Most local real-estate people have attended Coral Ridge breakfasts, though a few disapprove on the ground that something must be wrong with property requiring such effort to sell. Hunt ignores such criticism. He firmly believes that almost anything can be accomplished if enough meetings are held.

   He became sold on meetings when the automobile business turned sour during the depression of the 1930's. Hunt had his salesmen to breakfast every morning at his agency. They sang Happy Days Are Here Again and gave one another pep talks. Hunt furnished each man with a new rope and promised him a dollar for every disabled car he towed into the shop. Whenever a salesman sighted a breakdown, he would fling a rope around the car's axle and speed off toward Hunt. Hunt, in turn, would arrange with the owner to make repairs on a time-payment basis. Thus the shop had another job and the firm another customer. Hunt's business made money throughout the depression.

   Automobiles had been Hunt's livelihood since he worked after school as an office boy-salesman for an automobile agency in Detroit, where he was born on Dec. 23, 1897. During the first World War he joined the Royal Flying Corps as a fighter pilot and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Later he flew against the Reds in Siberia, and the White Russians awarded him two medals. His picture hangs in Ford's Dearborn Museum as a "pioneer of aviation."

   Back in Detroit, he created the NADA Blue Book, which still serves as a guide to the trade on used-car prices. He became first a Ford dealer, then one of the largest of all Chevrolet dealers.

   As a side line, Hunt bought an unprofitable Detroit radio station, WJBK, and built it into a money-maker by having hundreds of ordinary people from local communities appear as guest interviewees. He managed the Chicago, Duluth and Georgian Bay Steamship Line out of a $180,000 debt in less than two seasons by employing such tactics as paying the captain and the chief engineer fifty cents each for every ton of coal they burned less than the daily average under the former management.

Yet all the while, according to Hunt, his true interest lay in real estate. Believing that the East Coast of Florida had the best chance for growth over the next few decades, he built the Coral Sands Hotel at Fort Lauderdale in the late 1930's.

   But his larger plans for Florida were interrupted by World War II, during which Hunt served as a Coast Guard commander, receiving the Silver Star for leading a force ashore under heavy fire at the Salerno Beach landing. Later he mapped the Coast Guard's demobilization plan, and a year or so after the war served as the first national commander of the Coast Guard League.

   Following VJ day, Hunt sold his automobile agency and advanced upon Florida. He took along Joe Taravella, a New Yorker, who had served with him in the Coast Guard and is now his right-hand man at Coral Ridge. Acting on his private theory that all cities expanded northward, except when blocked by natural barriers, Hunt bought 110 acres north of Fort Lauderdale for $89,000 from four owners who had collectively paid $10,000 for the land a couple of years earlier. Hunt named it Coral Ridge and developed it into lots that he then sold for $1,250,000, making a $400,000 profit before taxes.

   Steve Calder, the broker who had handled the sale of this land to Hunt, soon became his partner. Calder had arrived from Georgia back in the days when Fort Lauderdale's population, now over 65,000, numbered seventy-six, Indians included. A large-girthed, easygoing man, Calder is the firm's grass-roots department. He has helped Hunt, an outsider, establish himself as a big wheel in town without arousing resentment among the old settlers, no mean accomplishment.

    Hunt was soon eyeing the most-sought-after land in the area--some 3500 acres that had been bought for around ten dollars an acre in 1911 by Arthur Galt, who liked the wild beauty of Florida's swamps. Galt had sold his land in 1925 to the American-British Improvement Company, owned by Mrs. Horace Dodge, Mrs. Edward T. Stotesbury, James H. R. Cromwell, the then King of Greece and some members of the British nobility. They had planned an elegant development, Floranada, but sacrificed their $1,000,000 down payment when the 1926 real-estate crash came. Galt took back the land and sold their clubhouse as a restaurant. When this was turned into a gambling house, Galt, who was sentimental about his land, fought the club owners through the United States Supreme Court. He won back his property; then, for twenty-five years, refused to sell so much as a spadeful, despite frequent lucrative offers.

   In 1949 Hunt telephoned Galt, whom he had never met, to report that another development was about to cut off some of Galt's property between some new homesites and the Intracoastal Waterway. He advised Galt to buy enough of the developer's land to get in and out of his own property. Galt did so and invited Hunt to call next time he was in Chicago. The upshot of all this was that Galt presently decided to sell Hunt and Calder 500 acres of his coveted land. Liking the way they developed it, he sold them another 500 a year or so later. Then, two years ago, he let Coral Ridge have the remaining 2466 acres, giving the partners twenty years to pony up the nearly $20,000,000.

   Until Hunt's arrival, Fort Lauderdale had been a placid, seldom-heard-from little city. Many of its wealthier residents were winter visitors or retired people from the East or Midwest who preferred the quiet life. As a result, Lauderdale had never had an exclusive golf club, a swank beach club or a modern yacht club; nor had it ever made much effort to attract tourists. All that has changed.

   The Galt property's mile of beach has already attracted a plush beach club, which opened last winter. It was built for $1,000,000 by Robert Law, a Chicago toy manufacturer who had been searching Southern Florida for the right spot to build a place where he, an arthritic, could watch others enjoying themselves athletically. When Coral Ridge made Galt's Ocean Mile available, Law's real-estate consultants advised him to build there.

   Fort Lauderdale's first fashionable golf club also opened last winter on 210 acres bought from Coral Ridge by Roger Trent Jones, the well-known New York golf-course architect. Hunt talked Jones into raising about $850,000 to acquire the land and build the course, which is rimmed by 126 half-acre homesites which Coral Ridge is selling at $18,000 apiece.

   Fort Lauderdale's new Yacht Club was also conceived, organized and promoted largely by Hunt, who figured it would enhance the value of local real estate. He doesn't belong to it himself nor, indeed, to any of the social groups he has helped to create--since his waking hours are devoted exclusively to land. And though he has created hundreds of fine water-front properties, Hunt lives with his wife in a $16,000, two-bedroom house on an undistinguished street. There is a swimming pool out back, to be sure, but no one has ever seen Hunt in it.

   When he is not thinking about land development directly, Hunt is busy with one of several complementary businesses that Coral Ridge owns: and electrical-supply concern, a construction-and-engineering company, an abstract firm and a bond-and-mortgage business, the latter managed by one of Hunt's two sons, Jack. In addition, Coral Ridge owns and operates several apartment buildings which cater to tourists, a car-rental concern and a limousine service between Fort Lauderdale and Miami airport, the latter established after Hunt had talked the airlines into advertising "packaged tourist flights to Fort Lauderdale, as they do to Miami or Los Angeles."

   Hunt's other son, James, Jr., manages Coral Ridge's dredging operation, which reclaims swampland by cutting canals to provide fill for solid, salable ground. Lauderdale, as a result of this take-and-put operation, is an amphibious city with 268 miles of waterways, about half of which are navigable.

   James, Jr., also manages the Coral Ridge cattle ranch, where Hunt held a barbecue for 10,000 Broward County Boy Scouts and their parents some years back when he was county Scout leader. All his employees, except one girl left at the telephone switchboard, came out and served the meal.

   Hunt was highly pleased a couple of years ago when the Catholic Church offered to help build a $2,500,000 hospital at Fort Lauderdale. Broward County Hospital had become so crowded that patients were sometimes bedded down in the halls, and Hunt figured that his best potential real-estate customers would not want to buy in a town with such inadequate hospital facilities.

   The church had specified, however, that the town must put up half the $2,500,000, and a professional fund-raising organization opined that Fort Lauderdale could not hope to raise that; thus challenged, Hunt, a Baptist, took over as chairman of the fund-raising committee. He held meetings by the score and exhorted his workers so persuasively that that more than the required $1,250,000 was raised in less than the set time. Holy Cross Hospital is nearing completion--on land bought from Coral Ridge.

   A while ago Hunt's fertile brain hatched yet another innovation. With an average of one new permanent resident arriving every hour, he reasoned, Fort Lauderdale was being filled with people who had no opportunity to absorb its history and traditions, atmosphere and flavor--in short, to appreciate their good fortune in living there.
   "We ought to have a town meeting," he told his men, "like the meetings they have in those little places in New England."

   So Coral Ridge staged Fort Lauderdale's first Town Meeting, although few New Englanders would have recognized it as such: A United States Marine Corps band joined with the local symphony was playing martial airs. A motion-picture history of Fort Lauderdale was shown, and the governor spoke. A hundred and fifty of the town's "pioneers" were on hand along with a tribe of Indians. Several hundred real-estate men, whipped into a civic frenzy by Hunt and his men, served as hosts and ushers, and the War Memorial Auditorium was jammed and running over with more than 3000 people.

   As the meeting's climax, high-school boys clad in black robes and hoods dashed out upon the darkened stage carrying signs written in luminous paint. In figures of fire these told the stirring story of Florida's--and particularly Fort Lauderdale's--remarkable progress.

   Between 1920 and 1950, the signs proclaimed, the population of the United States increased 50 per cent, while Florida's share went up 249 per cent and Fort Lauderdale's 2463 per cent. And the Southern Bell Telephone Company had forecast that by 1962 Fort Lauderdale would have 162,000 persons as permanent residents.

   This data was intended to back up Hunt's often-repeated gospel: "The sixty-mile strip of Florida's, East, or Gold, Coast, between Palm Beach and Miami, fanned by the tradewinds and caressed by the Gulf Stream, will have by the end of this century more people than live now in the area of Greater New York. So you had better get your little piece of paradise now, while there is still some still lying around.

   The Town Meeting audience went home atremble at the vastness of their area's progress thus far and at the prospects of such a mighty future. And no one was left with any doubts that all this was largely thanks to the dedicated efforts of that selfless civic leader, James S. Hunt.