I first came to St. John in 1972 for a 2 week visit and stayed for 5 years! A good friend of mine from college, Gerry Singer was living there with his family. He had a successful commercial fishing business and offered me and another friend Dave Isenberg a job as working partners.

We thought about it for about 5 seconds and said “sure! Why not?”

It was nice work!

We’d be out at the crack of dawn (usually) and be in with our catch by 10:30 a.m. Gerry had a good reputation and loyal clients so we would sell our entire catch by noon or earlier. Plus we ate Real Good! Lobster omelets, lobster and grouper salads grilled yellowtail, red snapper and so forth.

After the Singer’s moved to Hawaii I knocked around and hung out till I ran out of money. At that point the realization came that I had to get a job, or … My friend Dave chose to go back to New York.

Rodney Varlack - 1975 photo by Hannele

My job interview went like this-I spoke with Rodney for about 20 minutes. He asked about my life before moving to St. John-we spoke about music, what kind of activities I liked and so forth, just basically chatting. I asked him as many questions as he asked me. At the end of our conversation, he says to me, “Danny, I’d like you to be one of my tour guides and drive a safari bus. It would be good for you to learn the history and culture of the islands, plus you are educated and speak well so I think that you’d be good at this as well.” My response was “that’s great Rodney, but there’s one huge problem. I hear it’s very hard to get a taxi license unless you or your mom are born here.”

Just then someone says , Danny, this is what you do-go to Motor Vehicles and say I lost my license-they’ll say what kind of license and you’ll say taxi license and –it worked! I drove tour buses for about a year and enjoyed the work. {to be continued}