DAN'S PAPERS, July 23, 2010 Page 32 www.danshamptons.com
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Portugal was just a joke and the caller hung up. During the next week or so she fielded over one dozen inquiries about the Flight of Portugal. Exactly when was it? What were the prizes? How could you enter? Joli told all of them it was just the editor fooling around and most of the callers retreated gracefully. One caller, however, insisted that the Flight to Portugal actually was going to take place, and if she, Joli, didn’t know about it, then she, the caller, was going to call the Montauk Chamber of Commerce. “Go ahead,” Joli told this person. From that point on, Joli told all the people calling that if they wanted more information about the Flight to Portugal they should call
the Montauk Chamber of Commerce. She gave out the number. But three days later she got a call from a woman in Montauk. The Chamber office (like everything else) was closed in January in Montauk, but they had call forwarding, and all the calls to the Chamber were being forwarded to this woman’s living room and she didn’t like it and would Joli please stop telling everyone to call the Chamber about the Flight to Portugal. What was going on anyway? It was the following day, however, that Joli realized there was nothing further to do but to tell the whole story to me, the editor. She got a call from ABC Channel 7 Eyewitness News in Manhattan. Who was the media contact for the
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Flight to Portugal? They had it penciled in their diary. (Everybody apparently had penciled it in their diary.) And they wanted information about how they could set up to cover this event. What should she do? Joli was now asking me. You have to tell ABC News that all this was made up too, I told her. However, I was so struck by all of this, about all these people who had in October scheduled themselves to go to the Flight to Portugal in January that I sat down and wrote an article about THAT. Wasn’t it extraordinary, I wrote, that something could appear on page five in a newspaper in October, appear there just once 20 lines long and then three months later get this amazing response. On the other hand, I wrote, there had been a total of eight different weekend festivals and this was the only one that had elicited such a remarkable response. Something about the Flight to Portugal had struck a chord. Perhaps it was an event that was trying to happen. “And so we WILL hold this event,” I wrote, “but we will hold it in April, when the weather is a bit warmer, when there is time to plan for it and there is a greater chance of survival in the cold waters of the Atlantic.” I published this follow-up article in Dan’s Papers on January 23, 1991. One week later, I received a letter that absolutely knocked my socks off. It was from the Portuguese National Tourist Office on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and this letter offered a first prize of a free round trip vacation to Portugal for two for the winner of the Dan’s Papers Flight to Portugal. It included first class hotel and breakfast. And they had made arrangements with TAP, the National Airline of Portugal, to offer free airfare. I really didn’t know what to think. Had somebody made this up? Was somebody pulling my leg? Or if it was real were there people at the Portuguese National Tourist Office in Manhattan who believed this event would actually exist? It took two days for me to get up my courage. Finally I called. I spoke to the Director. Yes, it was true they were offering this round trip free vacation to the winner. I took a deep breath. “You know, people don’t actually drive their cars off the cliff at the Montauk Lighthouse,” I said. “I know that,” the Director replied. “I just think whatever you do it will be good for Portugal. You figure it out!’’ And so it is, here in June of 1991, that we are busily planning for the official and actual and real Dan’s Papers Flight to Portugal. It will take place on the cliff 80 feet above the sea at the Montauk Lighthouse on Saturday, August 10. It will be a benefit for the Montauk Historical Society, which runs the Lighthouse and which needs to raise funds to shore the cliff face up from the erosion that is slowly eating it away. Everyone is invited to enter this event. You send $10 as a non-refundable entry fee to Dan’s Papers, Drawer AR in Bridgehampton and we will allocate you a launch time somewhere between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. Include your name, address and phone number. There will (continued on page 34)