- November 23, 2024
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Jim Bradley is such a fixture in the community that people have even stopped at his stand and tried to vote on election day.
Everybody knows “the hot dog man.”
Drive west and you’re bound to see his tents standing tall in the Sears parking lot, at 4888 W. Palm Coast Parkway, decked out with flags and signs. Get closer and you’ll hear the clanking of wooden chimes, maybe the croon of a Frank Sinatra song from a portable radio nearby.
Every weekday, Jim Bradley, 76-year-old owner of the stand, arrives at 9 a.m. to set up and read the paper. By 11, he’s in business. And at 2 p.m., he takes everything down and loads it back into his van.
After 14 years, it has become a ritual.
“When I first came here, it was not about the money for me,” he said, wearing dark glasses and a brown apron with “Jim” embossed in its center. “It was about time (and interactions). … Then, when my wife passed away about four years ago, it was even more important.”
What everybody might not know about Bradley, though, is that he does more than sell Nathan’s hot dogs. He also collects donations, in an assemblage of jars by the mustard and relish packets, for causes like the American Legion, the Police Athletic League, the American Cancer Society and greyhound-saving initiatives.
Every three months, he presents checks to local charities. Since October 1998, he has donated $40,055.
“Eh, it’s customers’ money,” Bradley shrugged, taking a seat on one of a few folding chairs set up beside his cart. “I’m just the facilitator.”
And that’s true. The jars situated on his tables are all labeled — “The Disadvantaged,” “Boys & Girls Clubs,” etc. — but Bradley is modest. Not only has he been featured in the history book “Images of America: Palm Coast,” published in 2003, but in a lot of ways, his tent has become a city staple, a kind of center-of-town bulletin board on which any in the community can promote their companies or goals.
Want him to display your business cards? No problem. Running for office and hoping to fly an election sign? Sure.
If you’re a customer, Bradley will support you. And his tents have become so decorated that some have even mistakenly come there to vote in the past, he says.
“A lot of people know me,” he smiled, after an SUV pulled up and jokingly asked for free hot dogs, claiming a friend sent her. That was after a campaigner for Sheriff Donald Fleming visited to talk signage and another couple walked up to say hi and talk about old New York, where they, and Bradley, grew up.
Squinting toward the sun, Bradley said, “I’m very blessed.” He raised his eyebrows. “Very healthy, very fortunate. I don’t take any medications. … I’m lucky.”
He’s also got pinups hanging in his tent from publications that don’t even exist anymore, like the Palm Coast Courier.
Bradley and his tents have outlived them.
“All I have is Social Security keeping me alive,” he said. With the profits he makes from the stand, though, he finds enough leftover to occasionally help out his grandkids. He is also a Eucharistic minister at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton church and participates in the Knights of Columbus and other groups.
“It keeps me out of the house,” he added. “If I can make a few coins, to take a trip or whatever, then great.”
Since opening, Bradley hasn’t raised the cost of anything. Hot dogs are still $1.50. Drinks are a buck. Chips are 75 cents.
He likes to keep things stable, which might explain why he has bought the same tents 13 times, each after they got roughed up in Florida summers and storms. And back when he used to fish, before opening his stand in 1998, he never used to keep any of his catches for trophies or wall mounts.
“I’m a throwback guy,” he said. “Catch and release.” He has the same attitude toward the funds he collects at his stand.
In an effort to busy himself after a career in grocery distribution, Bradley has woven himself deep into the fiber of Palm Coast. Whereas he says he used to run for cover whenever it rained, now he stays put. He gets to work and waits for the storm to pass. He “hangs out.”
“We’re born to die,” he said plainly, in reference to his late wife. “It’s the way it is. … But I’ve always felt like I was blessed — to have this spot, to be here, to do something.”
