Can you believe that the Montauk Fall Festival – now a highlight of Columbus Day weekends, boosting a “shoulder season” just as the Montauk Chamber had hoped – is approaching its 45th birthday? The festival started in the 1970s as a Chili Cook-Off, according to Diane Hausman, who was a newbie in the early… Read more »
After Ruth Woodrow died in 1983, Bessi Hochstein wrote a letter to the East Hampton Star describing her memories of boarding at Mrs. Woodrow’s cabins in Shepherd’s Neck. “The first time I was in Montauk was early spring, 1979, the year before I entered college,” she wrote, “I came, like hordes of others my… Read more »
Either the people on this dock are going home pitifully empty-handed after a fishing trip, or else they have just landed in Montauk on a ferry after visiting New York or New London. We think it’s the latter, and that the era could be the 1920s, when the Montauk Steamboat Company and then its successor,… Read more »
In an oral history interview in 2005, Stuart Vorpahl reminisced about Montauk’s historic fishing village on Fort Pond Bay, its former open grasslands, the travails of fishermen in severe storms, the heartbreaking “Pelican” disaster, and how World War II transformed the lives of many residents. Stuart, who died in 2016 at 76, was too young… Read more »
What do all these photos have in common? A couple of hints. Think of one’s dismay at seeing a receiver dangling uselessly inside – a pretty sure sign of malfunction. Or think of one filling with rising water while Agents 86 and 99 struggle desperately to get out. The phone… Read more »
Where were you in 1976? Did you get to witness the nation’s jubilant Bicentennial celebrations – all the tall ships and parades and Revolutionary War reenactments? Were you terrified by the release of the movie Jaws – and among the crowds who gathered on the Montauk docks to gawk at the massive creatures? Were… Read more »
A ghost from Montauk’s history perched on an inexorably vanishing shore – this painting depicts the McCaffray/Rheinstein windmill on what was known as Sandpiper Hill. The work most likely was painted by William A. Rogers in the 1930s. It came into the family of Harold Hone, who purchased property nearby in Ditch Plains in… Read more »
On the corner of Main Street and Carl Fisher Plaza, White’s Pharmacy was a magnet for Montauk kids in the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. For starters, it had a soda fountain and a great view of any action that was going down in town. “What the liquor store is now was Dick White’s drug store,”… Read more »
Montauk’s first Blessing of the Fleet – born as the “Blessing of the Boats” – was in 1956 and the brainchild of Vinnie Grimes, a charter boat captain and Navy veteran who’d seen Portuguese tuna fishermen blessing their boats before they headed out to sea on the West Coast. “It is an old European custom… Read more »
One of seven children, Sarah (King) Tuthill was sent at age 6 to Montauk to live with Loretta Dickinson, a friend of her mother’s who lived in “better circumstances” and had indicated that “she would like to have one of the girls.” In an oral history interview in 1967, when she was 81, Sarah… Read more »