My tribute to John H. Perry Jr.

I met Mr. Perry and his lovely wife in Freeport Grand Bahamas in early 1968.
John Holliday Perry Jr. was a very impressive man and a genius millionaire.
He showed me how to build submarines when I was only seven years old.
And by the age of eight he had not only taught me all about submarines,
but he had introduced me, my older brother and my parents to President Lyndon Johnson.

Wow, I remember: there I was, with my brother at the table on our best behavior watching my Mom and Dad having dinner with the President of the United States of America. They were all talking about man landing on the moon some day, perhaps even going to Mars.

Once I saw Mr. Perry having a disagreement with President Johnson at the dock by the presidential yacht until President Johnson finally gave in and said "You're right John, we will have to do it your way." John Perry inspired me to grow up and be just like him. Now, I build flying boats and in 1998, I helped spearhead the successful redesign and rebuilding of an old Perry Submarine into the world's first five-person luxury Submarine. I was so honored to work on something he had once built, and so I tried to think like him and I tried to work just like him, and it was so much fun.

I remember when I was eight, he told me to go to the International Explorers Club at Lucaya Beach so I could get certified as a scuba diver someday. And so I did, that same day. I snuck over the fence in the back and dove down to the bottom of the training pool until I was noticed by one of the instructor divers and another diver offered me air to breath on the way up. But I didn't need any air because the pool was only about fifty feet deep. The next day John had heard about me and he was shaking his head and laughing because he knew that he was the one that gave me the idea to pull that stunt in the first place. Hahahahahahahahaha!  I miss you, John.

He towed his son and my brother Ivan and I behind his Yacht on special hooded surfboards that he had invented. They were equipped with glass windows so that we could look for treasure on the bottom of the ocean. And we found some, too. We found anchors and cannons from old Spanish Galleons. It was so exciting just to be with him. John was so full of energy, so smart and so full of ideas. It was just amazing. You really were an amazing Man, John, and we all miss you so much.

My Mom Alice, my Dad Tony Sr., and my brother Ivan and I still talk about you and we still tell the same stories to everyone that we meet. We are so honored to have known you.

I am sometimes invited to fly Learjets and big Helicopters and I think "this must be John helping me live in what most would call a dream". Your legacy lives on thru me, and the many others that you took the time to teach. I will do my best not to let you down. All of your ideas on Electric Cars, Watercraft, Solar Systems, Hydrogen, (the list goes and on and on) - well, I work on them every day now. I have even invented a fuel saving device that really works because of you, John. So one day the world can be like you wanted it to be: a safe clean world for your children and our children and their children too.

I know you are in heaven now, still doing the same things you were doing here on earth. Just maybe on an even grander scale.  

If there was a secret to John Holliday Perry Jr.'s success, it was that he got bored from time to time. He built submarines, invented pioneering newspaper technology, flew Army planes and worked to develop renewable energy, not exactly a dull life, but not enough to satisfy him. So he developed a national economic plan, helped prepare a national ocean program and invented a deep-sea recovery vehicle that became the center of a Smithsonian exhibit. John never truly retired, he wasn't the type of man who would, and his wife Helena was the former publisher of The Palm Beach Post and other local publications.

As well as an accomplished inventor and industrialist, at various times, he owned Perry Cable, Perry TriTech, Perry Technologies, Perry Baromedical, Perry Oceanographic's and Perry Submarine Builders. In 1990, he founded Energy Partners, a small research, and development company in West Palm Beach devoted to the concept of clean fuel for homes and autos using fuel cells, which extract hydrogen from fossil fuels, then convert it into electricity. "What John wanted for the world and for the U.S., and what he worked for, was a healthy economy, a world with renewable energy, and no dependence on fossil fuels.

He worked for that his whole life." Mr. Perry was born Jan. 2, 1917, in Seattle while his father, John H. Perry, served as general counsel to the United Press and the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain. The family moved to Tampa after World War I, then to Palm Beach in 1925. The elder Perry continued to prosper as his Western Newspaper Union increased its sales of stories, photographs and cartoons to many of the nation's weekly newspapers. Mr. Perry graduated from Yale University in 1939 and from Harvard Business School in 1940. he held a commercial pilot's license and was co-owner of a 2,600-acre farm in Kentucky. His father purchased the Jacksonville Journal in 1922 and later added two Pensacola newspapers and two Panama City newspapers. He added The Palm Beach Post, the Palm Beach Evening Times and the Palm Beach Daily News to the chain soon after World War II ended. The family bought a home in Palm Beach in 1946 while spending summers in Greenwich, Conn. After his father's death in 1952, Mr. Perry inherited the chain. He pioneered the use of cold type and computers in newspaper production and designed a revolutionary engraving machine.

One of his first major decisions as a newspaper owner was to sell the Jacksonville Journal in 1959 to the Florida Times-Union. Three years later, he acquired his mother's and brother's interests in Perry Newspapers chain.

He shunned the power and glamor associated with newspapering, preferring to concentrate his efforts on the production end. "I had set out to develop the automation of the newspaper industry," he once said. "When I achieved that, I could see it was growing beyond my wildest dreams and I sort of lost interest in it." In 1969, Mr. Perry sold his 27 newspapers to Cox Enterprises.

For more than 40 years, Mr. Perry espoused his National Dividend Plan to balance the federal budget, eliminate $200 billion deficits and pay every registered voter an annual dividend. Under the plan, all voters would share in and benefit from the free enterprise system. It called for a maximum 50 percent federal tax on corporate profits and the elimination of the personal income tax on corporate dividends. "It hit me that if we could divert part of the earnings of corporations directly to the electorate, it would have a tendency to cut off the demagogic appeals of the vote-getters or buyers," he said. "In order to buy votes, they've been spending more money than we can afford."

Mr. Perry branched into cable television and also poured his spirit and money into Perry Oceanographics, giving the world the machinery necessary to explore thousands of feet beneath the sea. He entered the submarine business after a close brush with a shark while spearfishing with his wife in the Bahamas in the mid-1950s. "I had speared a fish and just brought it into shore when my wife ran up yelling about a shark that had followed me in, when I looked back, sure enough, there was a fin cutting through the water where I had been swimming. It got me thinking about building a small submersible that would allow a diver to hunt safely."

He progressed from fashioning a wooden, diesel-powered submarine that didn't work to becoming one of the world's most successful builders of submersible vehicles. Mr. Perry created the idea during World War II while serving in the Army Air Corps as a pilot ferrying DC-3 cargo planes and B-26 bombers from California to Hawaii and Guadalcanal.

At one time, he was a member of a 15-man commission appointed by President Lyndon Johnson to prepare a national ocean program that led to the formation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) He said he never got into the space race because " I couldn't compete without the government behind me." Even so, he found himself battling huge companies to build a deep-sea recovery vehicle for the Navy, which wanted a device to rescue sailors trapped in a disabled submarine. "The difference between them and me was that I was trying to develop a cost-effective underwater business, when the Navy ran out of money for the project, I was the only one they could afford." There were moments when Mr. Perry had serious doubts that the project would work. The original Hydro-Lab had a serious flaw. Shortly after it was launched from a Riviera Beach laboratory in 1966 and docked on the ocean floor, it shot to the surface and disappeared. "Three or four days later we found it off Fort Pierce," he said. Subsequent design changes kept it on the bottom, where it belonged.

In 1989, John Perry decided to sell all of his holdings and devote his time to the development of a Hydrogen powered automobile.  The Company was split into three parts.  The military contract business was sold to what is today, The Lockheed Corporation, operating as Perry Technologies.  The remaining underwater business consisting of Diving Systems and Unmanned Vehicles was sold to a Scandinavian Investment Group and renamed Perry Tritech.  The Hyperbaric Chamber business was sold to a Perry Oceanographics Vice President named Mr. Ty Merritt.  Renamed Perry Baromedical Corporation, the Company relocated to a facility off Garden Road in Riviera Beach Florida to continue with the design and manufacture of Hyperbaric Chamber Systems.

In 2002, Mr. Perry died in the hospital in Gainesville, Ga. He was 89 years old. 

Riviera Beach named its planned aquarium, a key aspect of its $1.25 billion redevelopment plan, after Mr. Perry. 

Thanks John for helping me be who I am today. I owe you in a very big way.