Callery Rough And Tumble

May 15, 2007; Palm Beach Post; Callery rough and tumble, as usual; By Joel Engelhardt.

Jim Callery's father, Francis, once had a fist fight in his living room with an old friend. As they exchanged blows, John Hertz, founder of Yellow Cab and Hertz Rent-A-Car, pulled a .45 and pointed it at Mr. Callery. "My dad collapsed in laughter," Mr. Callery says and the two went off arm in arm.

Mr. Callery tells the stories of his father's rugged friendships with storied Americans Robert Lehman of Lehman Bros., Herman Brown of Brown and Root - later a subsidiary of Halliburton - and Mr. Hertz as though it were the most natural thing to rub elbows with captains of industry. Francis Callery was a Lehman Bros. partner, but he was no wallflower. A Houston oilman, he had a rough-and-tumble mentality that brought him in 1964, with son Jim, a recently discharged Marine, to Palm Beach County to build an orange grove in the middle of nowhere.

After 40 years in the fruit business, Jim Callery, 69, and his protege, Nat Roberts, 40, find themselves at the center of a public storm of their own making. They wouldn't have it any other way. Their proposal to transform 4,000 acres of farmland into a town with 10,000 homes at the center of the county's western communities represents to many of their neighbors the worst of development practices.

They consider their approach to be the only one that makes sense. Like most developers, they will set aside land for schools. But unlike most, they'll pay to build the schools as well. They'll offer land for water cleansing and provide the missing ingredient in the western communities: stores, offices and industrial sites. Will they profit? You bet they will. Are they building something to last? In their view, that's what makes it worth doing.

Mr. Callery and Mr. Roberts represent two generations but a single world view. Both grew up in privileged households. They came from ancestors whose pasts are noteworthy for cotillion coming-out parties and Princeton grads. Nat's grandmother was a French, as in the pharmaceutical giant Smith, Kline and French, now GlaxoSmithKline. Jim's great-grandfather, also named James, came to Pittsburgh from Ireland in 1840 and ran streetcars pulled by horses before helping to electrify the city - and run the new electric streetcars.

The two families came together in the 1950s, when Jim Callery and Nat's father, Brint Roberts, were best friends at St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H. The pair went on to room together at Princeton. They were featured in a 1959 New York Times story, two of five students riding a bicycle built for five to a Princeton-Yale football game. Not a great idea, Jim Callery recalls. The spokes on the 80-year-old bike strained, forcing frequent stops, but they made it, bedding down for the night at Brint's Rye, N.Y., home.

Brint went to Harvard Law and had a successful legal career before tragedy struck. In 1989, at age 51, Brint Roberts died in a car crash while on safari in the Kalahari Desert in Namibia. The next year, Nat Roberts, then 24, came to work with Jim Callery at the Palm Beach County citrus grove.

Jim Callery and Nat Roberts are not the kind to offer concessions to get along. Case in point: their relationship with former County Commissioner Tony Masilotti. Years of animosity culminated with the commissioner's corruption conviction, precipitated, perhaps, by the pair's decision to put a private eye on Masilotti's tail. It was the kind of action that challenged the status quo, the go-along-to-get-along mentality of the county's planning-development industrial complex.

If Mr. Callery and Mr. Roberts answer to anyone, it is to their partners, 15 families, including their own and another famous friend of Francis Callery's, the DuPonts.

They approach public hearings on their plan, which continue today, with the confidence of students prepared for exam day. They wouldn't have it any other way.

Staff researchers Melanie Mena and Michelle Quigley contributed to this column.

Joel Engelhardt is an editorial writer for The Palm Beach Post. His e-mail address is joel_engelhardt@pbpost.comCheck PalmBeachPost.com/Opinion daily

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