DAN'S PAPERS, October 17, 2008 Page 20 www.danshamptons.com
Mundus
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take a new written test. Mundus, who was surely the most prominent fishing boat captain in Montauk by that time, demurred. He would take the test, but maybe at the end of the fishing season. The Coast Guard insisted. And then Frank Mundus announced that he would retire rather than take it. Suddenly, a rumor swept through town. Frank Mundus, it was said, had never properly learned to read. (And now I knew why he did not particularly appreciate my newspaper!) The following year, Frank Mundus, now 68, took up with a young Englishwoman he had met in a mail correspondence. He had been widowed 12 years earlier. Now he married her and moved to the Big Island of Hawaii. There they live on a 20-acre farm near Naalehu, where they raise sheep, hogs, and occasionally wild boar that weigh more than five hundred pounds.* While writing this book, I came across a photograph of Mundus, taken in the 1960s, standing on the dock and peering at the camera through the skeletal jaws of one of the great white sharks he had caught. It was a terrific shot of him and I thought it ought to accompany this chapter. When I tried to contact him in Hawaii to get his permission to do so, however, I learned that he was back in Montauk. At the age of 82, he had just arrived here to spend a month, seeing old friends and going out fishing every morning in the Cricket II, which, amazingly, had been brought back out of drydock and restored by some filmmakers interested in making a documentary about him. “He’s staying at the Star Island Yacht Club,” his wife told me over the phone. “But I’m staying here. Somebody’s got to feed the animals. We’ve got a whole farm of them, including a nine-hundred-pound hog named Fritzi that Frank just bought. I’m sure he’d see you, though. It’s best in the afternoon, when he gets back in.” I found Frank, weathered and suntanned, sitting at one of the outdoor picnic tables they have set up there between the yacht club and the docks. There were his filmmakers and a small crowd of well-wishers talking to him. Spread out in front of him on the picnic table was some of the paraphernalia he had for sale and also some of the books written about him. Behind him, in its slip, bobbed the Cricket II. I listened to Frank reminisce for a while, asked him if he remembered the young man who once sold him an ad in the Pioneer, which he said he did. And I bought one of his books, which was called Monster Man. Then I asked him if he would be willing to let me use the photo of him looking through the shark jaws for this book. I had a copy with me. He took out a ballpoint pen, asked me to hand him the photo, and, when I did, swiftly wrote the following on the back of it: Dan Rattiner is welcome to use any pictures of me in any way he wants. Frank Mundus. June 13, 2007. Well, I thought, so much for the rumor that he wouldn’t take his fishing boat captain’s test because he couldn’t read or write. And so much for the theory that that’s why he didn’t appreciate my newspaper. *Frank Mundus passed away in September at the age of 82. After a nonstop flight between Montauk and Hawaii, he suffered a heart attack in the airport and died in Honolulu’s Queens Medical Center.