the chapters of his varied waterfront career with real gusto, especially when he remembered first seeing Josephine, I remembered what the harbor artist John Noble had told me : "The harbor lighters, these little wooden boats you wouldn't pay attention to, carrying lube oil out to the big ships and doing a thousand other errands-they're all manned by people from Stromboli, off Sicily." Stromboli and neighboring islands, he might have said. And Anthony now refines this picture a little, pointing out that it was predominantly a Scandinavian business until after World War II . Then the bottom dropped out of it, and he and his sons growing up in the business bought up the boats and carried on. He has sons who are skippers, grandsons who are deckhands, and great grandsons learning the ropes, afloat with us today. The H?rnie comes in to the National Society's pier at Fulton Landing. The other lighters of the Standard Boat Company, Anthony's company, put in at odd spots around the pier, and after the speechmaking by Borough President Anthony Gaeta of Staten Island, and Ports & Terminals Commissioner Susan Frank, and Board of Education President James F. Regan- and a very short speech, echoing over the waters via the PA system , from Anthony : "This is the happiest day of my life':._there is music, here and there a little dancing on the unsteady decks, and much joking and laughing and consuming of vast picnic luncheons brought along in big baskets.
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All this at the behest of John Noble, the artist and historian of the harbor who died a year before, May 15, 1983. He told us we should set up, in effect, a curatorship for New York Harbor. He knew these people, and other societies that make up the life of the working harbor. His paintings, drawings and lithographs celebrating that life are known by all portefios, as we might call ourselves, borrowing a term from the very similar culture of Argentina's Riachuelo, 6,000 miles south . John's work has yet to be hung in the Museum of Modem Art, 6 miles from the Upper Bay at the heart of New York Harbor- but a special room is devoted to it in the town museum of Mandel , Norway, across 3,000 miles of stormy North Atlantic. It is better, surely to be remembered by the people than the critics, for the people go on forever. Through the New York Harbor Curatorship, inaugurated on this waterborne festival occasion , we hope to remember the people of the harbor, their ships, their work, their lives . PS SEA HISTORY, FALL 1984
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