Neighbors: Joe Bondi

An old picture of two little girls and a little boy posing in a tree is taped on Joe Bondi’s vacation home refrigerator. The photo is one of many Bondi family photos taken on Longboat Key’s beach. Bondi, wearing a short-sleeved Hawaiian button-down shirt, points to these joyous photos that depict his now grown-up children as youngsters enjoying the same beach on which he grew up.

As a little boy, Bondi visited Longboat Key during the summer months.

If the name Bondi has a familiar ring to it, it is because it also belongs to Pam Bondi, Florida’s attorney general known for busting pill-mills in high heels and suit jackets. She is the eldest of Bondi’s three children.

“To see her in this powerful position and argue before the Supreme Court seems a little surreal,” he says. “She’s still our little Pam.”

He and his wife, Patsy, have three children. There’s Pam; Beth, who was the youngest elementary school principal ever appointed in Hillsborough County; and Brad, an attorney in the Northeast.

Patsy and Joe Bondi both grew up on the Gulf Coast and met in Tampa.

Patsy is a retired kindergarten teacher. Joe taught at the University of South Florida from 1965 to 2003 and still does a little consulting for school improvement projects. He’s also written 25 textbooks. Bondi served as a city councilman and followed the position with two, two-year terms as the mayor of Temple Terrace. He was responsible for building City Hall, a library, a family recreation center and a police department during his terms.

“I did it all in four years without raising taxes,” he says.

But on this day, he reclines in a La-Z-Boy near a window overlooking the beach. There’s a stack of books on the coffee table he’s working his way through. He’s relaxed and resembles a man on vacation. Bondi comes here to “get away and write,” from his other home, in Temple Terrace.

“This beach is near to paradise as anywhere else in the whole world,” he says.

Bondi talks about the suummer days he spent growing up on Longboat’s beaches during World War II. He and his best friend, Tommy, were “like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer,” he says. They used to disappear for hours at a time playing with turtles, fishing, swimming and romping around on the shores.

Bondi remembers when mullet boats would drag in their nets and litter the beaches with thousands of flopping fish. Bondi and his friend would come running, buckets in hand, to help pull in the nets. The fishermen would give them first dibs on any non-mullet “trash” fish, and Bondi’s mom would cook them up.

“Twenty years later, I looked out and saw one (mullet) boat,” Bondi says. “I got my son, got a bucket and ran down the shore. I got to re-live the past (with him).”

The Bondi kids visit Longboat Key every year, renting the apartment above their parents. The picture on the refrigerator represents what Bondi refers to as “their own little corner of the world”: three generations of Longboat Key beach Bondis enjoying their favorite home away from home.