THE HOLLER

It began in the flick of an eye. In 1982, and in an idle moment at the office, I picked up a new tourist guidebook to the West Coast of America which happened to be laying on someone's desk, and riffled quickly through the pages. And then stopped. For there, on page 83, was an entry which caught my eye.
It related to the Hoquiam/Aberdeen district near Olympic National Park, and more specifically, to Highway 109 and a place named Ocean Shores. The entry told how - because the area was so often fogbound - Ocean Shores had introduced a number of unusual festivals on to its social calendar, perhaps the silliest of them being Undiscovery Day. Naturally, I read on.
On April 27, 1792, so the entry went, Capt George Vancouver sailed right by Ocean Shores (which did not exist at the time, of course) without noticing the land. Thick fog, you see. So to rectify the matter, every April 27 from 1973 onwards the partying community has gathered on the shore to yell, 'Hey, George,' in the hope that the explorer's ghost might make up for his earlier neglect and pay a belated visit. After which they all retired to their local pub to drown their sorrows.
Daft, of what? Anyway, other dates on the calendar evidently included a Fog Festival and a Clam Prix, which I won't go into now because it was the Holler which interested me, as any mention of Vancouver also meant King's Lynn.
I soon established that (1) Ocean Shores was one of those smart American retirement communities, with no history of its own, and (2) that the invention of some of these 'traditional festivals' was largely down to the imagination of the then newspaper editor, Bob Ward, who brought into being the tongue-in-cheek American Historical Hollering Association (or AH-HA, as it was known).
It duly became more famous than Bob could possibly have imagined, for the story was eventually picked up by a San Francisco radio station which urged listeners to go into the streets at midnight on April 27 and Holler with all their might. This was followed by newspaper and magazine stories. Then some ex-Ocean Shores' residents living in Singapore 'hollered' by phone across the South China Sea. Meanwhile, in 1982, it was written up in the guidebook. Which is where I came in. 
Why not, I thought, try to arrange a Holler between Ocean Shores and King's Lynn, Vancouver's birthplace? And so it came to pass that in April, 1983, the first-ever trans-Atlantic Holler took place between 65 Undiscovery Day residents gathered in Ocean Shores' Legend Tavern, and 30 King's Lynn Vancouver Round Tablers in the Black Horse pub in Gaywood.
At the appointed hour a phone link was established and amplified, and the ritual enacted. From Ocean Shores: 'Hey, George.' And from Norfolk: 'Wadda you want?' In fact, and thanks to the amplification system, the two groups hollered, chatted, and sang to each other for over half an hour.
But the story did not end there, because in April, 1985, three residents of Ocean Shores, including Bob Ward and former mayor 'Bun' Lewis, actually flew to England to take part in the Norfolk end of the proceedings.
It was a particularly poignant international Holler that year, leading one of Gaywood's American guests to comment, 'Helluva way to come to make a phone call home!'