The thrilling, bonkers Greasy Pole Contest increasingly brings attention to St. Peter’s Fiesta in Gloucester, the city’s annual kickoff off summer, a celebration of Gloucester’s Sicilian-American Catholic commercial fishing community, a yearly homecoming and family reunion.
Each evening during the festival weekend, men costumed as police, Mario Bros., ladies, dodgeball players, saints, navy sailors and the like compete to be the first to walk to the end of a 45-foot-long wooden telephone pole, slathered in grease (formerly automotive grease, but these days supposedly biodegradable), extending horizontally from the end of a platform 200 yards off Pavilion Beach, without slipping off and breaking their ribs, to grab a flag off the end. Winners swim to shore and are carried though the streets on the shoulders of follow walkers in celebration.
Greasy Pole walkers generally gather beforehand at the home of Greasy Pole champion Peter “Black” Frontiero on Pine Street. On Saturday, I photographed competitors as they joined the Orchard Street Fiesta Bash parade, organized by sisters Amy Clayton and Robin Clayton McNair, known as the Crazy Hat Ladies for the dazzling hats they craft and wear each year decorated with extensive tiny dioramas of Fiesta events. Afterward, the walkers honored the late champion Anthony Matza Giambanco outside his Middle Street home and visited bars at Amvets, the Legion Hall, Gloucester House and the St. Peter’s Club for beers and to chant the blessings (“Viva San Pietro!”) before boarding a lobster boat flying a Trump flag to motor out to the Greasy Pole platform. I photographed the competition from a kayak floating near the end of the pole on Friday.
The festival, of course, is named for the patron saint of Roman Catholic fisherman. St. Peter is believed to have been a fisherman who became one of Jesus’s 12 apostles, or earliest and closest followers, and he’s traditionally celebrated as the church’s first pope. Gloucester’s festival takes place each year on the weekend closest to his feast day, June 29. This year it began with the traditional Novena, nine evenings of prayer from June 17 to 25 at the Legion Hall, and continued through Sunday, June 30.
The festival was founded in 1927 after Gloucester fishing captain Salvatore Favazza commissioned a Charlestown sculptor to create a statue of St. Peter, which Favazza showcased in a storefront window and paraded through the streets of Gloucester’s waterfront Sicilian-immigrant neighborhood, the Fort, as the faithful shouted “Me chi samiou, dute mute? Viva San Pietro!” (Roughly: “Shout it louder, are we all mute? Long live St. Peter!”) The blessing continues to be shouted during processions and by Greasy Pole walkers and revelers throughout the festival to this day.
The religious tradition continues as women lead songs and prayers for the first eight evenings of the Novena at the Legion Hall, in an upstairs room where the festival’s St. Peter statue has been set up on a stage. On the ninth evening, this year a Tuesday night, a priest leads a mass there, before men carry the statue out to the street, down to the sea at Beach Court for a blessing, and return it to the window shrine at the St. Peter’s Club on Rogers Street.
During Friday night’s opening ceremonies, the St. Peter statue is paraded back around the Legion Hall then to a temporary altar at St. Peter’s Square, next to the festival carnival. After an outdoor mass in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday morning, the statue of St. Peter and statues and icons of the Madonna and other saints are joined by marching bands and floats for a 2-mile-long procession through downtown Gloucester, stopping for blessings at shrines and churches along the way, before ending at the St. Peter’s Club. A blessing of the fleet is held at the Fisherman Statue at the Stacy Boulevard waterfront on Sunday afternoon. Each weekend afternoon seine boat rowers race a half-mile from Pavilion Beach and back. The Fiesta ends with a closing procession of the St. Peter statue though the nighttime streets of the Fort after 11 p.m. the ends with returning the statue to its home in the St. Peter’s Club window, where it rests until the next Fiesta.
