Welcome to episode number four of the Dan Time podcast. I'm your host, Dan McCardell. And of course I am thrilled to have you as a listener. Thanks for checking out the show. I am taking you through the Daniverse. Now we'll jump out from time to time. We will talk to some people with different names, but right now we're still in it. And this is an exciting episode, folks. If you came here to hear some storytelling, maybe came here to be inspired.
Maybe you just want to listen to somebody who's walked the walk and made a huge difference in his community. As I like to say, you're in the right place. Danny Zimmern. He is the commercial team owner, broker associate, senior commercial advisor, and recruiting mentor for team Zimmern of Keller Williams commercial in Pensacola, Florida.
Danny is also the owner broker of Skagans the third, Inc. Danny has been at the center of many important decisions and different crossroads over the past at least 25 years in Pensacola. And if you take him out of the mix, the landscape truly looks different. Just a quick run through Danny's achievements and organizations. He is the president of Pensacola Mardi Gras and has been in that role since 2002.
He has served on the board of directors of Temple Beth-El, the oldest Jewish community in Northwest Florida. He's served as the past president of Pensacola Little Theater, which is the oldest continuously operated community theater in the country. Former member of the downtown improvement board traffic and parking committee. He's been a board member on the downtown YMCA, 15 straight years on the in-weekly power list of the 100 most influential people in Pensacola.
Danny likes to talk about making great friends, making and keeping great relationships. And that's what it's all about. And if you're enjoying the show, please hit the download button or the subscribe button and you'll get the episodes as soon as they're released. I'm on social media at Dan TimePod on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. I'm Dan TimePod on Instagram, Dan Time Podcast on Facebook. I'd appreciate if you guys like or comment on those pages.
It really helps out the show gets, gets more visibility for Dan Time. And you can reach me directly at DanTimePod at gmail.com. You are going to thoroughly enjoy the stories that Danny has to share. It's not all business. It's not all economic growth. You might have a love story in here somewhere. Now, one thing you'll notice early in the conversation, there's some white noise in the background and I try to edit that out completely, but what you hear is the best result that I could achieve.
So hopefully it's all right. We are a work in progress. It's still done as better than perfect here on Dan Time and you'll hear it get better as we move along, but thanks for listening. Let's get to my conversation now with the one, the only Danny Zimmern. Right off the bat, I want to take you way, way back to when you were five years old. Wow. This may have been your first business venture on a hot August day. I don't recall much from when I was five. Was I selling lemonade or something?
This is from the Pensacola news journal. You and a buddy, Harry Smith. Across the street. Harry lived across the street. You guys set up an orange juice stand and the news journal quoted you saying, Hey, get your cool orange juice here. Beat the heat. Just a few pennies for a tall, cool drink. Oh, I love it. I was an entrepreneur from early on. Now I don't even remember that, but we grew up on Whaley Avenue. Harry was across the street from me and he was something else.
He's been also been around forever and we run into each other every five or eight years, somehow or another. And he really was a little older than me, but we had a lot of fun. I don't remember the orange juice story, but it doesn't surprise me. You know, I collected baseball cards. So the whole neighborhood, we traded and all that sort of stuff. And we got into where we would throw them and the person that threw them the farthest would keep the other card.
Man, we had some fun doing that because it was crazy, but it was great. It was sort of like a showdown in the middle of the street, you know, to see who could, and you had to put up, you know, if you had a Hank Aaron, they better have a Mickey Mouse. If you had a Hank Aaron, they better have a Mickey Mantle or whatever, you know? So, uh, learned early on about making deals.
When you were at a young age, uh, like you said, making deals early on, did you know that you had the fire in the belly back then for getting folks together? Was that already? I don't remember that Dan. I remember, uh, wanting to have a lot of fun. And, uh, as I got older, meet the neighborhood girls and, uh, you know, there were, there were boat houses so we could go hang around and do crazy stuff as kids.
We had a lot of fun in our neighborhood growing up, but I never remember the doing that, but I do have memories of growing up in beautiful Pensacola, Florida. My father was in business. He owned his own manufacturing company here. I'd go watch the old dude's work and do all that. And then, you know, I just loved all that. And then I remember, you know, running for student government seats and being in clubs and all sorts of things like that and getting into leadership roles.
So yeah, I've kind of found my way to the front of the room a lot of times. And of course I've ended up in the principal's office a lot of times too. So, uh, but I, you know, uh, as you bring it up, I have been a part of trying to make things better and grow them and kind of be a leader.
Yeah. Most of my life, uh, started my own business when I was in college, uh, uh, moved back to Pensacola and have enjoyed it ever since and worked all over the panhandle in different ways in the food and beverage business. And what I've really probably been most successful is, is making good friends. You know, I'm very interested in other people and learning from them, uh, and hanging out with folks who are sort of successful and who do have a chance to make a difference.
Well, you took the words out of my mouth. I was going to bring that up that not only have you been interested in going far and being at the center of a lot of important events, and this isn't true of everybody with those characteristics, but you really seem to get excited about other people's success and you get excited about the community thriving and people wanting to move here and people wanting to stay here as opposed to leaving for jobs elsewhere. Well, I love Pensacola.
Uh, it's a very, very unique place. I have a lot to say about that, but over the years, there have been some significant difference makers around town and I've been blessed to be able to hang out with some of those people and learn from them and maybe add a little bit of gas to the engine. You know, I have my own ways. I like everybody to have fun. I don't believe a whole lot positive comes out of fight.
Somebody might win a fight and sometimes you have to have them, but I like everybody to get together and have a little fun and come up with creative ways to grow together. It has kind of served me well. Part of my problem is I can't really get away from leadership. That's both a kind of a double edged sword. Every, basically every organization I ever feel like I've been a part of, I end up being a leader, a president or a chairman of, or something like that.
And I take those jobs and those volunteer positions seriously and I try to grow. It's how a Southern Jewish boy got involved in Mardi Gras, which is of course anything but a Jewish celebration. But we've been doing that 25 years. We've grown Pensacola's Mardi Gras celebration from about a couple of thousand people and about 20 Mardi Gras crews to over a hundred Mardi Gras crews and last year's Mardi Gras attracted about 200,000 people to Pensacola in Northwest Florida.
According to statistics, I didn't count everybody. It's been great for business. It's been great for the community and you know, it's a lot of fun, frankly. So it's kind of fun to put on a big party and have a hundred thousand people on a Saturday come, you know, and we've been able to do that. And luckily I have people who don't mind getting into the fray with me, Dan, and that part is also sort of a lot of fun. I try to make it great for everybody the best we can. So, so many different things.
I'm president of the Temple Beth-El of Pensacola, the oldest reformed Jewish congregation in the state of Florida. I am full of awe at the history of our congregation and I kind of put off being, I was offered a leadership role from the board. I've been on the board about 15 years. It was offered a leadership role on the board and I declined it. I'm basically made up excuses not to do it, but eventually I kind of couldn't get out of it. And I'm never going to try to go backwards.
I'm always going to try to go forward. So I just, I don't think you can ever do things the same. I think you either are going to get better or worse. And so I always want to get better. So I'm now president of a congregation and of course, in a small Southern city, being president of a reformed Jewish congregation comes with some challenges. So we're working through that. We're going to make it better. We all that's going well. The downtown YMCA, I was put on their board.
I was asked to be on their board a couple of times and turned it down and finally took that. And then I rose to be president of that board. And of course we went through a huge transition into a new YMCA downtown. And here it was a tremendous effort that I was happy to play a small part of, I guess. So I've enjoyed that. I went to the university of Florida. I'm a huge Gator fan. I'm a bull Gator. Go to almost every home game.
It's been a long time since I've missed one, but go to every home game and a lot of the way games. I love wearing my orange and blue on Saturdays and rooting for the Florida Gators. We have a local booster club. I was president of that, I think for 12 years. It was one of those things where once you started doing it, nobody else wanted to do it. Because maybe it was a lot of fun when I was president. We grew that and we've had a lot of fun with that.
I made some great friends over the years through going to the university, as well as being a part of the booster club later. So many different, one of my closest friends here in town is, he's an old dude. I'm 62. He's 85. He is a guy who taught me a tremendous amount about life, Jim Reeves. And Jim, and I'm super close with his family. I've learned a lot about Jim, but Jim came to me about 20 years ago and said, I want you to be on the Pensacola Little Theater board with me.
And when I got on that board, it was a lot of fun. But Jim said, we can fix this. It was kind of a mess. The mortgage payment every month at the Little Theater was $26,000 or so. And we figured out essentially that they worked for about 20 days of every month until they could pay the mortgage. Wednesday wine and cheese every Wednesday. And we sold stars that are in the like the waterfront, the There were only 10 days left to really develop any capital to put on productions and do things.
So we went about paying off that mortgage and it took us about five or six years, but we did. We had a mortgage burning party. Walk of Fame in California. And so I did that. I became president of that board of trustees. Our budget went from about $300,000 a year to about a million a year. The production value is it's the oldest continuously operating community theater in the country. Community theater means everybody's a volunteer.
And it's kind of tough when everybody's volunteering and you're still broke. Right. Right. So you ought to be able to put on good productions, have some great production value, sell tickets and have people pay to come. Well, even now at the Pensacola Little Theater, the production value is tremendous. But even now, the tickets are very inexpensive. The budgets are basically made and we decide how much we need to bring in to cover the bills. And that's how we make the ticket prices.
It's not about just raising prices to the shows all the time. We don't do it now. Of course, prices have to go up a dollar or two here or there. But you could sit in the front row at a Pensacola Little Theater production now for about $35 for a ticket. I mean, on Broadway, they're $400 for a ticket. So it's a whole different deal. But all those actors and actresses and seamstresses and all that, all those people get paid. They volunteer at the Pensacola Little Theater.
But as a part of making our community better, we have to have outlets. Mardi Gras is an example. The theater is an example. People want to enjoy their lives. Everybody has their passions. So with the arts, that's all arts, painting, acting, singing, dancing. With all arts, there's some people who like to act and there's some people who like to sew. And then there's some people who just like to take their spouse to a dinner and go to a show and relax. And you have to have an outlet for all that.
You have to have a lot of options in your community for people to enjoy, for them to move here. Danny, there's one quote that I pulled from the Pensacola News Journal. This is back in 2010. But I think based on what you're saying, this really still applies today. You said, it's amazing the amount, the amount of and quality of creativity that exists in the arts in Pensacola. If you've never seen one of the great productions at Pensacola Little Theater, get yourself a ticket. You will be hooked.
Yeah, and it's the truth. The quality of the creative people in Pensacola is off the chart. And sometimes it just takes building a facility or having an outlet for them to both enjoy their craft and perform for others, for others to see it. Pensacola, small little southern town, we have people who have become very, very successful in the arts world. Of course, it's like something's in the water with all the athletes that are stars that have come from Pensacola.
And I've been lucky to be a part of a lot of that. It really is a part of what makes us special. One of the things about growing Pensacola, see, it used to be, Dan, where the paradigm used to be that you built a plant and the plant would open its door and advertise that it had a bunch of jobs and people would move to that town to work there. Well, that's all changed. Now people go where they want to live and the jobs go where the people are.
The jobs in the big cities these days are there because the people are, not because it was the best place to open an office. I would assume that, for example, Amazon would not put an office in the middle of a downtown somewhere other than the people are there that they need to work. I'm very, very close with our current mayor, D.C. Reeves, and D.C. We started a brewery here, Perfect Plain.
D.C. had a dream and I was able in my commercial real estate life, which is how we pay the bills around here, in my commercial real estate life, we were able to put that together. And then it turned into something much, much bigger. He liked to talk about Ph.D. Marine biologists and MBA graduates that were tented bar because they just wanted to live here and they wanted to earn a living and they were waiting for the right job to come along.
In the meantime, they were making a bunch of money bartending and having the time of their life. So they were thrilled to be here. And their friends came from other places and Petsicle has exploded. Commercial real estate is what we do, Dan. And I'm an old dude. I told you I'm 62. America sort of went through a re-urbanization of its downtown, downtowns all over the place. Used to be you built roads out to a hundred acre track and you built a subdivision.
The grocery store went out there, near there, and it is just not super efficient development when some smart people, way smarter than you and I, figured out that the infrastructure is in downtown. And if we could build up our downtowns all over the country, that would be where people would want to go and made it easy. So I just happened to kind of be in the right place and know a few of the right people to be a part of a lot of big growth in downtown Pensacola.
And once you kind of understand that the utilities are there, the roads are there, you know, so much else, and then the density is there. And you learn, for example, that a surface parking lot is the biggest waste of a piece of property. So, you know, about 15 years ago, we did away with parking requirements in the downtown overlay, which allowed downtown to really explode. That was one of the key pieces that helped downtown explode. Then you could have a zero lot line place.
And as long as there was public parking around, whether that be a parking deck or street parking, that business could work. If code required one parking place for every 300 square feet, it would take a bigger piece of property. That's what's out by the malls, as an example, a piece of property with enough parking to handle that building. Well, downtown parking needs to handle all of downtown. So that's why there are community parking decks around.
And parking has become another big topic of conversation, probably everywhere in America. I studied that. I was head of the downtown Pensacola Parking Committee of the Downtown Improvement Board, another leadership position that makes nobody happy. I like doing things that make people happy, but that one was one that just felt like it needed to be dealt with.
You know, in Pensacola, we have been lucky to have a couple of really cool cats who were forward thinkers and were successful enough in their day jobs to bring some development and ideas and capital into Pensacola. And I've been lucky enough to have some of those people believe in me. So together, we've been able to work and put together some great projects. Of course, Quint Studer is probably most known for that. And Quint did a lot of travel.
And so he saw the benefit of growing a downtown and built the first large apartment complex downtown. He did very, very well with it. But that was the linchpin for for really growing our little town. And so I think that recipe could be repeated, frankly, all over the country. It's not super complicated, but you do have to sort of take a deep breath and step back and realize sometimes you have to make some changes and nobody's going to like it. We have a parking problem in downtown today.
Downtown Pensacola, Florida is on fire. We have food and beverage locations. We have retail locations. We have offices and then we have residents downtown. So it's hard to park and people get mad about it. But you had plenty of parking when nothing was going on, you know, and you want things to be going on. So it's just a matter of managing that properly. We had the world's authority on parking come talk to a small group of us here.
Who knew there was a world's expert on parking technology wise used to be, you know, a parking meter. That was pretty simple, but they break and they don't work. And it's just inefficient. Carry quarters around like the exactly I mean, the whole bit. So now that parking is very sophisticated, there's apps and you put your location in. It knows where you are now because of your cell phone and so many different things that make parking a little bit better.
But you got to understand it before you can fix it. We have a problem, I think, in America, but I know we have a problem here in our region, for example, of recycling. You know, I've kind of tried to be a part of some of that as well. I've kind of been through the ringer with it, but it is expensive to recycle. So it's good and it feels good not to bury cardboard and plastics in the ground because it takes them a long time to deteriorate in landfills.
And they fill up landfills. But it is expensive. So there's a trade off. And of course, the better the world gets at recycling, the less people will pay for cardboard to recycle cardboard, as an example. So it's these spirals that you have to deal with and you have to be a little malleable in our lives to try to figure out solutions for different things.
So, you know, have you ever been presented with a project where someone wanted you to to head it, take it on and find a solution for the problem? And you just ran into a wall and said, here, you guys find someone else. I've done all I can. The parking situation seems like you would just run into wall after wall. Well, parking is a challenge because the solution is there's never a finale. Whenever you fix some piece of the problem, there's more problems.
I've been a part of a lot of projects, but in most of them, having a finish line is sort of important. It's the intangible sort of projects that that don't necessarily have a finish line. It's like saying there's some crazy problems in our world today, like affordable housing, homelessness, that sort of thing. They're not necessarily related, but they are somewhat related. Those are hard for me to get my arms around because there's no real finish line. Or the Fentanyl crisis.
Drug, drugs, even immigration. There's a lot of problems that we should try to fix. I try to focus down on positive stuff that we can. I'm kind of a one step at a time. I'm kind of a rising tide lifts all boats kind of guy. And I'm definitely a big tent guy. Everybody's welcome. You know, I like to I like to have a real diversity of people around. My political stuff is not necessarily the same as everybody's, but I do like to focus on projects or issues that have solutions.
Do you ever find yourself seated at a table with different leaders? And you know that this person across the table recognizes that you guys are on opposite sides of the political spectrum. But they also know that, hey, I can work with Danny because I've always been able to work with Danny. Well, civility and discernment is something that's really missing at a lot of those tables, Dan. And I try to do that. I don't let anybody be ugly.
I like to sort of think that you don't have to make everybody happy, but you can't make anybody mad. I like to think that sometimes it's inevitable, I guess. But I have been at some very complicated tables, as you put it metaphorically, been at some complicated tables. And sometimes you cannot agree. You've got to try to find the best solution. Have you ever interjected with a couple of parties who are just hashing it out and said, hey, guys, we're not getting anywhere?
Have you ever had to be the mediator? Oh, hundreds of times, hundreds of times. You sort of can't help it, you know, if you're going to really be involved. If if there's no problems, it's probably not a real issue, you know, and that that needs solutions. But, you know, what you end up doing is sort of seeing that people have personal goals or agendas in the problem, not necessarily doing what they call right. But what it is is right according to them and their agenda. So that's that is hard.
We we certainly. Northwest Florida is probably a lot like the rest of the world. We have politically sort of people come from two different places or generally. But it's fairly civil around here. Generally, there are always crazy things where I think Pensacola has always had a melting pot characteristic to it. Yeah, we're I like to call us a big little city. We are kind of a little city that has some big problems. Sometimes we've had blown up abortion clinics.
We've had crime. We've had anti-Semitism. We've had protests. We've had all sorts of things that big cities have. But we know everybody in the crowd generally. So we're complicated in that way, but it's a wonderful place. I know much of the country is talking about Pensacola, Florida. I do a little bit of travel, but not a ton.
But I know, for example, I don't really want to mention any names, but a couple of billionaire landlords from around the country have come here and marched into the mayor's office and said, I don't know what it is. I have billions of dollars worth of real estate, but everybody's talking about Pensacola. What can I do here? How can I invest here? What can I buy? What can I what can we do together? How can I help you?
And those are great, great problems to have. But Pensacola is kind of on the map. Northwest Florida. Nobody knows this better than you, Dan. We like to kind of call ourselves LA. That's lower Alabama. You know, we're right up here below Alabama. And so Pensacola is in a unique spot in the economic development. We fight with Orlando and Tampa and Miami because they're our state. But we also fight with Mobile and New Orleans and Biloxi, and they offer their own sets of incentives.
And we don't have anything to say about that. We have something to say about Florida incentives, but not about our neighbors. So we have we fight both directions around here to do it. And we try tourism. We have the world's most beautiful white beaches as a function of where we are in the Gulf of Mexico. All the fine sand ended up on our beaches just by the flow of the tide. And our beaches just spectacular here on this little north Gulf Coast,
northern end in the panhandle of Florida and in South Alabama. Same sand. And a lot of the natural beauty is for some of you listeners who have never visited the area, a lot of the natural Florida beauty is captured on our beaches because we do have protected state park areas and the Gulf Islands National Seashore. We do. They'll be there forever. None of that's going to get touched.
And, you know, today we feel sorry for our Florida neighbors who are going through a tropical storm, a hurricane when it hit in, I guess, in the Tampa area. I'm still learning more about it. It's kind of happening as we speak. But but today, but we've been through our own crises like that and we've had to learn and we've come out better, Dan, I think most every time. Sometimes some of the bad gets wiped away. Hurricane Sally was an absolute blessing to me.
I'll tell you a story. You have time for a story? Oh, yeah. So I was married to Tanya and we we had a daughter in 1997 and we got divorced. Tanya had some demons in her life and it was just too hard. And and so we got divorced when when our daughter, Hannah, was about four and we were apart. Well, Tanya was able to get rid of those demons and found a way to manage some of the things in her life that could be a problem. And she did. And now she's 14 years sober.
I always worried she would sober up and fall in love with somebody else. And of course, she did. But I always loved her. So she had been engaged. And at the beginning of the summer, I guess, of 20, she got unengaged and spent that summer working on herself. I didn't really know that. I've always loved her and we've been close. But that's what she did. And she, you know, walking on the beach and reading and praying and working a program.
So she did all that. And here comes Hurricane Sally in September in September. And our daughter, Hannah, was in law school in Baton Rouge. She went to LSU and she called and said, Dad, Mom's got to evacuate the beach. She doesn't really have anywhere to go because she's been spending time on herself. Can she come stay in my room at the house? And I said, of course. So here came Tanya and her little dogs to the house. My ex-wife, Hannah's mother. And nothing nefarious happened, Dan.
But it's been years since you've been under one roof together, correct? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we stayed close, but that means talking every now and then. Maybe an occasional dinner with our daughter or something like that. But so here she comes. Hannah's in Baton Rouge. She's just me and Tanya and the two dogs now and my dog and cat. And so nothing nefarious happened, but four or five days of no power and very little cell signal.
And I had things to do, by the way, work, but no power and very little cell signal. We had to kind of communicate to make it all work. And that sort of made us communicate. And then after four or five days, the gas cans that were running the little generator ran out. So we loaded up all the 10 gallon gas cans and had it took a long romantic drive to Buc-ee's because Buc-ee's across the state line is the only place that had gas. That trip was full of emotions.
People would cut in line and people would kind of flip you off. And I mean, it was just happiness and sadness at, you know, times 10 in so many different ways. But we ended up getting a hot brisket sandwich and we ended up getting gas and we ended up laughing some and crying some. And that did lead us going to Baton Rouge to see Hannah, that sort of thing. And then on February 22nd of 22, that would be 2-22-22, I proposed for the second time.
And we were remarried in October of last year on our anniversary. So we have our anniversary coming up is coming October. And I'm not sure if it's the first anniversary or the 28th anniversary, but it's one of those and we have the same anniversary date. So that's something fun to sort of talk about. But what a beautiful story. But that was all that was all about Hurricane Sally. God brought us together. There's no doubt about it.
And so the journey has been hard and sometimes lonely, but it has all come together now. And so I'm just so happy and blessed to have Tanya back and to and to be a part of that. I like to say our marriage, my marriage to Tanya works well because she was willing to accept a child I had from my first marriage. Of course, it's her child, too. So, you know, it's a whole new chapter. It is. And Tanya does residential real estate.
We merged my commercial real estate business with her residential real estate business. And we're the top Keller Williams team here in the Panhandle of Florida by several different metrics. Danny, has Tanya the past 25 years or so she's closed nearly one billion dollars in sales? Yeah, absolutely. She's an absolute celebrity. She was Caldwell Bankers number one agent in the Panhandle and switched over to Keller Williams and convinced me to switch over to Keller Williams.
You know, we're having a blast. She's a complete celebrity and she's a complete professional. And she's just so good. People are loyal to her and she does a great job. And so it has been really a remarkable marriage. And so our team now is doing whatever. I mean, we did one hundred and twenty five million or so last year. And we're probably going to do significantly more than that this year as a team. And so, you know, life is a lot of fun.
It's not all perfect. And so we're trying to figure out how to make it better. But we we both love Northwest Florida and we both love family and all that. We so, you know, the other kind of things were still growing together after all this time. But it's great. And our daughter is so happy she's practicing law, doing family law, and she moved back to Pensacola. She would not have moved back to Pensacola if all that effort we'd taken all those years did make this a better place.
And so now there's stuff for her to do here. She's about to be twenty seven and we're just so life is good there. And Danny, I remember from some of our earlier early conversations, I think we first met about five years ago. And each time we talk, it seems like you mentioned Hannah, your daughter, Hannah. And you told me stories about the early days when she was kindergarten or first, second grade. And you've got all these things going on. You got all these balls in the air.
And a lot of busy guys, a lot of busy dads and maybe families who are not together, they don't either can't see their kids a whole lot and don't have a lot of control over that. Or they just stay too busy just to do things with their children. And from what I understand, you carried Hannah around with you a lot. She went various places with you and I did that must not have always been easy.
But well, when when we got divorced, I got custody of Hannah and it became the biggest responsibility for me in the world. And so I had to do some very deep thinking. I'm blessed to have two older brothers, both are physicians, both of their wives are super strong and powerful and successful women. And so I had a lot of help. You know, it takes a village. I certainly have been proven that. But I did take Hannah, I had to really prioritize my life in those years.
And how I figured it out, it may not be right and it may not be right for everybody. But how I had how I did was I sort of prioritized my life that there was work and there was Hannah. And those were both my top priority. They just interchanged at different times of the day. So when I dropped Hannah off at school, it became work was my number one priority. But when I picked Hannah up, Hannah was my number one priority. And then three, four and five were always never one and two.
So number three for me was always I had to take care of me because if I wasn't around, I couldn't do one and two. So I made time to go to the gym and I would take Hannah to the gym and she'd go in the kids zone and I'd go do what I did, which was basketball. You love playing basketball. Yeah, which was basketball. And there's a lot of stories about that, too. But I would bring her to the office sometimes. You know, when school was out, you know, she would stay with me.
We would go to things and I took her to a lot of meetings, particularly when it was sympathetic people I was meeting with. I knew it would help me sell some real estate, you know, if I had to show Hannah who I had to buy shoes for, you know. So we had a lot of fun. She had a unique experience. I do think having I've really grown to be a significant fan of having a pretty strong male in the family. You know, I know it can't be the case for everybody, but I think it's important if at all possible.
And I really encourage everybody I run into to be a part of their kids life. Men run into women, of course, but men to be a part of their life. And you're a leader. And I know your kids watch you and they see how you act. And you can't do something and say, don't do that, you know, because they're going to do what you do. I mean, that's just how it is when a child observes his or her father.
And and that's everything from how he talks, how he speaks to other people, the clothes that he wears, how he walks, when he gets mad, how he gets mad, how he laughs, all that stuff they see. I think you agree. That's how they think that all men should be. And so if their dad's not taking care of himself, that's also reflected in how they think that people how adults behave. Well, I think it's good for us to realize I like to say we all work for somebody.
Everybody works for somebody. A lot of the time, I've worked for Hannah, you know, to to to make her life better and to show her maybe a little bit about life. But I've worked for Hannah, but we all work for somebody. It's not just the guy that signs the check, you know, but we should all report to somebody. I have a basketball story about that if you want to hear it. Absolutely. So I played basketball at the YMCA as a older dude.
I was, you know, I ran my mouth a lot and had a lot of fun playing basketball. You can get a lot out of out of you. Basketball is it's competition. But you really learn about other people and how they, you know, do they play defense or do they cheat or, you know, all those sort of things you learn about people. So one of the guys at the YMCA, I played between three and five days a week for 20 years, maybe even more, actually, but forever.
And so one of the guys at the gym said, hey, there are these leagues in the city that are kind of open leagues in the spirit of you just play. So it's not an age group. It's not a, you know, a certain level like an ABC player or anything like that. It's just open. So it means it's the best players in our community. And he said, why don't we put a team in the league? So we figured out how much it would cost. And it was about five hundred dollars.
So we said we get 10 people. That's fifty dollars a piece. So we asked basically the 10 best guys in the gym basically to play. And candidly, about half of them didn't do it. So we picked up some other guys that did do it. And we lost that year in the city of Pensacola championship game. We lost. We finished second in the league for the year, but we didn't win. It was close to the game came right down to the end, but we didn't win.
And one of the guys that did play on our team was a guy who went to the University of Alabama, Birmingham, played basketball there on scholarship. And he worked with what then was Gulf Power. Now it's Florida Power, but he was Gulf Power. And he was in charge of generation for all of Northwest Florida generation of power. So he had a big job on the top floor office corner suite. And I said to him, his name was Mike. I said, Mike, some of these guys couldn't afford it.
And I said, why don't we why don't you and I just split it and then we'll pick the people we want on our team? And he said, OK, that was easy. It was about a five minute conversation. So we did and we picked the guys that we wanted. It said it doesn't cost anything to play. And basically, they all played, especially in the first couple of years, they all played. So there were two seasons, a spring and a fall season that spring season we had lost in the finals.
So we entered the fall season with basically the guys out of our gym that we wanted. And we ran through the league. We we won the first of our what I like to call city championships that year. And we won five more straight spring, fall, spring, fall, five more straight. And after every championship game, we would go out for chicken wings and beer. And and Mike and I would pay for that, too. And the guys all loved it.
And we got to always talk in and maybe the beer helped everybody talk a little easier, whatever. But we got to be friends because it wasn't really fights, but basketball games, you have to work like a team. And so we learned to kind of depend on each other and we learned to work together to win. I was kind of the coach all the all that time. I only went in when we were up 20 or down 20 and we were never down 20. So I always went in when we were winning big basically.
And then everybody else was tired and they pass it to me all the time. And so it was great for me. I loved it. I felt like I was a star. But all of those guys basically had been celebrities in high school, all everything basketball players in Pensacola as they went through, celebrities in their school, best player in their school. And they were celebrities and they all got college scholarships and virtually all of them blew it. They lost their scholarships, whatever.
And they came back home, no degree and really no training and really nowhere to go except back to basketball. And I realized after about the third celebration dinner, it dawned on me that the common denominator of all those guys was that they basically didn't have a strong role model, a strong male role model. And I said, well, you know, here we go again, right? Here's Danny. I said, I can help some of that.
I don't want to, you know, I don't want to be their father, but I'm happy to be try to help them live better. So I started making those chicken wings and beer dinners once a month. And I brought in people to speak to them, to sit at the table and drink beer with them. And I brought in like a urologist and I brought in a banker who taught them how to open bank accounts. And I brought in a car dealer and told them how to buy cars right.
Because they were going to these buy here, pay here lots that were super expensive. It was a waste. And I brought in a therapist. I mean, you know, but I brought in all sorts of things to teach these guys and slowly maybe looking back on it wasn't so slow, but it felt slow. I got about two of them on with the city. I got, I think, three on with Gulf Power. I got two on with the local utility authority. So these were good paying jobs with retirement, with health care, all those sort of things.
And was able to really, really help all those guys. Eventually, they made it on their own. And, you know, an old white guy was not the guy they wanted to hang out with on Friday night. And but I get it. And I love those guys. And they and you know what, Dan, they love me. If I see them, they still come to my office. Oh, I know they do. And I know they love you. Yeah. And they come to my office just to say hello and check in.
And but really what I think they're doing is telling me they're OK, which is better. Right. Because they never had a male figure in their life to say, hey, Uncle Joe, I'm doing pretty good. Hey, you'll never believe what I did. They didn't have anybody to tell good news. I guess it makes them feel good and it makes me feel good to do it, too.
But what's really interesting in all those years of those guys, it was probably it was a great sort of run about five or six years of being around those guys a lot. One time, one guy ever asked me to borrow money and he paid me back. I've been asked to borrow money by a lot of people and a lot who have not paid me back. But I'm OK. I mean, it is what it is. But to me, that's kind of a point that they would rather keep my respect. Sure. And they'd rather find a way.
I mean, I instilled a little bit in them to work your way out of a problem, not borrow your way out of a problem. Right. You know, you've illustrated something that I don't think it's talked about a whole lot where a young man, 18, 19 years old, blows a scholarship. And so just screwed up one time in a big way and he just thinks, well, that's it. Oh, I'm just no good. And then and then just kind of trails off. Well, or he's got the skill set that he's not using.
And he could be building a network, but he's not because he doesn't have anybody believing in him. Well, what a difference. I thought it was all about just shooting hoops. Well, when you're it's a little bit societal when you're in high school and you're the big man on campus, it's hard to go to the next step and not be the big man on campus, to be being told what to do when you don't really want to do it.
You know, when you're the all star on a high school team, you probably don't run the bleachers when everybody else does. And you probably can be a little late to practice and that sort of thing. But you're the star of that high school basketball team. But when you get to the first step of college, you know, it's a little different. I had one guy on our team. So crazy story. He is the greatest guy deep down. Now, he's I mean, everybody's got their own life and he's a little interesting.
But he grew up in Chicago and he was an all star basketball player in Chicago in high school. And at the Arch Enemy High School across town in Chicago now, this is not Pensacola in Chicago. The Arch Enemy School across town was where Dwayne Wade played. And so our guy here, BG, was on our team, I mean, on his team, and Dwayne Wade was on their team. And they played each other and BG just showed Dwayne Wade up.
I mean, it was crazy. But towards the end of BG's senior year, he broke his ankle playing basketball. And he quit. He quit school. He quit everything. He never graduated. Dwayne Wade, of course, went on to Marquette and Pro Fame. BG, you know, just was lost when he lost the thing he had and he never recovered, really. Now, he did recover and he's a manager now or a big retail business. He's doing very well. But he was a part of this journey to help him realize how good he was at life.
And he was easily the best basketball player around, not in a great way, not in a one on one kind of way. But what it takes to win as a team, he had it. I'll never forget, Dan, he played that guy played against me in the gym for five years, maybe, and he killed me. I never could score on him. Now, he was a great player and I wasn't. But he didn't look like he was working very hard and he would block my shot all the time.
God, don't. And so we got on this team and I got to be the coach and I got to be the guy that was kind of watching out everybody. And we go to the gym, this is after about a season and a half of playing the league. And BG goes, Dan, I got to tell you. I said, what? He said, you know that before you shoot, you spend the ball in your hand. And I said, no, what are you talking about? He goes, yeah, well, every time when you are going to shoot, you spend the ball in your hand and line the laces up.
I thought I'll be a son of a gun. I never thought about that at all my life, but the whole time guarding me. If I didn't spend that ball, he knew I wasn't going to shoot. So the minute I spun, he got in my face and blocked my shot all the time. He had such a mind for basketball. It is it is. He still does. It's amazing. And I told him that I told him that and I got him to coach a little league team. I mean, a little league team of little people's team.
They were great. He made all those kids into something. He's still got some of those fathers who talk about him. I mean, you know, just the kind of stuff. But basketball, you learn a lot about people. We've had a lot of stories around here, Dan. Danny, it's just listening to these stories I have at the top of my notes. And I don't remember if I said this earlier in our conversation, wants others to thrive and succeed. Now, that's before we sat down in this room.
And that's really been the hallmark of your career. From my perspective, everything you do is about community and about building others up. There's a lot of talent here. There's a lot of talent on the sidelines. I've just blown away. I like it. I like you play basketball. The why I didn't know anything else about it. Yeah. Well, I'm just picturing Danny running down the court. Oh, yeah. Pulling up for three. Oh, yeah. And that's exactly what I did.
And, you know, they went in pretty much more than they didn't. You know, I was a good shot because my theory of getting open is if you stand still long enough, the guy guarding you will leave. You know, but, you know, I got it kept me in good shape and it kept me healthy to be a parent. And it kept me healthy. And it would clear your mind. You can't be thinking about other things when you're playing basketball. I do play golf. I play tennis. But you think about other things doing those deals.
Tennis, not quite as much. But golf, you spend a lot of time between hitting. You know, I really find my golf game has gotten pretty good as I've gotten older. I kind of believe that if you think about other things when you play golf, you don't play as well. So you got to have a good mind. It doesn't feel like golf should be so much about your mind. But I think it's the difference of the guys on tour. The difference in when they win and not is where their head is, to be honest with you.
I think their swings are so good, all of them. You know, it just really matters how their attitude is that week, I think. Not sure about that. But, you know, I have some experience with that too. With pro golf, I worked with Jerry Pate, who won the US amateur and US Open. I ran the country club here. I was the general manager of the country club at Tiger Point. I focused on the food and beverage stuff and we built a new clubhouse. And Jerry was playing and he but he was commentating for ABC.
And so I got to travel with him a little bit to pro golf tournaments, experience some of those guys and experience some time with Jerry. So it was great. Danny, I wanted to talk a little bit about Pensacola Barthigraw. I know you've been the president of the organization for over 20 years since 2002. Specifically, I kind of want to go back to the first decade of the 2000s here, because we had a major hurricane, then we had the financial crisis. So it wasn't all fun and games.
Yeah, I went broke in the financial crisis. So it hit home. How were some of those years where you're trying to plan a big event like that, and it's 2005 or it's 2009 and it's a down economic year and your head's in another place, you know, how did you get through some of those times? It was a challenge from the beginning. We started with, I like to say we started with very little and we still have most of it. But we did. We started with very little.
And again, that philosophy of you got to either get bigger or smaller, you're never going to be the same. So we always tried to get a little bit bigger every year somehow. Never always knew what that meant, but we tried and I think we've been pretty successful. Pensacola Barthigraw has been a real joy, a real labor of love. It's fun. It brings people together. Everybody's basically smiling. You know, it comes with some drama.
When we started, there were about 15 or 18 Mardi Gras crews here in Pensacola. 15 or 18 today, we can identify over 100. We, the parade, we used to close the streets. There was nothing going on downtown. It was easy to close the streets. It brought her by downtown. It felt like it was a way that the restaurants that were open downtown and the retailers would have a big weekend. We felt like that gave them some money to have some runway to get to the summer here in Northwest Florida.
That part was great. Now downtown Socratic, they hate when you close the streets. The restaurants are busy all the time. So when you close the street, people can't get to them. See, it's just the opposite effect. But we take a lot of pride in how downtown has regrown based on Mardi Gras approved. People would come, right? So, you know, the reason those crews have expanded is those 15 crews have a couple of people that run them and every crew has a couple of people that kind of run it.
And they get crew members who go, I can do it better than you. I can do it better than you and they spin off. Or, you know, they get in some kind of argument and they spin off. And so for us, a little bit of drama in those crews helps us grow them. That's how we have more crews, really. Very few people come to town and say, I want to start a crew. It really is somebody who was in another crew and wants to do it differently or better. I love Mardi Gras because it's about the big tent.
Everybody's welcome. You know, on July the 4th, everybody is red, white and blue. But in Mardi Gras, you have a crew that is into whatever it is you're into. You're 30 to 50 or maybe sometimes we have a crew that has 400 people. But you're people that are in your crew who are into whatever it is. And you do it all under the umbrella of Mardi Gras. But you get to be yourself.
Dress up like whatever it is you do, your crew is, whether you're space people or Indians or whatever it is you are, you dress up like that and you hang out with those people and you kind of they become your sort of fraternity or sorority for the whole year. They start doing things for the community and nonprofits. So that builds for our world. And frankly, it's those type A organizer people that get involved in the Mardi Gras crews.
And those are the people who really get things done in our community. So it has been great in a lot of ways. We've added a kickoff on the 12th night of Christmas, which is always January the 6th. So now Mardi Gras became a season, more and more events, a few more parades. Now, last year, the economic impact in northwest Florida of Mardi Gras was around $100 million. We do all that with our budget, which our budget is about $250,000.
So, you know, we do that through sponsorships and a little bit of entry fees. But like I say, everybody is welcome. Now, that means you have to live by the rules. So if the rules include having insurance or not doing stupid stuff, whatever it is, you got to live by the rules, but you're welcome if you can live by the rules. And we get challenged with that all the time, because remember, I told you, those crews split up. And so they want to outdo each other.
And so they say, oh, you know how to not let them do whatever it is. And I said, they can do it if they aren't lived by the rules. So there's a lot of one-upsmanship. There is. Amy Newman has a big part of that, Dan. Amy Newman, my assistant, has been with me for 25 years. Yeah, I was going to mention Amy. Yeah. She's from Louisiana. So she had a little Mardi Gras on her blood. And we have been together. She's just so special as a part of all that. We're all getting older.
When we started, our kids were real young. So the last float in the parade was our kids. And that was really the payoff for us. Now, I can tell you how we got into it if you want to know. But the payoff really was that our kids could be in the last float. And if we had enough money, we could buy the beads for them to throw. So the kids just loved it, and that was really kind of why we did it. Then the kids got old and went off and did whatever.
And some of them have had more kids, and it's cyclical. But anyway, that's a part of Mardi Gras. We pride ourselves on Pensacola being a family-friendly Mardi Gras. The grand parade, which is the Saturday before Fat Tuesday, the grand parade on Saturday, last year had about 100,000 people. We have a little line on every parade application that says, how many people parade with you? So it's not scientific in the spirit of people can write whatever number they want. But we do add those numbers up.
And last year, there were 6,500 people in the parade. So if that number is true. So it's a big, big event. It's the biggest day in downtown Pensacola. And it's what a lot of Pensacola has been built around. We proved big events can happen. We proved our police department is good. We proved people like to have fun. And there's a lot of benefits to what Mardi Gras does. It's bigger than just one big day. It's been an interesting journey. We could do hours about it, but it wasn't long.
Maybe after the fifth or seventh year, something like that, we got a call from an advertising agency in New Orleans who said to us, we represent Zatarans. And Zatarans hears you've got something cool going. We want to be a part of that as a sponsor. And that was the day we said we're on to something. We didn't go after them. They came to us. Now, ultimately, we couldn't do it because we were too small. We couldn't really provide them with what they needed in return for a sponsor.
It was different at the time what you have to do then today. And we've learned all that. But we couldn't provide them with the exposure that they... We didn't know how to count exposure at the time. We didn't know how to do that. We were kind of a band of volunteers. And we just sort of put it all together and made something fun happen. Now, we've gotten professional with advertising agencies and all that sort of stuff.
So Publix is on board as our name sponsor in a big way, along with some other sponsors who have jumped on board. And they tell us it's the best thing they do all year long. And usually when they say that, it means it's fun for the whole family. Everybody from mom and dad, they're having a great time and the kids are having a great time. Where there's some events where I could imagine the kids are not having a lot of fun because it's too crazy, too unregulated. It is.
And there's barricades over the parade route. The balls are inside buildings. We try to keep everybody as safe as possible. But to see the kids at those parades with the beads and some candy, parents may or may not like them having them. But... It's really exciting for them. It's really a wonderful day. And then it's hard to explain, Dan, the energy that the people who are in the parade also have.
It's just something about 100,000 people, maybe not always, but 100,000 people or whatever it is, 50,000 people, yelling, throw me something and screaming at you and whatever. You're with your friends and you probably have an adult beverage, maybe. But we still pride ourselves on family friendly. We don't let people dress too provocatively. And everybody loves those stories. And so we fight that. We fight that.
Even though you've been doing it this long, every year do you still, I don't know, get goosebumps or just the electricity in the air? Is it still exciting for you? Oh, there's no doubt about it. There's no doubt about it. The energy is just great. And Dan, I got to tell you that it's good to be me and kind of be in the middle of all that and talking with media and talking with city leaders. On our blessing of the fleet, which is what we do with all the...
Not all, but we limit it to about 30 floats. And we park them. And then we have a father and city elected officials basically. And we do a royal processional and we bless all the crews. And the father says something like, may your hearts be warm and your beard be cold in the name of the heavenly father, something like that. And he throws holy water on them, which I would like to say is wild turkey. But I'm kidding about that. And they're blessed.
And we have had a safe Mardi Gras season, and seasons we've been really, really blessed with that. But the royal processional is the mayor and the police chief and the sheriff and the fire chief and every county commissioner and every city councilman just about. And our state representatives and even a senator or two. And we've even had some celebrities join us. Join us in that royal processional, sort of fun.
Yeah, it really is great to be in the middle of that and bring joy like that to people here in Pensacola. And, you know, yeah, I got to tell you, selfishly people thank me all year long and that feels good too. Absolutely. We have a weekly print publication called In Weekly here. It's a newspaper printed weekly. And it's been around forever. And 15 or 16 years ago, he started a list of the 100 most influential people in Pensacola. And I've been on that list every year. I was reading that.
Yeah. And every year since. And I still am. Thank gosh. Now, no disrespect to the current mayor or prior mayors, but I've heard you referred to as the unofficial mayor of Pensacola. I don't know about that. Do you accept that? I do not accept it. That means I got to fix people's parking ticket. I'm not doing that. But I've been on that list forever. But they always put Pensacola Mardi Gras. And then some years they put real estate, right? But they always put Mardi Gras.
So it has been good for me in that way too. Well, and Danny, for people listening that have never been to the Gulf Coast, what's the website if they want to just check out PensacolaMardiGras.com? It is PensacolaMardiGras.com. All one word except for the dot and the comp. Yeah. So we're in August. You got plenty of time if you want to plan a trip in the off season to Pensacola. Our beaches are beautiful.
The weather is you're kind of taking a shot, but sometimes we have some beautiful weather that time of year. Usually. Yeah. Almost always. Yeah, almost always. We've had some fun experiences with that. You know, we had a... There have been some mornings where it's the Grand Parade, the morning and the weather is just horrible. Oh, yeah. I mean, it doesn't happen much. Thank gosh. But it has happened a couple of times.
We had one famous year where it was raining and storming and all the floats don't come out, but nobody wants to miss that big day of the Grand Parade. So a lot of the floats came, most came in the local ABC affiliate, W-E-A-R-T-V, ABC3. Their weather guy has the sophisticated equipment. He's, of course, a friend. So he's at the station telling us and he said the parade rolls at two o'clock on that Saturday. And he said, OK, you're going to have from 1.45 till about 2.45. And that's it. He knew.
So we had to get basically a four-hour parade into that hour. And the videos of that parade are hilarious because people are like running down the street to keep up with their float. But we got it done and we got it in. We called for a driver's meeting on a corner, passed the word up and down the lineup of 220 or so entries. Danny, that one line, we got it done. And we did. How many times, how many situations can you apply, we got it done to difficult problems?
I know on your bio page, you remind people that you basically one phone call away if they lean on you to solve a difficult situation. I feel like that. I feel like if the solution is reasonable, I can get it figured out and accomplished. If it's unreasonable, nobody can. And of course, like I say, in the recession of eight, nine, and part of 10, the problems were not with anything I could fix. It was a national sort of problem. And in a real estate development, I just went over a cliff.
And I could never, there was no rope. But most of the time, if there is a problem or if there is a challenge, I do feel like through both connections and creativity, I can find a way to try to make it better somehow. And sometimes there's just medicine that either I have to take or somebody has to take. And I've lost plenty. But you know what, Dan, you learn more from your losses than you do from your successes and try to do that.
But I like to say, if you're not at the table, you might be on the menu. So I try to be at the table as much as I can. Well, Danny, I usually do a lightning round. I may trim the questions because, wow, and we could do another episode easily. I have some just fun questions I like to ask my guests, and they're all different every week. OK. But I know you're a big Florida Gator football fan. Do you have an all-time favorite Florida football player? Well, interesting.
I think most Gators would talk about Tim Tebow. But for me, it was really Wilbur Marshall and Percy Harvin. They were in different times. Percy Harvin was amazing athlete and an amazing kid. I got to meet him a few times. Wilbur Marshall was just a brute. He changed so much at the University of Florida, beating USC that year. It was great. So those are the two that come to mind. And there were some great teams in the 80s that people forget about before Spurrier.
They just ran into those sanctions and couldn't. I think they won the SEC. Well, Swamp King's on Netflix now. I don't know if you've seen that, but it certainly is interesting to talk about the Urban Meyer years. Urban knew how to win. I'm not sure everything he did was so great, but he knew how to win. If you could think back to a favorite championship game, would it be a Florida football championship game or Florida basketball? Interesting, because I went to both.
There were four or five years where we were in every national championship. For me, it was the Florida versus Ohio State game in Phoenix for the national championship of 2006. It was just an amazing experience for me. We landed in Phoenix. In Phoenix, you have to take a bus to the rental car place, the airport there. We got on the bus and there were about six or eight Florida fans. Everybody's in their stuff. The rest were Ohio State fans. Florida had sort of snuck into the game.
They weren't really supposed to get in the game. No, no, it's selection Sunday. It happened. Florida sneaks into the game and Ohio State was the number one team in the country the whole season long, killing everybody, playing great. The people on that bus were talking about they had made their reservations like in September of the last year. So they were just talking about they knew they were going to be there and all that stuff.
And I'm sitting there, you know, feeling so sorry, but I felt like it was going to be great. And then we went to the pep rally the night before the game. And Urban Meyer's on stage and he goes, you know what? They asked me in the media if we had a good practice today. And he said, I lied to him. He said, I told him, yes, we had a good practice. But he said to us at the pep rally, I mean, it was me and 15,000 fans. And he said, we didn't have a good practice. We had a great practice.
And then we went back to the hotel after the pep rally and at the deck by the pool of the hotel in Phoenix, the whole team was out by the pool in their gym shorts running through plays by themselves without coaches by the pool. And I said to Hannah, who was young then, they're far as going to win. And the game, like the first play of the game, the Ohio State guy runs a kickback for a touchdown and he was so excited celebrating he got hurt.
He was their best receiver celebrating this first touchdown. And it was seven to nothing before you really got in your seat. And it was like Ohio State was going to blow you blow them out. And Florida won 41 to 14. It was, I think I remember that game. It was over and over just beating them and beating them and beating them. And they all left, you know, and all that. I mean, it was epic to see those Ohio State folks. Yeah. You know, so anyway, that that was the one that was the most fun.
We went to Indianapolis for the basketball master championship. We went to Miami where Florida played Oklahoma for a football master championship. All those were great. In fact, we were in the box next door to Bill Clinton in that game. And it was the craziest thing. It's another story. It's another. Did you get to meet the former president? I was from me to you from him. But there was a piece of glass between him. He was in the suite next door. Piece of glass. And that was crazy.
I mean, it's a good story. We got the tickets. I actually course traded some tickets with a ticket broker guy that I worked with all year and could get you in the suite. And he goes, last time in that suite, there was some movie star. He said, so you never know what's going to happen. So I said, OK, this will be great. So we go up to the suite and standing in front of the suite door are two guys with M16s in camouflage fatigues. And it's like you're thinking this is somebody I don't know. Right.
Exactly. I'm thinking, well, hey, this is whatever. And they may be see your driver's license to make sure you're the guy. I mean, it was not just an ordinary walk into a suite. So we got in and the game there's warm ups and stuff. And I said to Hannah, I'm going to go to the bathroom. You go see when you're a single dad, you got to go into the bathrooms. Complicate. So after a certain day. Yeah. So I had to work that out. Right.
She's been in many men's bathrooms, even though it was 20 something years ago. There's not that today. It may not be anything special, but back then it was quite a challenge. So but we went to the bathroom and we walked out of the suite and there's about 15 guys with them 16 and military fatigues. And I went to the bathroom and there's a guy in there with the M16 standing there. You know, God, I wouldn't have wanted that.
But anyway, so we came back and the next thing you know, we're in the suite. And actually, you know, here comes President Clinton in the suite next door. And it was a complete circus. You've never I've never seen anything like it even still. And I've seen a lot of stuff. It was a complete circus. And of course, the camera focused on the president and I'm sitting in the seat next door to lose a piece of glass, but I'm on the jumbotron next to Bill Clinton.
You know, so that all that was what an experience. It was crazy. This lady and her son, the son was missing. Oh, he didn't have his leg. I don't know the dynamic, but they came down and kind of got right in our laps. And she took her son's leg off to hold it up and show him she was trying to get, I guess, the president to meet her son or something. And I mean, it was just a circus. The whole thing was a complete circus.
And we would watch that they would bring in food and somebody would taste it first before he would. I mean, the whole thing was just crazy stuff. You're that close to the president of the United States like that. Then, you know, like I say, it's a different time now. But anyway, something you'll never forget. Oh, and the women were throwing themselves at him. It was crazy. It was crazy. You know, what year was this again? Or around?
2006. I mean, this is an off year, not an election year, or I guess it's a midterm year. But you know, Hillary wasn't anywhere near him. But these women were like throwing themselves at him. They weren't leaning against the glass. And I mean, it was crazy. It was the biggest circus you've ever seen. All right. Some really silly questions. What would you rather grab a handful of and just shove them in your mouth? A handful of Skittles or a handful of M&M's?
M&M's. Even though I can't really do it. I'm a type 2, do I bet. Popcorn was a choice. It would have been popcorn. That leads me to another one. Food that you love, that you just absolutely love, but you just can't eat it. Or you can't eat a lot of it. Or very often. Probably oysters. Love them. And they're hard to get. And you got to be careful now when you eat them. And you know, so but oysters. When I go to New Orleans, I eat oysters about three out of four meals or something.
So I think we covered it, but we may not have used to run one of the original oyster. Oyster bars. Yep. In Pensacola in the mid 80s. Yep. Early 80s. And there was a there was an oyster bar at Seville Quarter that's not there anymore. Is that right? I think it is. It's just not exactly an oyster bar, but it is there. But I did run that too. That's exactly right. And we had a hot sauce collection. We had a lot of fun. Those walls could talk at Seville Quarter. I tell you.
That's another destination. Again, put Seville Quarter on your list of places to see if you come to Pensacola. Fifty-five thousand square feet. Seven bars under one roof. You'll never have an experience like it, no matter if you come late night, middle of the day, middle of the evening. A lot of people know it as Rosie O'Grace. You may not listen to much music or have a lot of time, but do you have a favorite genre or an artist that you like? I like kind of dance music.
So I like I don't like some of the bad rap. If you turn on the radio right now with what the kids are listening to, do you hate it? Are you OK with it? Or do you kind of really like it? I do kind of like it. I don't like the message that some of today's music puts out. I don't really like that. I don't think it's helping anybody. Last year at Gator Growl, which is the pep rally before Florida's homecoming game, they had Flo Rida.
And that song, whatever it's called, Boots with the Fur, you know, it's not the name of it, but that's the song. That was the most fun. And I was lucky enough to kind of be right up on the stage. And then it was the I've never seen a crowd of people as into it. I'm not a tremendous concert guy. I've been to plenty, but never seen anything like that. That was exciting. And when you're not in Pensacola and you're somewhere across the country, is there a place that you like to visit every so often?
No surprise. New Orleans. I love it. And, you know, kind of followed their Mardi Gras history and their Mardi Gras traditions and some of the things in the city. So I frankly could probably be a Mardi Gras tour guide in New Orleans. Even though I never get to go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, I go either before or after and get to see it because I'm too busy doing Mardi Gras here. Danny, this has just been a great conversation. I appreciate you taking some time.
Taking a lot longer than we thought, didn't we? We just got going and it didn't stop. Let's hope people pay you by the minute to listen. Right. Well, everybody, please check out Pensacola Mardi Gras. If you are looking to purchase real estate, commercial real estate, Danny is... Yep, or residential. Our team, we do it all. He's part of Team Zimmern and that's Tonya Zimmern on the residential side. Danny is head of the commercial side.
Guys, remember, when you're out there day to day, keep your eyes open, keep your ears open. You're probably around people that you can impact and you just don't know it. So if you're playing sports, if you're in some activity group and somebody looks like they need a hand, they need someone to listen to them, they need someone to give them a push, and you can be that person, be that person. All right, that's it for Dan time this week. We'll see you next week. Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Danny.