The Eccentric Mr. Mac- John D. MacArthur March 6, 1897 – Jan. 6, 1978

Next 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 preachers.
But MacArthur stood as Flagler’s unrefined 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 father, William Telfer MacArthur, the traveling 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 second 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, perseverance and direct nature made her quite possibly the only person he feared.
He didn’t leave his fortune to his son and daughter, both born of a first marriage that ended long after he began living with Catherine.
He didn’t set up the MacArthur Foundation to do good. “I’ll 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 continues 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 Watermark Communities and another 15,000 acres of environmentally sensitive land to the government.
- JOEL ENGELHARDT
John D. 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 example, 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.” “Scotsmen are supposed to be very tight. Cheap is a better word for it. I’ve never denied it. I inherited it. My father was a Scotsman even if he was born in New York City three days after the boat landed.”
“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.”