Newell History: 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