He bought a $10,000 organ right there on the spot. Jackie Gleason came in one day to see what that was all about. “I used to advertise that you could play the organ with one finger. He put music in everyone’s home including every big star there is,” they wrote in an email to the Miami Herald.
His granddaughters Jeanna and Christina proclaim Tibaldeo an “incredible businessman and generous man. “He went into his first business getting lilies out of ponds with his rowboat and selling them to people with palms in their yards. “Dad went to the bank, got a $75,000 cashier’s check, and told his wife, ‘We’re moving to Florida,’” DiRaimondo said. The grateful owner asked Tibaldeo if he wanted to buy the store, too. When a customer came in looking for an organ, Tibaldeo demonstrated one of the instruments. He popped into a piano store, run by an older gentleman who was ready to retire. Tibaldeo opened Victor Pianos & Organs in Miami after one of his annual vacations. Tibaldeo and Victor’s were one and the same - Miami institutions. I want to help the children who are learning now,” Tibaldeo told the Miami Herald in 1995. “When you talk to Miami Cubans, everybody’s grandmother is a piano teacher. Many exiles - pop stars the Estefans, among them - had been customers at Victor’s. In 1995, he helped a California piano tuner who wanted to donate pianos to Cuba. How could he say no to the Jackson 5 and lead singer Michael Jackson?įor the neighborhood kids, he was also known as the kind man who bought them ice cream and handed out dollar bills at the same time. “We’re doing a show at the Deauville and need a grand piano and a B3 organ delivered there. Once, at closing time in the early 1970s, five young men and an older man, presumably their father, strolled through Victor’s door and approached Tibaldeo with a request. “He would close up shop at 5, go home and have dinner, and change into his gold lamé suit and go to the Fontainebleau and play to 3 in the morning with Frank and Sammy Davis Jr.,” DiRaimondo said.
Tibaldeo put those skills to good use years later when he backed Sinatra at the singer’s gigs at the Eden Roc and Fontainebleau hotels on Collins Avenue. She bribed all the neighbors with her home cooked food and they let him go.” “His grandmother was a fabulous Italian cook. “They didn’t have AC and when you’re playing Beethoven and Bach for 14 hours a day you will get complaints,” his daughter said. In the 1940s, his parents bought him his first nine-foot Steinway at a Manhattan showroom for the aspiring concert pianist to practice. He played the instrument for the “Howdy Doody” children’s television show and for Miami’s Channel 10 in its early days. He mastered the accordion, built by hand by his father from the wood in the kitchen table, and won contests playing in accordion bands with Horace Heidt. Bush, a Class of 1948 Yale University graduate. Tibaldeo, born June 18, 1923, in New Haven, was, alongside President George H.W. Now it’s DiRaimondo’s turn to run Victor’s and vows to keep the flagship store in Liberty City open.
is now a popular DJ at Miami’s Club Space. Daughter Camille, a Broadway actress, was Victor’s New York agent. The only time his family ever saw him cry, his daughter and granddaughters say, was when he saw his great-grandson Hunter for the first time.Īlways a family business, from its roots in 1939 New Haven, Connecticut, when Tibaldeo’s musician father ran a music store, a Tibaldeo offspring had always manned the counter at Victor’s.
0 kommentar(er)
