Donald C. McClosky: the legal baron

South Florida CEO,  Oct, 2004  by William Plasencia

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From his downtown law office, Donald C. McClosky's gaze sweeps across the Fort Lauderdale skyline as he jabs a finger into the air pointing towards dozens of sites he has helped to demolish or build.

"I and our firm, has been responsible for a tremendous amount of permitting of residences and businesses, from US 27 to the Atlantic Ocean; from the Dade-Broward [county] line all the way through into Boca Raton," says attorney McClosky, whose baronial presence has been felt at city and county commission meetings for more than 45 years.

Today, the 77-year old presides over one of Florida's largest law firms, and the biggest in Broward County. Ruden McClosky--founded in 1959 with law partner and close friend Simon Ruden--can easily be credited with the advance of communities such as Lauderhill, and played a pivotal role in shaping the downtown Fort Lauderdale skyline.

Like most stories of growth and power McClosky's begins with a struggle.

He was born in November 1926 at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. A few years later, the nation would plunge into the worst depression in its history. Raised by a single mother, McClosky says he learned to work from an early age.

"We were poor and lived in a rooming house." he says. "Those were some pretty sparse times."

Miami during the 1930s would be unrecognizable to many today. The interstate highway did not exist and the downtown Burdines department store was a wooden-front building with a hardware store across the street. Segregation restricted the movement of blacks and other minorities and kept them from enjoying many of South Florida's beaches and parks. Like others in his generation, the Great Depression left McClosky with lasting feelings of "never being comfortable and being afraid that it could happen again."

While living in a house off of NW 2nd Avenue, he remembers watching a Ku Klux Klan mob strap a Filipino man to a coconut palm and beat him to near death because he had married a white woman. "I also remember that people of color couldn't go downtown or to Miami Beach at night without getting stopped by a policeman," he says. "Those were not the good old days."

A scrappy young McClosky survived his rough and tumble childhood by studying hard and playing sports, particularly basketball--a lifelong passion he pursued at least three times a week until he turned 70 years old. Once, as a child, he was accosted in Lummus Park and his bicycle thrown into the Miami River. "Back then there was a juvenile court judge whose name was Walter Beckham, and we went before him, my eye was split, and he said to my mother, 'Boys will be boys.' I never forgot that; I did my own fighting," McClosky says. Biding his time until he grew in strength and stature, McClosky went after his assailant and threw him in the river.

He attended Miami High School and befriended classmate Robert H. Traurig, who went on to the University of Miami with McClosky and later founded the Greenberg Traurig law firm in Miami. "He was slim and a great basketball player," McClosky recalls of his fellow "Legend."

A stint in the US Army Air Corps during the close of World War II took him to Italy and Germany, where he worked on aircraft. He was discharged in 1948 just as plans were being made for the Berlin Airlift. "Miami was my home," McClosky says. "When I got out of the service I came back home."

To help pay his way through college, McClosky went to work at Jackson Byron department store, where his mother had also worked. By age 23 he became the youngest store manager in the chain. It was here that he met his friend and future law partner Simon Ruden, who convinced McClosky to join him at the University of Miami to study law.

"He was a large, handsome man who looked like [actor] Spencer Tracy, and he was gregarious and outgoing," he says. "He would talk to a fire hydrant if he thought there was a one-percent chance of getting an answer out of it."

By this time McClosky and his family had settled down in Broward County while he managed the store and his wife stayed home to raise their children. Four nights a week he would drive the dimly lit city streets--there was no I-95 yet--to class at the University of Miami. "My kids called me 'bye-bye' because I'd sit in a room and had the ability to concentrate on doing my case law study. It took me three years to graduate," he says.

In 1960, Ruden and attorney Elliot Barnett started a law firm on North Federal Highway in Fort Lauderdale. McClosky became a partner that year along with Carl Schuster, whom McClosky calls "a principled man.... He was guardian of my children and my property if something happened to me. We have been partners for over 40 years and there's never been a harsh word between us. He is as honorable as the day is long."

During the early 1960s, Fort Lauderdale was a squat, sleepy seaside town. "Las Olas [Boulevard] was so deserted you could shoot a cannon down it and you wouldn't hit anyone," he says. It was not until Broward County decided to expand its operations downtown and Fort Lauderdale followed by building city hall there, that the neighborhood begin to pick up.