|
By PENNY FLETCHER
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
 At 54, Bill Francis is still doing what he’s always done: working with comics, bands, divas and entertainers of all kinds.
Retirement just didn’t work for him.
Now the lifestyle director for American Land Lease based in Clearwater, Bill covers the company’s 19 communities in an area between Ft. Myers, Orlando and Ocala but keeps his main office at Ruskin’s Riverside Club on Stephens Road.
His job entails pulling in talent for shows which is part of what he has done his whole life while working in New York and other areas of the country.
“I tried to retire,” he told me in an interview last week. “But my wife is a flight attendant. She didn’t want to stop working. After awhile, there was only so much golf I could play.”
So Bill went back to what he had done since childhood. He found work in the entertainment industry.
Penny Fletcher Photo
Bill Francis, lifestyle director for American Land Lease based in Clearwater, covers the company’s communities in the area between Ft. Myers, Orlando and Ocala and works out of American Land Lease’s Riverside Club in Ruskin. His job entails pulling in talent for shows which is part of what he has done his whole life while working in New York and other areas of the country.
When Riverside opened 2-1/2 years ago, Bill came out of retirement gladly and used the contacts from his former life as owner of Bill Francis Entertainment in New York as a starting place but also went to new areas including Miami and Las Vegas to meet, and sign, new talent for shows along the Gulf Coast.
He started in the entertainment business as a child because his mother liked to sing and his dad, a New York City fireman, had a band on the side.
“I started my own singing career but people began to call me to book other entertainment as well until pretty soon, I started my company and concentrated on that,” he said. That lasted more than 30 years, with him based in New York City, New Jersey and Connecticut.
He even got into commercials, and won a Clio Award along with his friend John Abbott for “Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t.”
But when he and his wife, Renae moved to Clearwater, he sold his company and thought retirement looked good.
“I had been booking entertainment for big Wall Street firms, commodity firms. There was a lot of money for big parties in the 1970s and ‘80s,” he said.
He worked with Rodney Dangerfield, Gloria Gaynor, and all the big disco groups. “It was a wild time,” he said over coffee in his office. “ I learned who wanted an entourage, who didn’t want an entourage, who had to have chocolate in their rooms, who needed a limo and who wanted not to be noticed.”
“I booked everything, weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, private parties, as well as corporate work.”
And that’s how he learned some funny things about people.
He remembers a wedding where the groom, a doctor, left a bride at the altar and then her family didn’t want to pay him. Another wedding where the bride broke her leg doing the First Dance and went to the emergency room, only to come back at the very end of the reception.
At another party, some men had hired prostitutes and he remembers thinking, “my there are a lot of women here,” until he realized what was going on.
Cakes fell over and were reassembled; people were mugged over envelopes of money being passed around at weddings; “things you’d never believe unless you saw them happen,” he said.
“Once, a guy fell over dead during a party and the man who had hired me shouted ‘Just play something’ to distract people but I couldn’t.”
Bill has worked with the Rat Pack, Do Wop groups, comics from the Improv, and knows agents around the world.
It’s comparatively quiet at the Riverside Club and American Land Lease’s other 18 properties, he said. Committees of residents take care of a lot of the details once the arrangements are made.
The shows at the local club are open to the public. The next one is Oct. 9 and will be a dinner theater. The public can call and arrange for tickets through the club office, (800) 889-9804. Or check it out at 2550 Pier Drive, after turning left off U.S. 41 South onto Universal, and right on Stephens Road.
I can vouch for two things you’ll find there: good coffee, and great stories from Bill!
*Perhaps you have something you’d like to share. Or maybe you’d rather tell the community about your favorite charity or cause: or sound off about something you think needs change. That’s what “Over Coffee” is about. It really doesn’t matter whether we actually drink any coffee or not (although I probably will). It’s what you have to say that’s important. E-mail me any time at
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
and suggest a meeting place. No matter what’s going on, I’m usually available to share just one more cup.
|
