by Dave Briggs

1. Takter said his number one fear is snakes, followed by heights. “I hate snakes… I hate heights. I worry a little bit about our trip to New Zealand because I don’t like heights (and there’s a lot of mountains).”

2. His favorite band is Pink Floyd. “If you put me onto a desert island and I could only pick one band to listen to it would be Pink Floyd. I think they are great musicians. I’ve seen them twice, actually I just saw Pink Floyd once and I saw Roger Waters during the tour he had a couple of years ago. It was awesome. They made the record called, The Division Bell and it’s unbelievable.”

3. He likes to relax by detailing his car, power-washing the house or barn or painting things, said friend Perry Soderberg. “He likes to paint things, like race bikes. He stripes them, paints them, out in the garage. He likes his quiet time to do those types of things,” Soderberg said.

4. He once shared a bed with Frank “The Elder” Antonacci. “It was in Pocono or someplace,” Antonacci said. “There were no hotel rooms. There was one hotel room left and my dad had to sleep with my brother and I had to sleep with Jimmy. We tease each other all the time about that.”

5. The Antonaccis fired Takter after he set a 1:57.2 world record at Yonkers with their horse Sir Taurus in 1984. “We were really prepping the horse for the Hambletonian, not that he would’ve won, but people remember he set a world record in Yonkers two weeks before the Hambletonian and that got Jimmy fired,” Antonacci said, laughing. “My father and him were very close, so I tease Jimmy all the time that we paid for all his mistakes. My dad probably fired him two or three times.”

6. Takter has palm trees on his New Jersey farm sitting beside the man-made lake that features an island with a miniature Statue of Liberty. The palm trees can’t survive a New Jersey winter and have to be brought into Takter’s basement every autumn until there is warmer weather.

7. He used to listen to a lot of news while driving his car, but switched to music because news, “makes you depressed. I’m a positive guy and when people talking negativity, I hate that. Negative people, I don’t want to have around me. They draw too much energy out of you. You’ve got to have positive people around you.”

8. He said he’s a barbeque master.

9. He said he’s also a master at B.S.