BRADENTON BEACH – The hurricane-displaced grave marker for an infamous and beloved Bradenton Beach dog, Buddy Lee, was recently discovered on Egmont Key and returned to his former owner and “dog mom,” Claudia Lee.
Buddy Lee was well known on Bridge Street and beyond for his wandering ways that brought him to his favorite watering holes and other locales in Bradenton Beach and Longboat Key.
After Buddy passed away on Nov. 5, 2018, a memorial marker was placed in the front yard of the Third Street South home Lee and Rip VanFossen lived in at the time, just around the corner from the Bridge Tender Inn.
On July 31, charter Capt. Laura King found Buddy’s grave marker on Egmont Key. King owns and operates the Holmes Beach-based Anna Maria Charters and is also a commercial stone crabber for A.P. Bell Fish Co. in Cortez.
In her free time, King and her son, Wilder, take hurricane debris salvage trips to Egmont Key. Among their discoveries is a commercial cooler King later determined came from an ice cream shop in Bradenton Beach.
“There’s so much stuff out there. I should make a lost and found page. It’s not useful stuff but it’s interesting and distinctive,” King said.
“I met Buddy a long time ago and I’ve known Rip forever. I used to work at the Anchor (Inn) many moons ago,” she said.
King texted VanFossen a few days after she found Buddy’s marker. After returning from a scallop hunting excursion, she returned the marker to Lee, a longtime Bradenton Beach resident and decades-long employee at Hurricane Hank’s in Holmes Beach.
“I was so surprised. I’m glad to have it back,” Lee said. “The night before I found out about it, I made him another marker. I was shaking when I heard about this. It’s too strange. I used to say Buddy went on more vacations than I did.”
Because work is currently being done on the house that Lee, VanFossen and Buddy used to live in, Buddy’s marker now hangs inside Lee’s home in a residential unit on the Bridge Tender Inn property.
When contacted by phone, VanFossen said he now lives in Melbourne after spending nine years living on a bridge-less island similar to Jewfish Key and located between Melbourne and Sebastian, where he did a major remodeling job on his sister’s house.
“We had to take a boat back and forth,” he said of his time living on that east coast Florida island.
When discussing Buddy’s marker and the journey it took, VanFossen said, “Isn’t that a hoot? We can’t get rid of him. He keeps finding his way home. He went underneath the Cortez Bridge and the Manatee Bridge and out to Egmont Key. Laura texted me and said, ‘Does this look familiar?’ I said, ‘Yes, that’s definitely Buddy’s grave marker from the yard.’
“At one time, Buddy knew everybody on the Island and everybody knew that dog; but now I don’t know if there’s anybody left. It’s a great memory of the little guy though,” VanFossen said.
A 2018 story about Buddy Lee’s life and passing can be found online here.
