The eccentric Mr. Mac (Our Century) (John D. MacArthur) (PBP) 12-19-99The Palm Beach Post & Sunday, December 19,1999 OUR CENTURY 95
John D. MacArthur at his regular hangout, the Colonnades Hotel coffee shop, in 1977 ne eighth -grade
dropout made his fortune selling $1-a-month insurance policies during the Depression, and he never
stopped counting his pennies. `He was as tight as the bark on a tree, "said attorney Joe Farish.
Others say MacArthur was so cheap that he didn't run the air conditioner at the Colonnades in the
summer and never accepted a cocktail napkin because that was a waste of paper
The eccentric Mr. Mac
ON O. MACARTHUR
March 6, 1897—Jan. 6, 1978
ext to Henry Flagler, no developer has
influenced Palm Beach County as much
as John D. MacArthur.
Both were self-made millionaires who
grew up poor, and both were sons of preach-
ers.
But MacArthur stood as Flagler's unre-
fined opposite. Ornery, cheap and profane,
MacArthur reviled blue bloods. He had
more patience for those in blue collars.
He turned against the teachings of his fa-
ther, William Telfer MacArthur, the travel-
ing preacher. Instead, he lived by the lore of
his brother, Charles, the playwright and
hard-boiled newspaperman.
Once, when asked why he dressed like a
bum, MacArthur explained: "Sometimes, it's
better to feel like a bum than a millionaire."
. He awoke at 4:45 every morning,
smoked three to four packs of cigarettes a
day, drank 20 cups of coffee and swilled
Scotch. He lived to be 80, and in the process,
he built northern Palm Beach County.
MacArthur sold mail-order insurance in
Chicago before coming to Palm Beach
County in 1955 to collect on a loan. He took
control of 80 percent of Lake Park and all of
what he would name North Palm Beach. He
kept buying, adding thousands of acres. He
founded Palm Beach Gardens in 1959 and
decided to stay and watch it grow.
When he died in 1978, he was the sec-
ond wealthiest man in America. He gave his
fortune to a foundation named for him and
his second wife, Catherine, the bookkeeper
whose fierce Scottish isolationism, persever-
ance and direct nature made her quite possi-
bly the only person he feared.
He didn't set up the MacArthur Founda-
tion to do good. "Ill do what I know best and
make (money)," he told his lawyers. "You
fellows will have to learn how to spend it."
But the foundation has done good. It's
given away more than $2 billion and contin-
ues giving at about $150 million a year. Its
last major act in Palm Beach County came in
1999: It sold 15,000 developable acres to Wa-
termark Communities and another 15,000
acres of environmentally sensitive land to
the government.
— JOEL ENGELHARDT
;MacArthur, in his own words
"THERE ARE SOME BEARDED JERKS
and little old ladies who call me a despoiler
of the environment. But I believe I have more
concern than the average person. For exam-
ple, I built Palm Beach Gardens without
knocking one tree down. I moved the biggest
tree ever moved in Florida — they said it
weighed 80 tons, although I doubt it ... Many
environmentalists today are obstructionists
and just throw rocks in your path. They are
trying to keep people out of Florida. To me,
that is un-Christian. The poor slobs in New
York and New Jersey saved their money and
bought a little piece of land down here, and
now the obstructionists say they can't use it."
"EVERY TIME I give somebody something, I am
besieged by a thousand others with their hands out.
Frankly, I don't believe you can buy your way into
heaven and prefer not to be known as charitable."
"I AM NO GENIUS, and at least a dozen times
in my life, if I had gone east instead of west, the
show would have been stranded in Podunkville."
"THE ONLY REASON I own 100 percent of the
stock of my `empire' is that no one with $100 would
invest in an impossible undertaking. My own brother
spent hundreds of hours giving me valid reasons
why I had attempted an impossibility. By all the rules
of the game, Bankers Life & Casualty Co. should
have gone down the drain 40 years ago. The only
explanation I can offer is luck,"
Photos by
'JOHN J. LOPINOT
Staff photographer