Edition: U.S. / Global

Honorary Avaiator Tends Blue Angels Shrine

Published: May 21, 1997

In the cool of the morning, before even the first of the daytime drinkers enters his ramshackle bar on Palafox Street, it is just Martin Weissman and the angels.

The angels, Blue Angels, peer down from hundreds of photographs tacked to the walls, all clean-cut, confident, smiling young men in flight suits, men who pose beside their lovely, dangerous planes. The old bar is a shrine to all aviators, but especially the Angels, the Navy's precision flying squadron, based here, that has thrilled and terrified air-show audiences for 50 years.

''It's natural to love guys who take chances,'' said Mr. Weissman, the elderly but spry owner of this world-famous aviators' bar, Trader Jon's.

Since he opened it in 1950, he has been like a father to these pilots, the Navy's best. He has flown with them, again and again, delighted, like some very old child on the grandest playground swing in the world.

Their relationship has outlived wars, has witnessed the change from propeller planes to jet engines, has even outdistanced the lives of some of the men whom he loves. They died in wars, in mid-air collisions, other ways, and here and there in the bar there is an empty flight suit, or a sentiment scribbled on a black and white picture by a dead man's hand.

Of the thousands of mementos that decorate this place, where pieces of wing hang from the ceiling and a giant tail fin adorns the scarred bar, it is those reminders of fallen angels that are most precious to an old man who turned a place to buy beer into a home for generations of pilots.

On one wall, past the pool tables where a civilian is drinking whisky straight up, is a golden flight suit hanging from a wall. The name patch reads ''Harley Hall,'' who led the Blue Angels in 1970 and 1971. He befriended the old man, or the old man befriended him. When he left, he left his suit, about the most precious thing a pilot has to give.

''In 1973, he went to Vietnam,'' Mr. Weissman said, standing underneath the suit. ''The day the war was over, he was shot down. Never been found. It wasn't right.''

The face in the nearby picture is strong, intense. All of them look that way.

''It's hard to believe anything like that would come apart,'' the old man said.

He feels the same old sadnesses when he looks at Skip Umstead, who died in a mid-air collision in 1974. There are 12 in all, pilots of unusual reflexes and abilities who died from a twitch of the controls or a lucky shot, or other things. ''Not too many. Twelve. In 50 years,'' he said, considering the dangers. Then he moves quickly along the walls to the ones still alive, the ones he can look at without it breaking his heart.

''He is flooded with memories,'' said Lieut. Comdr. Milton J. (Gus) Goss, United States Navy, retired, who flew Corsairs in World War II and taught a baseball player named Ted Williams how to fly. Commander Goss, who frequents the bar, carries a sack filled with magnolia blossoms, and hands them out to the pretty women.

''I've been everywhere and I've done it all,'' the former carrier pilot said. ''The only thing is, I can't remember it,'' and he smiled.

''But he's the legend,'' he said, of Mr. Weismann, whom most people call by the name of the bar, Trader Jon. ''I'm honored to know him.''

Martin Weissman, who is 82, is as much a puzzle, a peculiarity, as the bar, where hundreds of model planes dangle from the ceiling by fishing line and old pilot helmets rest on a back bar. The Blue Angels are just part of this display, which includes photos, patches and paintings, from officers and enlisted men. They come to drink and talk jets, mixing with local people, listening to the blues.

Locals bring him their paychecks to cash. Pilots bring him a photo, or a patch or a small present, and take their place on the wall, in history. This has been the way it has been for almost 50 years. Some of the things left are a little puzzling, like the wooden statue of the South American headhunter who holds aloft a severed head.

Mr. Weissman works the bar most every night. Last week, he ate pork and beans out of a can with a spoon and explained how it all started.

He has loved to fly, since he was a boy on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. When he joined the Army in the late 1930's, he volunteered for the paratroopers, 36th Infantry.

He stepped from the plane and flew, for a few precious seconds.

''It was beautiful,'' he said.

Landing, he had trouble with. ''I got hurt,'' he said, simply, and acknowledges that it is why he now walks in a kind of hurried limp, like that very old child that he is.

He has always been a bar owner, first in Manhattan, then in Key West, finally here, after the end of World War II. Word got around at the nearby naval base that the old man was friendly to fliers, to sailors.

''You got to earn their love, their friendship,'' he said. He found them to be like young men and boys anywhere, homesick, fearless in the sky but a little afraid on the ground. The pilots were tense, looking for someone to share their burdens. Mr. Weissman was a good listener.

They adopted him as much as he adopted them, and he has seen their characters faintly shift, especially the Blue Angels. Each team has had 10 members, and he remembers them all. In the 1950's and 1960's, they were more prone to swagger, to drink whisky. ''Loose,'' he said. ''Fancy free.''

Now the young men seem much more a part of their highly technical aircraft. They drink beer. They are not swashbucklers, but triggers. If anything, they are more tense. The way Mr. Weissman sees it, they need an auxiliary family, a listener, a home away from home, more than ever.

They repay him with a ride in the clouds, a few times a year.

''I've never been afraid,'' he said.

He concedes that now they take it easy on him, with no loops or dives.

He flew himself, once, as a private pilot, but he has not been physically able to fly for a long time.

The Blue Angels made him an honorary flight leader some years back, but it is the rides he cherishes.

Among the mementos on the walls is a patch that was worn by an astronaut on the space shuttle. He acknowledges, sadly, that it is one flight he is just too old to make, now.

''But,'' he said, ''wouldn't it be great?''

Photo: Martin Weissman, owner of Trader Jon's, a Pensacola, Fla., bar that honors aviators, showed visitors flight memorabilia. His fond relationship with the Blue Angels, the Navy's best pilots, has survived for decades. (Lee Celano for The New York Times)