Life Begins at 88

Of all the pleasure domes built along Florida's Gold Coast in the late 1920s, none was more ornate than the Boca Raton Hotel & Club, 42 miles north of Miami. Put up by Utilitycoon Clarence H. Geist as the world's flossiest private resort, it cost $10 million, had 450 rooms, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, two 18-hole golf courses, dozens of fountain-filled gardens and a beach-front cabana that is bigger than most hotels. During the Depression, Geist ran Boca Raton as his private hobby, happily paid its staggering deficits. But when he died in 1938, the club fell on hard times. The Army Air Forces used it for a training center in World War II, and in postwar years it was owned and operated as a public hotel by Schine Hotels; Boca Raton's white-jacketed staff often outnumbered the paying guests.

Last week Boca Raton got a new lease on luxury. In the biggest deal in recent Florida history, Arthur Vining Davis, one of Alcoa's founders, paid out $22.5 million to J. Myer Schine for the hotel and 1,000 acres of land. Davis, who owns 1,336,824 shares (6.5%) of Alcoa common stock and ranks among the world's richest men (one estimate: well over $350 million), plans to revamp the club into a resort for millionaires, cut up the land into estates. Said Davis: "While Florida will always offer ideal home sites for the middle income group, we [must] provide also for the group whose accomplishments enable them to enjoy the finest."

Tomatoes & Orchids. At 88, Davis is still Alcoa board chairman, although he spends most of his time in Florida, where since 1948, he has become one of the state's biggest landowners. Gruff and publicity-shy, he keeps most of his deals a tight secret. Once when a reporter managed to get him on the phone, and ask what his aims were in Florida, Davis snapped: "Making money. What else? Now go away and let me get on with it." One of the few reporters to interview him is the Miami Herald's Nixon Smiley, who came away goggle-eyed. "Arthur Vining Davis," he wrote, "is a large body of money surrounded by Dade County."

Estimates are that Davis already owns close to 75,000 acres or 12% of Dade County, has another 50,000 acres spread around the rest of the state. He has bought so much land so fast that land selling at $300 an acre six years ago now costs $2,000 or more. Davis has spent at least $2,000,000 on a tomato farm, millions more on four plant nurseries, including the world's largest orchid and house plant producer. He operates the biggest ice cream plant in the Southeast, runs three dairies, owns a big slice of a freight airline (Riddle).

Ships & Sweat. Davis launches new businesses as easily as turning out an aluminum pan. Once he bought a 1,000-ton war-surplus Canadian minesweeper for a yacht, then decided to turn it into a banana boat. Result: Davis' Three Bay Lines now has seven ships transporting 1,000,000 tons of produce monthly between Caribbean ports. Everywhere around Miami, Davis draglines, Davis bulldozers, Davis dredges are filling in swampy land, cutting yacht canals to prepare the way for $35,000 to $100,000 homes.

Short and stocky, Davis has not let age slow him a whit. He still arrives at his Du Pont Building office in Miami at 9:30 sharp each morning, spends much of his time on inspection tours of his growing empire. He pays his workers well, expects everyone--big and little--to bend to the job. Driving along a dusty farm road one day, the story goes, Davis ordered his chauffeur to stop beside a laborer leaning on his shovel. Said Davis: "Are you supposed to be working for me?" Drawled the man: "Yes, sir. I sure am." "No, you're not," roared Davis. "You're not sweating."

Ah, Wilderness. All told, Davis has spent between $40 million and $50 million on Florida's future. And he has just begun. Besides his plans for Boca Raton, he has ideas for a $20 million shopping center south of Miami at Kendall. In January he bought Miami's Metropolitan Bank, and this week he signed a long-term lease on another big property near Delray Beach, where he plans to put up a $1,500,000 hotel. He is also busy developing the island of Eleuthera, 75 miles east of Nassau in the Bahamas. There, Davis, who has five other homes on the mainland, has already built himself a palatial hideaway on a 30,000-acre property, has opened up a harbor, built an airstrip, an 18-hole golf course designed by Robert Trent Jones, and 30 guest houses. He hope to turn Eleuthera into a tropical paradise for "rich millionaires" who do not want to rub elbows with the mere millionaires at Boca Raton.

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