Ted Nelson says he could spend hours telling you Jimmy Buffett stories. From their friendship at McGill Institute to days on Gulf Coast shores, Jimmy Buffett and Ted Nelson — “I was always Teddy to Buffett,” he says — surely created memories to last a lifetime. “He and I were close friends in his early life, and we remained friends throughout his life, really until the end.”
Buffett and Nelson’s friendship started in the halls of McGill Institute, Mobile’s all-boys Catholic high school. In 1960, Buffett and Nelson were both freshmen, the former coming from St. Ignatius Catholic School and the latter from St. Mary’s Catholic School. Nelson became the freshman class president and was tasked with making the class poster for the big game.
“The game was Friday night, so I said, ‘Okay, we’ll get a group together Thursday and get it done,’” says Nelson. He recruited a group of artistically inclined students to help accomplish the task. Come Thursday, the only student to show was Jimmy Buffett. “That’s how we kind of started becoming friends,” Nelson says. “I felt like he was somebody I could depend on.”
The pair spent high school weekends on the water and weekday nights hanging out. “He’d be at my house playing his guitar, and everybody’s like, ‘Jimmy, oh no, you’re gonna bring the guitar again!’” Nelson laughs. “He loved to play. In late high school, he started developing this love for playing guitar and music.”
After graduation, their paths diverged as Nelson headed off to the University of Montevallo and Buffett to Auburn University, but they kept up through letters while apart and ended up back together in the Mobile Bay area on weekends and the summers working at the shipyard during time off from college.
Off work, they’d take to body surfing on Dauphin Island. “One day, we were walking on the beach, and he stepped on a beer can. He sliced two toes really badly. I had the fireman carry him over a sand dune to a clinic,” Nelson says. “I always wondered if that ever inspired his lyric about stepping on a pop top.”
At the time, Buffett was playing at the Admiral’s Corner, and Nelson and other McGill friends would often help drum up a crowd for his performances. “We would go around and pick up people and force them to go to the Admiral’s Corner so that he would keep his job down there,” Nelson laughs. Nelson often acted as an unofficial roadie for Buffett’s trips to small venues in Biloxi, New Orleans and surrounding cities.
Even with long stints at college — by this point, Buffett was attending the University of Southern Mississippi — they never lost much time once reunited. “We’d get together and just terrorize the Eastern Shore,” Nelson laughs. “We were pretty inseparable friends during that time.” Buffett was even a groomsman in Nelson’s wedding in 1969.
Careers and families soon took over their lives, but their relationship remained strong. “At one point in Nashville, Jimmy was kind of down on his luck. He had just wrecked his car and didn’t have one. My wife Diana had this beautiful yellow Mustang, and I had a new car. I was headed overseas in the military, so I said, ‘Look, Jimmy, I’ll tell you what. I’m only going to need one car because I’m going off overseas, and Diana has agreed that we’ll give up her Mustang.’” Nelson offered the car to Buffett for $1,000, but the beleaguered Buffett didn’t have the cash. Instead, he offered to pay $100 and pay the rest as he could. Nelson accepted. About a month later, Nelson was in Washington, DC, and got a phone call. It was Buffett. “He goes, ‘Teddy, we got a problem,’” he says. “And I said, ‘What’s the problem, Jimmy?’ He said, ‘Somebody stole our car.’ And I said, ‘Jimmy, that’s your car. You owe me $900.’” The car wasn’t the only thing to have vanished: Buffett’s checkbook was in the backseat. By default, the loan was forgiven. The friendship stayed the course.
In 1974, Nelson came back to Alabama to complete his master’s degree. “I’m just driving down University Boulevard with the radio on, and I hear this song, ‘Come Monday.’ I went, ‘Oh my God, that’s Jimmy Buffett! He made the radio!’ I couldn’t believe it. I was so happy.” As his career progressed, Buffett would send Nelson copies of his albums. “I was so happy for him to have actually made it, because there were times when people weren’t sure that music was going to be his career,” says Nelson. “But my gosh, look what happened.” Nelson continued with school and military work as Buffett’s career took off. “We would get to see each other at concerts,” he says. “Anytime he was doing a concert anywhere in the Southeast, he would get in touch and say, ‘Hey, you want to come to a concert?’” Nelson has happy memories of taking his young sons to watch his high school friend perform on the stages he aspired to back in the day.
Though the years passed, you’d never know it by Buffett’s warm and welcoming demeanor. “One night in 2023, Diana and I were sitting in our living room in Fairhope, and the door flies open. It’s Buffett. He comes in like we were still the same old Jimmy and Teddy, you know what I mean?” They spent the night riding a golf cart around Fairhope and swapping memories and stories from throughout the years. Buffett left the next day.
A few months later, Nelson’s email was hacked. “Everyone in my address book got an email that said, ‘I’m out of the country, and I don’t have any money to get back into the country. Can you please help me?’” remembers Nelson. “Of everyone who got that email, the only person who answered was Buffett. He said, ‘Hey Ted, I know this doesn’t sound like you, but if I can help, I got your back.’” Nelson pauses. “That was the bookend to our friendship,” he says finally, his voice unsteady with emotion. “He died a couple of months later. When he was over here, he never mentioned much about his illness. I didn’t know how bad it was, and he didn’t want me to.
Throughout everything, Jimmy never changed. Despite his celebrity, fame and fortune, he remained the same guy his classmates knew and liked in the early 60s.” Buffett passed away before the 60th reunion of his McGill class. There, Nelson gave a eulogy for his friend to their classmates. “He always kept a young-at-heart attitude, and he wanted everybody else to be happy,” he says. “He brought incredible joy and pleasure to so many people. He created an entire lifestyle out of a lot of the things that happened in Mobile.”
