It’s a typical summer afternoon on Nantucket: day-trippers disembark from ferries, children line up for ice cream cones, and church bells peel in the sea breeze. But soon a 75-foot sea monster is scheduled to wash ashore.
If you’re not from Nantucket — or even if you are — chances are you’ve never heard of Morton. But back in 1937, he was the centerpiece of a nationwide media hoax orchestrated by artist Tony Sarg. On August 5, Morton makes a return to the island, nearly 90 years after the prank, as part of a celebration of the artist organized by the Nantucket Historical Association.
“In a lot of ways, Tony Sarg was Walt Disney before Walt Disney,” claims Darin Johnson, current guest speaker at the Nantucket Historical Association and founder of the American Theater for Puppetry Arts. “Yet nobody knows who he is.”
Considered the father of modern American puppetry, Sarg was an accomplished illustrator, animator, designer and entrepreneur. Perhaps his most lasting legacy is that he conceived and created the very first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade balloons. Sarg’s legacy is visible to even the most passive consumers of American culture. “He really educated that whole next generation of puppeteers,” Johnson said.
Bill Baird, who created the marionettes in “The Sound of Music,” worked for Tony Sarg. After that, Jim Henson of “Sesame Street” worked for Bill Baird, Johnson explained. “So there’s this lineage that all goes back to Tony.”
While closely associated with his New York-based studio, Sarg spent some twenty years summering on, and drawing inspiration from Nantucket.
“He loved this place. You can see it in so much of his commercial products and his artwork,” Johnson said. It’s no surprise then, that the lion’s share of Tony Sarg memorabilia and ephemera is under the stewardship of the Nantucket Historical Association. Dubbing this the “Summer of Sarg”, the association has been offering community programming around the puppeteer’s legacy in conjunction with their exhibit “Tony Sarg: Genius at Play.” Alongside lectures, galleries, and other traditional historical society fare, the upcoming festivities mark the return of Morton —a nod to Sarg’s original hoax.
“He met up with two of his fisherman friends who he coaxed into going to the newspaper and telling the newspaper that there was a sea monster spotted out in the water,” Johnson said. In the weeks before the balloon arrived, those so-called “first-hand” accounts were augmented in the press with photographs of enormous footprints on the South Shore beach. “And then they blew up this giant sea monster balloon and floated it out in the water. And it became this huge national media sensation.”
These kinds of theatrics might seem unexpected for a venerable New England historical society, but it actually couldn’t be more quintessentially Nantucket. The “little gray lady of the sea” has been trading in nostalgia for longer than you might think.
”Nantucket was a leading whaling port in the world in the 18th century,” says Michael Harrison, chief curator and Obed Macy research chair at the Nantucket Historical Association. “And then in the 1850s, investment left. The ships left. The economy collapsed. It was around that time that local promoters, boosters, and entrepreneurs began to realize that they had something else that could be sold and that could attract investment here. And that was the summer.”
Still, all the hoopla around this Summer of Sarg does make one wonder — why go to all this effort? The answer can be found in the artist behind the balloon: Bill Smith.
“I saw my first Macy’s parade on TV when I was three years old, and knew that that was going to be my career.” Smith is the founder of Smith Special Productions/ Balloonworks, and the artist behind the modern day Morten. It was way back in the early 1990s when Smith first pitched the idea of recreating the Sarg serpent hoax. “And so here we are all these years later, we’re actually making it a reality.”
In the end, the hope is that by channeling this whimsical chapter of the island’s past, those present might make a magical memory of their own carrying Sarg’s legacy of wonder into the future.
