Rain Saturday night, Sept. 12, prevented headliner Dennis DeYoung and the Music of Styx from taking the stage at the 38th Norwalk Oyster Festival, which is run by the Norwalk Seaport Association, but festival chairman Mike Reilly said, even so, the festival was a hit.
“There is no crowd count yet, but the crowds were good,” said Reilly, a Seaport Association trustee who has been associated with the festival for what he called “a very, very long time.”
“The Saturday rain was unfortunate,” he said. “But … this is the big show. I call it the last big thing of the summer.”
In addition to running the festival, the Norwalk Seaport Association owns and operates the C.J. Toth, a 45-foot passenger catamaran built in 2010 that ferries visitors to and from Sheffield Island, where it maintains a nearly 150-year-old lighthouse.
The Dennis DeYoung cancellation mirrored last year”™s festival at which headliners Joan Jett and the Blackhearts were similarly doused by bad weather.
Vincent Scicchitano wears several hats besides the one he wears as Seaport Association president. He is the owner of Accurate Auto Repair in East Norwalk, sponsor of the craft beer tent at the festival and an active drag racer “eight or nine times a year†at tracks in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Here, he is beside a dragster he likened to a slingshot – zero to 185 mph in 8 seconds – beside the beer tent. When he competes, he said, a plunger shifts gears automatically because, “At 185 mph, you don’t want to take your hand off the wheel.â€
Festival webmaster and technical director Ray Cooke. Cooke and his identical twin, Carl Cooke, own Utopia in Norwalk, which Ray Cooke called “the coolest store in town,†and Ticketpro.com, a web-based sports and entertainment ticket portal.
The teal T-shirt-clad representatives of First County Bank were again festival mainstays by the entrance.
Norwalk Mayor Harry Rilling made the rounds.
Bedford, New York band Ask Your Mom, here performing Grand Funk Railroad’s epic, “I’m Your Captain/Closer to Home.â€
Bill Fallon is editor of the Fairfield County Business Journal. He has worked at Westfair Communications for more than five years, previously editing an upstate New York daily and a national motorcycle magazine in Nevada. He attended Iona Prep in New Rochelle, N.Y., and the University of Virginia.
