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From the Breeze archives: Leonard Rosen, ‘The more I got into it, the more excited I got’

By Staff | Sep 18, 2020

Leonard Rosen

(Editor’s note: The following story was published in the April 7, 1980, edition of the Cape Coral Breeze.)

Dreams, like puffy clouds, are too high to reach, and even when one comes close, the substance apparent from afar is missing.

Dreamers like Leonard Rosen don’t settle for that result. They reach the cloud, then pursue the cloud beyond–there is always a higher cloud.

Leonard Rosen created Cape Coral. Even his detractors admit that Cape Coral was conceived in the fertile minds of Leonard and his brother Jack.

“People who are creative and doers are more interested in what they’re doing tomorrow than what they did the day before yesterday,” Rosen says, metaphorically explaining his passion for the roulette wheel of life rather than the money-back, lifetime guarantee of hum drum living.

At age 40, about 20 years ago, Rosen wanted to retire in Florida. He traveled the half-moon from Miami to Punta Gorda, searching for a slice of heaven.

“I thought Fort Myers was an unusually attractive and beautiful city. It had a lot of romance. I thought a site in or near Fort Myers would be a very good place to live. I thought of buying a small farm to use as a retirement place.”

He found Redfish Point.

“The more I looked around, the more I became enamored with the development of it. Actually,” he says, having a second thought about what he is saying, “development was a second thought.”

The plan Rosen had was simple: he would keep a large plot of land for himself and parcel off the remainder for a small residential community. When he went back to his home base of Baltimore, Md., he bounced the idea off some friends and associates, and they thought the plan had promise.

Promise was all Leonard Rosen ever needed.

“I became more and more intrigued. I was a salesman sold on his own goodies.”

“First there was just the idea of retiring and looking around for a nice place, but the more I got into it, the more excited I got about the larger picture.”

Cape Coral (nee Redfish Point) was born, though Rosen can’t remember exactly why it was called Cape Coral. The “Cape” part is obvious: it referred to the peninsula which surely the land was. But Coral?

“I think we just kept kicking names areound, and that’s what we liked.”

The plan for a small development mushroomed, obviously, but Rosen said control of the development was always firmly in the clutches of his brother and himself. He says the continuty of the Gulf American staff contributed mightily to the success of the project.

“I think we did extremely well running the company and planning the community. All the people who started with us lasted at least five years and most stayed to the very end.”

Development was not exactly in Rosen’s blood.

“I knew about as much about development as a six month old baby,” he says with a laugh.

“I didn’t know what comes first, the development or the people. If we could get enough land sold, we could afford to do all we wanted.”

The key was land sales, and land sales had to be generated through features Cape Coral had which no other place else had.

Rosen decided to develop not only homes but amenities which prospective buyers would find irresistible.

“Everything we did, we tried to do in a very fine way,” he says.

Money from the land sales was used to build better roads, Rosen remembers, better than even many existing county roads.

“We wouldn’t wait for the county or the state, we did as necessity drove us.”

Cape Coral grew in an orderly fashion based on plans which Rosen was frankly amazed to see come true. He makes no claim of being an engineer, his forte was promotion.

“We had it all laid out before we ever started,” he says, “I was always so fascinated it came out exactly the way we planned. But then, I’m always amazed that a plane arrives on time.”

 Of all the monuments in Cape Coral which could be commemorated to Leonard Rosen, none is more prominent or probably more permanent than the bridge.

Rosen ran into opposition as fierce as he had ever faced, but as usual, his product was so desirable, the people wanted so badly, and finally it was done. Though he claims no special credit for the bridge, he had grabbed the jawbone and had done battle in heroic fashion to link his community with the rest of Lee County.

“We politicked. A guy on the other side (of the river) refused to give us the land we needed.”

The people opposed to the bridge were people Rosen believed would be against any progress.

“It is so very easy to say no. I never said no in my life, I just don’t know how to say no.”

The bridge sustained the community, but Rosen remained in its bloodstream, and the community in his. Ultimately, however, an attractive offer came along and Leonard Rosen found his beloved community had a price tag.

“They (GAC) offered me so much we had to sell.”

How much?

Rosen seems slightly amazed at his own answer.

“When we started (Cape Coral), we figured we were worth about one, one and a half, maybe two million dollars. When we sold, we thought we were worth $125 million.

“I regret having turned the company over, but it’s like saying you would like to be five years younger,” Rosen says explaining the futility of regrets.

When GAC went sour, Leonard Rosen wasn’t isolated from the pain just because he had sold his company. He had a million shares of stock in GAC.

“It went from $68 a share to nothing,” he remembers, without a hint of bitterness.

The bankruptcy baffled him.

“I never dreamed in my wildest dreams the company could have so much trouble.”

The network of revenues he had set up seemed invincible. He says he had 125,000 customers lined up paying every month, and he couldn’t understand how such a staggering amount of income could be somehow misplaced.

But the collapse came, and all but Rosen’s spirit seemed defeated.

“It would be very easy for me to sit down and cry about the money I lost in the stock market, but I would rather go out and do something.

“I was a rich man when I came to Cape Coral. I had always been a big money earner,” he remembers.

Leonard Rosen is a believer in himself. Doubt is a word for which he has no use.

“When you are a dreamer, you dream of more dreams, and the dream is more fun than the actuality. There was nothing we didn’t think could be accomplished in Cape Coral, there was never any question.”

He says he “always knew it was going to be successful after the first 15 months.”

“We would have done even better if we’d continued to run the company, but it’s very difficult to go back. I’m always moving forward.”

“I’m not disappointed in Cape Coral, what we set out to do is build a nucleus of a fine community, and we did that.”

Rosen remembers many anecdotes about the early days, and spinning a yarn is a pleasurable experience for him.

One of his favorites involves a banker, Harry  Fagan, who helped out when Rosen needed help.

“I needed a check for $140,000. Fagan certified the check, and later he found out he didn’t have the funds to cover it.”

The situation turned out in favor of the Rosens and the banker; the magic was working in those very early years.

He remembers the good-natured derision he took at the hands of some associates.

Once a future Gulf American employee came to visit Cape Coral when the land was still essentially untouched. On his return home, he had a wacky story to tell, which somehow got back to Rosen.

“He told people, ‘You know, that Rosen’s got the Florida fever, he’s showing me department stores and golf courses, but there’s nothing there!'”

The story tickles Rosen, but it is a clue to his personality.

“My drive came from when people would say ‘You can’t.’ Then there is nothing else to do but do what they are questioning. When you start out, a fellow says, ‘Are you really going to do it?'”

Rosen did “it,” and much more. The questioning of his abilities was a serious factor in motivating him.

“We are all searching for identity. It was very gratifying for myself to be involved in the success in Cape Coral. I would say we did the best we could.”

He remembers an incident when his car was swallowed by mud during the early dredging. His engineer, Tom Weber, pulled him out of the mud, and the two men sat down on a crest of dirt and talked in that quiet, reflective moment.

“I turned to Tom and said, ‘You know, I think we’re going to build a city in spite of ourselves.’ Then we laughed like hell.”

“There was a tremendous need–people wanted to come to the sun.”

He lapses into metaphor from the sea.

“Something is happening, a swell builds up and at first you’re pushing it, then its pushing you.”

Cape Coral, he said, fit that analogy: it took pushing, but once it got started, it was self-sustaining and carried a lot of people along with it.

“No matter what mistakes we made, we knew it was going to work. A lot of people caught this spirit.”

Rosen calls his late brother Jack “a great, great thinker and motivator.”

“That was what it was all about, moving and motivating.”

The days he spent working on the Cape Coral projects were satisfying, fulfilling.

“I was very happy; driven, but as happy as I’ve ever been.”

The Leonard Rosen philosophy: “You must feel a great sense of fulfillment and get caught up in what you are doing. But the anticipation is greater than the actual fulfillment.”

“I would look on Cape Coral as a child,” Rosen says, analogizing on the efforts of rearing a community.

“It was a very emotional feeling, very heavy feeling to leave Cape Coral.”

Still a dreamer, Rosen now lives in the capital of dreams, Las Vegas. He is involved in consulting on land dealings.

“With a mind like I have, it is very difficult to look backward. I dread to have to live on what I have done, that’s a lot of baloney.”

A final question. With all his involvement in Cape Coral, with the original intent of the “development” to be a retirement haven, why did Rosen never live in Cape Coral?

“I don’t know why, I probably should have. I’d probably be a happier man.”