Miami Herald

February 20, 1983

ARONOW STILL GOING

FULL SPEED AT 55

ERIC SHARP- Herald Boating Writer

A few years ago, boatbuilder Don Aronow ran one of his speedboats past Alan Brown's Donzi shop and washed one of Brown's boats completely out of the water and onto the dock.

Brown took revenge by getting a pistol and shooting out all the lights at the back of Aronow's boat yard next door.

Aronow's carefully plotted retaliation against his old friend, former employe and rival began when a cohort signaled that Brown was standing on the dock. Aronow came ripping down the canal in one of his new Magnum boats at 70 miles per hour, trailing a huge wake and wearing a monstrous grin.

"He cut the throttle and threw the wheel over to wash me down with the wake," Brown recalls. "The only problem was that the throttle was broken and the boat never slowed down. The last we saw of Don, he and the boat jumped the seawall and disappeared into the woods at about 50."

Aronow, The Herald's 1983 South Florida Boater of the Year and the man who almost singlehandedly created the offshore powerboat boom, doubles over with laughter when reminded of the story.

"Oh, God, yeah," he says, a huge grin seaming his craggy face like the lines on a road map. "But did they tell you about the time a kid got a new jet-powered ski boat, and his dad asked me to test it for him? Well, we went out in the bay and came back down the canal here, doing 65, 70 m.p.h., with about 50 or 60 workmen from a couple of boat factories watching us.

"I decided to show off and go right down to the end at full speed, then spin it in a circle. When we got to where I was going to turn, I cut the power. I'd never driven a jet boat before, so I didn't know that without power you can't steer the damned things. There was a piling right in front of us with a seawall next to it, and I couldn't miss 'em."

The eight-foot-wide boat looked considerably worse for wear after Aronow made it fit through a five-foot-wide opening. He then drove the sinking craft over to the stunned crowd, hopped out and told the boat's owner, "See, kid. I saved your life. That boat's dangerous."

On another occasion, Aronow called the office and told his employes to send a trailer to pick up his Donzi at a public marina. When someone casually mentioned that the marina in question was a hard place to find a space to tie up a boat, Aronow answered, "That's no problem. The boat's up in the parking lot."

The ability of Aronow, who has won the world offshore powerboat title twice and the American championship three times, to laugh at himself also has made him one of the best-liked people in the boating industry. But it is his immense energy, acumen and capacity for work that has made him one of boating's most successful businessmen.

A small empire

Northeast 188th Street is a short street in North Miami Beach, four-tenths of a mile long and unpaved for one-third of its length. You can't even reach it directly. If you're coming north on Biscayne Boulevard, you have to turn on NE 187th Street to get to it.

It is along this unpretentious stretch of road -- still largely lined with Florida scrubland and concrete block and pre- fab buildings -- that Aronow founded and sold five companies that bear some of the hottest names in high-speed boating: Formula, Donzi, Magnum, Cigarette and Squadron XII.

"I never built a boat for the public," Aronow says. "I designed them for racing, and for myself. I was never in a position financially where I had to worry about whether the public would like it.

"To me, speed is the product of beauty. Look at the Concorde. To me, that's magnificent. The lines of speed made that airplane beautiful. They didn't have to do anything to make it look better. And we didn't have to jazz up our boats with hardware. They were beautiful because they were fast."

Aronow has sold Cigarette to a New York Firm called Integrated Resources. He was included in the deal as a consultant, and the sales contract limits him to building boats over 60 feet, under 24 feet, and those that use a surface effect system (similar to a hovercraft).

His office in the Cigarette complex in Miami is homey and comfortable. A built-in bookcase and shelves are filled with dozens of silver cups, plaques and bowls, racing trophies that are tarnished and dusty and obviously receive no care whatsoever. Aronow and his boats have won so many races that the silver bowls are nestled four and five deep, and they are only a fraction of the original number. He has given away trophies literally by the dozens.

Adorning the walls are ceramic lions and elephants, ship models in glass cases, and oil paintings and photographs of his latest passion, horse racing.

"I could always sleep comfortably the night before a big boat race. I'd just get in the boat and feel good and go. But it's so different with the horses. Before a race, I can feel my heart palpitating. I'm not light enough to ride, and it kills me. I guess it's because I'm in a situation where I don't have complete control."

His Aronow Stables at Ocala houses 60 horses, and he has started an ambitious breeding program that he says will net him 15 farm-produced two-year-olds at any given time.

"I'm trying to run it the way I run a boat business, to control everything ourselves. We have our own stud now, and we don't have to go outside for anything. I'm still claiming horses, but pretty soon we'll have enough of our own that we won't have to claim."

Last year, Aronow had a horse named Victorian Line that was a Kentucky Derby contender until he cracked a leg. This year, his Derby prospect is called My Mac. My Mac won the Tropical Park Derby in January, and the next big test is the Florida Derby March 5. But even if his horses never reach the Kentucky Derby, Aronow points out that the horses, which he bought for $30,000 each, have earned him more than $360,000 in prize money.

On the social scene

Four years ago, Aronow married the former Lillian Crawford, then a model for the Wilhelmina agency in New York whom he had met through a mutual friend, King Hussein of Jordan. Her father, James Crawford III, was a famed blue-water yachtsman and ocean racer.

Aronow says his wife is "a pretty good little athlete" who ran her own 16-foot Donzi from Palm Beach to New York when she was 16, long before she met the man who built it.

"We met in Palm Beach," he says. "She was going through a divorce, and I was going through a divorce, and we just kind of hit it off."

While the rough edges have not been entirely scraped off, Aronow has become a prominent fixture in the Palm Beach and New York social set. He has homes in Southampton, Long Island and New York City, in addition to his South Florida residence.

Aronow has four children, three from his first marriage and one from his second. His oldest son, Michael, is a horse trainer in New York.

"My kids range from 33 to 3," says Aronow. "Michael is doing real well as a trainer. He doesn't work for the Ocala farm, although he has trained horses for me."

Michael is in a wheelchair, the result of an automobile accident while he was a 19-year-old University of Florida student.

"Mike was like me, kind of a wild kid," Aronow says. "He and a friend were going to see a couple of girls in Tennessee at the time, and they crashed at 100 m.p.h. The other boy was killed."

He shook his head and said, "All those years, I never took my kids in a raceboat with me. I was afraid they'd get hurt during a race and I'd have to slow down. Then Michael gets badly injured in a car wreck."

Reckless abandon

Aronow himself has survived numerous wrecks in boats, cars (hot cars and vintage autos also are passions of his), and motorcycles (he has wrecked three of them.)

While discussing the latter, he points to a scar near his left eye and says, "There's my last motorcycle accident, last year. I hadn't been on a bike in years, and Lillian decides she wants to ride one. So I say, 'Well, I'd better test it before you get on it. So I get on and ride around near the house, and by about the third time around I'm getting pretty cocky again and going faster. Then: Wham. Down I go on some sand." It took 52 stiches on his face and 32 on his body to repair the damage.

Ironically, Aronow insists that "I'm not really a boater. I don't even own a boat right now. I really don't care much about going for pleasure cruises."

"Jim Wynne's a boater, and Dick Bertram's a boater, guys that know about knots and docking and stuff like that. But I'm a racer and a builder and an experimenter. I've tested every new boat myself, and I love the competition."

He has achieved something with his boats that is the ultimate mark of success: As Xerox has become a generic term for all copying machines even though there are numerous other brands, so has Cigarette become a generic term for the offshore speedboat.

And every time some drug smuggler is caught in what is described as "a Cigarette-type boat," Aronow simply grins, realizing the truth in the old saying about not caring what they say about you as long as they spell your name right.

Besides, he knows that stories about police and customs officers who track down smugglers will talk about the officers' "Cigarette-type boats," many of which have been seized from the bad guys.

Donald Joel Aronow, 55, is the product of a middle-class upbringing in the Sheepshead Bay region of New York City. He says he was "something of a juvenile delinquent" until he was 17, when he began attending King's Point and Brooklyn College "and I had to deal with adults on an adult basis."

He earned a degree in education and taught for six months in a junior high school but quit because "I just couldn't make a living at it. I had a wife and a kid by the time I graduated from college, and teachers weren't paid anything."

In college, he picked up extra money buying and selling war-surplus equipment, especially marine gear, but he would handle anything that could turn a profit. He once bought an Army surplus bulldozer in the Bronx and had to deliver it to Brooklyn at the other end of New York City. Aronow sidestepped the usual problems of getting such a monster delivered; he went to an Army surplus store, bought a set of fatigues and GI helmet and drove the thing through city streets.

Aronow then went to work for the construction firm owned by the family of his first wife, Shirley, and learned the business. He then struck out on his own, putting up housing developments and shopping centers at a pace that made him a millionaire before 30 and sent him into retirement at age 32, mostly as a relief from what had become a boring job.

Fast crowd

He moved to South Florida, where he fell in with a fast- moving crowd of gamblers and boat racers. Offshore racing in those days was an incredibly rugged sport, one in which macho determination was more important than skill. Rocky Marciano, the world heavyweight boxing champion, once decided to go along for a race from Miami to Nassau and back. At Nassau, the bruised and bleeding boxer crawled out of the boat and refused to get back in, flying home later that day.

Aronow started racing in 1962 in a deep-vee boat designed by Wynne, but those early deep-vees were a far cry from today's offshore powerboats. The deadrise on the hulls was not great enough, and the boats were so short that riding in one in a big sea was like doing 50 miles an hour in a car that was being dropped from a height of 10 feet or so five times per minute.

It was late 1963 when Aronow started the Formula Boat Co., which initially was a tax dodge to finance a new 23-footer he had Wynne design for him. That boat proved successful, mostly because it was strong enough to withstand Aronow's brutal, push- it-till-it-breaks style of driving.

Brown, now located just down NE 188th Street from Cigarette as president of the rival Cougar Marine USA, remembers running a race in the Houston ship channel with Aronow when the latter started Donzi Marine in the mid-60s.

"We could do maybe 65 m.p.h., and the race included hydroplanes and GN boats that would do over 100," Brown says. "We were running way back in the pack, a half-mile behind the leaders, when we crossed Galveston Bay. Then we came up on three tugboats and a couple of oil tankers. All of the other boats came off plane when they saw those huge wakes. Don never brought the throttle back an inch. By the time we crossed their wakes, we were a half mile ahead."

Aronow soon began designing boats himself, and in 1969 he came up with a 32-footer that he called The Cigarette, after a Prohibition era rumrunner. It was a brute of a boat and was virtually uncontrollable (a year later he sold it to two Australian friends, brothers Val and Paul Carr, who were killed when they turned it over at 70 m.p.h.).

But it flew in big seas, ripping through six-foot waves at nearly 80 m.p.h. in an era when 70 was fast on flat water. If you could keep the deck pointed upright, nothing could touch it. That was the year Aronow earned his second world championship by winning eight of 11 races, a string of victories that stood until 1977, when there were many more races in which to compete.

Aronow's go-for-it attitude brought him plenty of setbacks along with racing victories. It took three years before he realized that he was losing races he might have won if he had not insisted on keeping the boat going full speed no matter what the sea conditions. In another race, the boat was taking a horrible beating when Brown, who was riding along as navigator, said, "You know, we can still win this even if we back off a little." Aronow stared at him for several seconds, grinned, and then shoved the throttles wide open. That time, the boat held together.

Before a race in Italy, Aronow's longtime friend and mechanic, Knocky House, ran up and said the Italian dock workers had refused to lower the boat into the water unless they received a bribe. Furious, Aronow ran down the dock, looked back and yelled, "Is this the guy, Knocky?" When House confirmed that it was, Aronow delivered a right-hand punch that knocked the crane operator into the water. Aronow then climbed into the cab of the crane and lowered the boat himself.

Aronow and his cohorts also had highly inflated opinions of themselves as ladies men. Four of them once made a bet. They each put $100 into a kitty, and the money was to go to the first man who could pick up a girl in a local bar and get her to leave with him.

"Well, we went into the bar, and we each picked out a good- looking girl and started talking to her. Then I saw Aronow come in," recalls one of the competitors. "He looked around, picked out the ugliest woman in that bar and sat down next to her. Five minutes later, he whispered something in her ear, and they left before the rest of us had finished our first drink."

Larger than life

Aronow is one of those people commonly described as larger than life. You can almost see him vibrating with energy. He is extremely restless, toying with pencils and papers when on the telephone. When he walks, shorter people have to scurry to keep up with his powerful, 6-3, 210-pound frame.

Aronow's top priority now is his Surface Effect Ship, which really is a surface effect boat, a 45-foot tunnel hull that uses a 170-horsepower gasoline engine to lift the boat off the water by blowing a cushion of air underneath. Then two 400-horsepower gas engines turn twin No. 3 Speedmaster outdrives to drive the boat at 60 m.p.h.

"This would make one hell of a pleasure yacht," Aronow says as he stands on the big yellow boat, obviously already envisioning such craft skimming over seas from South Florida to the Mediterranean. "And can you imagine what kind of houseboat it would make. You could build these up to 110 feet long. Power them with diesels. I think this is the big boat of the future, although you still can't beat a deep vee for real rough water."