Don Street Jnr 1930 – 2024
The magic scene observed at Street level - Iolaire racing with the Street family (in three generations) and friends at Antigua Week 1990
I’ve been putting off writing about the life (and death) of Donald Street for a couple of reasons. Firstly he didn’t really have much of a connection with this corner of the world, and secondly I found it hard to gather a comprehensive account of his life that delved a little deeper than the standard sycophantic couple of paras.
That was until I saw WM Nixon’s wonderful story of this eccentric sailor’s life, published in AFLOAT (“Ireland’s Sailing, Boating & Maritime Magazine’)
Donald MacQueen Street Jnr of Glandore and the Caribbean and formerly New York has gone from among us after an extraordinary life of nearly 94 years, in which he experienced a sometimes picaresque existence. Throughout it, he significantly encouraged, instructed, and influenced sailing people on both sides of the Atlantic and across all oceans to such a respected extent that he was inducted into America’s National Sailing Hall of Fame while still active afloat.
He was a one-man universe at such a level that he successfully lived with the contradiction of his total rejection of his banking family’s assumption that he would follow their traditional career path into what he disdained as “the canyons of New York”. For in his prime at a well-advanced age, he was running a miniature conglomerate involved in sail charter, nautical journalism, ocean sailing instruction, cruising guides and their on-site research by sea, with chart publication and correction to such a high level that he was consulted by the Hydrographer of the Royal Navy.
Man at work. Don at the helm in the midst of Iolaire’s successful rig re-development. Whatever they might have thought at the brewery in Amsterdam, it was reckoned in the Caribbean that well-chilled Heineken was invented primarily for Don Street