Once unknown. Go in the off season for the real vibe. Tourists talk about Montauk as a surfer's paradise, but until 2007, it was a hearty-soul fishing village attracting workaday Long Islanders, who came for inexpensive family getaways and dayboat charters. Chic summer vibes found far west of here in Southampton, Westhampton, Amg, E Hampton never clashed with local life. I can't imagine what it was like to winter up in Montauk during the 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s and even in to the '80s. These families who did it, the Uihleins, Tumas, Darenbergs, Whites, Hewitts, Pospisils, Sepps etc are the real heros. Bushwackers back in the day, mostly refugees from the urban sprawl of Woodside and Bushwick, they came out when virtually no one was here, bought and built houses and businesses on the cheap, weathered three seasons of gales and isolation, sent their kids to St Theresa's and Montauk School, volunteered for the Montauk Fire Station, Little League, PTA, Friendly Sons of Erin. Not because it was cool, but because they believed in this village and their civic pride turned a zip code into a home for hundreds of kids through the decades. All through the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, the twenty+thirty+even forty- something Yuppies then DINK crowd viewed Montauk as "too far, too unclassy, too local, too blue collar, nothing to rave about." And that was its magic. We started coming in the early 1960s, thanks to my Irish grandmother, who wisely bought property on the old highway with her coffee can money! In the 1940s, her cousins ran Hither House and The Lakeside Inn, now the infamous Surf Lodge. Back when we were kids, only just Kew Gardens gradeschoolers hauling out from an unwinterized cottage in Sound Beach, we drove out the LIE, which ended at Exit60 or Sunrise Highway to Yaphank and then dirt and local roaded it the rest of the way. It was an almost 3 hour trip from Brookhaven when I was growing up, past peach farms, potato fields, cabbage patches. No new Montauk Highway back then, just the winding, hilly Old Highway, marked by Hither Hills, the Panoramic, then Gurneys, Hildreths, then us. My uncle Donald, mom's younger brother who worked shifts at a Miller Place bar, drove us, unseatbelted, facing backwards, piled into a wood paneled station wagon with a baby bassinet hooked and hanging from a rigged up handlebar, swinging wildly back and forth perched above the backseat. We swam at a private, unguarded beach just east of the Gurney's dip in the road. The pull-in then and still now requires a secret key to open the private drive. An old red pump hidden in the honeysuckle and beachplumb bushes was the password to fresh drinking water. Fifty year old wooden steps curved down an eroded cliff face to the softest pounded powdery sand. Fog swallowed you up and as you ran toward thundering surf, you knew what awaited: Getting smashed, aggressively, into a tripleback tumblesault as you fought what to you were walls of fifty foot waves. Barely visible through the fog + foam, your cousins would be shouting to come out further past the second break but ... "No! the scary undertow," you'd shout. Too late, now I'm already in the sweep and out you'd go. Minutes later, after what seemed like hours at death's door, you'd be coughed up, bathing suit half off and filled with sand, spewed into the whitewash with gulps of saltwater gargling in the back of your throat. As the cousins were getting chewed up in the Atlantic mauw, my mom would be back up the cliff, sitting side saddle in the big yellow clunker of a Pontaic wagon, slathering white bread with Hellman's to make us plain bologna - bologna!! - sandwiches, a side of watery local tomatos chased by some vanilla fingers and YooHoos. What memories! The sweet sweep of the ocean now an ocean of time and memories. Sandy, water-logged, exhausted bodies would roll into the village, poke around the penny souvenirs at the Corner Store then off to see monster tunas being loaded and weighed out at Tumas Dock. What a dream! No billionaires bank account could buy such memories.