LIVING HISTORY
10 THINGS YOU PROBABLY DON’T
KNOW ABOUT WALDO SEXTON
1.
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VERO AT 100
He was named Waldo Emerson
Sexton after Ralph Waldo Emerson,
who led the philosophical and social
movement known as transcendentalism,
which holds that divinity pervades all nature
and humanity. Sexton also named his oldest
son, Ralph Waldo Sexton, after Emerson.
Waldo’s philosophy — “work with nature’’ —
seems aligned with transcendentalism and is
reÅected in the Iuildings he would create
He developed a test to analyze the superior qualities
of Florida oranges, and the results helped promote the
worldwide reputation of Indian River citrus.
He developed three varieties of avocado, one of which is
named Sexton.
/e had an affinit` for siler dollars
He carried sacks full of them to buy
salvaged items during his buying trips to
Palm Beach mansions falling under the
wrecking ball, gave them to his California
grandchildren during visits and tossed a
chest full of them to parade-goers on Waldo
Sexton Day in 1958.
He suffered from manic depression and was hospitalized
repeatedly, with the depressive episodes often occurring
after the completion of a highly creative project. He had
several stays at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas,
where family members say he met fellow patient Judy Garland
and members of the famed Barrymore acting family. One of
Waldo’s older brothers, Enoch, died of suicide in 1924 after a
nervous breakdown. Another older brother, William, a police
officer, died of drowning when sweWt off a Ioat attemWting to
rescue Åood ictims
He was friends
with the
celebrated writers
Marjorie Kinnan
Rawlings and Zora
Neale Hurston, with
whom he had a
correspondence
over several years.
He had a spiritual streak.
His parents were members
of the Methodist Protestant Church
in Indiana and he helped build the
Community Church of Vero Beach,
though he did not regularly attend it.
He awarded his older grandchildren
money if they learned the books of the Bible. He said he built
Waldo’s Mountain because of its Biblical implications. He
acquired and collected bells, often giving them away to friends
and churches. “When I give them away to a church, I ask them
to pray for me. I’m a sinner.’’
8.
Though he lived full-time in Vero beginning in 1913,
three of his four children (Jacqueline, Barbara and Ralph)
were born in Chicago near their maternal grandparents’ home
because Vero had only one doctor and no hospital. Only the
youngest child, Randy, was born in Vero.
He championed the virtues of the “guinea cow,’’ a small
cow said to originate with the Spaniards’ arrival in
Florida in the 16th century. He boasted that the cow required
less feed and produced more higher-priced cuts than other
beef cattle.
He was a frustrated artist who lacked competent
drawing skills. Though he would sometimes enlist the
services of architects and friend, landscape painter A.E. Backus,
to create artistic renderings of his concepts, he often completed
them based on his own crude drawings.
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