Richard Windsor McEwen, an astute businessman who more than doubled the size of the Burdines department store chain while its CEO from 1977 to 1984, was also a civic leader who worked toward multicultural harmony during a tumultuous time in Miami.

McEwen died on Oct. 23 in Macon, Ga., three weeks after his 89th birthday. Martha Hardy McEwen, his wife of 66 years, said he suffered from congestive heart failure and had moved to the skilled nursing wing of their retirement community.

He had been a University of Miami trustee and president of the Florida Retail Federation in addition to serving on numerous corporate and bank boards.

An avowed agent of social change -- he unsuccessfully tried to co-sponsor the elite Rivera Country Club's first Jewish member in 1978 -- McEwen was also a self-confessed ``loner.''

``I feel for people,'' he once told The Miami Herald, ``but I don't need a lot of people around me at a given time. I'm not one for idle chatter, you know . . . Oftentimes when someone's talking to me, I'm aware of the fact that I'm thinking about some other problem. On the other hand, if somebody in the organization has a problem where they don't think they're being treated fairly, I'm the one they call.''

McEwen joined Burdines in 1966 as executive vice president and served as company chairman from 1977 to 1984. The locally founded chain, owned by Federated Department Stores since 1956, expanded to 23 Florida locations from 11 under his leadership -- mainly into malls -- and saw healthy profits.

``We bought well ahead of the actual [mall] development, and we always bought much more land than we needed, and then we sold the extra land to the developer, and we'd come in at zero costs for us,'' he explained to The Miami Herald in 1996.

About the same time as McEwen took the helm at Burdines, Miami found itself beset by cultural conflict over bilingualism. He invoked his Midwestern childhood as he got involved in efforts to ease tensions.

``Toledo and other northern cities went through the same problems,'' said McEwen, whose father worked in railroad-track maintenance. ``Toledo had many Slavic immigrants, and all we heard in public was the native language of the part of Europe that each speaker was from. In fact, those people didn't do as well as the Latins here are doing about learning English.''

As a leading retailer, he said he was ``very much interested'' in Spanish instruction because South Americans ``who used to go to Mexico City to shop . . . want the comfort of being able to do their shopping in their native language.''

Said his wife: ``My husband was the sort of individual who very often looked for what was not good about a situation and wanted to change it for the better. It was just his nature.''

After graduating from the University of Toledo, McEwen captained a U.S. Navy PT Boat 370 in a Motor Torpedo Squadron -- and ever after, kept his watch set to military time.

He deployed to Panama nine days after their May 1943 wedding, his wife said, and then went to the South Pacific.

He made a vow upon returning, Martha McEwen said: `` `I'm not going to buy a Japanese car; they shot at me.' He bought a Porsche and two Corvettes.''

A freshwater fisherman who never kept a boat in Florida, McEwen also taught celestial navigation at the University of Notre Dame's USN Midshipman School.