PERSONALITY PROFILE
BOB TAGERT
JOHN PANN A Man of Many Talents
T
here aren’t many people that you meet and everyone else seems to like. My late partner with the Old Town Crier, David Underwood, was like that. Always a great attitude, always a smile and always asking “Hi, how are you?”. John Pann is like that! When the Pandemic hit this past March, most of us stayed at home to work, lost our jobs or just got by as well as we could. John Crouch Tobacconist was impacted by the virus but did stay open through the shutdown with John as the only employee. Eight hours a day, seven days a week. He got to see a lot! John is first generation Irish and grew up in Michigan and Florida. John’s life and mine sort of paralleled each other. My early years were spent in Florida as well and as this article progresses you will discover the other coincidences in our lives. John is a restless soul. He started riding motorcycles in races when he was six-yearsold and competed until he 6 | July 2020
was 15. “I enjoyed it,” he tells me, “I broke both legs, arms and a rib.” He then shows me the bulge under his shirt that marks the broken rib. “My dad bought me a 50cc Honda when I was 6,” he tells me. In the beginning he rode motocross starting with a Suzuki 125 and then moved to bigger bikes like the very well balanced Honda 250 single cylinder. As he got older he moved to flat track racing which is basically a dirt oval. One of the preferred motorcycles in those days was the Triumph Tiger 100, a 500cc motorcycle that was light at only 335 pounds and had a high ground clearance. It was the same kind of motorcycle that Bob Dylan crashed in 1966 near his home in Woodstock, New York. In the wake of that accident, Dylan withdrew from the public and did not tour for eight years. John was not so reluctant, he followed in the footsteps, or rather, tire tracks of his motorcycle riding dad and hit the streets in 1988 on his 1000cc, Honda Hurricane. This is our second
coincidence. I also rode a 1966 Triumph 500 motorcycle that I wrecked in 1968 and put me in the hospital for three months off and on. I first met John when he was working at O’Connell’s Irish Pub in Old Town where he worked for five and a half years. This was soon after O’Connell’s opened and John joined a cast of Irish Lads that were the most fun people in town. John lit up the bar with his engaging personality. From O’Connell’s, John went to work for our friend Stephen Mann and his newest restaurant, T.J. Stones. While John was working at O’Connell’s he also worked part time at John Crouch Tobacconist. When he got to T.J.’s and was working fulltime, Mann didn’t want John to have another part time job. He wanted him to enjoy his days off, which John understood. After 2 years John left T.J.’s to work at one of Steve’s other PERSONALITY PROFILE > PAGE 7
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