Throwback Thursday — ‘Time to Look Forward’

“Are you contemplating a ‘good ole summertime’ vacation?” asked a letter to customers of the Wavecrest Motel and Apartments in anticipation of the summer of 1961, which was personally signed by the resort’s owners, Franklin and Lucille Jarmain, as well as their children. “Now is the time to look forward to that special week or big holiday weekend in Montauk.”

The resort offered sunbathing on the “Sea Breeze” private beach, free cocktails and dances, play areas for children, a picnic area, even movies — according to a 1958 newspaper article, outdoor screenings once inspired the owner of a neighboring motel to threaten “massive doses of Italian opera in the evenings.” Over the years — decades, really — there came to be at various times an indoor/outdoor swimming pool, a coffee shop, a cocktail lounge, the Sea Witch restaurant, tennis courts, babysitting services and swimming lessons, even accommodations for conferences and other corporate events.

The owners of the resort were Lucille and Franklin Jarmain. Lucille, who was originally from Brooklyn, had been attracted to Montauk through an ad for the Mirror Development in Hither Hills, according to a profile by Albert Holden in his 1978 Montauk Almanac.

Lucille and her mother and 9-month-old son drove out in an underperforming Dodge in 1940 and bought land, built a house in 1942, then built another one, “the Jarmain House,” for Lucille’s use in 1948.

Motels in Montauk were still few and far between, so overflow guests from the Montauk Manor were sent to the Jarmain House to stay, leading Lucille in 1952 to buy more real estate (including properties from such local stalwarts as George Andrade and Mary Wood) and in several stages build the Wavecrest Motel and Apartments in Hither Hills and downtown Montauk.

Also included was the Jarmains’ own “Tower Apartment” with its “elevator and open look,” Holden said, adding that “the view from all sides is breathtaking.” The base of the octagonal glass “wheelhouse” served as a reception office, and its crescent-shaped roof, appropriately enough, resembled a wave.

“Every Friday night, the Jarmains invited select hotel guests for cocktails,” Lynn Stayton-Eurell, an employee in the 1970s, wrote in her Montauk Unspoiled Facebook blog. “Lucky guests rode a private elevator up to sing songs with Lucille around Guy Lombardo’s piano, which had come from the Montauk Manor. Every Friday we employees would wonder who was invited to the cocktail party.”

In addition to developing other properties, Lucille was president of the Montauk Chamber of Commerce and an energetic booster of tourism in Montauk, working in particular on behalf of motel owners in the 1960s. Along with the Chamber, she also led a successful movement in the 1970s to establish a medical facility in Montauk, forming a realty corporation to purchase the brick building once occupied by New York Telephone and today by the Meeting House Lane Medical Practice.

“She was the greatest president the Chamber ever had,” said the late Rose Ball Mackay, a friend, fellow businesswoman, and local personality in her own right, in an East Hampton Star obituary for Lucille, who died in 1985.