• How's this for a strange coincidence?
Jimmy Buffett has a song called Last Mango in Paris. In one of the verses, he sings about visiting a bar in Key West called Captain Tony's Saloon and getting advice from the bar owner.
When he performed Last Mango in concert, Buffett would explain how the good citizens of Key West got fed up with local politicians and elected their favorite bartender as mayor.
Captain Tony Terracino served as mayor from 1989 to 1991.
Terracino was born in 1916 and moved to Key West in 1948. He had $18 in his pocket. He got a job as a deckhand on fishing boats and 10 years later bought a dive bar, which he named Captain Tony's Saloon.
It quickly became a favorite hangout for locals and eventually, thanks in part to Buffett, a tourist attraction. Terracino sold the joint in 1989, but the new owners kept the Captain Tony's name.
Before entering politics, Terracino worked in several more honorable professions, including running guns for anti-Castro mercenaries during the Bay of Pigs invasion.
In 1980, they made a movie about him, Cuba Crossing, starring Stuart Whitman. Terracino also wrote a book about his exploits called Life Lessons of a Legend.
During Terracino's time in City Hall, I found myself in Key West on vacation. I made an appointment to see him. I'm a Parrothead and just wanted to meet a character from one of Buffett's songs.
Here's where the coincidence gets strange.
He told me that he was born in a small apartment upstairs from a pizza parlor in New Jersey.
I told him that I was from New Jersey, too. What city?
"Elizabeth," he said.
Hey, me, too. What pizza parlor?
"It was a place called Spirito's. It's probably been gone for decades."
Nope, it's still there. That was my hangout when I was in high school. I ate about a million pizzas there. Just last summer, when I was visiting the Jersey Shore, I stopped off in Elizabeth for a pie at Spirito's. Still popular. Still packed.
In Last Mango in Paris, Buffett sang of Captain Tony:
I had to search my memory
As I looked into those eyes
Our lives change like the weather
But a legend never dies.
Captain Tony Terracino passed away last Saturday. He was 92.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/lif ... 92611.html
from Ken Hoffman---Houston's own PH
Capt Tony just looked at him and said "You might pummel me son!!" (George was 6'7") 
I am hoping George and Capt Tony are sitting at the big bar in the sky telling each other sailing stories like they did that day! 
