eastern Turkey to Damascus, Syria, where he was born.
Raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, he moved to Miami to attend the University of Miami and graduated from the first graduating class of the law school in 1947. He practiced law in Miami, Florida for 55 years.
Married in 1947 to Shocky (Rosa Boyajian) of Richmond, Virginia, they raised three children.
Legacy.com
For many of the 57 years that James Pilafian practiced law in Miami, he unrepentantly flouted the stringent codes of the city where he lived, hiding both a ham radio tower and a working apiary behind tall shrubs around his historic Coral Gables home.
The tower allowed his kids to talk to Santa Claus every Christmas -- and Pilafian to broadcast emergency weather information. He believed his bees' honey could cure the environmental allergies of anyone in a 10-mile radius.
The Syria-born son of impoverished Armenian immigrants, Pilafian grew up in Massachusetts and lived in South Florida for 50 years. He died on Jan 1 at 90 from 'a fatal reaction to an antibiotic,' said daughter Marni Pilafian of Richmond, VA, where her father and mother -- the former Rosa 'Shocky' Boyajian -- had been living for a year.
James Pilafian worked until he was 85, finally retiring after a couple of strokes and a fall down two flights of stairs. He never owned a new car, preferring to spend his money on real estate, said daughter Marni, an attorney.
In 1951, he founded Key Realty on Key Biscayne, where he owned motels and a strip mall. He bought storefronts and an office building on Coral Way, property in Homestead, one of the oldest houses in Coral Gables -- 1800 LeJeune Rd., built in 1924 -- a downtown Miami lot that Florida Power & Light acquired in 1986 for $1.5 million, and a Morningside-area motel on Biscayne Boulevard.
Former Miami Commissioner and mortician J.L. Plummer often lunched with Pilafian at Maria's Greek Restaurant, in one of the Coral Way storefronts.
'He had a great repertoire of the history of this community,' Plummer recalled. 'He knew Miami well and loved to talk about it.'
As generous as he was frugal, Pilafian endowed a music scholarship at Boston University in honor of his son, Sam Pilafian. The founding tuba player of the renown Empire Brass quintet, Sam Pilafian taught at BU for 20 years.
The family still owns the Coral Gables house, where the elder Pilafian raised vegetables, fruit and spice trees on nearly an acre -- as well as the honey bees.