Stimus brashly went where no other did
BYLINE: Chris Anderson
SECTION: B; ARCHIVES; Pg. BNV01
DATELINE: BRADENTON
BRADENTON
He wore sideburns and Sansabelts, and the way he thumped the hoods on all those burnt orange custom conversion vans made him a local car lot legend.
If you were around Bradenton in the 1980s and early ’90s, then the phrase “Tom Stimus No. 1” is sure to turn back the odometer in your mind. People used to line the streets to watch Stimus shoot used-car commercials with pro wrestling icon Dusty “The American Dream” Rhodes, and it was just comical enough to make the slick salesman a multimillionaire.
Stimus would jump up, then slam his fist on a truck that said “Don’t make a $5,000 mistake” on the windshield and yell: “People all over the world are talking about one thing: Tom Stimus, trucks, trucks, trucks. Tell them, Dream, tell them.”
Then Rhodes would ball up his fist and loudly sputter with a lisp, “When the Russians tried to put a spaceship on the moon, that ain’t awesome. Awesome is Tom Stimus. Awesome is our deals. And if you can’t deal with us, then we’re gonna come deal with you, and you don’t want that mess at your house ’cause we gonna knock you out.”
Stimus, the man who once appeared on “The Phil Donahue Show” and put a $100,000 bounty on the head of former Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gaddafi, is said to be living in Dayton, Ohio, and is in his mid-70s now. Though occasional efforts to reach him over the years have been unsuccessful, he is still a character worth remembering.
He arrived in Bradenton flat-broke in 1979, borrowed money from some relatives and turned a used car lot into an empire. He was the king of promotion, a man decades ahead of his time — he once paid a local cable station $1 million to set up StimusVision, a 24-hour channel that featured nothing but his used car commercials.
The DeSoto Speedway
And those commercials were classics. You can still see some on YouTube. In one commercial, he said people would be burned if they shopped at his competition, and then he set a stuntman on fire. He used elephants, pigs, chickens and Hall of Fame baseball player Willie Stargell. He even promised he was going to get Frank Sinatra. Never happened, but he did get Dusty Rhodes, and somehow that was even better.
In 1979, he invited the Shah of Iran to live in his Sarasota Bay home, and he rented an airplane that circled Manatee County with a banner that read: “The Shah is Coming to Tom Stimus.”
In 1978, a California man named Larry Singleton raped a 15-year-old hitchhiker and chopped off her arms with an ax. Singleton served eight years in prison and moved to Tampa. Stimus took out a full-page ad in a local paper offering Singleton $5,000 to move out of Florida. There was nothing Stimus wouldn’t do for publicity, and he received it nationally.
He bought DeSoto Speedway for $800,000, sunk another $1 million into it and made it one of the premier tracks in the South. Stimus once had Dale Earnhardt Sr., Geoff Bodine, Michael Waltrip and Rusty Wallace racing in Bradenton on the same night. Even the King himself, Richard Petty, made an appearance.
Another time Robbie Knievel jumped 30 Subaru station wagons on a motorcycle at the track. Evel Knievel set up the stunt. But some people were not exactly amused with the stunts Stimus himself pulled. Margi Nanney, former spokeswoman for the Manatee County School District, owned the track before Stimus. She says Stimus finagled his way into ownership and forced her out.
“I don’t like the word ‘hate,’ but I hate that man,” Nanney says. “It took me a long time to get over losing that track.”
Quietly disappeared
By 1992, the good times had rolled for Stimus as he closed his Bradenton dealerships, sold the speedway and filed for bankruptcy. He disappeared for a few years and then opened a few more lots, but it was never the same.
In 1997 Stimus was indicted on federal charges of dealing with stolen weapons. He was accused of hiding guns in a van on his lot for Louis Caputo, who has always claimed to have ties to the Gambino crime family. Stimus faced 20 years and a $500,000 fine, but the charges were dismissed in 2000. By then he was out of the area and living in Georgia. The loudest, brashest, funniest, most obnoxious voice Bradenton has ever heard somehow had disappeared quietly into the night, without so much as a thump of a minivan hood.
And yet he is not forgotten. In August a family member posted a letter on the Internet. It was from a man seeking an autograph. The letter read, in part: “I grew up on these commercials, even hit my own car hard as a kid. Why? Because Tom Stimus was No. 1 in the world.”
There was an Internet discussion three years ago about entertaining local television commercials, and of course it didn’t take long for someone to chime in on the greatest used car salesman of them all.
“If you are from Bradenton, one of the worst commercials used to be Tom Stimus pounding the hood of a car, but guess what? After all these years I still remember his name.
“I guess that’s the point, isn’t it?”