Beechview man loved golf and music
July 16, 1923 - Jan. 14, 2017
Joe Bonadio, an unassuming golf expert and musician from Beechview who lived in a humble house his father built on one of the steepest streets in the world, seemed to have lived a Forrest Gump-style life.
Everywhere he went, he and his friends said, he crossed paths with giants in the worlds of golf, jazz and baseball: Arnold Palmer, Ben Hogan, Dizzy Gillespie, Henry Mancini, Mickey Mantle.
Those who knew him said he was special because of his kindly demeanor and desire to learn.
Even at age 79, he took up the flute after reading about the Pittsburgh Flute Club. He soon became a fixture at the Pittsburgh Flute Academy in Oakland and later traveled to flute conventions around the country.
“Joe became so involved with the flute in his retirement that we started calling him ‘our Joe,’” said Wendy Kumer, director of the academy. “He was very gentle, never pushy. There was no artifice. He was just an avid learner.”
He had attended a flute rehearsal on Jan. 7 and then went to a Downtown play, where he had a heart attack. He died at the hospital a week later. He was 93.
A welder and electrician by trade, Mr. Bonadio’s real passions were golf and music.
In his younger years, he worked on the railroad and spent his winters in Florida as a golf pro at various resorts. Friends said he knew big-name golfers in the days before players became celebrities with entourages. He was well-known in the local golf scene, too. Among his projects, he helped Wynn Tredway, millionaire founder of River Forest Country Club in Freeport, develop the club’s golf course and worked for many years for the Tri-State Professional Golf Association.
In an oral history, Mr. Bonadio said he started playing golf at the suggestion of Max Adkins, his saxophone teacher and the leader of the pit band at the Stanley Theater. Mr. Adkins thought Mr. Bonadio was too stiff and muscle-bound from his cement-mixing job and said golf would loosen him up.
“Max said to me, ‘I’d like you to take some golf lessons,’” Mr. Bonadio said. “He said it would give me flexibility so you won’t grab the instrument like you’re a bull in a china shop.”
Mr. Bonadio took up golf and became skilled enough to teach and promote the sport in Florida, where his job repairing cars for the Pullman Co. took him every year. In those days, he said, he also played golf with some of baseball’s stars during spring training, including Mickey Mantle and Ted Williams.
Mr. Bonadio, who served in the U.S. Merchant Marine in World War II, had visited the New York jazz clubs at war’s end in 1945 and saw the era’s top performers. He later met them at the Stanley Theater and Crawford Grill back home. He said he even gave Dizzy Gillespie a golf lesson once behind the Crawford Grill after a show.
Born in 1923, Mr. Bonadio grew up with three brothers and six sisters in the house his father built in 1903 on Canton Avenue, which is tied with streets in San Francisco and New Zealand as the steepest in the world.
He attended Connelly Vocational High School, and when the war began worked to build LSTs at Dravo Corp. He signed up with the Merchant Marine in 1943, sailing tankers. On one trip to Scotland, he said, his ship was hauling gasoline and P-51 fighters when German planes attacked and machine-gunned the deck. But nothing blew up, he said, “so we were very fortunate that we escaped that.”
Stationed in New York after the war, he visited clubs on 52nd Street and at one, the Red Door, heard Coleman Hawkins playing the sax. “And so I said to myself: Man, I sure like the way he plays,” Mr. Bonadio recalled.
Back in Pittsburgh in 1946, he bought a sax and began lessons with Max Adkins. He studied until 1948, when he got drafted into the Army in the buildup for the Korean War. He ended up at Fort Knox, Ky., where he played in an Army band.
He said he once went to see the great Pittsburgh trumpet player Roy Eldridge at a Louisville club. After the show, he said, Mr. Eldridge gave him a ride back to his base in the “green hornet,” his Cadillac with fishtail fins. When they got to the base, he said, Mr. Eldridge smoothly defused any tension with the security gate guard.
“Roy tips his hat to him and he said, ‘I’m Mr. Bonadio’s chauffeur. Is it OK for us to come in?’”
In Pittsburgh after his war service, Mr. Bonadio began making his trips to Florida, joined the PGA and took golf training courses. “I even got to practice and play with Mickey Mantle while he was in spring training with the Yankees,” he said. “He could hit the ball a mile, both leftand right-handed.”
Mr. Bonadio devoted himself to the game in Florida and Pittsburgh. He also apparently made some investments in Florida real estate. He never married or had children and lived frugally in the same Canton Avenue house, but he may have been wealthier than he appeared. On trips to Florida, Mr. Bonadio would point out real estate he said he had purchased, including lots in Sarasota, property on an island and rental property next to McKechnie Field in Bradenton, where the Pittsburgh Pirates practice.
“I spent time with him in Sarasota,” said Dennis Darak, former president of the TriState PGA. “He took me around and showed me property he owned. He had bought it from Major League Baseball players when they left. I think people would be surprised [at what he owned].”
The city of Pittsburgh in March 2014 honored Mr. Bonadio with a proclamation marking March 4 as Joe Bonadio Family Day. The following year he was inducted into the Italian American Sports Hall of Fame.
Visitation is from 2 to 4 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. Wednesday at Brusco-Falvo Funeral Home in Mount Washington. A funeral mass will be held at 10 a.m. Thursday at St. Catherine of Siena Church in Beechview.