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Home > Blogs > Through the Arch > Archives > 2008 > November > 07 > Entry

blog: Farewell, Captain Tony

By Tom Archdeacon | Friday, November 7, 2008, 11:18 AM

A dear old pal of mine has died in Key West.

Captain Tony Tarracino — fisherman, charter boat captain, gun runner, one-time barefoot king of the hippies, legendary hustler, ribald raconteur, former mayor (“I kissed the mothers, not the babies”), perpetual womanizer, father of 13 children ages 22 to 72 — died last weekend. He was 92. His funeral is this Saturday.

I’ve known Captain Tony for some 30 years. When I lived in Miami, I spent a lot of time in Key West, much of it at the Greene Street saloon bearing his name. I came for the libations, to shoot pool, listen to the music — I remember Jimmy Buffett, fresh out of Alabama, just starting off there for a few bucks a night — watch people and mostly just talk and listen to Tony.

Key West has been home to Ernest Hemingway, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Tom McGuane, Phil Caputo and dozens of other novelists and playwrights, yet Captain Tony was the island’s greatest storyteller.

Over the years everyone from Walter Cronkite, Ted Kennedy, Strom Thurmond, Tallulah Bankhead, Jerry Jeff Walker to Buffett — who immortalized Tony in his “Last Mango in Paris” — soaked in his tales.

A book on him — “Life Lessons of a Legend” by Brad Menard — is just out and another is in the works.

I wrote about Tony over the years and some of those stories still hang in the bar. He gave me my own bar stool — my name stenciled in yellow letters across the seat— just as he did Muhammad Ali, Dustin Hoffman, Bob Dylan, John Candy and another pal of mine, Shelby Strother, one of the country’s best sportswriters who died way too young.

After his death in Detroit, his wife Kim and I went down to Key West, put the urn with Shelby’s ashes on the bar he loved so much and spent the night giving him the kind of raucous wake he would have loved. The next day — bobbing in a dinghy, with a hangover, a heavy heart and some thoughts written on a bar napkin — we spread his ashes at sea.

“Hell of a send-off,” Tony said that night. “He deserved it. He was the best.”

And so was Tony.

To remember him today, I’ve included a story I wrote back in 1995 after one of my trips from Dayton back to Key West.

TONY STILL KEY WEST’S MOST COLORFUL PERSON

KEY WEST — “I’m 78 years old, been married three times and had 10 great relationships in my life. From all that, my oldest child is 58, the youngest, 8. Thirteen kids in all. Now, truth is, I’d like to make it an even number. So if you know a healthy girl up there in Dayton.”

The glorious sunset — with the big, orange orb lowering itself into the horizon and the clouds glowing Technicolor pink and magenta — had been over for hours and that meant the high-wire walker, the bagpipers, Cookie Lady, Iguana Man, fire eater, steel drummers, xylophone and zither players and the hundreds of sunburned tourists who pack Mallory Square for the daily ritual were gone, too.

Turns out it was nothing but a warm-up act.

Now it was well past midnight and the most colorful phenomenon in Key West finally was coming to life.

Tony Tarracino — “Captain Tony,” as immortalized by Jimmy Buffett song and worldwide embrace — had walked into the sagging, mustard-yellow saloon bearing his name, pulled out a bar stool dedicated to Tennessee Williams and settled in for a nightcap. Once that meant Cutty Sark and water. Now, it was just a draft beer and another Lucky Strike.

Immediately, he was surrounded by three fawning New York college students, who never did notice the 17th century chastity belt, the shrunken heads he had gotten while searching for Ponce de Leon’s grave in Nicaragua and the skeleton wearing the blond wig all decorating the bar behind him.

The young women studied Tony’s perpetually tousled gray hair, the deeply lined face and especially those faded, still-mischievous blue eyes under which hung bags big enough for an overseas trip. They saw the ash-colored goatee, tobacco stained at the lip, and they couldn’t miss the naked woman that has posed on his right forearm since that long-ago night the young sailor visited a skid-row tattoo parlor in Seattle.

Most of all, they were mesmerized by his gravelly voice — as weathered and cracked as the hull of an old shrimp boat — and the incredible tales that spilled from his lips.

“I always had action going on my boat. One day we caught a mess of margate. They’re white snappers. I got a can of spray paint and painted ‘em red and green and yellow. And when I got back, Captain Tommy Lones, my big competitor, couldn’t believe it. He just kept saying, ‘I ain’t never seen no green fish!’ ‘Nother time, a guy flew in a few rainbow trout for me. I hung ‘em up and pretty soon all the old captains were down there trying to figure out what the hell I had. I made up a name and they went searching for it in a fish book, but couldn’t find it. Then some guy from Michigan walked up and blurted out, ‘Hey, those are rainbow trout!’ The other skippers chased me down the dock and threw me in the water.”

Over the years his stories have mesmerized thousands, none more so than Buffett, who first came to Key West in the early ’70s. Back then Captain Tony had a reputation for helping musicians and street people:

“Jimmy came in here, a kid from Alabama with cotton sticking out his ears, and I gave him a job. Paid him $10 and a few beers and told him he had to play something people here identified with. I said, ‘Nobody sings about Key West — that could be your ticket.’ “And sure ‘nuff, after a while he has a hit with Margaritaville. Then it was several years till we saw each other again. And then one day he walks in and we talked a long time about the past, about how to handle success, about my love affairs. Next thing I know I hear The Last Mango in Paris.”

It was Buffett’s tribute to the gritty, lovable street philosopher. As the song goes:

“I went down to Captain Tony’s To get out of the heat, And I heard a voice call out to me, Son, come have a seat. I have to search my memory As I looked into those eyes, Our lives change like weather But a legend never dies. I ate the last mango in Paris I took the last plane out of Saigon, I took the first fast boat to China, And Jimmy, there’s still so much to be done.”

Thanks to Tom Bush, owner of the Parrot Island store in the Town and Country Shopping Center, I’ve found out that Captain Tony has something of a cult following in and around Dayton.

To prove his point, Bush, whose store caters to the Buffett followers — Parrotheads — said he had a months-long waiting list to sell the Captain Tony posters — “All you need in this life is a tremendous sex drive and a great ego, brains don’t mean shit!” — he’d just shipped in from Key West.

“Anybody who follows Jimmy Buffett knows about Captain Tony,” Bush said. “People here want to know everything they can about him.”

So where should we start?

How about Elizabeth, N.J.? Tony was raised there. His sense of theatrics was developed early as he helped his parents with the traveling puppet show they ran in the Italian neighborhoods of New York City. The hustler’s heart was born while pasting labels on bootleg hootch he sold with his dad.

Tony said he quit school after the eighth grade — and an affair with Mrs. Wipperman, his eighth-grade teacher — and set out peddling cockroach powder, watches with no works and even plastic flowers taken from grave sites once the mourners left. Then came the flimflam that changed his life:

“In 1947, my father got one of the first TV sets in the neighborhood and one day fooling ‘round with the set, we found we could get the sound, but no picture, from Garden State Race Track. My brothers found we could beat the bookies with it since it took them six to eight minutes to get their results. We started past-posting races and winning a bundle.

“That went on for a month. Then there was a problem and I was told to go down to Lehman’s Bar in Newark. It was a mob place, so I took two football players with me. But soon as we got there, my heavyweights split and I ended up facing two big goons in Chesterfield overcoats by myself.

“They took me on a nice, long ride to the dump where they were getting landfill for the Newark Airport. They beat the hell out of me and left me for dead. I woke up the next morning with footprints on my chest. Right then I decided I needed a career change.”

He boarded a bus and made his way to Miami with one thought in mind. “All I wanted was to go to Hialeah Race Track. To me, that was like a Jew going to Israel or a Catholic to Rome.”

It didn’t take long for the pilgrimage to turn into tap city. That’s when he saw a poster on Biscayne Boulevard advertising Key West. Hitchhiking down the Keys on the back of a milk truck, he was stunned with his first glimpse of the tropical outpost:

“I couldn’t believe it. Key West was like the Barbary Coast — dozens of whorehouses, bars, poker games and crap tables. It was so beautiful I cried.”

He got jobs heading shrimp for a seafood processing plant, then working as a mate — first on shrimp boats, then charter fishing boats. Finally, he talked a wealthy tourist into financing his own boat. And, before long, he was the most fabled fisherman in Key West.

“You know what made me a good fisherman?” he asked. “I went after it the same way I tackled the rest of life. I broke rules, broke tradition. When I’d hustle on the dock and tell stories, it was all foreign to the rest of the skippers. But the people listened. They wanted on my boat, and they had fun. From that, the legend just grew and grew.”

“I had a boat load of people out fishing one day when Tommy Lones came up with his drift boat. He anchored next to me, so I decided to work him. I mean, I lived just to beat him. Well, I told my passengers I was gonna throw my overcoat in the water and start shooting at it. And I wanted them all to run to that side of my boat and start yelling and making a fuss. They did. They took pictures and went wild. Well, poor old Tommy got depressed. His party wished they were on my boat where all the fishing action was, so he started up his engines and left. Back at the docks, he couldn’t wait to find out what we’d got into. When someone told him I’d shot my overcoat - it just blew his mind.”

In 1960, Captain Tony took over the run-down bar on Greene Street — the original Sloppy Joe’s where Hemingway drank scotch and soda daily and met his third wife, journalist Martha Gelhorn.

Hemingway had been so taken by the place that he included it in “To Have and Have Not,” calling it Freddy’s and describing it perfectly.

That Captain Tony resurrected the place — Sloppy Joe’s had been moved to Duval Street once Hemingway left town — is fitting.

Tarracino could very well pass for Harry Morgan, the legendary sea captain in the novel. Morgan fished the waters of the Florida Straits, running rum and guns and playing a deadly game of Cuban politics in the 1930s. Tony did the same 30 years later.

Just as Tony was no ordinary fisherman, his drinking establishment was no ordinary bar. Esquire once picked his place as one of the 10 best saloons in America.

Although Captain Tony recently sold the bar, the place still lives off his name, and once in a while you’ll still find him there telling his tales and dispensing his salt-of-the-earth philosophy.

“The white jewfish became the first fish I really knew. He drove me nuts for 20 years. He weighs 1,000, maybe 1,200 pounds. He’s the size of a Cadillac and lives inside the wreck of the Sturtevandt, an old destroyer 20 miles from here. I don’t really think he’s an al-bean-no. I think he got his scales blown off him. They did a lot of demolition work in the area, and I think he got too close to an explosion. He survived, though. He became a personal thing to me. Once I baited him with a 36-pound amberjack. He broke the rope I used for a line and wrapped it around the propeller. Another time I had a fisherman hooked up with him and the guy had a heart attack so we cut the line. Then there was the time I got him on, but a big blow came up. The boat started bouncing and the line snapped. That fish became a great symbol to me. And to this day I hope he is alive out there. Some things you just never want to let go of.”

In recent years, he parlayed his popularity into everything from politics to promotion. In 1989 — on his sixth try — he won the race for Key West mayor and immediately began lifting the banner of the town’s everyday folks.

Since his two-year term ended — he’s since been named Mayor Emeritus of Key West — he’s been working on a book of his life (a movie telling part of his story was released a few years ago) — and caring for his family.

He and his understanding wife, Marty — who is in her ’40s and first met him when she was a college student vacationing from Michigan — have two children, 13-year-old Josie and 8-year-old T.J.

For all Tony’s risque ruminations — “I’ll take that Dayton gal to Vegas, get me one of them rooms with a ka-shoot-zee, a cho-soo-gee, what’s the name of that thing where the water hits you in the rear end?” — he’s a caring family man who remains true to Marty. Not that he’s tempered his sales pitch.

Recently he began offering a nightly gambling cruise — FunKRUZ, it’s called — out of Key West. “I help run the casino and kiss the pretty girls,” he said. “It’s the perfect deal.

“All my life, I loved gambling and women and the sea. Now I got ‘em all together. It’s like God gave me a pre-taste of Heaven.

“Truth is, when that angel finally does appear and says, ‘Hey Tony, what’ll it be — heaven or hell?’ I’m gonna ask, ‘How ‘bout Vegas instead?’”

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