JIM BROOKS: PARADE CHAIRMAN

More than 80 marchers and floats are getting set to participate in East Hampton Town's great big anniversary parade Oct. 10 - but first, Jim Brooks must get through the week ahead.

His life will be "meeting upon meeting upon meeting" with the various contingents, not only the ones strutting their stuff on Main Street but the dozens of behind-the-scenes helpers, there to insure that all runs smoothly.

The task has been formidable. "Every meeting I go to, somebody raises their hand and says, 'What about this?' - and it's something we haven't thought of," said Mr. Brooks, the parade chairman.

A partner in the Amaden Gay Agencies (whose receptionists, he confided, sometimes answer the phone with "Hello - Parade Central"), he has lived all his life in East Hampton. His grandmother Lillian Lester was a "Pantigo Lester," he noted.

"I haven't made too big a loop," the Sherrill Road resident said contentedly.

Since June, when serious planning began, he and his hand-picked committee have been untangling the snags of what Mr. Brooks called a "logistical nightmare." At a meeting tonight, participants will learn the final details - when to arrive (arrival times are being staggered), where to line up (three or four possibilities), and where the march will go ("up" Main Street, not "down" - in other words, from Hook Mill toward Home, Sweet Home).

The parade will follow a chronological time line - "anything from the Ice Age all the way through" - of the town's history. Mr. Brooks swears he tried to convince someone to dress up as a glacier, and thus lead off the line of march, but failed.

"The first thing we wanted to do was to make sure we didn't leave out anybody," he said. Letters went out to schools, libraries, civic and religious organizations, environmental and preservationist groups, military and fraternal orders, and just about every other organized body in town last November, with follow-up communiques and meetings since then.

The first person Mr. Brooks turned to for help in planning, actually, was his wife, Olivia, a teacher at John Marshall Elementary School and a Ladies Village Improvement Society member who helped plan the society's 100th-anniversary parade.

Sweethearts at East Hampton High School, the Brookses were married in 1973. They have two children, Casey, a sophomore at the High School, and Sarah, in her first year at Middlebury College.

Mr. Brooks graduated from Miami University in Ohio and taught high school social studies in Riverhead for 10 years before going to Amaden Gay. His father, Amasa. Brooks, was a teacher-turned-plumber who took his son along on jobs as soon as he was old enough. "That's how I grew up," Mr. Brooks said, "crawling under the best houses in East Hampton."

"Don't you want to go to college?" the father would inquire.

The Brookses collect funky antiques. Tin signs advertising Coca-Cola hang in their living room, setting off an ancient but functioning vending machine in one corner.The old sign from Lyons Chinese Restaurant reminds Mr. Brooks of the spot he used to visit as part of the "Newtown Shuffle," from Sam's to Lyons to Cavagnaro's.

Down in his basement workshop, Mr. Brooks relaxes by making birdhouses, many of them replicas of historic East Hampton buildings. He has made bird-friendly copies of the Gardiner Brown house, Clinton Academy, the early East Hampton Library, and The East Hampton Star office. Earlier this year, he donated a replica of a Mulford house to the Garden Club of East Hampton to be raffled off; that one took him over 140 hours to build.

Other birdhouses are lined up along living room shelves or perched on poles among the plants in a crammed and vibrant garden, another of Mr. Brooks's hobbies.

Some of the birdhouses are witty pieces of folk art: a jailhouse for the "jailbirds," "Camp Bluebird," others that he calls "low-rent motels," "Buffalo Bill's feed and livery store," and a New England covered bridge. A schoolhouse birdhouse is currently on loan, he said, to the John Marshall Elementary School, which is basing its parade float on its design.

"Maybe that's why I ultimately did the parade," said Mr. Brooks. "You want to give back to the community what it's done for you. Sometimes it's easy to write a check."

"I just wish I could give you all the names of the people that are helping along the way. There are so many."

Mr. Brooks also gives his time to the East Hampton Fire Department, where he is captain of the fire police unit. He is a member of the Lost Tribe of Accabonac and the Masonic Lodge.

"And after this parade is over," he declared with a big smile, "I'm going to drop out of public life forever."

JOANNE PILGRIM