September 4, 2018 — The Morning Glory Coffee Shop was in its glory Sunday morning. As an unofficial grandstand for the Gloucester Schooner Festival Parade of Sail, the line of spectators waiting for a coveted table stretched clear out into the parking lot.
Most were native Gloucesterites, but there were some first-time tourists, too, and for them the 34th annual Gloucester Schooner Festival was a total surprise, beginning with the first big boom! of the water cannon sounding across the Outer Harbor.
“We wondered what was happening,” said Martha Goldberg, in Gloucester from Lowell for the day with her friend Connie Parker. When that first boom sounded, they watched, transfixed, as the great sails gathered. “It looks beautiful,” said Goldberg, “just awesome.”
“Beautiful’ and “awesome” are words heard a lot along Stacy Boulevard as the sails “schoon” by to pay their respects to the Fisherman’s Memorial in this harbor where the very word “schoon” is said to have been born in 1713. They’re words Paul Clancy, waiting for a table with his wife Ellen, used to describe what they think of this, their first schooner festival. Though they’ve lived in Gloucester several years and always wanted to come, this was the first time they actually made it to Stacy Boulevard, and, if truth be known, it was just for breakfast. But then came the boom! “And we were like, ‘Whoa! What’s going on?'”