Greenwich Day: How We Celebrated the Founding of Greenwich in the 60's.

When I was growing up in central Greenwich in the '50s and '60s Island Beach was our beach. Make no mistake, we loved going to Tod's Point (now known as Greenwich Point) but that was far away when you were too young to drive. We could walk to the Island Beach ferry. On Greenwich Day we ran to the ferry.

Greenwich Day was a townwide party promoted by Sam Pryor. If you saw the Leonardo DiCaprio's 2004 biopic about Howard Hughes, 'The Aviator,' Sam Pryor was one of the PanAm lobbyists portrayed.

On Greenwich Day the two ferries, The Island Beach and The Indian Harbor, ran packed to the gills with over-excited chidren and families equipped to spend a fun-filled day on the Island.

Competition was in the air. Running races on the beach, swimming races and diving competitions from the low and high diving boards were the morning events. The Boys Club organized boxing matches with boys flailing at each other wearing gloves that sometimes seemed bigger than the boys wearing them were held in the afternoon in a champion-sized outdoor ring.

If you didn't bring a picnic, hot dogs, hamburgers and fried clams were available in the canteen. For adults there was a fully-stocked bar, which I recall being full of men with a few younger women mixed in the crowd.

Celebrities were also invited to attend. I remember Ernie Kovacks cracking jokes and Edie Adams, famed as far as I knew for singing "The minute you walked in the joint..." in White Owl cigar commercials. My brother recalls Duke Kahanamoku, the Hawaiian father of surfing, blessing the fleet anchored about the Island casting flowers to the waters.

One of the highlights I recall was being able to go aboard a WW II era submarine anchored nearby. Seeing the reality of how cramped crew quarters were, I rethought my plan to become a submariner based on films like "Run Silent, Run Deep" and "Operation Pettycoat", which is probably not the impression the Navy wanted to make on impressionable youth. I also recall touring a destroyer escort, but that may have been connected with the America's Cup race when my Dad was commodore of the OGYC.

One final impression of Greenwich Day was the various hues of people's skin as we waited to board the ferry for the trip home. This is not a racial comment; I recall the crowds as diverse and multi-racial. Rather it is a comment on skin care in the '60s where people used tanning butter, baby oil, even olive oil, for "deeper, richer tans" as the ads used to say. I recall tans that ran the gamut from ebony to ivory with more than a few lobster red and painful even to look upon. Most of us in those days aspired to deep, dark tans. The tired, happy crowds waiting to board the ferry reflected their time and place, which is gone but not forgotten.