Rick Roth
1939-2019
He was kind. He was fair. Over and over, the people who knew former Monroe County Sheriff Rick Roth repeated those two facts about the top man in Keys law enforcement for two decades. Roth died on Oct. 15, 2019. He hired onto the force in 1965, as a radio dispatcher. He rose through the ranks to road officer, detective and sergeant in Marathon. In 1990, the governor appointed Roth to finish the term of his predecessor, J. Allison DeFoor. He kept winning elections, for a total of four four-year terms, serving as sheriff from 1990 to 2008. Under his watch, the agency fought a war on home turf to end drug smuggling in the 1970s. In 1980, it dealt with a massive influx of Mariel Boat Lift immigrants. The jail on Stock Island was built on Roth’s watch and he started the animal farm under the sheriff’s headquarters. The Trauma Star program was also started during his tenure.
“My three-word definition for Rick Roth is ‘humble public servant,’” said his friend Brian Schmitt. “He gave so much of his life to the people of the Keys and did it with such humility. He did it for the right reasons. He was just an honorable guy.”
Stuart Newman
1922-2019
“The Greatest Generation” indeed.
By the time he launched a public relations agency in 1946 in South Florida, Newman had flown 35 combat missions and survived two crash landings in B-17 bombers over Europe during World War II.
Surely he could handle PR for the Ritz Plaza Hotel in Miami Beach.
And he did, having launched an agency with some fraternity brothers after the war.
Newman quickly rose to the top of the industry by understanding how to give something the right type of attention. For nearly 40 years, Stuart Newman & Associates, now NewmanPR, has handled public and media relations for the Florida Keys & Key West’s Tourist Development Council.
“He saw something in the destination all those years ago that no one else did,” Stacey Mitchell, director of the Keys’ Tourist Development Council, said upon Newman’s passing. “Stuart is a hero to the hospitality industry and the tourism-based economy we enjoy today.”
Jacob Gelt Dekker
1948-2019
Jacob Gelt Dekker, international entrepreneur and philanthropist, died Sept. 1, 2019, in Key West after a renewed battle with lymphoma. He was 71 and had packed more than most into those years.
He is survived by his lifelong partner and fellow Key West-based philanthropist and education advocate John Padget.
Jaap, as he was known to those closest to him, was born in North Holland on April 22, 1948. He traveled endlessly, practiced dentistry in Amsterdam and later became a renowned entrepreneur, states an obituary by AmsterdamPublishers.com.
Dekker and Padget launched multiple businesses in Europe involving one-hour photo booths, rental cars and cosmetics. In 1990, Dekker fell in love with Curacao, where he revitalized a rundown area that became Hotel Kura Hulanda & Resort that includes a museum with more than 10,000 artifacts documenting the transatlantic slave trade. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage site.
His philanthropic interests focused on advancing schooling and education, primarily for underprivileged students wherever he lived, including Key West, the obituary states.
He held a doctorate in dentistry, MBAs from the University of Rochester and the University of Rotterdam.
Oh, and he was knighted by the Queen of the Netherlands.
Don Kincaid
1946-2019
Underwater photographer, diver, treasure hunter and sailing charter captain, Don Kincaid was the quintessential Keys character. The National Geographic photographer died on Dec. 17 after battling cancer.
His legend lives on in the 30,000 underwater images he left to the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum that detail the discovery and recovery of $400 million in treasure from the 1622 wreck of the Spanish galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha. Divers from Mel Fisher’s Treasure Salvors found the main pile of treasure in July 1985, but Kincaid had the enduring honor of finding the very first gold from the Atocha 14 years earlier in 1971.
Linda Russin
1950-2019
Linda Russin did what she did because it was the right thing to do, not because she wanted or expected any credit for it.
The service-driven Rotarian and radio station owner died suddenly from natural causes on April 17, 2019. She was 69.
Russin was also a Key West Chamber of Commerce board member, civic activist and former public relations director for a Miami hospital, where she met her husband, Dr. John Russin.
“As a media representative, groups would offer her the chance to do some really cool things, and Linda never said no. She was always game for anything,” Trice Denny, who worked for Russin at WIIS 106.9 radio station for 14 years.
“She went skydiving with the Golden Knights, the U.S. Army’s Parachute Team. She went to the U.S. Marine boot camp on Parris Island. She flew in the Blue Angels’ legendary C-130 ‘Fat Albert,’ and enjoyed a thrilling tail-hook landing aboard the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.”
A native of Oklahoma, Russin was also a proud member of the Cherokee Nation who loved Southern-style cooking, Oklahoma Sooners football and her commitment to service above self with The Rotary Club of Key West.
Sergei Proudnik
1971-2019
The owner of Key Colony Inn, a popular restaurant in the Middle Keys, passed away unexpectedly in October while on vacation visiting his home country, Belarus. He arrived in the Keys in the 1990s and took his first job as a dishwasher. He would work his way up to chef, and then restaurateur at places like Little Italy in Layton. By 2006, he had married his wife, Lena, and his son, Anthony, was born and the family had purchased Key Colony Inn from restaurateur Harry Kirchner. Sergei had an appetite for work, loud conversations, fishing and classic rock.
“I am an old-school businessman and that’s the way my relationship with Sergei began,” said Kirchner, Sergei’s former boss and mentor. “I have always tried to bring my key people up from the ranks. We would meet in my office (a bench in the airport terminal) and in a half-hour finish all our business without the aid of pen or paper. Sergei was a real-life story of going from the bottom (dishwasher) to owning first Little Italy and then the Key Colony Inn. Our relationship had turned to friends in business, conceived with a great amount of trust. His success was no accident but the result of an amazing amount of work ethic. His untimely death has taken a big piece of me, and I will miss him like a lost son.”
