Claire Laurence's Obituary
Claire Laurence was a rock star although she never stood before an audience with an electric guitar.
And yet, “everyone wanted to be seen with Claire,” said Florida blues singer Lynn Noble on a Facebook tribute page to Laurence her son posted after she died on Aug. 27, 2022, in Kendall. She was 90, one month shy of her 91st birthday.
“Claire was, and will always be, such a warm, loving, funny presence,” admired Rene Rodriguez, theater manager at the University of Miami’s Cosford Cinema and the Miami Herald’s former film critic.
She’d still have made for an unusual rock star, anyway.
Laurence was into her 80s when she was still out and about town. She stood but 5-feet-2 inches -- just an inch taller than Stevie Nicks, one of her favorite songwriters. But unlike the Fleetwood Mac singer, she never sought the spotlight. She’d be the first to tell you she couldn’t carry a tune.
At countless pop and rock concerts in South Florida, or at her favorite theater, Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables, with her son, Howard Cohen, a reporter with the Miami Herald and former pop music critic, Laurence still drew an audience on her sheer charm.
“She would always introduce herself as ‘I’m Howard’s mother!’ I always got such a kick out of that,” said South Florida concert promoter Woody Graber. “She was always a bright spot whenever we got together!! Loved her so much.”
One of her son’s favorite memories is the time in 2012 when he took her backstage at Hard Rock Live Hollywood to meet members of one of her favorite bands, classic rock group Boston. In strolls mastermind and lead guitarist Tom Scholz.
“There’s mom, 80, along with all the other people you’d expect to see backstage at a rock concert – read, much younger – and she approaches the lanky Scholz, all 6-feet-5 who towers above her. She tells the rocker, ‘I love your music. I can hear the classical composer’s influence in your work – the German composers, Bach, Beethoven.’”
Scholz beamed. This little French Canadian lady got it. ‘Yes!” the clearly impressed musician said. He told her he had indeed merged the dramatics of the classical composers’ music with the heavy metal, hard rock muscle of 1960s’ Jeff Beck to come up with modern classics like “Foreplay/Long Time” and her favorite Boston song, “A Man I’ll Never Be.’”
She also knew that Scholz was an MIT-trained engineer. Oh, and by the way, she’d add: “My father Alfred was the dean of the school of pharmacy at University of Montreal. Do you know it?”
Never about herself. Always touting someone else. That was Laurence’s style.
Born in Montreal, Canada, on Sept. 26, 1931, into a blended family of 11 children – they were Catholic, don’t you know? – Laurence grew up in the Montreal neighborhood Outremont. One of her neighbors was Pierre Trudeau, who would later become the 15th prime minister of Canada.
Laurence excelled at tennis even though her mother wanted her to study piano.
“We have a piano in the house; you’re going to learn that,” her mom told her. “I would have rather taken dance but she wouldn’t hear of it,” Laurence later told her son.
Nevertheless, the classical training clearly left an impression and explains why she gravitated to classically trained pop musicians like Elton John decades later while living in Miami.
Her mother may have hoped for a piano wizard but she got a jock instead. Laurence, who had also loved skiing as a kid, won tennis championships and one summer, in her early teens, her skills qualified her for a summer trip to the United States, Maine. Her father gave her one directive: “You can go, but you need to learn English.”
So she did. In that one summer. Fluently. But until she hit 90, she still would approach friends and strangers alike in Miami with words in French to keep her language alive. She might have had another incentive to learn English, she’d later confess.
Her doubles partner could speak the language and she was smitten – and not just for his prowess on the court. He was good looking. But, she later told her son, Gordie was also a few years older and looked at her like a little sister. Fondly. Not like a pesky little sister. But a little sister, nonetheless, and one who could be an asset at the net.
Soon after her father died in 1950, Laurence married another partner she had met around the courts in Montreal, the also dashing George Armet.
Laurence and Armet’s son Allan was born in 1954. Armet worked for Cunard Line and one day Allan remembers his Dad came home, clearly irritated. Seems a neighbor had approached Armet before he got to the door of his duplex to complain that he had heard a very strange sound in the unit above his that sounded like roller skating.
Claire, ever the rebel, had allowed her young son to roller skate around their apartment. It was probably a Canadian winter. And Laurence knew that sports, and the discipline they demand, could be a learning tool.
The marriage did not last, but in a moment made for an Oprah Winfrey show, Laurence and Armet, who never remarried, reconnected in 2000 and established a beautiful friendship that connected Miami and her beloved Montreal and lasted until his death in 2008.
In the early 1960s Laurence met a talented musician turned hockey coach turned salesman for Pitney-Bowes, Bert Cohen, with whom she had her son, Howard in 1963.
In 1967, the three moved to Miami Beach to be near Bert’s mother, Ida Santapaula.
That marriage, too, would not last, but for the sake of their son, the pair remained on good terms until Cohen died in Aventura in 2014.
As a single parent, Laurence worked several jobs. First, at the Dade Boulevard Publix in Miami Beach as a cashier through the 1970s under store manager Tony Diego who, more than 40 years later, would become one of her favorite Facebook friends. She did accounting for years at several places like Kendall Toyota and Coral Reef Yacht Club, studied to become a travel agent, and made new friends as a receptionist at the Riviera Country Club tennis courts until she retired around 2003.
“Claire Laurence loved the town. And the town loved her. There was Claire in the front row of the musical theater opening. There she was at a rock concert. There she was greeting Carly Simon and Gloria Estefan backstage. There she was holding court at her favorite Japanese restaurant. And there she was in the Miami Herald video studio giving commentary on the Ultra music festival; wrote Jeff Kleinman, the Herald’s breaking news editor and Howard’s longtime editor, in an email to the Miami newsroom.
“But Claire was best known as a devoted and supportive mom. She was the force behind her son’s swim practices. She helped support the family as a cashier at a Miami Beach Publix,” Kleinman wrote.
“As our roles had changed in the last few years with me assuming a caregiver role people have been saying, ‘You're such a good son!’ Well, maybe, and not always," her son, Howard, said.
“But I'm reminded that it was Mom who got me up at 4:30 in the morning from our Miami Beach apartment for 5:30 a.m. swim practice with the Hurricanes at the University of Miami in Coral Gables when I was in elementary through high school. I was like any other kid who balked at getting up that early for torture sessions in a cold pool. But she sacrificed and never wavered. "You're going!"
“So if I've any discipline from that sport that's served me to the age I find myself now – and because that team also gave me my two oldest best friends to this day – it's all due to Mom,” Howard said.
Said one of those friends he had met on the Hurricanes in 1971: “As I went back and reread your tribute to mom, our mothers instilled in us a discipline and dedication to hard work. Both of our mothers had that attitude that you will get up, go to practice and school, and there will be no complaining. I loved your mother as much as I love mine and will miss her dearly. She dedicated her life to you as much as you committed yourself to her,” said Tori Hames-Picciochi.
Tough. Hip. An octogenarian early adopter of social media with Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts. And a rock star.
“Without a doubt, she was the coolest mom!” Hames-Picciochi said. “She loved our music and I think she was the only reason my mom let me drive to our first concert – your mom riding shotgun! She was definitely loved by all of us and will be forever in our memories.”
Laurence’s survivors include her sons Allan and Howard and three grandchildren, Rylan, Keely and Kendra.
A celebration of life for Claire Laurence is planned for 2 to 4 p.m. Sept. 18 at Van Orsdel, 11220 North Kendall Dr.
Donations in Laurence’s name can be made to the Southeast Florida Alzheimer’s Association and its Walk to End Alzheimer’s at alz.org/miami.
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