Frank Mundus has bit the big one. Mundus, a high school dropout who began running his own boat, the Cricket, out of Long Island's Montauk Harbor in 1951, achieved pop-culture immortality when word got out that he was the real-life inspiration for the character of Quint, the low-rent Ahab created by Peter Benchley in his novel Jaws and played by Robert Shaw in the 1975 Steven Spielberg movie that invented the modern concept of the summer blockbuster. Mundus, who had heard the call of the sea while still a teenager, said that his reputation as a shark hunter began as "a joke": he happened to snare a shark while out fishing one day and decided to post a sign advertising "Monster Fishing." His legend grew after he harpooned a shark estimated at seventeen feet in length and a weight of 4500 pounds. This was back in the days when Peter Benchley was among the customers who chartered his boat, though Benchley always denied having had Mundus or any one person in mind when he created Quint. Mundus, a lovably salty self-promoter, was just as quick to insist on the resemblance, saying of Benchley, "If he just would have thanked me, my business would have increased. Everything he wrote was true, except I didn’t get eaten by the big shark. I dragged him in.” Those knowledgeable in the arcane ways of the deep will tell you that not getting eaten by the fish you're trying to kill is the true test of a master seaman, one that the fictional Quint, for all his sea-chanty airs, flunked spectacularly.
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