Imagine for two weekends out of every year putting on a conehead mask and becoming a crazy, ostentatious character on a float in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. “It’s a live road show and it’s crazy fun,” says Headcone and Conehead founder John Murray of East Quogue.

The St. Patty’s Day Parade: bagpipes, pretzels, horse poop, and of course, the Coneheads! What would St. Patty’s Day be without the parade staple that is the Coneheads? Well before 1978 that was a sad reality.

When I first thought to write about the Coneheads, I knew right away to go to Headcone and family friend, John Murray. I emailed him a few questions about the float’s history, and behind the scenes, and was told he’d get back to me. A few days later I came home to find some folded papers stuck in my doorjamb. Handwritten on yellow legal paper, was scrawled a brief yet complete history of the Coneheads.

He began with their very first parade, during the brutal winter of 1978. While working for the Chesterfield Association, co-worker Dave Allen suggested their joining. “He kept telling me the St. Patrick’s Day parade needed new blood,” Murray wrote.

So he took his ’64 Volkswagen and put on a flatbed, and dumped snow allover it with a pay loader. John road through the parade with his friend Kilo (riding shotgun, he had been picked up walking home, and suddenly found himself in the parade), with a sign that read, “Remember the Winter of ’78.” Forty-two inches of snow!

Christmas the next year, a friend gave him a full Conehead mask, which he immediately fell in love with. His wife, Chris, however, felt slightly differently. She said, “Well that’s very nice, but you’ll never use it!”

But that March, he proved her wrong, by wearing it in the back of a ’55 Ford pickup (that still makes an appearance in the parade to this day), with a sign that said, “Coneheads are Irish too!”.

After that, more of his friends began joining in. A year later for the float, “Wild Irish Jaws,” Spencer Fink (freshmen Jack Fink’s dad!) sat in a fighting chair being pulled by a rope hooked to a great white shark in the back of the truck, with the Cone’s famous, Miss Piggy (Laura McChesney) flopping around in its jaws!

More friends and family joined in as the years went on, to become the Coneheads we know and love today!

It takes hard work and preparation. John said, “We don’t really know what it’s going to look like ‘till we get rolling,” but it always seems to come out perfect.

John’s top 10 favorite floats from the past thirty-two years are as follows:

1. “Lonesome Cone: A Cowboy Epic”
2. “Build it and they will Cone” baseball theme
3. “The Wall” Tearing down the Berlin Wall
4. “El Cone Niño” A mudslide
5. “Conehead Fire Department”
6. “Conehead Casino”
7. Nor’easter Parade, canceled due to blizzard. Coneheads went anyway!
8. “Cone TV” couch potatoes
9. The Gong Show
10. “Avacones”

So there you have it! The complete history of the Coneheads! We can’t wait to see what they come up with next!

Visit the Coneheads on their Facebook: WhbConeheads for pictures from old parades and to see what they’re up to in the off season!