Rash's Surname Index
Notes for Fitz Eugene Jr. DIXON
Fitz Eugene Dixon Jr., 82, a sportsman and civic leader who earned Philadelphia's gratitude by making Dr. J a Sixer and for putting the LOVE statue back on its pedestal at JFK Plaza, died of melanoma yesterday.
Mr. Dixon was descended from the grandest of old Philadelphia families, but wanted to be considered an ordinary man and was proudest of his career as a teacher and coach.
He was heir to the Widener fortune and always wore his grandfather's emerald ring, handed to his grandmother as she boarded a lifeboat from the sinking Titanic.
Mr. Dixon, who lived at Erdenheim Farm, a 500-acre estate near Whitemarsh, was a civic jack-of-all-trades who touched countless institutions.
"You remember Citizen Kane?" Gov. Rendell said yesterday. "Fitz would have been Citizen Dixon. He was a man of great material possessions who devoted virtually all of his time to helping others... . He could have lived the life of a true ne'er-do-well, but he was so generous."
Mr. Dixon was a member and former chairman of the Art Commission, the Fairmount Park Commission, and the Delaware River Port Authority. In addition to ownership of the Sixers, he once had shares of the Phillies, the Eagles and the Flyers, and 100 percent ownership of the now-defunct Wings, a professional lacrosse team.
Over the years, Mr. Dixon raised millions for a variety of causes, including the Police Athletic League and Abington Memorial Hospital, and was head of the trustees at Widener and Temple Universities.
Mr. Dixon loved horse racing, and owned stables of racehorses, as well as champion show-jumpers and dressage horses. He was chairman of the State System of Higher Education from 1983 through 2002, and served on the Pennsylvania Horse Racing Commission for years.
"Fitz was a true gentleman and a very classy person," said Bill Giles, chairman of the Phillies. "He loved all the Philadelphia sports teams. He was a big help when I was putting a group together to buy the team in 1981... . He was one of the first to join the group as a limited partner."
Relatives and friends said Mr. Dixon had battled cancer for about a year. He died at Abington Memorial.
In honor of Mr. Dixon, Rendell ordered flags to be flown at half-staff at state facilities in the five-county Philadelphia region and at the Capitol in Harrisburg.
The governor had asked Mr. Dixon to come back as chairman of the state Horse Racing Commission in 2003, after having been a member of the body from 1986 through 1997.
"If you called Fitz - as I did many times, both as mayor and governor - and said, 'We need you to do this,' he never said no," Rendell said.
Two of Mr. Dixon's best-known contributions were the signing of Dr. J and the saving of the LOVE statue.
The studio of Robert Indiana, who created the statue and lent it to the city for display during and after the Bicentennial, issued an ultimatum to the city: Either buy it or kiss it goodbye. The city did not have the $45,000 asking price, so LOVE was soon on a truck bound for New York.
Spurred by the outcry from Philadelphians, who by that time had fallen in love with LOVE, Mr. Dixon bought it (for just $35,000) and brought it back.
It cost Mr. Dixon many times that - about $6.6 million - to bring Julius Erving to town in 1976, only a few months after he had bought the team from Irv Kosloff for $8 million.
When he learned that the star was available from the New York Nets, Mr. Dixon never flinched, though he had never seen the Doctor play, hardly knew of him, and had to outbid the Los Angeles Lakers and the Milwaukee Bucks. But then, he had the means.
Mr. Dixon was the great-grandson of P.A.B. Widener, "the traction king," who made $50,000 selling mutton to Union troops during the Civil War and used that as a stake to develop more than 500 miles of streetcar lines in Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh and Baltimore. Widener helped organize U.S. Steel, American Tobacco, and International Mercantile Marine, which owned the Titanic. Widener's son and grandson were aboard the liner when it sank in 1912.
Mr. Dixon's grandfather George married Eleanor, whose father, William, made $30 million from public utilities, Standard Oil, and Widener's streetcar ventures. The two families' streetcar lines in the Philadelphia region became the foundation of SEPTA.
George and Eleanor had three children. One went down (with George) on the Titanic. Another, William, died in 1971. The third was Eleanor, Mr. Dixon's mother, who divorced the senior Dixon when her son was 4. At the death of his mother and uncle, Mr. Dixon inherited the entire Widener/Elkins fortune.
Born in Maine, he lived much of his life on his family's suburban farm, in a 60-room mansion that had a branch of the Wissahickon Creek flowing beneath one of its balconies.
In addition to the main house, the grounds included a landing strip for Mr. Dixon's plane (which took him to other homes in Florida and Maine), a one-mile racetrack, indoor tennis courts and pool, a 30-room mansion, greenhouses, formal gardens sporting $1 million worth of flowers, and barns for prize-winning cheviot sheep, black Angus cattle, and horses.
He was a graduate of Episcopal Academy and attended Harvard University. He was 4-F during World War II.
After college, Mr. Dixon returned home and, for 17 years, taught English and French at Episcopal Academy, where he coached the squash, tennis and 120-pound football teams. He later became athletic director and admissions director.
Family members encouraged him to become a doctor or lawyer, a position more in keeping with his social stature, but Mr. Dixon had an independent streak and stayed a teacher of English and French. He wore a blazer and gray slacks instead of the customary suit and tie.
Mr. Dixon believed in work and pitied those who did none. His philosophy: You get out of life what you put into it.
"I believe I'm the only member of the so-called Widener family who ever did work, who ever did take home a salary. But that's the greatest experience you can have," he told a reporter in 1976.
"I'm fortunate enough that I don't have to go out there and earn a paycheck," Mr. Dixon said. "But I couldn't sit home and do nothing. Christ, I'd be a martini drunkard at the end of six months."
He was described as unpretentious and disliked being thought of as rich or socially connected. "I'd much rather be an ordinary person and thought of as an ordinary person," he said.
He often said having so much money was a burden, one he sometimes wished he didn't have at all.
Even so, Mr. Dixon put a good portion of it to use in a wide array of philanthropic causes.
His contributions helped save Pennsylvania Military College from bankruptcy, and the school was renamed Widener University in gratitude.
There is a Dixon Oval at the Devon Horse Show, named after Mr. Dixon contributed $30,000 to renovate it. The headquarters of the State System of Higher Education in Harrisburg is named for Mr. Dixon, the first chairman of the board that governs the 14 state universities.
"Nobody knows all he did," said businessman Robert P. Levy, a friend of 60 years. "He put kids through school that nobody knew about, just because he wanted them to be successful."
Generations of politicians - the late Mayor Frank Rizzo, former Gov. Richard Thornburgh and others - owed much to his largesse. Thornburgh picked Mr. Dixon to head up the new combined higher-education system in 1983.
"He got that unique institution up and running. He was no figurehead, as a chairman, but was a hands-on guy who visited every one of the 14 campuses frequently to talk with students and faculty," Thornburgh said yesterday. "He was a true giant among Pennsylvania citizens and is going to be greatly missed."
Mr. Dixon's donation and other contributions enabled the Philadelphia Museum of Art to acquire a John Singleton Copley portrait from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania for $4 million in 2000.
Mr. Dixon's gift of $5 million to the Dixon School of Nursing at Abington Memorial Hospital in 2001 allowed the college to offer scholarships and interest-free loans forgiven with a work commitment of one to two years at the hospital.
The Wideners and Elkinses were founders of the hospital.
Mr. Dixon was a member of the association that owned the fabled thoroughbred Man O' War, and, more recently, purchased one of Smarty Jones' offspring.
Some of his happiest days, he once said, were spent as a coach at Episcopal. When he coached, he always dressed in white shorts - no matter how cold - and always led his team on a quarter-mile jog around the track to warm up.
But what he really wanted was to own a pro team, and not just a piece of one, either.
"It was an itch I always wanted to scratch," he said when he bought the 76ers in 1976.
For a time, before Jerry Wolman took control of the Eagles in the 1960s, Mr. Dixon owned a small piece of the team. An ardent booster, he and his friends - Dixon's Quarterbacks, they were called - met in his superbox for brunch, cocktails and cheering. Mr. Dixon's family said he had rarely missed a home game since the late 1940s.
Mr. Dixon owned a quarter interest in the Flyers when they won their first Stanley Cup championship in 1974.
He bought the Wings about 1975, and lost more than a half-million dollars on the team before the league went under and took the Wings down with it the next year.
Buying the 76ers finally gave him what he wanted: complete control of a high-profile club he could run as a business and, hopefully, build into a championship team that would be his gift to the city.
In the beginning, all went well. The payroll was high, but the team was stocked with talent. All that was needed to make money was for the team to average 17,000 spectators per game. And with Dr. J on the team and a championship practically assured, how could he miss?
It never happened. Mr. Dixon's teams got to the NBA Finals twice, but won no championship. Attendance fell to about 12,000 a game, and in a 1981 playoff game against the Milwaukee Bucks, it hit bottom. Only 6,704 fans showed up for a game on Easter, an embarrassment to the city and to Mr. Dixon.
His relationship with the coach, Gene Shue, who had taken over a 9-73 team and made it a playoff squad, was never good and turned bitter when, after one particularly frustrating loss, he confronted the coach in the middle of a news conference to demand: "Well, what are your excuses?"
His relationship with reporters also turned sour, and they began to see him as a hard-driven, bad-tempered and imperious man who liked to throw his weight around and who didn't like to lose.
Instead of sitting in the owner's box during games, he stationed himself in a seat under the east basket and became the Sixers' No. 1 fan, cheering the players and berating officials when calls went against them.
He forbade photographers to pass in front of him and barred vendors from selling refreshments near his seat.
He had his bodyguard escort out any spectator who got between him and the action.
In 1981, frustrated by the decline in attendance and angry at financial losses, Mr. Dixon sold the Sixers to Harold Katz.
In 1952, Mr. Dixon married the former Edith Robb. She was introduced to him by her brother David, one of Mr. Dixon's students at Episcopal.
He is survived by his wife; a son, George Widener Dixon; a daughter, Ellin Dixon Miller; three grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.
Burial is private. A memorial service is scheduled for 11 a.m. Sept. 29 at St. Paul Episcopal Church, 22 E. Chestnut Hill Ave.
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