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Miami Herald February 4, 1987
'GODFATHER' OF POWERBOATS LOVED SPEED
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Don Aronow loved speed. When he died Tuesday, shot at close range on a North Dade street by someone in a car with tinted windows, he had already devoted the last 25 years of his life to racing, first with the speedboats he designed, later with horses. "To me, speed is the product of beauty," Aronow said in 1983. "Look at the Concorde supersonic passenger aircraft. To me, that's magnificent. 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, 59, a boat designer described as "the godfather of powerboat racing," died a fast death, too. Witnesses said someone in a Lincoln Continental laid in wait for Aronow as he left a boat shop on Northeast 188th Street. A few words were exchanged when the gunman suddenly fired five shots at Aronow, sitting in his white Mercedes inches away. Aronow, who almost single-handedly created the offshore powerboat boom, was shot in the middle of a road that was a veritable monument to the man: Both sides are lined with dry docks that store hundreds of the Aronow-designed Cigarette boats. Many of the boat companies had been founded by Aronow. "You can't say powerboats without using his name," said Mike Thaler, who used to do odd jobs around Aronow boat shops. "He is the one who started it all. He is powerboat racing." Like the boats he designed and the racehorses he bred, Aronow led a fast life. He was a friend of kings and celebrities. And he was a hard-driving man who had won the world offshore powerboat title twice. Aronow's boat-racing life, which began after he retired from the construction business in New York and moved south in 1960, was ripe with anecdotes that made Aronow seem larger than life. During an offshore powerboat race off Long Beach, Calif., for example, Aronow collided with a helicopter when a huge wave swelled beneath him, lifting him and his boat skyward and into the bottom of the chopper. Although Aronow was notorious for pulling dangerous pranks, often to harass business competitors, friends said the man's ability to laugh at himself made him one of the best-liked people in the boating industry. "To me, Mr. Aronow had a good heart," said Patty Lezaca, 43, who has worked as Aronow's corporate secretary almost 16 years. "I can't say anything bad about him. He had no enemies." Friends said it was Aronow's immense energy and capacity for work that made him one of boating's most successful businessmen. Along the street where he was shot are some of the companies Aronow founded and sold, bearing the hottest names in high-speed boating: Formula, Donzi, Magnum, Cigarette and Squadron XII. Donald Joel Aronow, who would have turned 60 on March 1, was brought up in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn. After a short teaching career, Aronow went into the construction business, putting up buildings 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. "When he came down here in 1960," Lezaca said, "he bought himself a boat, but he was unhappy with its construction so he decided to design one himself." It was a decision that would make him famous throughout the world. "He started with the Formula," Lezaca said. "Then he founded Donzi, which was named after him, then Magnum. He sold that and started Cigarette," the sleek craft favored by, among others, South Florida drug smugglers. In 1981, Aronow sold Cigarette, the company that produced the boat he designed in 1969 and modeled after a Prohibition-era rumrunner. In 1973, Aronow started an ambitious horse-breeding program. His Aronow Stables at Ocala now houses more than 100 horses, Lezaca said. "They race all over South Florida, as well as at tracks in Kentucky, Ohio, New York and Maryland." Friends were confounded after learning of Aronow's murder, a slaying that looked suspiciously like a planned execution. "It sure sounds like a hit to me," said Ana Barnett, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami. She said she had met Aronow through his work with the U.S. Customs. She said it was ironic that some of the designer's boats were used simultaneously by drug smugglers and the Customs agents trying to snag them off South Florida's coast. "I know he had designed Blue Thunder," Barnett said, referring to the high-powered catamaran designed to catch Cigarette boats. After divorcing his first wife, Shirley, with whom he had three children, Aronow married Lillian Crawford, a one-time model for the Wilhelmina agency in New York whom he had met through a mutual friend, King Hussein of Jordan. According to Lezaca, they had their second child, a boy, just four months ago. |