May 18, 2006
Thursday Morning
West Palm Beach
John H. Perry Jr. died Tuesday night in Gainesville, Ga. He was 89.
Palm Beach Daily News City Editor Frank Houston noted in his obituary that the undersea-explorer and one-time owner of The Palm Beach Post and Palm Beach Daily News grew up on Palm Beach and taught the Duchess of Windsor to twist.
Houston wrote:
Mr. Perry was a pioneer of automated newspaper production and cable television in Palm Beach County, championed renewable energy sources and established the Perry Institute for Marine Science on Lee Stocking Island in the Bahamas, which he owned.
Despite his pedigree and fortune, Mr. Perry favored deck shoes, polo shirts and a Panama hat, and he divested himself of his publishing holdings to focus his attention on his underwater pursuits.
"I want to put into life more than I take out of it," Mr. Perry told Palm Beach Life magazine in 1989. "I don't see why I can't do something as significant as Thomas Edison."
Among the seven U.S. presidents he knew on a first-name basis, he grew up with John F. Kennedy in Palm Beach, and in 1937 took the future president and his sisters to the Bath & Tennis Club at a time when the Kennedys were looked down upon in town.
Gerald Ford was his boxing coach at Yale University; and Lyndon Johnson appointed him in 1968 to chair the newly formed U.S. Commission on Marine Sciences, Engineering and Resources.
During the 1950s, Mr. Perry was known locally as the "Twist King." He cut rugs at Ta-boó and the Bath & Tennis Club, where he taught the Duchess of Windsor the fad.
A former member of the Everglades, Bath & Tennis and Sailfish clubs, Mr. Perry once remarked of the island's social scene, "I own the ladder. Why should I climb it?"
He was an early proponent of renewable energy sources, and devoted a significant amount of time and financial resources to the development of such energy technologies as hydrogen fuel cells as well as a global energy plan.
In his Palm Beach garage, Mr. Perry built the first two-man submarine, called the Cubmarine, in the 1950s. Later, his companies built the underwater training facility known as the Hydro-Lab, which now resides at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. His numerous companies, including Perry Oceanographics and The Perry Group, hold the patents on many fuel cell applications and became longstanding suppliers to branches of the U.S. military and NASA.
John Holliday Perry Jr. was born Jan. 2, 1917, in Seattle to John H. and Dorothy Lilly Perry. By the time he was 7, his father had moved the family to South Florida, where he built an empire that came to include 28 newspapers in Florida and Kentucky, five radio stations, and magazine publishing and printing operations before his death in 1952.
"I was a little boy looking out the window of a train as it crossed over into Palm Beach in 1925," he once recalled. "The Breakers hotel was still smoldering after burning down. That was a long time ago, wasn't it? And we've come a long way, Florida and America."
Mr. Perry graduated from Hotchkiss in 1935 and Yale University in 1939, and briefly attended the Harvard School of Business Administration. During World War II, he served as a pilot in both the Anti-Submarine Service and the Air Transport Command.
As the heir to Perry Publications, which in 1947 had purchased the Palm Beach Daily News, the Palm Beach Post, Palm Beach Life and the Palm Beach Times from E.R. Bradley, Mr. Perry was recognized for pioneering the introduction of photo typesetting and computers for automated newspaper production.
While working as a newspaper executive in the 1950s, Mr. Perry once said he would come home and work into the night in his garage on what would become the two-person Cubmarine.
The 1962 invention landed him television appearances on To Tell the Truth and I've Got a Secret, and later was featured in several James Bond movies. By the 1960s, Perry Oceanographic had become the world's largest manufacturer of manned commercial undersea vehicles.
In 1969, after a three-year strike and a Supreme Court loss that required him to pay $1.5 million in back wages, Mr. Perry sold the family's newspapers to Cox Newspapers for around $70 million. In 1986, he sold Perry Cable, with its 87,000 subscribers, to Adelphia Cable for $130 million.
He founded the nonprofit Perry Institute for Marine Science in 1970, following his work on the Technology Panel of the Marine Science Commission, and was instrumental in the creation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
"He was a man who was way ahead of his time," said Dr. John Marr, executive director of the institute. "He was an incredibly gifted person in his vision, and extremely generous."
After his first two marriages ended in divorce, in 1966 and 1985, Mr. Perry married his third wife, Helena, in 1989 in Brussels. After one date, she once said, she never went out with anyone else. "He said something that wiped me out: He was making fuel from the ocean."
In 1990, Mr. Perry founded Energy Partners, where he continued to pursue his dream of clean, renewable and efficient energy sources. In 1993, he developed a zero emission vehicle, known as "The Green Car," a fuel cell/battery hybrid electric vehicle that presaged today's hybrid cars.
His efforts also resulted in the creation of a patented system that makes methanol from seawater. With his daughter Christiana, he published Methanol: Bridge to a Renewable Energy Future, in 1990.
"He's one of the most interesting Americans of our time," former U.S. Sen. Larry Pressler, R-S.D., told Palm Beach Life in 1989.
Mr. Perry is survived by his wife, J. Helena Perry; a brother, Farwell Perry; three daughters, Christiana Perry Gregory, Francesca Perry and Alessandra Perry; three sons, John H. Perry III, Henry "Hap" Perry and Stan Perry; and five grandchildren, Lisa Montgomery Perry, Nathaniel Perry, David Perry, Perry Gregory, and John Gregory.
