As good a light history of his Florida days as one is likely to find.
From the Palm Beach Post:
How ‘Old Man’ MacArthur bullied, bulldozed and built North Palm Beach County
This story was originally published in The Palm Beach Post on Sunday, May 15, 2005
Fifty years ago this week, Palm Beach County met the man who would steer its future: John D. MacArthur.
George Frost was a young engineer in the early 1960s when he and a Palm Beach County commissioner walked into the old man’s home for a morning meeting.
John D. MacArthur stood before them stark naked, cooking eggs.The billionaire, discussing plans for a turnpike interchange, didn’t explain his lack of clothing and the two men didn’t ask. Eventually,MacArthur got dressed.
“A tool,” Frost called it. Just another way for the old man to get what he wanted. Controlled eccentricity.
John Donald MacArthur, owner of most of northern Palm Beach County, was a risk-taker extraordinaire.
Irascible, ill-mannered, foul-tongued. A Scotch-slinging, chain-smoking, fanny-pinching billionaire. A man with the contempt for wealth found in someone who spent most of his life without it.
Whether he was buying land, lending money or wangling his way into a corporate board room, John D. MacArthur had to get the better of the deal.He didn’t do it to see his name in lights. He once said that if he wanted a monument, he would have called the city he founded MacArthur City, not Palm Beach Gardens.
He didn’t do it to support a lavish life. He was so cheap that he wouldn’t buy rubber bands, instead relying on the ones that came with the morning newspaper.
He did it because he could.MacArthur, who pronounced his name with a booming MACK-Arthur, didn’t make his first million until the age of 48. He died at 80 in 1978, America’s second-richest man, owner of a $1 billion empire of insurance companies, land in eight states, including 100,000 acres in Florida, and investments as varied as Alamo car rental and MacArthur Scotch.
He announced his first Palm Beach County real-estate deal 50 years ago this week. Like Henry Flagler, MacArthur proved that Florida could be shaped by a single man. Like Flagler, MacArthurbuilt his Florida legacy in the last decades of his life. But in place of Flagler’s gilded edge, MacArthur brought a common touch.
He perched atop bulldozers to direct drivers around trees, toted luggage for guests of his hotel and spent hours manipulating politicians for sport. He wore rumpled, worn clothing, lived humbly and took great pains to avoid convention.He put his faith in the one thing that brought him to the top: himself.
He used people as props. He divorced one woman to marry another, refused to help his daughter find her missing son and took over his son’s business when it became a success.
His best friend was a dog.Yet he inspired fierce loyalty in his sales force of thousands and, even today, many of the men and women who worked for him in Palm Beach County gather every March 6 to toast him on his birthday.
He grew up in the shadow of three successful brothers: Alfred, an insurance executive; Telfer, a publisher; and Charles, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. His cousin, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, commanded U.S. forces in the Pacific and South Korea.
John left the fame to them. But when it came to collecting money, he would come out on top.
He lived like a character out of one of his brother’s stories during the Roaring ’20s: savvy, direct, ruthless.His friends and employees knew him as the Skipper, John Mac or the Old Man. He did not look rich, sitting with a slouch in a coffee-stained shirt, whiskers bristling, cigarette dangling.
He never stopped doing what he liked best: making money.
In death, it is what he didn’t do, however, that reverberates today.He left his $1 billion fortune and his stewardship over northern Palm Beach County to a foundation. And he left the foundation no instructions.
“I’ll do what I know best and make it,” he told them. “You fellows will have to learn how to spend it.”....
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