Anna Maria Island success stories are sometimes love stories, too.
Here, at this sweetest time of year, are three couples who have left their marks together in the sand and on the books.
Chuck and Dara Caudill of Holmes Beach are a wedding dream team — he gets people moving on the dancefloor with his music and she captures the good vibes in her photography.
Before they combined forces in artistic pursuit and love, they had a meet-cute that is emblematic of Manatee County — who needs a wingman when you have a wing-manatee? And not just any manatee but Snooty, who set a record for being the world’s oldest of his species in captivity.
While Chuck has spent most of his life in Florida, Dara moved from Ohio in 1991 to work as a stockbroker. Her firm organized a fundraiser every year, which is when Snooty and a need for a new tank at what is now the Bishop Museum of Science and Nature came into the picture. Being a music lover, Dara secured the talent for the fundraiser — she hired Chuck’s duo, the Tropicats.
It took some time for them to officially start dating.
“She comes out and walks the beach a lot and I’d see her,” Chuck said Feb. 2.
The fifth time was the charm for their relationship.
“I called him, and I was at work, and I said ‘Are you in for raising funds?’ We had a different fundraiser every year,” Dara said.
When Chuck responded, “Oh yeah, it’s my annual chance to flirt with you!” she put him on hold and shared the flirtation with coworkers.
That hold didn’t last long.
Throughout their relationship, they developed their own language to help each other out in their pursuits. Sometimes, the now-married duo said, all they need is a look across a room for Chuck to know how to time out a music set or come out with a second lens to provide backup shots for Dara’s photography.
What they enjoy most about their work is making lasting friendships with couples getting married under the strumming of Chuck’s guitar and the clicks of Dara’s camera, and then see those marriages evolve into families and children.
With such a love story of their own, it isn’t surprising they help others make memories.
The Shooks spread love
The Rev. Charlie Shook and Lois Finley Shook cut a recognizable silhouette against the sunset.
Over many years on Anna Maria Island, the married couple has been involved in a stunning amount of beach weddings.
They met while Charlie was serving in a church in Cincinnati and moved later to southwest Florida, where he eventually settled at Longboat Island Chapel on Longboat Key and earned the title of minister emeritus.
It wasn’t until Charlie’s retirement, though, that they really became busy.
“I was a minister over all those years and all the churches I served over 40 years, I may have had 500 weddings,” Charlie said Jan. 29. “Then I come down here, retired, looking for things to do, and in the space of two and a half years I had 2,500!”
When asked how many of those she helped out with, Lois said with a laugh, “Oh, about 2,500.”
“Usually, I just got him there,” said Lois, widely known on AMI as the owner of the former Mama Lo’s By the Sea ice cream shop in Anna Maria.
They reminisced on the certain amount of free-spiritedness that accompanied officiating the destination weddings, which added color to their lives.
They recalled one afternoon when Charlie got carried away reciprocating Lois’ role as his assistant working as a waffle cone wrapper at Mama Lo’s.
Charlie remembered, “The phone rings and the voice says, ‘This is the best man, were you planning to come to the wedding?’”
By the time Charlie arrived at the wedding, the sun had gone down.
“Fortunately,” he said, “they had discovered Jack Daniels and the power of the margarita. So when I got there, everybody was mellow.”
In 2003, friends and family gathered to hear Charlie’s deeply resonant voice, a desirable fixture of the many weddings he presided over, performing a self-written song, “When Love Comes Your Way,” for his own bride.
Murphy-Timmins feed our love
For Holmes Beach residents Sean Murphy and Susan Timmins, arriving on the balmy shores of Anna Maria Island 45 years ago was the aperitif that set off the taste of success for their award-winning restaurants and enduring life partnership.
Originally from the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, they met on a romantic sailing ship called the Bluenose.
Perhaps the wind that filled its sails was a sign of adventures to come, as a southward breeze of wanderlust then took them to Central America, after which they lived in New Orleans.
“Restaurants were a natural thing to work in,” Susan said Jan. 26 about the variety of service jobs they held during their backpacking and traveling days.
They found their latest destination when they followed friends from New Orleans to Longboat Key.
Here on AMI, working on a shoestring budget, they opened the Beach Bistro in Holmes Beach, which quickly earned awards and a Zagat-rating.
Improvisation was characteristic of their early approach to getting their project off the ground.
“I don’t consider myself in the food and beverage business. I’m in the theater business,” Sean said. “All the world’s a play and all the men and women merely players.”
With the sunset as their backcloth, the two rotated roles from night to night. One evening he would maitre d’ and she’d work the room and then they’d switch.
Eventually, Susan started focusing more on desserts, having grown up baking with her mom and her grandmother, and on bookkeeping, because it allowed her to spend more time at home with their children.
Sean maintained a presence in the restaurant, where he continued perfecting the art of customer service as an offering of escapism and entertainment.
As writers of their destiny, perhaps it isn’t surprising that their current establishment, The Doctor’s Office, sprang from an anecdote involving Susan pleading for Sean to go to a real doctor after an incident with brake fluid and an old car.
Sean saw potential in the little building and the adjacent garden space he visited that day to get his injury checked out, which would blossom into the lively spot it is today.
Although Susan is less involved with the new venture than she was with the bistro, the entrepreneurial pair continue to follow a winning formula, finding ways to delight those around them with a graceful and exquisite experience, as if, like when they had arrived all those years back, they are seeing it for the first time.