R. Emmett McTigue left us the same way he lived — quietly and without fanfare.
He died June 13 in his sleep at his Fort Lauderdale home, his son Patrick said. He was 92.
Mike Stocker/Sun Sentinel
Steve Bousquet, South Florida Sun Sentinel columnist.
A confidante of two Democratic governors and a pillar of Broward civic life, McTigue was a foundational figure in the 1970s and 1980s, in two decades of transformational change and growth.
A courtly and thoughtful man, he disliked flamboyance and flash and preferred to work behind the scenes. He navigated the closely connected worlds of business and politics in his low-key style.
“Things would start moving around when you talked to Emmett,” said his friend of six decades, lawyer Bob Huebner. “In a very subtle way, he got things done, and he was his own man.”
Name a civic endeavor, and McTigue was part of it: North Broward Hospital District, South Florida Regional Planning Council, Broward County Planning and Zoning Board, Florida Council of 100 and Broward Workshop, to name a few.
When Huebner ran for the County Commission in 1970, he recalled, a young E. Clay Shaw, later a mayor and member of Congress, introduced him to McTigue, a Democrat, who helped Huebner, a Republican, win the seat.
Later, Huebner went to Tallahassee to urge the new Republican governor, Bob Martinez, to leave McTigue on the regional planning council. Instead, the governor picked Huebner to replace McTigue. They laughed about it for years.
“He never forgot it,” Huebner said.
Fort Lauderdale Daily News
An early real estate ad by M.R. McTigue in Fort Lauderdale.
Born in 1933, McTigue was a little too young to be a Fort Lauderdale pioneer, but his father was. From the city’s earliest days, M.R. McTigue made the family name synonymous with its most lucrative asset — real estate, which became the family business.
The father founded the Las Olas Development Co. in 1935 to represent the Wells family from Chicago, which was buying up much of the city’s prime real estate, including the Champ Carr Hotel, which became the Riverside.
McTigue’s signs and ads in the Fort Lauderdale News, with three-digit phone numbers, were familiar fixtures.
The McTigues had much to do with the cultivation of Las Olas as a premier shopping destination. “The Street,” they called it.
As a boy, Emmett McTigue tagged along with his dad on real estate appointments. He had to stand on the passenger seat to see over the car’s dashboard, he told the Fort Lauderdale News in 1979.
In 1951, McTigue was senior class president at Fort Lauderdale High. Then he headed off to the University of Florida and became an Alpha Tau Omega fraternity brother of Lawton Chiles, who would become a U.S. senator and governor.
When Chiles had to fill one of those highly coveted hospital board seats in 1993, he rejected every name put forth by Broward’s always-feuding political factions and recruited his friend McTigue instead.
McTigue was also helpful to a little-known Democrat named Bob Graham, who ran for governor in 1978.
When the Sun Sentinel listed McTigue as one of four key Broward influencers of Graham, along with lawyers Bill Leonard and Steve Josias and Causeway Lumber executive Gene Whiddon, he lightly dismissed it.
“I am not a powerful person,” McTigue said. “The governor connection is not a form of power.”
But it was.
McTigue was living proof that you didn’t need to hold elected office to have influence. The one time he ran for office, for a House seat in 1966, he lost — as a Democrat in then-heavily Republican Broward.
“The man had impeccable style and manners — a true one-of-a-kind individual,” Fort Lauderdale lawyer John Milledge said.
McTigue was also a member of Fort Lauderdale’s Downtown Development Authority at a critical time.
A milestone in Broward’s evolution was the creation of the Performing Arts Center and nearby Museum of Science and Discovery in the 1980s. As a DDA member, McTigue helped the authority acquire needed property for a parking garage.
“For decades, Emmett was a true pillar of Broward County,” former Sheriff Ken Jenne recalled. “He was often the smartest one in the room. But he never acted like it.”
His contemporaries, a close-knit group of businessmen who formed what was known as the “downtown power structure,” are mostly gone, such as bankers Robert “Buddy” Lochrie and Fred Millsaps and shopping center developer Leonard Farber.
The family plans a small service near the Yankee Clipper hotel on the beach. As a child, McTigue lived for a time in the nearby Coast Guard cottages, his son said.
McTigue’s online obituary said only: “He came. He saw. He left.”
That doesn’t begin to tell the story of Emmett McTigue, but that’s what he wanted.
Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. Contact him at sbousquet@sunsentinel.com or (850) 567-2240.