Kirby Marcantonio doesn’t always read East magazine, but he happened to pick up the Thanksgiving issue last week. Flipping through the pages, he found an illustration that looked familiar: a shark flopping around in Town Pond.
The illustration by Kym Fulmer, and the attached story by this reporter, took Mr. Marcantonio back to Easter Sunday in 1976, when he and some friends were fresh out of college.
The friends were hanging out at someone’s house, “swapping stories, drinking beer, and smoking pot, as anybody in 1976 would,” when they got bored. Billy Strong, somebody’s younger brother, who was around 10 at the time, kept “bugging” the group: “Let’s DO something.”
The summer before, in 1975, Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster “Jaws” had been released. Everyone in Mr. Marcantonio’s circle was “addicted,” he said, “its having happened here in Montauk.”
On opening night, he remembered, “There was this guy who was screaming. He was standing in the middle of the lobby. He was screaming at the top of his lungs” that the film was “a lie.”
“Well, it turned out to be a guy named Frank Mundus,” a well-known Montauk charter captain who wore a shark’s tooth around his neck and is widely believed to have been the inspiration for the character Quint in the film. Going into the theater, the friends were “jittery” and then “stirred up” from seeing and hearing him in the lobby.
They were “knocked out of the park” by the film, Mr. Marcantonio said, and couldn’t stop thinking about it. Months later, on that boring night just before Easter, young Billy Strong hatched the idea of putting a shark fin in Town Pond.
One of the group of friends home from college was a skilled carpenter, who happened to have his tools with him. They grabbed a piece of plywood, cut out a fin, painted it to resemble a shark’s, and attached it to a small platform. To keep the platform from being spotted by passers-by, they attached a weight to its bottom.
If they’d left it that way it would have drifted to the side of the pond, but they came up with a way to tether it to the ground and keep it in the middle. After putting the contraption together, they all went to James Lane and slipped down furtively to the edge of the pond.
It was spring, and still cold out, or cold enough that nobody was jumping to wade into the water in the middle of the night. Except for the 10-year-old. “I’ll do it! I’ll do it! Let me do it,” Mr. Marcantonio remembered Billy saying.
He went on: “There’s only about two or three feet of water in that thing, but he goes wading out into the middle of the pond” to prop up the fin. “He’s almost frozen by the time he gets back.”
The sun was starting to rise by then, and they could see the shark fin drifting about in the wind. “It’s actually starting to kind of circle in a way, which was pretty realistic,” Mr. Marcantonio said.
The friends lurked around, trying to stay out of sight, watching traffic come down Main Street to see some reactions. That early in the morning, the first few cars failed to notice anything.
Pretty soon, though, the friends saw someone roll down a window and point at the pond.
“So, obviously, somebody saw the shark, and somebody thought it was real, and then the next car and the next car, and we’re just laughing our asses off, dead tired, hung over,” Mr. Marcantonio said. They piled into a Jeep and drove the short distance to 1770 House, which his family owned at that time.
After some sleep, they returned to check the fallout. “There’s cops there! They’re trying to fish the thing out of the pond, and it’s on the front page of The East Hampton Star!” Later, Mr. Marcantonio went back to take some photos, which he still has. (Unfortunately, for the purposes of this story, the photos are stored on slides and could not be converted to a proper format.)
“We just laughed our asses off and said, ‘Look, nobody says nothing, nobody’s going to know. This is going to be the ‘Great Mystery of the Shark in the Pond.’ “
And for 48 years, the great mystery persisted. Everyone involved made good on their promise — “I was sure Billy was going to shoot his mouth off” — until Mr. Marcantonio saw the story in East last week, prompting him to come forward with the tale.
“I don’t think any of us has ever told the story in public,” he said. “I’m the only one who’s still here in East Hampton, so I’m the only one who would even know that it was written about. It was just one of those nights, quite frankly, just one of those crazy nights that young people get themselves thinking about things, and we just got ourselves into this whole prank idea.”
