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Imagine that we could put Ybor City into a time machine and go backward, before the bars and tattoo parlors, before the prior generation of bohemian artists and writers, before urban renewal and the awful gash left by Interstate 4, back to an era when you still might walk down Seventh Avenue from shop to shop to buy your meat and your fish and your Cuban bread for your family.
If we could take that trip, and keep track of the changes up and down that street over the years, there still would be a constant, a steady link with the present day: the S. Agliano & Sons Fish Co., at 1821 E Seventh Ave.
Buster Agliano, grandson of founder Sebastian Agliano, no doubt could have sold this site long ago for a healthy profit and moved elsewhere. But he was loyal to the memory of his longtime customers, loyal to the tradition of his own family business, and perhaps above all, loyal to Ybor City.
"He is one of the old-timers of Ybor City," says one of Agliano's closest friends, former City Council member Charlie Miranda. "There was no need for businesses back then to have a contract, a lawyer. If they shook your hand or gave their word, that was the contract."
Ask people about Buster Agliano and you hear the same things over and over: That he stuck it out in Ybor City, that there was never a straighter-shooting man, and that he was an astute student of politics precisely because he stood to gain nothing from politics himself.
The storefront on Seventh Avenue saw just as much politics as it saw fish. It was known for the famous shoot-the-breeze sessions in which Buster presided over informal gatherings of lesser and greater politicians, who knew he would pull no punches with them.
"We used to go there to shoot the breeze in the morning, and talk about each other," Miranda recalls, ticking off a list of current and former judges, mayors, county commissioners, congressmen and Tampa celebrities.
"It's just part of a landmark that is no longer available any more."
Clay Phillips is a former district director for U.S. Rep. Jim Davis, D-Tampa. He remembers Davis taking him to meet Agliano for the first time: "I'm thinking, this is our biggest guy, I'd better mind my Ps and Qs."
They walked in the front door of the old fish market and there were maybe four, five lonely pieces of fish on ice in an otherwise empty case. Phillips thought to himself, "Oh my God, if this is our biggest guy, we're in trouble."
Not until his next visit, when he visited the back door, did Phillips see the fillet knives flying, and all those trucks lined up to haul fresh fish all over the city. The wholesale business had long before become the main enterprise. Buster felt he had to keep up the front case out of, you know, a sense of obligation.
"Most people who are political folks, you run into them at a restaurant or bar, because they're going out to see people," Phillips says. "Buster, all he did was open up the shop and on Saturday morning, everybody would come by." Nobody was too high and mighty for him to address plainly. "If you were a politician, you had to get ready for Buster to give you a hard time - especially if he liked you."
E.J. Salcines is an appeals-court judge, an authority on Tampa's heritage and a veteran of Tampa's political boiling-pot. He says one significant thing about Buster Agliano is that unlike many sons and daughters of Ybor City and West Tampa, he pursued his higher education (University of Florida) but then came home to take up the family business.
"Rather than quit Ybor City when things were getting dark and gloomy, Buster stuck it out, and urged people not to leave and keep their business there," Salcines says. "He was very faithful and loyal to history, and to the Latin roots of Ybor City. He has to go down as one of the giants of preservation."
Patrick Manteiga, editor and publisher of the trilingual newspaper La Gaceta, agrees with all those assessments and more. "He is a man who wielded some power," Manteiga observes. "But you would never know it."
Back in 2002, Buster was diagnosed with cancer, and he fought gamely for a good while. He turned 69 in February. Here is an odd thing about our society, that we so often wait until after the fact to say the good things there are to say about a person, when we ought to say them today.