"Tony "Monk" Cassata may be the most famous Memphian that people here never knew. Most people living here in the 1950s,1960s,1970s, and beyond had heard stories about the odd little fellow that everyone called Monk. Perhaps some of you had encounters with him. But nobody really knew much, if anything about him: his real name, his background, where he lived. Our own magazine actually published a profile of this fellow back in 1979, written by my pal Susan Turley, and it was one heckuva interview since Tony Cassata - yep, that was his real name - had plenty to say, all right, but not many things that actually made sense. In fact, the story was rather cryptically titled "Who is this Man?: The Secret Life of Memphis' Most Visible Eccentric". ~Vance Lauderdale, Memphis Magazine 2007 "You could find him bundled in four or five wool shirts on days when the blacktop is hot as a skillet," wrote Turley. "And you can find him bent over his walking stick, an oversized baseball cap cocked on his head, a stub of a cigar protruding from his small, furrowed face, tapping on car windows". Monk, whom Turley said stood less than four feet tall, claimed to walk 50 miles a day, selling pencils, magnolia blossoms plucked from neighbors' trees, whatever he felt like doing. One reader recalled first seeing him in the late 1950s: "We called him 'Monk' because he looked like a monkey". The name stuck. Turley determined that Cassata was born in Italy in 1905. Despite rumors that he lived on the streets, every night he walked home to a neat bungalow in Midtown, where he lived with his brother and sister, who didn't want their names mentioned in the magazine article. When Cassata was growing up, he "always seemed a little bit different, "they told Turley. "He's slow, but he's not dumb, "said his sister. He speaks two languages, English and Italian, so he can't be that slow". Her explanation for her brother's layers and layers of old clothing? "He gets cold". Turley followed Monk around for an afternoon, but the man who would spend his days standing in the middle of Poplar shouting at cars clammed up around the reporter. He supposedly was an expert on baseball, but at the end of the day, she admitted, "We really know little more about Monk than we did three hours before." That's a shame. The fellow she called "an eccentric constant in a faddish universe" passed away some time in the early 1980s. Or so I heard. I couldn't find an exact date, and something tells me Monk wouldn't have cared, anyway. Tony Cassata was struck by an automobile on October 10, 1970 and died shortly afterwards." (historic-memphis)
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