By Willie Howard
OCEAN RIDGE — Flip Traylor made a living on the water around Boynton Beach most of his life. The Ocean Ridge resident loved fishing, music and his two West Highland white terriers, Dobbie and Duff. The former pilot, boat captain, real estate broker and commercial fisherman died March 1 at the VA Medical Center in West Palm Beach following a long battle with skin cancer. He was 86.
Philip Bryan Traylor was born in a bridge tender’s house in July 1929 — three months before the stock market crash that led to the Great Depression — in Deerfield Beach, where his father, Burt, was working.
While growing up in Boynton Beach, Mr. Traylor fished for food and sold fish to help his family make ends meet. He fashioned a fishing rod from a piece of bamboo, its wire line stripped from the windings of an electric motor.
He and other boys dug clams from a small island on the north side of the Boynton Inlet, now known as Audubon Island. During the winter, his father gathered oysters from the west side of the Lake Worth Lagoon where the Palm Beach Yacht Center is located today.
“We had no money, but we had fish, oysters, clams and sea turtles,” Mr. Traylor said in a 2014 interview.
Mr. Traylor attended high school in Key West, where he learned to play the drums and began to peddle his musical talents in bars. Seeing her son working in bars didn’t please his mother, who sent Mr. Traylor away to Brewton-Parker College in Georgia.
He attended the University of Florida in the 1950s but ran out of money and returned home to work on the many charter fishing boats that ran out of the Boynton Inlet. He met his wife, Barbara, in the mid-1950s at the South Ocean Club, a live-music club near Lake Worth Beach. “He liked to jitterbug,” Barbara Traylor said, recalling the many nights they went dancing at the Boynton Woman’s Club.
Fishing became a thread that connected many parts of Mr. Traylor’s life.
After a wealthy man asked Mr. Traylor to run his boat one summer, he spent 20 years working as a private boat captain — a job that led him to billfish tournaments in the Bahamas and inspired him to become a pilot.
After his employer’s death in the 1970s, Traylor became a real estate broker, selling resort property in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
Mr. Traylor worked as a commercial fisherman. He headed out the Boynton Inlet before sunrise on his 24-foot boat, MLB (My Little Boat), in pursuit of kingfish as often as the weather permitted, even after his body had withered from the effects of skin cancer.
“There’s a hell of a lot of kingfish off Boynton Inlet that are breathing a sigh of relief,” friend and fellow boat captain Dr. Charles “Buddy” Moore said following Mr. Traylor’s death.
“People will remember him with his straw hat and his Levis and suspenders, as a fisherman,” Moore said. “He was a philosopher, a well-read, kind, intelligent man.”
Friend Arnold Stroshein said he and Mr. Traylor were both in their early 20s when they served as escorts for women from Chicago who were visiting The Breakers hotel. They eventually learned the ladies were in a club for exceptionally tall women.
“They were all a foot taller than we were,” Stroshein said.
Friend and fellow commercial fisherman Kim Morrison said he was impressed with Mr. Traylor’s ability to keep fishing after treatments for skin cancer left him rail thin and nourished with a feeding tube.
“He fought the best fight I’ve ever seen,” Morrison said. “He needed a rest.”
Mr. Traylor’s fishing buddies planned to spread his ashes on the Atlantic — along with the remains of his two dogs — in March.
Mr. Traylor is survived by his wife, Barbara; sister Mary Ann Wilson of Lakeland; daughter Pam Anwyll of McLean, Va.; son Greg of Boynton Beach; granddaughter Ashton Krauss of Ocean Ridge; a great-grandson; and several nieces and nephews.
A memorial gathering for Mr. Traylor is scheduled for noon to 3 p.m. June 5 at the Boynton Woman’s Club, 1010 S. Federal Highway. Those planning to attend have been asked to RSVP by sending an email to panwyll@verizon.net.
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Comments
Flip was my neighbor across the canal for many years. I remember waking early each morning to the sound of the MLB starting up before dawn. He always had a smile and a friendly wave. When he returned home my kids would run to the seawall yelling, "Here comes Captain Flip!
We fished together once for Kingfish and I marveled at how he wrapped his index finger with a piece of rubber inner tube, then slipped his hand inside a cotton glove. Laying his flat line over the protected finger he would stand at the transom of the MLB and rhythmically sweep his arm back and forth jigging the hook that trolled about 10 meters behind the boat as we slowly cruised along the empty beach.
He showed me how to make Kingfish lures from strands of colored nylon rope - dark colors for overcast days, light colors for when the sun shined.
Flip was not the tragic character in Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea but his love of the ocean and his pursuit of fish, he called it hunting for fish rather than fishing, were to me as Hemingwayesque as any sportsman I have ever known.