HISTORY

The Halloween Yacht Club was founded in 1926 by Commodore Alfred Noroton Phillips, Jr. and 16 other fishermen with small boats.  They acquired several acres of waterfront property and a boathouse by leasing an unused portion of Cummings Park (then known as Halloween Park) from the City of Stamford.  Subject to periodic renewals, that lease is still in effect today.

Phillips was the Club’s founding Commodore.  He was an accomplished sailor who served three different terms as Mayor of Stamford, and was later elected to Congress.

One of the Club members, a local commercial artist, designed the Club’s first burgee to include a black witch riding her black broom on an orange field — Halloween colors. And so the name Halloween Yacht Club came into being and remains to this day.

Additional interesting details of the history of the Club can be found in the book by Stamford resident Ronald Marcus – “What’s in the name …” (Stamford History Center).

A bit of trivia: The Halloween Yacht Club burgee is one of only three yacht club flags that displays a witch. The other clubs are the Salem (Massachusetts) Yacht Club (the witch is an obvious symbol for this historic club’s flag), and the Greenwich (Connecticut) Boat & Yacht Club. The witch on the Greenwich club’s burgee is green (“Green Witch,” got it?).

Halloween Chronicles

When Diane Brantner retired as the Club’s Steward, I spent some time in the office, and happened upon a copy of the Halloween Chronicles. It is a collection of HYC annals, covering, in varying detail, 1926-1991. I heard about the Chronicles from Past Commodore Joe Magyari a few years ago, but he had only a partial copy and did not know where the rest of the document had been stored.

I am a believer that the best way to preserve written history is to share it, so I took the document home and scanned it. The scanner picked up a lot of punched holes, coffee stains and dirt. Plus, since much of the document was typed, the end of almost every line had a word broken and carried to the next line. I decided to use optical character recognition (OCR) and re-edit the document.

I regretted that decision. OCR is amazing technology, but, when it converts a scan into a word processing document, it makes a million formatting assumptions, many of which make the resulting document difficult to process. So, the accompanying edition of the Chronicles through 1991 represents my best effort in the time I could give to it. Fonts, line spacing, and other specifications vary. We still have the originals, so someone else can take a crack at this in the future. Meanwhile, we have the SUBSTANCE of the Chronicles and it is a TREASURE.

There is a tendency, in every institution, for the most recent members to think some things are happening for the first time. Take the shoaling of West Beach sand outside the mouth of the lagoon, for example. That problem existed when the Club was established nearly a hundred years ago, and it has been a major issue MANY times since. As I read the Chronicles, I felt a little embarrassed for our time when I learned about summer cruises involving 50 boats and 200 people visiting Montauk, East Hampton, Block Island, Newport, and so on. I felt the same way when I read that the Club had over 550 members a generation or two ago. But, as I read on, I saw these waves subside. People got busier, numbers went down, the Club adapted. One feature of the Club that was consistent throughout the story was the GIVING. The Chronicles should remind any reading member that we owe a large debt to the members who founded, preserved and improved the Club before us. Our paltry dues do not earn us what we enjoy here. To come anywhere near deserving it, we should be stewards, ourselves, and pass forward an even better HYC.

The Chronicles end in 1991, and we cannot let that be the end of the story. Over the coming year, I will ask members, new and old, to contribute their significant memories of the last 33 years, so that, by our centennial year of 2026, we have a story that covers 100 years.

Chris Hynes, Commodore 2024-5

To read the complete chronicles, please click here