Capt. Alex Newell (1885-1964)

Capt. Alex Newell (1885-1964):  A Florida Original

by Alec Newell

Captain Alex



Capt. Alex Newell was born in the horse and buggy era to one of Orlando's first pioneering couples and lived on into the Space Age.  During the  course of his colorful life he would brush elbows with some of South Florida's most famous and infamous characters.  A man of many paradoxes,  his pedigree included an unbroken line of Scots-Irish  college professors and distinguished educators that stretched back to the late 1700's, while he himself may have only had an 8th grade formal education.

His grandparents, Susannah Rippard Newell (1828-1883) and Professor M. Alexander Newell (1824-1893) had come to the United States aboard the ship A Z, and eventually settled in Baltimore, Maryland.  George Rippard, Susannah R. Newell's father and shipping merchant by trade, had access to a fleet of packet ships in Liverpool.  It was aboard one of those ships that the young couple had arrived in New York (1848) during the Great Irish Potato Famine.

Professor McFadden Alexander Newell

Irish immigrant, Professor M. Alexander Newell had already taught Greek and Latin by the age of 15, at the Royal Belfast Academic Institute (now Queens College in Belfast), where his father, Professor John Newell, had been a distinguished faculty member. The young Alexander Newell was also a graduate of Trinity College in Dublin, where he had won prizes for excellence in Logic and Rhetoric.

In Baltimore, M. Alexander Newell authored a series of textbooks, set up the Maryland's public school system,  was appointed its State Superintendant {1866-1890), served as President of the National Educators Association (1877-1878), and founded what would later become Towson State University.  He declined an offer to become the U.S. Commissioner of Education to President Grover Cleveland, and was awarded an Honorary PhD. from Princeton.  His sons, George Rippard Newell (1858-1898), and Harry Alexander Newell (1862-1940),  as young single men, would both be drawn south in1881, to make their fortunes in the frontier settlement of Orlando, Florida.

Gertrude and Harry A. Newell

The elder son, George Rippard Newell Esq., would become the legal representative for the Orlando-Winter Park Railroad Company.  He built a fine house on S. Lake Ave. across from Lake Cherokee in Orlando.  His younger brother, Harry, who would later be called "Professor" (Harry) Newell, married Gertrude Sweet (1862-1947).  Gertrude was the sister of one of Orlando's first mayors, Charles Sweet.  She had once been voted the "most beautiful woman in Orange County."  Harry made his living as a professional musician, giving lessons, organizing bands, and selling instruments.  Gertrude and Harry built a fashionable two story Victorian wood-frame house at 215 East Robinson Ave., across the street from Lake Eola, in what is now downtown Orlando.  Their home became a social hub of the small community, and the couple was remembered by one historical source as being "very popular, especially with the younger set."

Gertrude and Harry had only one son, who was named after Harry's father, McFadden Alexander Newell .  According to family lore, the rambunctious young Alex chaffed a bit at formal education.  He was a tall, handsome, athletic young man, more interested in hunting and fishing than coronet lessons.  In 1905, he left home and pedaled a bicycle from Orlando to an obscure, swampy little town on the Southeast Coast of Florida, called Miami.

From this point on, the thread-line of his story gets a little fuzzy.  Unlike his ancestors, the paper trail Capt. Alex left behind is pretty thin.  He had no formal profession, but be had many practical skills. He was rumored to have sold mules to the U.S. Army during the first World War, and travelled as an itinerant lather for building projects throughout the state.  He had worked for Henry J. Klutho on the St. James Building in Downtown Jacksonville in 1910, and had mentioned going to a place called Mayport, where he had eaten boiled shrimp and drank whiskey  "on the beach near the rocks."  He also spent at least one harvest season on Drayton Island at the north end of Lake George, building wooden shipping crates for oranges, but most of his working life was spent on the water.  He had lived at a lot of different addresses, especially in the fluid landscape of an ever changing Miami skyline. 

Alex was a man of few words with a deadpan sense of humor.  He was at ease with an amazing cross section of interesting people, but almost never talked about himself.  He also had seven children and a very rocky marriage to the same woman for many years.  During one hiatus, they were separated for 10 years but not divorced.  He was widely known, well liked, but owned very little in the way of real property.  He had a 30 foot wooden boat that he'd built himself.  It had two bunks and a head.  He didn't have a house, and I never knew him to own or drive a car.

 

He had captained the Chieftain, a 106 foot luxury yacht that was berthed at the Royal Palms Hotel pier near the mouth of the Miami River, and he also worked whenever he could as a charter boat captain and fishing guide from his own boat.  During Prohibition he supplemented the family income by running boatloads of rum from Bimini and Cuba to Miami.  His boat was powered by a recycled bread truck engine that, for a time, had been specially modified for speed.  When the Labor Day hurricane of 1935 hit the Florida Keys, it was the first category five hurricane ever, to make a landfall in the United States.  A film crew that made newsreels for the motion picture industry offered to pay Capt. Alex an unheard of charter fee if he would take them close enough to document the unprecedented destruction caused by the hurricane.  Financial windfalls like that were rare during the depression.
 

 The Chieftain, owned by manufacturing magnate, Albert Blake Dick, of Chicago 

 

Ernest Hemingway and trophy marlin, dockside.

Capt. Alex had also been on hand for another event that occurred in the Florida Keys, and surfaced in print years after both he and Ernest Hemingway had died.  Mate Bethel, an old fishing buddy of Capt. Alex, had been hired by a retired Army Colonel and his much younger wife, as a fishing guide aboard their private yacht.  Hemingway, Capt. Alex, and the Colonel all had boats temporarily berthed at the same marina.  The group was well into their cups when Hemingway made a remark to the Colonel's wife which erupted in a scuffle.  Hemingway punched the Colonel, knocking him off the dock and into the water.  A fictionalized version of the incident surfaced in Islands in the Stream which wasn't published until 1970. 




Mathews Cruiser

For the last twenty-five years of his life the old man lived alone in a corrugated metal boathouse on the Miami River, making cast nets by hand, and doing a little fishing on the side.  His last official title was Fleet Captain for Mathews Cruisers.


Arthur Godfrey


Mathews Cruisers was a small family owned company that built luxury motor yachts for millionaires.  They kept a sales model on the Miami River that could be shown to potential yacht customers, rented out for elegant private parties, or chartered for V.I.P. fishing trips.  His job was to keep the yacht in show room condition at all times and to double as captain, fishing guide, and gourmet seafood cook for important clients.  Arthur Godfrey had been one of Mathews' high profile yachting customers.  If Alex had been unimpressed by Hemingway's celebrity status, he seemed to genuinely like Godfrey, and was a fan of Godfrey's radio show.

Grandpa Newell leaving for Miami, and an unhappy boy

My memories of the man were as my Grandpa Newell.  Whenever he came to visit us he always traveled by Greyhound Bus, and regarded our three channel black and white television set as an extravagant novelty.  He'd also been a fan of the radio show "Gunsmoke," when he saw James Arness in the starring role of the television show, he allowed that Arness just didn't look or sound the way that Mat Dillon was supposed to.

His formal attire was a short sleeve sport shirt, khaki pants, leather loafers and a straw panama hat.  Informal wear was khaki pants a white cotton tee shirt, white canvas boat shoes without socks, and no hat.  He smoked a corn cob pipe, shaved with a straight razor, and was seldom without a short coke bottle full of Pink Pepto Bismol in his hip pocket.  He liked Sophie Mae Peanut Brittle, which was hard on his false teeth.  He bought his reading glasses at Woolworth's.

He sometimes brought smoked shrimp or mullet in a Sophie Mae Peanut Brittle box when he came for a visit.  He smelled of pipe tobacco, shaving soap, and Bay Rum aftershave.  His clothes and suitcase always smelled like the boathouse: a combination of creosote, barnacles, manila rope, gasoline and mildew.  During one of his visits he made a slingshot for me which caused some stress for my mother, but that slingshot and my first folding pocket knife were two of my most prized possessions as a boy.

When we visited him in Miami, my parents and sisters slept on the 40 foot Mathews Yacht which had sinks, a shower, heads and beds. I got to sleep on an air mattress inside the boathouse.  I liked being able to scrape our dinner plates directly into the Miami River where garfish could feast on the table scraps.  I did not like bathing in a special  garbage can that was normally used for flushing the salt water from small outboard motors.  I can remember shivering naked on the dock, and being rinsed off with a garden hose while tourist in boats, passed by on the river, waving.

Interior floor plan for a 40 foot Mathews Cruiser

My indignities were usually assuaged with a couple of 22 cal. cartridges, which were always the medium of exchange for good behavior whenever my grandfather was tasked with watching me.  Grandpa Newell kept a boy's single shot bolt action 22 cal. rifle that hung from a handy nail.  He used it to shoot the big river rats that sometimes invaded the boathouse.  After a morning of painfully good behavior, I could spend a gleeful afternoon shooting rats and garfish from the dock.

There was a similarly relaxed attitude toward eating and drinking on the boat when we fished with the old man.  There were two wicker fighting chairs and a metal Coca Cola ice chest bolted to the aft deck of the boat.  The cooler was always filled with ice, bait, and bottled soft drinks that you could have whenever you wanted, without asking anyone's permission!   The old man also packed sandwiches, a box of saltine crackers and a block of cheddar cheese that you could slice with a bait knife whenever you got hungry.  Fishing with the old man was always like being let out of school for the first day of summer vacation.  I loved it.



Grandpa Newell's boat with Mac, Mate Bethel, Alex and Alec
 

Scattered throughout the family is probably half a shoebox full of old photographs, a few newspaper clippings,  and a hand full of prized relics from when Alex made his living on the water.  There isn't much tangible evidence of the legacy he has left his heirs.  Mostly there are just the stories.  I'm extremely lucky to have a couple of his old guns and the antique bamboo rods he made for salt water big-game fishing.  Those fishing poles hang on my wall as a reminder of family traditions that I am privileged to be part of.  It is also my privilege, and self imposed obligation, to preserve at least part of Alex' story.  There are no more like him.

Capt. Alex, (Gracie?) and unidentified children

Mac and sisters on their houseboat's dock
(Al Pfluegeler's Taxidermy Shop in the background)

 



Capt. Alex' Children c. 1930:  First row center, Peter
 Second row left to right: Elaine, Bonnie, Mac, David (lap) and Winnie
Top row center, Jeanne



 

The Newell Children and their mother at Capt. Alex' funeral 1964
Front row left to right: Winnie, Gracie (their mother) and Elaine
Top row left to right: Bonnie, David, Peter, Mac, and Jeanne 

Mcadden Alexander Newell's three: Mac, Alec, and Alex

 

Capt. Alex Newell and Family Documents on Ancestry.c​om

Important mainly because of the words in the message.
Click to teach Gmail this conversation is not important.

 

	Inbox		x

 

Sara Nielsen	12:17 AM (3 hours ago)
to Bobbye, Sharon, Dave, Timothy, John, Sara-Nett, me, connie

 

1) Captain Alex (Grandpa Newell) WW1 Draft Card

2) Miami Directory Capt. Alex Matthews Cruisers

3) Miami Dade 1930 Capt. Alex , Martha Grace Newell and Family

 

 

3 Attachments

Capt. Alex WW1 Draft Card.jpg

96 KB

Miami Directory Capt. Alex Matthews Cruisers.jpg

1.6 MB

Miami Dade 1930 Capt. Alex , Martha Grace Newell and Family.jpg

1.4 MB



 

Mac Newell's Obituary

Obituary for Mac Newell  (June 21,1924 - July 26,2012)

 

McFadden A. (Mac) Newell Jr., Professional Consulting Engineer (Ret.), and long time Atlantic Beach resident, passed away July 26, 2012, at the age of 88.  Born June 21, 1924, on the Miami River, to Capt. "Alex" and Grace Newell,  Mac grew up on the water in Miami, and joined the U.S. Navy shortly after his graduation from Miami Edison H.S.,  in 1942.

During WWII, Mac was attached to Fleet Air Wing-7, of the Royal Air Force Coastal Command, St. Eval, Cornwall, and Dunkeswell, Devon, England.  He served as a navigator aboard PBY-4As (modified B-24s} flying patrol and reconnaissance missions over the English Channel and Coastal France in preparation for the D-Day Invasion.  After the War, he enrolled as a Veteran at the University of Florida, where, in 1950, he graduated with a Bachelor's Degree in Mechanical Engineering.

During his long career, Mac was held in high regard by his professional peers.  He was an active member, and held several offices in numerous Professional Engineering Associations.  He was registered to practice in six States, and had consulting offices in Warrensville Hts., Ohio, Jacksonville, FL., and Atlantic Beach, FL.

Survivors include: his caring wife, Helga, son, M. "Alec" Newell (Kathy), Mayport, FL.,  daughters Sara-Nett Wood (Ashley), Evinston, FL., "Connie" Langston (Bobby), Orange Springs, FL., sister, Bonnie Greaves, Beverley Hills, FL.,  five grandchildren, two great grandchildren, and numerous nieces and nephews.

There will be a  Memorial Service held  for Mac at the Mayport Presbyterian Church, on Saturday, August 4, 2012 at 10:30 A.M., with a reception immediately after the service.

Interment will be in the family plot at Green Mount Cemetery, Baltimore, Maryland.

Eulogy for Mac Newell

Eulogy for McFadden Alexander (Mac) Newell Jr.

June 21, 1924 - July 26, 2012

 

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the completion of Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast Railroad that ran along the East Coast of Florida, and terminated in Key West.  To build the last and most challenging leg of the line, work crews lived aboard two storied houseboats that today's U.S. Navy calls "berthing barges."  Twelve years after completion of that rail road, one of those very same barges moored on the Miami River, became Mac Newell's  birth place; and except for the uniqueness of the place, Mac was, in many ways, typical of the men Tom Brokaw would later come to call "America's Greatest Generation."

Mac was the middle child of the seven surviving children born to Gracie and Capt. Alex Newell. They had a difficult time raising a big family during the Depression.  Work for a charter boat captain was sporadic, and the pay was never great, so Capt. Alex supplemented the family income by running prohibition era rum from Cuba back to Florida in his home made boat; and despite their relative poverty, whenever Mac talked about his days as a youngster on the Miami River, there was an almost idyllic tone his stories about jumping from bridges and swimming naked in the river, or sailing his boat to small islands in Key Biscayne and eating coconuts on the beach, night raids on sugar cane fields, fishing from his father's boat, or playing football for Miami Edison High School.  As I conjure memories of those stories, they seem almost like an odd mixture John Boy Walton's family on the Mountain, and Huck Finn's adventures on the Mississippi.

There was also the story about returning to the boat house one afternoon, in early December of 1941, after a day of fishing with his buddies, in his father's boat, the teenage boys were told by Mac's father, who'd just heard it on the radio, that the Japanese had just bombed Pearl Harbor.  Within a year, he and his boyhood friends had all volunteered for military service and had been sent to different parts of the globe.  Mac was sent to England where he was attached to Fleet Air Wing 7 of the Royal Air Force Coastal Command, where he served as a navigator aboard PBY4-As (modified B-24s), flying patrol and reconnaissance missions over the English Channel and Coastal France, in preparation for the D-Day Invasion.

Like so many WW II Vets, Mac was very humble about his contributions to the War Effort, and it wasn't until about two months before his death, (just before Dorothy's funeral last May) that he gave me a copy of a journal he had written three years earlier, detailing his memories of his military service.   Some years before that, knowing it would probably fall to me to write his obituary, he had given me his vita sheet.  In it he had listed every employer he had ever worked for, and what his duties had been, and every office he had ever held in every professional engineering organization he'd ever belonged to.  It read like a job resume'.  He was not a man to be embarrassed by his own profession.  Just before Kathy and I went on vacation, I had several long visits alone with him.  I wanted to thank him, and to acknowledge that highest and best legacy  was leaving to me, would always be the good examples that he had set.  There were also some questions and ambiguities about his journal I wanted to clear up in my own mind, and for the sake of posterity.

As we all know, if you asked Mac what time it was, he might start by telling you how to build a watch, but if you asked him how to build a watch...... anyhow knowing that our time together might be growing short, and knowing that unasked questions might go forever unanswered, I wanted clarification of some specific information that I might need for a rewrite of his obituary, but didn't want to come right out and say it.  I think I had just asked him about a question about the exact military nomenclature for the planes he had flown in, when he launched into this story I had never heard before.  It was about how while on an anti-submarine patrol, over a German Anti-Aircraft Battery along the French Coast, and having no bombs, a pilot had decided to drop a depth charge on the gun battery.  Since depth charges weren't designed to explode on impact, all the "attack" did was to alert the Germans, who promptly answered by shooting up the plane, qualifying one of the flight crew for a purple heart award, due to a shrapnel wound.  When I asked if the pilot any of the other crew members had received any awards or  acknowledgements, he said, "Yes, headquarters issued a directive that there would be no more depth charges dropped on land-based artillery batteries."

After the War, Mac returned home and entered the University of Florida on the GI Bill.  He had no car, and he could carry everything he owned in a Navy duffle bag.  Within one or two years, the student population at UF jumped from 200 to 4000 students.  This put a tremendous stress load not on the University itself but upon the surrounding community of Gainesville, where housing became a critical issue.  To save money, he and Bob Cook, a boyhood friend from Miami, had shared a rented room with one bed, in a house with one bathroom, miles from campus, with a family of four.  Mac said he couldn't believe his good luck at the opportunity he'd been given.  My mother's family lived about a hundred yards up the road from that house; but by the time of his graduation, Mac and Dorothy were married, had two kids and were living in tiny FlaVet housing unit on campus.  The FlaVets were a hastily reconstructed living community of recycled military barracks that had been cobbled together to accommodate the flood of returning Veterans.  The quarters were Spartan at best, but probably a whole lot better than sharing a bed with Bob Cook.  Mac even spoke of his experiences in the FlaVets with a certain amount of warm nostalgia.  He was a newly minted family man in a strange place on the threshold of graduation into a bright career in a nation that was bursting at the seams, with confidence and energy.

What followed was a decade filled with a new house, a new car, a new three channel, 19 inch black and white television set, Christmases with electric trains and football helmets, and  a new baby sister.  It was an era of unbridled optimism and unprecedented affluence.  The flinty pragmatism and thrift formed in the depression, and the quiet, confident, self-reliant, "can do" spirit, the tireless work ethic, the unprudish moral compass and patriotism forged into the characters men like Mac, seem almost naively quaint by today's standards; but their efforts have provided us with the highest standard of living in the history of the world.  Decades or centuries into the future, historians may well fix the apex of American Culture as being the Post War Era.  It will be directly attributable to men like Mac.  I am very very proud to have had him for my father.

I can think of dozens of funny stories about Mac, he was very human and would always be his funniest when he didn't mean to be.   I have many warm childhood memories of Mac just being a father, rolling on the floor with his children, or reading poetry to us at bed time.  I can also remember his bewilderment at the changes seeping into our culture during the late 60's and early 70's, and I remember his concern for the influence those changes might be having on his children.  Mac was not an overtly religious man, but he made sure we got to Sunday School regularly.  He was a busy man.  He had strong commitment to the engineering profession, but he always had time for birthdays, holidays, graduations, and family outings.

As my sisters and I morphed into adulthood, with children of our own, Mac could relax his parental concerns a bit, and became a true friend. Always good company, he was first person on the guest list for every party or social gathering we had.   He mellowed into the guy who had not only nurtured me in my childhood, and gritted his teeth through my adolescence, but also served as the best man at my wedding, the year I turned 50.

Toward the end of his life when the biological machinery of his body began to wear out, he approached those problems with the same diligent work ethic, grace, and humor, with which he had confronted all of life's obstacles.  Well up into his 70's, he was still swimming a mile every morning, and lifting weights three days a week at the Beaches Aquatic Club pool.  He worked at his profession until he was 77.

Mac was well read, well informed, and didn't need any one's help in formulating his own opinions on anything.  He liked history and was keenly aware of his own place in it.  I believe he saw his war journal as a minor firsthand account of the larger events unfolding in the World around him.  Mac was a good, not a great man, and I told him was proud of him for that too.  When I ran down the list of all the buildings down town that had been named for important men, (Lou Wolfson, Wesley Paxon, and Haydon Burns, etc.) they had all eventually been investigated, and/or indicted, by grand juries.  Mac was proud too, of his own good name, and of the family heritage it carried.  Mac's Grandfather, Harry Alexander, and Gertrude Newell were among Orlando Florida's Pioneering settlers.  There is a two volume History of Orlando in which they are prominently featured with pictures and anecdotes from family friends and acquaintances in Volume I.  Mac's  Great Grandfather and namesake, immigrated from Ireland, in 1848, the year of the Great Potato Famine, and became the original founder of what has become the Towson State University, in Baltimore Md.  At his request Mac's ashes will interred in the old family plot in the Baltimore's historic Green Mount Cemetery.

This morning, shuffling some Mac's old papers,  I was able to locate a map of that cemetery, showing plot locations, some old insurance policies, family trees with pictures of his Great Great Grandfather, John Newell had been a faculty member at Queens College in Dublin.  There are pictures and remembrances from the trip he and Helga took to Ireland 1992 to explore his Irish roots, complete with photocopies of the "Newell" section of Irish phone books.  There are some letters, and copies birth registries from his grandmother's Bible.  I also noticed a series of job enquiries from 1967, the year my parents separated,  one was an enquiry about a job in Orange County Florida, (the Orlando Area);  and another was for a $12,053.15 per annum for job in the Panama Canal Zone, as a Utilities Engineer for the Government.  Anyhow, there's more stuff in there that I only had a chance to glance at, but it will all be on a table at the Reception Hall for anyone who wants to look at it after the service.

There is also a book from the archives room of the Towson State College that was given to me when I was up there some time ago.  There is a building, Newell Hall, named for Mac's namesake on the Towson University Campus, and all kinds of personal papers, and a huge oil painting of  M. A. Newell 'Zero'*, housed in the school's  library.  I once wrote to the archives in Baltimore, asking for photocopies of anything they might have on M.A. Newell 'Zero,'  (born 1824, 100 yr. before Mac.)  One of the documents I got back was a hand written invitation to the Baltimore City Fathers, to attend the school's Charter Class Graduation Ceremony, it is dated June 8, 1866, and signed M.A. Newell, (my name).  By an eerie coincidence,  the invitation was dated 100 years to the day from my own High School Graduation.  Exactly the kind of delicious historical irony Mac would have loved.

 

*The 'Zero' designation is to reduce confusion over descendants' names.  The order is as follows:  John Newell (1768-?),  Mcfadden Alexander Newell 'Zero' (1824-1893), Harry Alexander Newell (1862-1940), McFadden Alexander Newell 'Capt. Alex' (1885-1964), McFadden Alexander Newell Jr. 'Mac' (1924-2012), McFadden Alexander Newell III  'Alec' (1948- ).