Tony Trutanich’s parents, Martin and Mary, were Croatian immigrants who settled in a house on 15th St. in San Pedro after originally coming to the port city of Tacoma, Washington in the early 1900s.
Anthony Andrew Trutanich was born on Nov. 29, 1922. As a young man, he worked in the commercial fishing industry in San Pedro during the summers while attending San Pedro High School.
After graduating from high school in 1940, he attended Compton College, but left school to enlist in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. He trained as a lead flight navigator and flew on combat missions for two years during the war.
He earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and a promotion to first lieutenant for his work aboard the B-17 bomber “Lady Luck,” which conducted bombing raids during the D-Day invasion on June 6,1944. He would go on to win an additional four Oak Leaf Clusters for his other missions before the end of the war.
After returning to San Pedro, he gave working in the commercial fishing industry another shot, but decided against making that his life’s work. He worked in real estate for a few years before finding his true calling, which involved preparing fish instead of catching them.
On March 1, 1952, he opened his first seafood restaurant, Tony’s Cafe, in a small building on the Redondo Beach pier. It soon became known more specifically as “Tony’s on the Pier,” and also became known for specializing in serving a wide variety of seafood dishes.
The male employees wore Hawaiian shirts, and the females wore sarongs. The drink of choice was the Mai Tai, served in a free souvenir glass.
In 1956, the specialty of the house was the Shore Platter, which included lobster, swordfish, scallops, shrimp and filet of sole, according to Daily Breeze restaurant writer Marge Finken.
In 1960, Trutanich hired a waitress named Jean Mays. He married her three years later, adopting her two children to go along with his two children from his first wife, Doris. He and Jean later had another child, Tony Jr. All five children worked in the restaurant at one time or another.
Tony’s proved to be a popular Redondo Beach gathering place, but it had a limited amount of space in which to expand. When the room reached its limit, Trutanich had the novel idea of adding onto it vertically.
On June 10, 1965, a new cocktail lounge called Top O’ Tony’s officially opened above the original Tony’s restaurant.
The room was built on four 65-foot-high pilings sunk 25 feet into the ocean floor and had seating for 50 people. Besides the drinks, its main selling point was (and still is) “an unobstructed view from Point Dume to Point Vicente,” according to the Daily Breeze.
Four years later in 1969, Trutanich expanded once more, this time opening a second restaurant across the way from the original Tony’s that he called Tony’s Fish Market. (It contained an actual fish market inside.)
Roomier than the original, it proved to be a very popular lunch site. Its official name is almost a trivia answer among locals, who call the original “Old Tony’s” and this new second location “New Tony’s.”
The restaurants have survived several catastrophic events over the years. These included powerful storms that pounded the Redondo coastline in 1952-53, 1982-83 and 1988, and, most notably, a devastating fire that destroyed parts of the pier on May 27, 1988.
The fire started beneath the Breakers Seafood Restaurant, destroying it and sweeping through the northern portion of the pier. The Tony’s locations to the south survived the blaze, unlike The Edge and Breakers restaurants, which were destroyed.
The disastrous fire led to a period of contentiousness between Trutanich and the Redondo Beach city government. Trutanich would go on to claim that businesses on the pier never fully recovered from the 1988 fire, claiming that the city’s slowness to repair the damage caused a serious drop in business.
The city opened the rebuilt portions of the pier in 1995, seven years after the blaze.
In the early 2000s, Trutanich began to suffer from symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. In March 2007, his health took a turn for the worse. With family members at his bedside, he died at 84 at his Rolling Hills Estates home on April 12, 2007.
After closing the restaurants on the day of his burial only, family members and his wife Jean continued to run the restaurant, telling Daily Breeze reporter Kristin Agostoni that Trutanich would have been upset about any closure of the restaurants.
On April 12, 2008, exactly one year after his death, family members, friends and civic leaders gathered for the unveiling of a bust of Trutanich to be placed in front of “Old Tony’s” restaurant in his memory. The statue is currently on display just inside the front door of Old Tony’s.
Tony’s Fish Market, aka “New Tony’s,” closed in November 2008, but Old Tony’s and its upstairs cocktail lounge continue to serve customers.
Tony’s survived perhaps its most devastating crisis when it reopened on June 8, 2020, after the Covid epidemic had caused its closure three months earlier in March.
Sources:
Daily Breeze archives.
San Pedro News Pilot archives.
Tony’s on the Pier website.
Torrance Press-Herald archives.
