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Tiki Central / Locating Tiki / The Castaways, Miami Beach, Miami Beach, FL (restaurant)

Post #633333 by Dr. Coruba on Mon, Apr 23, 2012 5:26 AM

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On 2009-04-10 10:22, bigbrotiki wrote:
Great info about him in the article! Where is Stanley Klim now? And where can I get some of those Mai Tai tumblers with his portrait on them? And all the names of those other Motels!: Thunderbird, Aztec, Surfside Six, Carib, Driftwood and The Dunes...where is my time machine!?

Follow up on Stanley Klim (sadly,from his obit):

"Deid sah Milk Yelnats" March 10, 2005

Deid sah Milk Yelnats. The longtime Castaways bartender was 77. The cause was lung cancer, said his wife, Wanda, who had no good explanation for how the backward name gag started. “He was a funny guy. He liked to make people laugh. Yelnats – it doesn’t take much when they’re half-loaded. But he was funny.”

Stanley Klim worked behind the bar of the Tahitian Lounge at the Castaways Motel and Night Club from 1947 through the early 1980s, when the building – on Collins and 163 Street – was razed to make way for luxury condominiums.He set the atmosphere by crowding the place with stuffed parrots and wearing leis and Hawaiian print shirts – by the time of his death, he had more than 50 – to work every night of the week.

Over the years he added hula hoops and hand buzzers, which drove away fewer customers than you might think.
He founded the Roving International Association of Turtles, which had no dues, nothing to do with turtles and no real purpose for existing. Nevertheless, it assumed brief world-historical significance in 1968 when Apollo VII astronaut Walter Cunningham, a loyal customer of Klim’s, held up an are you a turtle? sign in a high elliptical Earth orbit on live international television.

Klim had a prodigious memory, matching thousands of faces to first names and bar tabs. Many of his customers were tourists who wrote postcards from back North. Klim stapled the cards to the Tahitian’s ceiling and bet those who returned months, sometimes years later, that he could point out the postcard they’d sent. He won enough bets one year, Wanda said, to pay for a considerable portion of a European vacation.

But Klim’s finest hour came with perfection of the drink-balancing act. The act involved cowbells, trays of drinks and a very steady head. It commenced whenever the jukebox in the Tahitian started to play “The Battle of New Orleans.” When this happened, Klim balanced a tray of drinks on his head and made a slow pass down the length of the bar. At the end of each pass he added another tray, all the while ringing his cowbells in time with Johnny Horton’s voice. It is believed he worked his way up to three trays before certain laws of physics interceded. In interviews he claimed there were nights when his bar “looked like a bombed-out window factory. …. I broke thousands and thousands to get to where I am today.”
His wife said he never dropped one, and had superior balance, though she never found the trick awe-inspiring. “Ah, nothing impressed me, ” Wanda said.

After the Castaways closed, Klim did part-time work at the Sonesta Resort on Key Biscayne but in recent years limited himself to a few private parties. He did his last in December. “He knew they were going to ask him to do the balancing trick, ” said Wanda. “He was out in the garage practicing with those glasses. All night, back and forth, back and forth. I was listening – he didn’t drop any.”

A memorial Mass will be held 7 p.m. Friday at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church, 415 NE 105th St. in Miami Shores. Friends and Turtles are encouraged to attend.