Every angler has a favorite lure in his or her tackle box. For some it’s a simple bucktail jig. For others it’s a wood plug or a shiny tin. But for many anglers it’s a Rapala, the Original Floater, the classic balsa wood minnow imitation. 

The Rapala was invented in 1936 by Lauri Rapala, a Finnish fisherman who observed that large fish typically targeted injured prey, particularly those that swam with a slightly off-center wobble. He decided to create a lure that imitated the action of a wounded minnow to earn some additional income and save time baiting hooks. Rapala used a shoemaker’s knife and sandpaper to shape a piece of cork that perfectly imitated the wiggle-wobble or twerk, as the young ’uns might say, of an injured baitfish. He wrapped the cork in tinfoil from consumed chocolate bars to create a reflective surface and melted photographic negatives to form a protective coating. As the size of Rapala’s catch grew, so did the legend of his lure and the demand for it. Today Rapala is the world’s largest lure manufacturer, with some 20 million units sold across 140 nations. 

One would think an angler’s favorite lure is the one that catches the most fish. But sometimes it’s the beauty of the lure’s craftsmanship rather than its production that elevates it to the number-one position in the tackle box. In fact, a favorite lure may never see water. Danger lurks there. Bluefish with razor-sharp teeth are waiting to mangle that cherished handcrafted wood plug with multiple layers of glistening paint. Catching such toothy critters is a job for the favorite’s scraped, tarnished, and bent-hooked siblings or the orphan stepbrother rusting in the bed of the pickup truck. 

It’s not unusual for fishermen to keep their favorite lure protected in the original packaging right up until the time it’s needed. Less important lures are unpackaged immediately after purchase and thrown into the tacklebox with reckless abandon and with no concern for scraped finishes. 

Don’t ever ask a fellow fisherman or loved one to borrow his or her favorite lure. That’s just crossing the line. Better to go fishless that day. Sorry. If a fisherman goes temporarily insane and offers up their prized one, refuse it with deep gratitude. For if it’s lost in the mouth of a fish or otherwise, the story will be told again and again for eternity plus one day. 

At Ditch Plain in Montauk, a steady flow of small stripers has been responding to white bucktails and swim shads, Paulie Apostolides at Paulie’s Tackle in Montauk reported. “Afternoons are better than the mornings,” he said, speculating that the still chilly water temperature had something to do with what appears to be a certain dawn-time lethargy.

The cool half of spring means that though there may be fewer baitfish in the bay, striped bass sneak up into East End creeks and grassy harbor edges, where they can snack on the hardy killifish that make their home there. As the waters get warmer, the options for anglers get better and better as more stripers arrive and their dining options multiply.

“There are loads of little bass around,” Ken Morse of Tight Lines Tackle in Sag Harbor said on Monday. Their apparent numbers were a good sign for the future of the fishery, he said. Sunset and into the evening seemed to have been the ticket, which Morse suspected had to do with the water heating up during the day, goading fish to getting their chew on.

Most of the reports he had heard from anglers came from people fishing along the shore; few had ventured out yet by boat that he knew about other than a man who said he had trolled up a bluefish near the South Ferry slip and a few folks who had scored a few porgies. “Most people I know hold off until fluke season,” which opens May 17, he said.

Harvey Bennett of the Tackle Shop in Amagansett suggested that early indications for fishing in Gardiner’s Bay were strong. A trap fisherman of his acquaintance, he said, found about half a dozen fluke in his net that would have topped six pounds and one that might have weighed more than 10. But what really blew Bennett’s mind were in the back of the guy’s truck, what he called the biggest porgies he had ever seen — “These were porgies so big that I had to ask him what they were. I’ve never seen anything like it. They were like the Godzillas of Porgyland.”

Bennett said that early, hungry bluefish, more skin and bones than flesh, have been around and that there were reports of shad as well. “A guy caught a couple on the ocean just messing around. He said he saw them flipping and tried it.” Squid had appeared in the bay as well, he said.

Alewives had made it back in a big way into Big Fresh Pond in Southampton to spawn, drawing black-crowned night herons, blue herons, egrets, and osprey, Morse said. Though the herring-family fish are off-limits to harvesters, they make a fine meal to the bass and other predators that feed upon them. Big, hungry bass can sometimes be picked up as they prowl narrow East End backwaters looking for an easy mouthful.

With Reporting by David E. Rattray

“This storefront is more my style,” Beth Eckhardt said last week, as her business, Amagansett Flowers by Beth, began to blossom in its new home at 255 Main Street. “I’ve had my eye on this building for a long time, and it just so happens. . . .”  

The former outpost of Homenature, Ms. Eckhardt’s new space is bright, spacious, and, with the arrival of a wide variety of flora, fragrant. “We specialize in succulents,” plants that store water in their leaves, she said. Flowers, and plants of all sizes, are surrounded by antiques, art, furniture, and vintage pottery and lighting. All of it is for sale. 

Ms. Eckhardt returned from Florida last week, heading north in a box truck filled with hand-selected specimens (“It’s important to hand-pick some real beauties”), and immediately opened in her new location. 

“This is a bromeliad,” she told two early visitors. “It is a specimen plant, very large, very hardy, very easy to care for. I like to do a lot of that out here, because people aren’t here all the time, and on the weekends they still want to have something living, a little life in their house. The same with air plants — low maintenance.” 

Last month, The New York Times pronounced ficus lyrata, also known as the fiddle-leaf fig, “the ‘it’ potted plant of the moment.” But “you should have an orchid in every room and a green plant in every room, in my opinion,” Ms. Eckhardt said. “It’s good to have variety. Look at these orchids.” She waved toward an assemblage of new arrivals from a Long Island grower. “They’re awesome!”

Weddings are a large part of her business. “We don’t have one every weekend, we have three,” she said, stopping to admire a few more specimens on display. “We do weekly house accounts, and a lot of events: rehearsal dinners, bar mitzvahs, weddings, a lot of parties.” The business also provides organic wheatgrass for several house accounts.

Antiques and other merchandise are sourced from estate sales, among other places. “I’m always looking for vintage vessels, things with a little more character,” Ms. Eckhardt said. “There are some new pieces here, but mostly it’s vintage.” 

Amagansett Flowers by Beth will be open daily until the fall, when the shop will close on Tuesdays, and will remain open year round. Its number is 267-2620; customers can also call Ms. Eckhardt’s cellphone, 516-768-6826.

Ted Stafford Jr., a longtime Sag Harbor Fire Department volunteer, died on Monday night after collapsing in the driveway of his village house. Because he had responded to a call a few hours earlier, it is being considered a line of duty death, according to Tom Gardella, the department’s chief. He was 73.

The Fire Department had been called at about 6:15 p.m. to stand by for a medevac landing at Havens Beach for an 11-month-old, who was being airlifted to Stony Brook University Hospital after suffering injuries in a fall. Mr. Stafford went to the firehouse to take over dispatching duties. After the call was finished, he attended a meeting at the firehouse, which began at 7 p.m. He went into cardiac arrest two and a half hours later.

The Sag Harbor Volunteer Ambulance Corps was called to Mr. Stafford’s house, on Palmer Terrace at 9:35 p.m. He had just gotten back from the firehouse, Chief Gardella said.

“If somebody dies within 24 hours of being at a call, that’s considered a line of duty death,” the chief explained. While he had not been involved in fire suppression, which would trigger an investigation by the Department of Public Employment Safety and Health, Mr. Stafford’s family may be entitled to certain benefits.

“Let’s face it, it’s a stressful thing,” the chief said of responding to calls, regardless of in what capacity. “He was there for us. Did it contribute to him passing a way? I don’t know. I can’t make that determination.”

Mr. Stafford was a retired Southampton Town police officer, a Navy veteran, and a former Sag Harbor Village Board member.

A wake will be held at the Yardley and Pino Funeral Home in Sag Harbor on Saturday from 7 to 9 p.m. and Sunday from 2 to 4 and 7 to 9 p.m., with a firemen’s service at 7:15 p.m. A funeral will take place at the Old Whalers Church in Sag Harbor on Monday, though the time had not been set by press time.

A full obituary will appear in a future edition of The Star.

A grace period to allow time for owners of rental properties to comply with a new town law requiring them to register with East Hampton Town and obtain a registry number expired on Sunday.

As of yesterday, the town’s Building Department had issued 1,895 rental registry numbers, according to Ann Glennon, the chief building inspector, who said numerous last-minute applicants have been in the office recently. “The last few days they’ve been flying in here,” she said. In addition, about 75 applications per day have been arriving by mail.

Because it is illegal under the new regulations to advertise a rental property without a registry number, local real estate brokers have removed unregistered listings from their websites, several agencies said. The law went into effect earlier this year, but town officials had said that enforcement would not begin in earnest until this month.

Brokerages report a mixed response to the new law.

“Most agencies have said, if you don’t have a rental number as of May 1, we can’t list you,” Tom MacNiven, a Compass broker, said. He said he has fielded inquiries about the registry process from a number of homeowners, but has heard “no real backlash.”

“It’s just a part of doing business,” he said.

Others, such as Mason Horstmann of Main Street Properties in East Hampton, have seen property owners decide to pull rentals from the market rather than comply with the law. “I think some people just don’t want to do it,” he said. For others, “it’s too much trouble,” he said. “I think a lot of people are saying, ‘I’ll just take my house off the market for this year.’ I think it will catch on as time goes on, but right now I think there are a lot of people who are saying ‘I’ll just use it myself’ ” rather than rent their house.

A group of clients who have not yet registered their rentals are “scrambling” to get it done, Mr. Horstmann said. Then there are a few who have told him, ‘It’s against my Constitutional rights — let them sue me.’ ”

Based on legal advice, his brokerage, like others, is deleting unregistered properties from its website. For owners who have not registered, “that’s having an effect on their exposure,” he said.

“It’s definitely affecting things. Numbers are down, for sure.” But, he said, “I don’t know how much of that is Airbnb.” That online listing service, which by all accounts has played a part in the proliferation here of illegal short-term rentals and is a focus of town enforcement efforts, has dampened the last couple of rental seasons, in Mr. Horstmann’s estimation. “Now, the rental registry — it doesn’t really help things, for sure,” he said.

On the plus side for brokers, though, the time owners must take to comply with the registry law “weeds out certain owners that aren’t necessarily committed to renting their houses,” the broker said.

It was standing room only in the Southampton Town meeting room Tuesday night at a hearing on Bridgehampton Gateway, with an overflow crowd watching on television nearby. While opinion varied  on the environmental, septic, and traffic impacts of the planned development district proposal, which would bring a mix of commercial, retail, and residential use to a 13.3-acre property across Montauk Highway from Bridgehampton Commons, everyone agreed on one thing: More affordable housing is needed in Bridgehampton. The debate was whether the property was the right spot for it.

The proposal to change the zoning on the Konner Development property from highway business to P.D.D. includes a commercial complex, now reduced to 80,000 square feet, and 20, mostly one-bedroom, second-story apartments above commercial uses such as an Equinox gym. The apartments, would be considered affordable, but the income equations have yet to be determined. Affordable housing is considered a community benefit, which is a required component of planned development districts.

The controversial project elicited a recommendation from the Bridgehampton Citizens Advisory Committee last week that the Southampton Town Board reject the P.D.D., although the committee had initially been supportive, and Bridgehampton Action Now, a group formed in recent months, has collected nearly 1,200 signatures in opposition.

Christiana McPherson, a 29-year-old social worker who works with the mentally ill on the East End, captivated the audience as she cried and said she and her husband were gainfully employed but that 70 percent of her individual income goes toward rent for their one-bedroom cottage.

“It’s not enough to be able to save and buy a house and that’s the American dream,” she said. “It’s a disgrace to our community that I am not alone.” Ms. McPherson said she wasn’t a big fan of the entire project, but wanted to support affordable housing.

Having begun as a town initiative, the proposal was originally for 90,000 square feet of commercial and retail space with 30 affordable apartments above the commercial space and market-rate condominiums in a separate building. Carol Konner, the principal, had agreed first to reduce the commercial space to 85,000 square feet. Then, this week, she agreed to another reduction, bringing the commercial space down to 80,000 square feet. The 20 apartments would take up 20,000 square feet and the four separate  condominiums would also remain.

A state-of-the-art sewage treatment system has been promised at a cost of $2.4 million. On Tuesday, Pio Lombardo, a wastewater consultant who has worked for the Town of East Hampton and was hired by Mrs. Konner, said the treatment system, Nitrex, is a nitrogen and phosphorous management plan that would protect nearby Kellis Pond, and he said the 10 homeowners around the pond could hook up to it.

Mrs. Konner, who lives on Mecox Bay, which Kellis Pond feeds into, said she was committed to clean water. She would even accept wastewater from neighboring homes at no charge, she said, as long as they paid for the hook up. “They are as serious about cleaning up Kellis Pond as I am, then they should put their money where there mouth is,” she said.

Robert DeLuca, the president of the Group for the East End, asked the board to forego further consideration of the P.D.D. because the property is environmentally-sensitive. He said he objected to P.D.D.s in general, finding that the relationship between the town board, which reviews P.D.D. proposals, and the developers is very murky. “Are you an objective jury? Are you a partner? Is it a collaboration?”

Supervisor Schneiderman, who took office in January and has been critical of planned development districts, reminded Mr. DeLuca that he had been involved in drafting Southampton’s P.D.D. law — twice. He said the town was now reviewing the law and that a moratorium on further applications was being considered. The Gateway is an example of why P.D.D.s don’t work, Mr. DeLuca said, adding that a community benefit like affordable housing should be the primary part of a proposal “not a shoe-horn aspect.”

Sandy Taylor, who lives on Audobon Avenue, said she was neither against Mrs. Konner nor affordable housing, but opposes “unsustainable retail.” She asked the board to consider acquiring the property for open space. “We do not need this dumped on our charming, rural hamlet, one of the last on the South Fork.”

Bonnie Verbitsky, who started Bridgehampton Action Now and lives near Kellis Pond, said the town needed to find the “proper place for families and children so they can enjoy themselves and not have to cross the highway and risk fatality.”

Philip Cammann, who lives on the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike and works and volunteers as a paramedic, spoke in support of the Gateway. “In my 36 years of service there have been more fatal or near fatal accidents between Butter Lane and Bridgehampton School — including just this past weekend — than anywhere near the Bridgehampton Commons,”

He couldn’t understand what the citizen committee’s “recent flip-flop is all about.” Mrs. Konner had done her due diligence to hear the concerns of the community, he said. “The next generation of E.M.T.s, firefighters, hospital employees, and teachers can’t afford to live here, and we as a community need to properly address those needs now.” While some developers would offer “a land-use swap,” offering credits for affordable housing in Flanders, “that does not make a Bridgehampton community, nor does it put out your house fires or save your child’s life from a medical emergency.” 

Elizabeth Naclerio, who owns a house on Kellis Way, said the property would be overdeveloped, which would create more congestion, and in turn hurt the tourism economy that she said everyone benefits from. “My friends are going to go to Nantucket. My tenants have made it very clear they’ve had it up here,” she said of her summer renters. Affordable housing is needed, she said, “I just don’t think this is the spot.”

Later in the meeting, Louis Myrick, who grew up in Bridgehampton and represents a new citizens group called Current, said, “The easy way out is to say I’m just as concerned about affordable housing as anyone, but this isn’t the project. If not here, where? If not now, when? We can meet in rooms and talk for another 15 years. But right now people are hurting. People need homes. People are homeless.” 

After three hours of testimony, the board held off on voting on whether to consider the planned development district. The hearing was held open until May 24 at 6 p.m.

A classic 1968 Ford Mustang that crashed into the front of a Sag Harbor store last Thursday evening once belonged to the writer Truman Capote.

The candy-apple red convertible suffered front-end damage when Myron Clement, 93, drove it over the curb and into the brick facade of the Henry Lehr store at 96 Main Street at about 7 p.m. He reportedly put his foot on the gas instead of the brakes after he mistakenly thought he was in reverse. A plate glass window was shattered, and the area was briefly closed off as the building was assessed for structural damage. No pedestrians were injured.

Mr. Clement was taken to Southampton Hospital as a precaution and released the next day.

The Mustang, owned by Mr. Clement and his husband, Joe Petrocik, is at Reid Brothers in Sag Harbor for repairs. “We love that car very much,” Mr. Petrocik said.

Capote, who died in 1984, was the couple’s close friend. He had purchased the car as a gift for his partner, the playwright Jack Dunphy, and used to tool around the South Fork in it.

He called the area “Kansas by the sea,” and an Architectural Digest article quoted him as saying that it he thought of it like “Kansas with a sea breeze.”

Despite having a house in Sagaponack, the “In Cold Blood” author often stayed at Mr. Clement and Mr. Pretrocik’s house on Madison Street in Sag Harbor, where he would drink vodka and orange juice. They still refer to a room in their house as “Truman’s bedroom.”

The couple first met Capote on the beach in Sagaponack in the late 1960s as they were packing up a Scrabble game on a Sunday even­ing before heading back to the city. “All of a sudden we looked down and there’s Truman,” Mr. Petrocik remembered. He came over and asked if they had seen his dog, Maggie. The next day, Mr. Clement, who ran a successful public relations firm in Manhattan with Mr. Petrocik, was having lunch in Manhattan with Horace Sutton, a travel writer. Capote was at a nearby table. “That was the beginning of a long, long friendship,” Mr. Petrocik said.

Turns out, Capote was never the greatest driver, he said. On one visit to their house in his big green Buick Riviera — “He could just reach the wheel” — he missed a turn as he drove into the driveway turn as he drove into the driveway and hit a tree so hard he totaled the car.

The couple drove him back to the city from the South Fork two days before his death. After he died, Gerald Clarke, Capote’s friend and biographer, his lawyer and literary executor, Alan Schwartz, and his Random House editor, Joe Fox, enlisted Mr. Clement and Mr. Petrocik to help search Capote’s Sagaponack cottage for his final unfinished manuscript, according to Vanity Fair.

“Truman would talk to us about all these things that were going into ‘Answered Prayers,’ ” Mr. Petrocik told the magazine in 2012. “But the thing is, at that time, I never saw the actual manuscript. And then it occurred to me, later, just before I nodded off to sleep, maybe he had made the whole thing up.” Driving to Manhattan from the South Fork later, however, Mr. Petrocik told the magazine that “Truman handed me the manuscript to read on the way. I actually had it in my hands.”

Mr. Clarke, who became the executor of Dunphy’s estate, knew that the couple fancied the Mustang, and some years after Capote’s death, they were eventually given the car.

When they took ownership, they had it refurbished, a process that took about a year. Its “Capote” license plates pay homage to their late friend.

“To this day, whenever we drive into town, somebody comes up with a story about the car and about the fact that they knew Truman,” Mr. Petrocik said on Friday, as he waited for Mr. Clement to return from his overnight stay at the hospital. 

Dunphy died in 1992. His ashes, along with some of Capote’s, were spread in Crooked Pond, an area of the Long Pond Greenbelt that was purchased with money donated from the sale of their estate. The greenbelt runs from Sag Harbor to Bridgehampton.

Mr. Clement and Mr. Petrocik allowed the Mustang to be displayed at the Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt’s Black and White benefit, honoring Capote, in 2010.

“We have a very sentimental attachment to it,” Mr. Petrocik said, but despite the accident, it appears that everything is fine, “nothing major, thank God.”

While potential jurors were waiting in the halls of East Hampton Town Justice Court Tuesday morning, the town attorney’s office reached a deal with most of the co-defendants in the town’s criminal case against Clan-Fitz, et al., better known as Cyril’s Fish House. However, while the Napeague property owners named in the criminal charges settled, Cyril Fitzsimons, the owner of Clan-Fitz, did not, and jury selection went on throughout the day, until six jurors and two alternates were chosen.

Represented by Christopher Kelley of Twomey, Latham, Shea, Kelley, Dubin & Quartaro, the property owners, Debra Dioguardi Lakind, Michael Dioguardi, and Robert Dioguardi, agreed to all the changes to the property negotiated with the town. In return, their case was adjourned in contemplation of dismissal. “The pathway has been laid out, now we just need to do the work to implement it,” Mr. Kelley said afterward, outside the courthouse. “We worked with the town to achieve a settlement with respect to the owners in making improvements to the property to bring it into compliance, and get an updated site plan.” That new site plan was presented to the town’s planning board April 27, where it was warmly accepted.

According to Mr. Kelley, the work, which includes removing the roadside bar and brick patio, as well as the awning and deck on the west side of the property, and reducing total seating capacity to 62, will be done in two phases. The first phase, to be completed by May 26, the Thursday before Memorial Day, includes almost all the changes to the actual building agreed to in a stipulation between the owners and the town. The second phase, which includes parking and needed fencing, calls on the owners to go before the town’s zoning board of appeals to obtain various permits required to build near wetlands, as well as some variances from the town’s zoning code.

The Dioguardi family also agreed to pay a $60,000 fine.

Neither Joseph Prokop, special counsel to the town, who is a prosecutor on the case, nor Michael Sendlenski, who heads the town attorney’s office, would comment on the settlement and why Mr. Fitzsimons was not included. “I don’t know how he is going to deal with his issues,” said Mr. Kelley about Mr. Fitzsimons. “He chose not to join with us in this application,” he said.

Mr. Fitzsimons is being represented in court by John T. Powers Jr. Mr. Powers did not comment outside the courtroom Tuesday. At one point, he asked a panel of 10 prospective jurors, “Is there anyone who is not aware in any way of Cyril’s?” None of the 10 held up their hands.

Mr. Fitzsimons’s company, Clan-Fitz, was facing more than 60 charges relating to zoning code violations, such as building a structure without a permit and not having proper certificates of occupancy, at the beginning of the day. Some of the charges are duplicative and may be dropped. Many are classified as misdemeanors, which are considered crimes. A conviction of even one misdemeanor could jeopardize the roadside bar’s liquor license, which is in the name of Clan-Fitz. Each misdemeanor, upon conviction, could result in a fine of $1,000 and a jail sentence of up to six months, though jail sentences in such cases are unusual.

None of the defendants were present on Tuesday. The trial, which was scheduled to resume yesterday, is expected to last until at least this afternoon. The witness list for the town include Thomas Preiato, the former chief building inspector, Ann Glennon, the town’s current head building inspector, and several other town employees.

The agreement between the owners and the town will also resolve an open civil lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court.

After last summer’s debauchery in Montauk, when crowds of drunken young adults wreaked havoc on the Fourth of July weekend, Tom Bogdan, a retired businessman who has lived in the hamlet for 46 years, created Montauk United. His goal was to get 1,000 members to lobby East Hampton Town officials to stop the madness. He said this week that the membership has grown to 975, and the group is ready to make its next move.

By early June, a mass mailing with 20 questions will go out to about 4,500 taxpayers, in an effort to find out what they foresee for the future. Mr. Bogdan said the business community is well represented among Montauk United’s membership, but that the questionnaire will reach the people who matter, the property owners.

The questionnaire was drawn up over the winter with the help of several retired police officers and marketing professionals who have joined the group, which hopes to find a solution through talks with the businesses that attract rowdy guests, and also to find a way to deal with the cabs that come east in the summer to make a quick buck.

Mr. Bogdan and others contacted other small municipalities to see how they coped with similar out-of-town-cab situations. One place closely resembling the Town of East Hampton was New Rochelle, N.Y., he said, which set up a taxi commission, run by a single police sergeant, to handle everything from licenses and fines to enforcement. “And she does it very well,” he said.

Mr. Bogdan and his wife, Marilyn, were living in the city 46 years ago when they took a ride out to the South Fork on a Sunday afternoon. By the next Thursday, they were back, looking for a place to rent. “We thought we were the luckiest people on earth,” he said. Over the years they have owned 18 stores selling high-end merchandise, some in the Gosman’s Dock complex. Ms. Bogdan still runs Summer Stock, a women’s luxury clothing shop at Gosman’s. 

They live in a sprawling house perched on a hill overlooking Fort Pond. A back porch leads down to a rolling lawn, past a pool tucked in for the winter, to the pond, where a few kayaks are stored. The couple has always been involved in the community. Mr. Bogdan’s contributions and fund-raising played a big part in the rebuilding of St. Therese of Lisieux Catholic Church, and both he and his wife had a hand in starting Project Adventure, which arranges for children suffering from cancer to enjoy activities in Montauk in the fall.

Montauk United is also concerned with the question of airport traffic, now that flight times have been limited at the East Hampton airport. Mr. Bogdan said  air traffic over the hamlet had already increased last summer and may affect the entire population if it continues. He knows personally, he said, of helicopter companies that are offering flight packages including ground transportation from the Montauk airport on East Lake Drive to East Hampton and back. 

Recipients of the questionnaire will be asked to return it within two weeks, or to fill it out online at montaukunited.org. Mr. Bogdan anticipates a good response. “Imagine this,” he said. “We’ve always been told what we want. Now, we’re really going to find out statistically who we are.”

Update, April 29, 10:10 a.m.: The 1968 Ford Mustang that smashed into the front of a Sag Harbor store on Thursday evening once belonged to the novelist and playwright Truman Capote. Myron Clement, who, with his husband, Joe Petrocik, were friends with the "In Cold Blood" author, was identified by Village Police Chief Austin McGuire as the driver. In fact, the Mustang's license plate was CAPOTE, the chief said.

Mr. Clement accidentally drove the classic car up over the curb and into the brick facade of the Henry Lehr store at 96 Main Street at about 7 p.m. He reportedly put his foot on the gas instead of the brakes after he mistakenly thought he was in reverse. Mr. Clement was taken to Southampton Hospital with a minor injury and held overnight. The building was not structurally damaged, but a plate glass window was shattered. No one else was hurt.

Mr. Clement and Mr. Petrocik allowed the Mustang, described as cherry red, to be displayed at the Friends of the Long Pond Greenbelt's Black and White benefit, honoring Mr. Capote, in 2010. The Mustang suffered front-end damage, but the extent was unclear. The couple, who were close friends with Mr. Capote until his death, had had it restored.

It has been said that Mr. Capote wrote part of the novella "Breakfast at Tiffany's" at his Sagaponack house. Along with his partner, the author and playwright Jack Dunphy, some of Mr. Capote's ashes were spread in Crooked Pond, an area of the Long Pond Greenbelt that was purchased with money donated from the sale of their estate. The Greenbelt runs from Sag Harbor to Bridgehampton. Mr. Capote died in 1984 and Mr. Dunphy in 1992. 

Originally, April 28, 8:06 p.m.: A 1968 Ford Mustang convertible crashed into the Henry Lehr storefront on Sag Harbor's Main Street Thursday evening, breaking the glass window and leaving the driver with a minor injury, according to Village Police Chief Austin McGuire. 

Police and the Sag Harbor Fire Department were called to 96 Main Street at 6:59 p.m., after the driver ran up over the curb with the classic red car, hitting one side of the brick facade and glass windows on one side of the entrance. The man, whose name was not immediately released, had a possible eye injury, and the Sag Harbor Volunteer Ambulance Corps took him to Southampton Hospital. No one else was injured. 

The plate glass window on the front of the store was shattered. The building owner was reportedly on his way to board up the broken window. The chief said the building didn't appear to have sustained any structural damage.

A pedestrian was flown to Stony Brook University Hospital with a head injury Saturday night after being hit by a vehicle in Bridgehampton, Southampton Town police said Sunday.

Michael McCrum, 61, of Bridgehampton, was hit by a car at about 10:30 p.m. while he was crossing Main Street in front of Starbucks. He was flown by helicopter to Stony Brook University Hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, according to police.

On Sunday his condition was reported to be serious, according to a hospital representative.

No charges were filed following the crash. Police have not yet provided any details on the driver of the car that struck Mr. McCrum.

The accident site is not far from the Main Street crosswalk near the Bridgehampton Post Office where Anna Pump, the longtime proprietor of Loaves & Fishes in Sagaponack and a well-known chef and cookbook author, was struck by a pickup truck last October. That accident happened at 10 p.m., almost the same time as Saturday's. Ms. Pump did not survive her injuries.