Pirate Sales Catch Wind
Many like to credit Johnny Depp’s inimitable turn as Captain Jack Sparrow for bringing back pirates. We, however, would like to point some fingers at Mark “Cap’n Slappy” Summers, John “Ol’ Chumbucket” Baur and Dave Barry — yes, that Dave Barry.
See, Summers and Baur like to talk like pirates, and in 1995, they dedicated a day–September 19–to doing so and selected Barry as the day’s spokesperson. When Barry found out about his role, he wrote a column about it. The buzz grew, and the duo officially launched Talk Like a Pirate Day in 2002–a year before the first Pirates of the Caribbean film was released.
“To be a pirate captain, you have to be an entrepreneur,” says Thomas “Blackbeard” Downey, a leatherworker in San Jacinto, California, who sells his hand-crafted belts, eye patches, gauntlets and baldrics through his website, at Renaissance and pirate fairs, and to retailers. He’s got a point. After all, isn’t a boss the captain of his own business, supervising a crew of seadogs, throwing any scurvy-ridden bilge rats overboard should they dare to call in sick?
Perhaps one of the more surprising success stories in the pirate world is Talk Like a Pirate Day. It’s simple and fun, yet it’s unlikely anyone could’ve predicted the day would become such a phenomenon. Gonzalez says that when he first started working at Pirates N Plunder, about one out of 10 customers had heard of it; now, he says, one of out 10 haven’t heard of it. And along with Halloween, it’s his busiest time of year.
For Summers and Baur, the day has helped them step out of the mundane. While they’re still working at their day jobs, the founders have been interviewed by media from all over the world and have written a book, Pirattitude!: So you Wanna Be a Pirate?: Here’s How! (with a forward by Dave Barry to boot), and two e-books. Baur’s family even appeared on Wife Swap, and his wife received her own book deal after the show aired.
Photo by runtotheocean.net.
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