This week marks the 61st year of Sag Harbor’s annual celebration of local history, now known as Harborfest. The first celebration of the Old Whalers Festival took place in June 1963. This photograph from The East Hampton Star’s archive shows part of the festival’s parade, possibly from 1963, with four men dressed as sailors riding in a whaleboat. Behind them is a car towing a whale float.
One of the men riding in the whaleboat, possibly Ben Menaik (1916-2006), wields a harpoon, and another appears ready to compete in the festival’s beard-growing contest. In the background several businesses are visible, including the polka-dotted Sag Harbor Cinema, R.C. Barry & Son Hardware, and the building that housed Marty’s Barber Shop. The strip of light-colored brick on the far right of the image hints at another favorite haunt for festival organizers, the notoriously rough-and-tumble Black Buoy bar.
While this photo is undated, Nada Barry of the Wharf Shop confirmed it captured one of the festival’s earliest years. Marty Trunzo (1918-2016) opened his barbershop at 66 Main Street in 1965, but the store’s windows do not reveal if Horn Electrical still occupied the building. A more definite date comes from R.C. Barry & Son Hardware, at 72 Main Street, which became Emporium Hardware by 1971.
It is unclear if the sailors in the parade were participants in the whaleboat races that are now a keystone of Harborfest, but those races didn’t begin until 1964. That year, the writer John Steinbeck, a Sag Harbor resident and the Old Whalers Festival’s chairman, described the whaleboat races as “no clocked affair. . . . The winning boat gets the first harpoon in a genuine artificial whale. And if that isn’t an invitation for mayhem, I don’t know what is.”
The early festivals possessed a spirit of creativity and irreverence, captured by Steinbeck’s proposal to stage a “fish beauty contest” when a real beauty pageant became too complicated.
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Andrea Meyer, a librarian and archivist, is the head of collection for the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection.
