Parents divorce · raised in Miami Beach

After his parents divorced, Byrd was raised by his mother and stepfather in Miami Beach, Florida. Wikipedia’s early-life section and matching obituaries place the lasting childhood geography on the beach, not in Cleveland alone.

Miami Beach is where he grew up: hotels, nightclub color, tropical light, and a household that public biography later described as glamorous and troubled at once.

For the estate timeline, “where he grew up” is a dedicated chapter — separate from birth — so visitors do not flatten Tennessee and Florida into one postcard.

The coastal city feeds later theatre palette and autobiographical memory: Deco façades, nightlife, and the sense that spectacle was both work and weather.

This chapter precedes the unhappy-home details and the 1959 Miami Beach High School diploma that close childhood.