Shark fisherman Frank (Louis) Mundus died 10 September 2008 of a heart attack. Born in Long Branch, New Jersey, on 21 October 1925, he lived on a lemon tree farm in Naalehu, Hawaii, but he will be remembered as the Long Island shark fisherman who was the inspiration for Captain Quint in Peter Benchley’s Jaws. That inspiration is almost universally acknowledged, except by Benchley himself, who died in 2006, but who claimed Quint was “a composite character.”
Mundus’s extensive web site claims he was the inspiration for Quint, but also says of the 1975 movie Steven Spielberg made of it: “It was the funniest and the stupidest movie I’ve ever seen because too many stupid things happened in it. For instance, no shark can pull a boat backwards at a fast speed with a light line and stern cleats that are only held in there by two bolts. And I’ve never boiled shark jaws. If you do, you’ll only end up with a bunch of teeth at the bottom of your bucket because the jaw cartilage melts.”
This extensive New York Times obituary details his life, and how he became a shark fisherman, expedition leader, and the “Monster Man”. The shark which grew into the legend that became the monster in the book met Mundus in 1964. At the time, he “already had two sharks hanging on the side of his boat and a third on the hook. Then he spotted a huge one alongside. ‘I harpooned him and he took off for the horizon,’ he told The Daily News in 1977. ‘Before I got him, I harpooned him five times. A white shark. A killer. He was 17 and a half feet long and 13 feet in girth and weighed at least 4,500 pounds. The biggest ever caught.” After that, Benchely was a frequent passenger on his fishing expeditions.
Mundus wrote two self-published books: Fifty Years a Hooker and White Shark Sam Meets the Monster Man.
Mundus is survived by his second wife, Jeanette Hughes (they married in 1988); his sister, Christine Zenchak; three daughters from his first marriage, Barbara Crowley, Theresa Greene, and Patricia Mundus; five grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. His first marriage, to Janet Probasco, ended in divorce.