Our Story

In 1965, my father, a teenager living in New Jersey with his Mom, Dad and two sisters, was introduced to Nantucket when he signed on as a caddie at Camp Sankaty Head, then one of the last remaining caddie camps in America. As he tells it, Dad’s first vision of the Faraway Island, however, could not have been more unsettling. Arriving on an early morning ferry, which in those days sailed out of Woods Hole, he also arrived in the midst of a Nor’easter that left the Ipswich clams eaten the night before at the Landfall Restaurant deposited into Nantucket Sound. And on that wind-whipped, rain-soaked June day, Dad traded quiet Jersey suburbia for the Quonset huts and scrub oak of the caddie camp. Little did he know that the camp, set between the 11th and 13th fairways on one of America's classic links golf courses, Sankaty Head Golf Club, would mark the start of a lifetime love affair with Nantucket.

Initial trepidation quickly gave way to hard work caddieing for Nantucket residents and their guests. The bags were Kangaroo-skin (the fashion in those days) and the pay was $3 a bag for 18-hole doubles – and $3 a day went to pay his room and board at the camp.

And, as he settled in, trepidation also gave way to curiosity about the island. On his one day off each week, Dad explored the beaches at Cisco and Surfside. He hitchhiked down Milestone Road and into town for pancake breakfasts along Centre Street. These same shops, like The Porthole, sold popcorn and cotton candy later in the day and you could easily tell by the lingering scent of both in the early morning.

There was shopping along the cobblestone streets for madras at Murrays, CPO jackets hanging above the wooden floors in the Nobby Shop and barrels of scrimshaw and other whaling memorabilia in places like The Seven Seas and Sign of the Whale. The Captains' homes with their widow’s walks all made real the photos and artifacts found in the Whaling Museum and the Atheneum, Nantucket’s formidable library set in Greek revivalist architecture on India Street. The Island, then as now, was an enchanting, foreboding place, one which enticed visitors to return. And my Dad was one of them.

So it was that in 1984, my father packed our Mom, me, my brother and sister in the Pontiac station wagon, all of us off to spend the first of what would become many family summers on Nantucket.

Back home in New Jersey, we hung in our kitchen a framed photo of a whale just about to dive. To us it showed the beauty, grace and majesty of the world’s largest living creature, and recalled for us the legacy of the whale and the Island – its memories as well as our own. There was also a quote on the photo, by a man named Tom Sherman. Referring to the massive whale in the photo it said: “He roams the seas in freedom with no enemy, save man.” What a perfect image, I thought, for such a majestic animal.

In the Fall of 1997, I geared up for my freshman year at Loyola College of Maryland. I was excited because I loved this school and was slated to be one of three freshmen on the golf team. Little did I know that my roommate would also be a kid from New Jersey, also a Loyola golfer and the person who would eventually become my best friend.

John Kovacs, or “Vax” as his father nicknamed him and close friends call him, quickly became a familiar face around the Farley family. During summer breaks, we worked together at golf courses in New Jersey and then, with my family, vacationed on Nantucket.

It was during these summers that both John and I realized how much we really loved being here on the Island. After graduating from Loyola we launched into our respective corporate careers, but our thoughts still turned to the Faraway Island. We reminisced about our adventures there. And sometimes we dreamed together about how we might make a new career while still, as my father always said, “giving something back.”

It was in early 2004, during one of these “late night discussions” below the picture of the whale in our kitchen that we hit upon the idea for a logo – one that would honor the heritage of the whale and Nantucket.

Thus, the Farley/Kovacs partnership was formed!

In the fall of 2004, just as we were completing our logo design, a store front opened up on Broad Street, just up and across from the newly renovated Whaling Museum. And so, in the spring of 2005, we took a deep breath and moved to Nantucket to open The White Whale – and, for us, it’s been all we could have dreamed and hoped for.

The White Whale is, of course, Moby Dick, the leviathan that drove the possessed Capt. Ahab around the world and eventually to his death in the Herman Melville classic. What may be less well known is that Melville found his idea for Moby Dick in Nantucket. It came from the true story of the Essex, a whaling vessel out of Nantucket which sailed in 1820 and was rammed and sunk by a white sperm whale, leaving its surviving crew adrift for months in the South Pacific. That harrowing tale was captured by Nathaniel Philbrick, a Nantucket author, in his unforgettable account, “In the Heart of the Sea.”

Melville himself lived for a short time on Nantucket before shipping out aboard another of the several hundred whaling ships that called Nantucket their home port in the mid-1800s. So the connection of Moby Dick, the original White Whale, to Nantucket was forged over 150 years ago!

Today on Nantucket, Cape Cod, and throughout both North and South American coasts, substantial efforts are underway to protect and preserve this most magnificent of living creatures. Some whales, like the Grey, are flourishing under the watchful eyes of an array of dedicated non-profit conservation and environmental groups. Other species, such as the Right Whale (so named because its friendly nature made hunting him an easy contest) at a population of 350, are perilously close to extinction. For our part, the White Whale has joined with the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies, the International Fund for Animal Welfare and the Nantucket Historical Association, all organizations dedicated to an appreciation of the history of the whale and, equally, its preservation.