Salt-and-pepper braid to her waist, cigarette in hand, Rose Klayman was a fixture in Miami's Edgewater neighborhood.
Slowly, haltingly, she'd make her way up Biscayne Boulevard from Northeast 26th Street, where she lived, to Boulevard Liquors at 30th Street, where she helped out.
(sic) and famously quirky retired Miami Herald librarian -- dead in her $650 second-floor efficiency. She was 71.
A hard-drinking, two-pack-a-day smoker who swore like a sailor, Rose Klayman died of respiratory failure.
She joined The Miami Herald in the 1960s, left ''in a huff'' in 1970, according to one-time supervisor Gay Nemeti, then was lured back in 1984 because she was ``a newspaper junkie.''
She took a buyout in 2001.
''We all did everything back then,'' Nemeti said. ``She was a database editor, then photo librarian. She had encyclopedic memories and knew how to ferret everything out of the files.''
...
Among other things, she had been a Saks Fifth Avenue sales clerk and a Playboy Club ``bunny.''
She was married once, to David Klayman, more than a decade her junior. He went to prison on drug charges and died in 2003.
''She was crazy in love with him,'' Nemeti said.
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