Obituary of Walter M. Shaw

Our father, Walter Mayfield Shaw Jr., three weeks shy of his 93rd, birthday, passed away peacefully in his home on March 30, 2020. A resident of Hialeah and most recently of Pembroke Pines, Florida, he was born in an apartment on Jefferson Street on Miami Beach, the son of the late Walter Mayfield Shaw Sr. and the late Ruby Louise Baskin Shaw. Dad spent much of his early childhood in Miami Beach moving to Miami as a teenager where he attended Andrew Jackson High School. His classmates called dad ‘Duke’ while his mother and two sisters called him affectionately ‘Bud’. In high school he excelled in sports becoming quarterback of the varsity football team, captain of the basketball team and third baseman on the varsity baseball team earning a scholarship at Georgia Tech. With World War II raging all through his high school years, he declined the scholarship and asked to graduate early hoping to enlist in the U.S. Navy. In January, 1945 he enlisted but was rejected for being color blind. Undaunted, he enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard and served on the USS Beaufort (PF-59) patrolling the North Atlantic during the final months of the war. Later the Beaufort served as a signal ship for aircraft returning from Europe. Dad was a proud patriot and in his later years, wore a hat with the ships insignia everywhere he went. Once discharged, dad returned to Miami and on May 9, 1947, married his high school sweetheart, Betty Jane Akin, our mother. One of his first jobs was stacking wood for Lindsley Lumber in Allapattah, a suburb of Miami. He worked 67 hours a week for 60 cents an hour. As kids we watched our father come home exhausted, eat dinner and then leave again. “He’s going to school,” our mother said. Dad had enrolled in the University of Miami taking Business Administration classes determined to get out the lumber yard and into Lindsley’s administration office. Those tough months of stacking plywood during the day and sitting in classrooms paid off and he became one of the company’s accountants. Eventually he was promoted to Credit Manager for Lone Star Concrete when the company bought Lindsley Lumber. Dad was an avid outdoorsman; he taught us how to hunt and fish and took us camping all over Florida where the five of us would pitch a tent and spend weekends swatting bugs, chasing raccoons and running from alligators. My brother and I became Boy Scouts and with our father by our side, we learned most of life’s important lessons, making us the men we are today and they are some of the best moments and memories in our lives. Mom and dad moved to San Francisco in 1980 where he took over as Lone Star’s west coast credit manager. His territory spanned from Seattle, Washington to Hawaii and they both travelled extensively for ten years touring the country until retiring in 1990. Once retired they moved back to Hialeah where he learned to work with stained glass, making each of us something we will cherish forever. Dad was also a skilled gunsmith and woodworker; he loved his time alone in his shop working on a rifle, making cabinets, entertainment centers and tables. He was an artist with wood and everything he made is still around today. When not at their home in Florida, they spent half of each year in their cottage in Dahlonega, Georgia where dad became an avid gardener. They would spend all day up on their hill top growing and canning tomatoes, peppers, squash, corn, strawberries, blackberries and blueberries. Dad never did anything halfway, he was more of a farmer than a gardener and I can picture him now, behind his tiller with dirt flying in all directions, a smile on his face and my mother watching from the shade of their pear tree, glasses of sweet tea in each hand. While spending the summers in Georgia, dad would sit for hours in the carport talking to a neighbor’s dog Ruby. He and the black Lab were best of friends and I remember his disappointment when Ruby moved away. We remember our dad as a devoted father, a loving husband to our mother, a strong, proud man and a child of the Great Depression who worked hard all his life to provide for his family. He is survived by his loving wife of 72 years Betty, three children; Daniel Shaw (Anita), Jeff Shaw (Susan) and Janet Shaw Vones (Chuck), six grandchildren; Jessica, Allison, Brittany, Casey, Sarah and Stephen; and six great grandchildren.