In 1925, George English was a young lawyer on his way to Miami when he stopped to chat with a friend in Fort Lauderdale.
He never left town, and over the next six decades he molded Fort Lauderdale.
George W. English Jr. — lawyer, banker, businessman, city executive and civic leader — died on Thursday. He was 94.
“Many of the things that he did created much of what we know today as Fort Lauderdale,” said Dan Hobby, director of the Fort Lauderdale Historical Society.
Mr. English helped create the Sunrise Boulevard causeway, design the city’s city manager form of government and found two banks.
Mr. English’s name is everywhere.
A city park off Sunrise Boulevard is named for him, as is the technical library at Nova University and the YMCA building. He was on the board of many banks and on the Orange Bowl committee, and he was a director of Florida Power & Light Co., a Nova trustee, and a one-time co-owner of television station Channel 17.
“He had his fingers in most things around. He was a philanthropist to some extent,” said Mr. English’s son, George W. English III of LaBelle. “He had no hobbies, business and work were his hobbies, I guess.”
Former Mayor Virginia Young said, “He helped make Fort Lauderdale the great place it is.”
Young said she will remember Mr. English for “how kind and gentle he was and for his great brain for making things happen, instead of letting things happen.”
One example of that was the Sunrise Boulevard causeway. Fort Lauderdale had just been through two major hurricanes and the stock market crash of 1929, and money was scarce for residents and government alike.
So Mr. English, city attorney at the time, engineered some trades that acquired 30 acres of land on the north side of Sunrise Boulevard. He decided a road was needed to link Federal Highway to State Road A1A, but no goverment had money to build the project.
So Mr. English got the state Legislature to approve a toll road; then, through various donations and trades, he got a federal loan to finance construction of the causeway. He leased the road to the state, used the payments to repay the federal loan, and no one ever paid a toll.
Mr. English engineered a similar deal to acquire historic Stranahan House, Young said.
“He was a person who could see opportunities and take advantage of them,” Hobby said.
Mr. English was born on Feb. 19, 1898, in Vienna, Ill. He served in World War I and II, and graduated from the School of Commerce at the University of Illinois. In 1924, he graduated from Harvard Law School, a classmate of the late Sen. Claude Pepper.
Mr. English borrowed $126 from his mother’s savings account and boarded a bus to pursue a job prospect in Miami.
When the bus stopped in Fort Lauderdale, he spied a college friend from his window, talked to him and ended up taking a job as an assistant to the city attorney.
Mr. English was promoted to city attorney in 1928 and stayed in that job until 1939, when he went into private practice, founding the law firm of English, McCaughan & O’Brien.
Dubbed “Mr. Finance of Fort Lauderdale,” he helped create First Federal Savings and Loan Association, now Glendale Federal Bank, and First National Bank, which later became Landmark Bank, and is now NationsBank.
“He was just a genuine friend,” Young said. “He’d call to say, ‘Virginia, meet me for lunch because we’ve got a project.’ … And it would be getting the Boy Scouts started. He was not just an old-timer, he loved this place.”
In addition to his son, Mr. English is survived by his wife, Virginia Alexander English; two grandsons, Tam Andrew English of Fort Lauderdale and George W. English IV of Tallahassee; a granddaughter, Lisa English Danneker of Elizabeth City, N.C.; and seven great-grandchildren.
A funeral service will be at 11 a.m Saturday in the Sanctuary of the First Presbyterian Church, 401 SE 15th Ave, Fort Lauderdale. Burial will be private.
