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- ).