Erosion Expert's Revetment Cited

Rhodes W. Fairbridge, a professor emeritus of geology at Columbia University who is considered an expert on coastal erosion, has been charged with violating the East Hampton Town Code.

According to papers filed in Justice Court, Mr. Fairbridge allegedly built an illegal 75-foot rock revetment on town property next to his Fresh Pond Road, Amagansett, house, which looks out onto Gardiner's Bay. Mr. Fairbridge was not present for a court appearance scheduled for Monday.

Mr. Fairbridge explained on Tuesday, from his other home in Manhattan, that the town's notice was sent on Nov. 14 to his Manhattan address but that he and his wife, Dolores, were still in Amagansett at the time. They returned to Manhattan for the winter on Monday, he said, and found the notice in their mail.

Answering Charges

According to information filed by James Cavanagh, assistant natural resources director for the town, Mr. Fairbridge is accused of building "an approximately 75-foot revetment on town property in the parking lot on Fresh Pond Road, adjacent to his residence," without a natural resources permit or a building permit.

A line of boulders, perhaps 30 feet in length, on what appears to be town property in front of the road-end parking area, was visible on a recent visit. Mr. Cavanagh said Tuesday that he could not make any comments on the case at this time.

He was writing a letter to Justice Roger W. Walker to explain why he was not present in court as well as to answer the charges "at considerable length," Mr. Fairbridge said on Tuesday. Because the judge has not yet received the letter, Mr. Fairbridge did not want to discuss the charges at much length, he said.

Beach Erosion

He did say that he believed he had a current permit to construct the rock revetment at issue, adding that he and his wife believe the permit is valid until 1998, although he could not recall whom the permit was issued by. No record of any such permit was in the files of the Town Zoning Board of Appeals, which issues natural resources permits for activities within 150 feet of protected features, such as the beach.

A 1985 permit from the Zoning Board did give the Fairbridges permission to rebuild and repair the inner and higher sea wall and outer and lower wooden bulkhead which still exist on the bay side of their house. The bulkhead ties into a town-owned bulkhead seaward of the road end.

Mr. Fairbridge also said, as he has expressed in the past, that erosion of the bay beach in the area of his house has been caused by the two Fresh Pond jetties, which he said should be removed, and the town's bulkhead, which he said should be made taller and repaired.

Jetties In Question

Mr. Fairbridge, honorary president of the Quaternary Union Shorelines Commission and associate editor of the Journal of Coastal Research, also recommends building offshore breakwaters in the area.

His observations and recommendations for the bay beach around his home were the subject of a Guestwords in the Jan. 19, 1995, issue of The Star.

Discussions among the East Hampton Town Trustees, the town's engineering consultant, and the State Department of Environmental Conservation on the possibility of shortening or removing the northern Fresh Pond jetty were reported in The Star last month.

Hard structures, both parallel and perpendicular to the shoreline, have been praised for protecting shoreline properties by some, but also have been criticized for affecting the natural flow of sediment and hastening erosion in front of and downdrift of the property where they are installed.

About the closest thing to a real-life episode of "The X Files" you can get on the East End is a trip to Montauk Manor on a damp, slightly foggy, moonless night.

Just as you despair of ever finding it, you round a steep corner and there is this vast Victorian grotesquerie in front of you, looking uncannily similar to the hotel in "The Shining."

You drive up to the front door, where there is nowhere to park and only the smallest sign announcing the existence of the Manor's restaurant, Il Farole. So off you drive again to a remote, completely silent, and rather creepily well-lit parking lot.

On the trek back to a subterranean entrance to the huge building, you may hear sudden movements and heavy snufflings in the nearby bushes.

"It's a deer," I said to myself encouragingly, doubling my pace. "Montauk's crammed with deer. They have to bring out the deerplow on Main Street all the time."

I believe it was a deer, but Mulder would have said different.

In the anonymous underground corridors of the building, there are no signs to the restaurant or the elevator, nor, once the elevator is located, any indication as to where to go.

When one emerges in the lobby, the resemblance to "The Shining" is complete. Anyone who hasn't been to Montauk Manor really should pay it a visit for a totally out-of-East-End experience.

With the hairs on the back of my neck rising in anticipation of meeting Jack Nicholson, it was a great relief to find that Il Farole itself is small and cozy and not in the least spooky.

On the night we were there, the staff consisted of the maitre d', a waiter, and a busboy, which meant that when all the tables filled up at the same time they were over-busy and service was a little spotty. But it got back on track once our food was served.

Compliant Chef

The wine list is not large, but each wine is carefully described. A pleasant Gristina Vineyards cabernet sauvignon from the North Fork was $22.

Appetizers range from $3.75 for cheese tortellini in chicken broth or the soup of the day, which was fresh cream of mushroom on this occasion, to $10.75 for a seafood salad. It is worth noting that the chef is happy to comply with special requests wherever possible.

The tricolor salad of endive, red onion, arugula, lettuce, and radicchio came with a lively raspberry vinaigrette, but the zucchini fritti were limp, watery, and dull, with a disappointing tomato sauce.

The deep-fried calamari, on the other hand, were crisply battered and tender. The calamari were so small they could almost have qualified as "chiperones" and been served whole. They came with a choice of an unusual honey rosemary sauce which, while a little on the sweet side, was an adventurous change.

Adventurous Sauces

In fact, adventurous sauces seem to be a hallmark of Il Farole. As well as the raspberry vinaigrette and the honey rosemary dip, Long Island duckling comes with strawberry liqueur, porcini mushroom ravioli with a Gorgonzola sauce, swordfish with a raspberry sauce, and poached salmon with a Grand Marnier sauce.

We tried baby lamb chops with a Chianti barolo sauce. They were good enough to pick up and eat with your fingers.

High Marks

The specials of the day included soft-shelled crabs. Floured, pan-sauteed, and served in their concentrated juices, they were excellent.

High marks also to the Dijon mustard-baked salmon, which was cooked to the second, juicy, and, well, salmony.

It is a good test to go to a place not at the best time, but rather at the worst. Il Farole merits the trek, even in the depths of winter. And oh, that spooky Montauk Manor setting.

All the entrees come with a variety of fresh vegetables. Prices are average, ranging from $11.25 for pastas to $21.75 for filet mignon.

As the desserts are mainly ice cream-based variations, we just tried the chocolate mousse cake. It was outstandingly good, big enough for all of us, and a bargain at $4.50.

The View Is Famous

Now it may seem completely perverse to review a restaurant in the depths of winter when what it is famous for is its view. And certainly summer is the time to drive up to the Manor, when you can have a leisurely drink on the terrace and look out across the ocean on one side and the bay on the other.

But it is a good test to go to a place not at the best time, but rather at the worst. And Il Farole merits the trek, even in the depths of winter.

You'd especially enjoy it if you're one of those who believe that book about aliens landing at the Montauk Air Force Base. I think they took rooms at Montauk Manor.

The protocol is that the United States Coast Guard takes the lead, Ed Michels, the chief of the East Hampton Town Marine Patrol, told the town board on Tuesday about the rescue of a bayman on June 24.

"The Marine Patrol didn't do 'nothing'," said Mr. Michels. "We activated the system. You designate someone in charge, you do what they say to do."

Mr. Michels has been roundly criticized for the way he handled the incident, in which Charlie Niggles spent hours in high winds on a partially submerged boat in Gardiner's Bay before the Coast Guard picked him up at 4 a.m. the next day. Among his critics have been Brad Loewen, the president of the East Hampton Town Baymen's Association, who is also a Democratic candidate for town board, and several writers of letters to the editor in today's Star.

They say Mr. Michels should have launched a Marine Patrol boat to look for Mr. Niggles, who was reported overdue to the Marine Patrol at 12:17 a.m. The fisherman had left home to check his traps at about 7 p.m. and was expected back about two hours later.

Mr. Michels told the town board on Tuesday that he was following an established policy in which the Coast Guard, once it becomes involved in such a situation, takes the lead.

The Marine Patrol chief was called at home just before 1 a.m. and apprised of the situation by Sean Daly, one of two of his officers assigned to patrol the beaches that night. He immediately called the Coast Guard.

The Marine Patrol can undertake its own search for an overdue vessel, Mr. Michels said, but normally alerts the Coast Guard, instead, for a search-and-rescue operation. The Coast Guard's base in Moriches has search-and-rescue computers with maps and detailed weather data, and it can also call for airborne help, he explained.

"If there is a maritime distress - an overdue vessel, which that was - we are the on-scene manager," Lt. Jonas Yang of the Coast Guard Moriches Group said yesterday. "We have the entire picture, if you will, so we can search smartly."

However, Lieutenant Yang said, local agencies are free to decide for themselves how to respond to an emergency.

Nevertheless, Mr. Michels said yesterday, the marine units on Long Island have agreed to follow the Coast Guard's lead when multiple agencies are involved in an operation. Mr. Michels leads training sessions for marine officers across the Island.

"We are the professionals," said Senior Chief Petty Officer Nick Pupo of the Montauk Coast Guard station yesterday. "I don't see anything wrong with the action that was there. We are deferred to in a search-and-rescue operation on the water."

On the night of the Niggles incident, the Coast Guard had a 25-foot patrol boat that is based in Montauk within a mile of Gardiner's Island, with Joe Billotto, a State Department of Environmental Conservation police officer, on board. It was diverted to search for the fisherman at 1:06 a.m., according to a timeline Mr. Michels presented to the town board.

Marine Patrol was told to be ready to take over the search at 5 a.m. if the Coast Guard "didn't get results," Mr. Michels said. Meanwhile, Marine Patrol was directed, along with the East Hampton Town Police, to mount a search. It did so, using flares to light the East Hampton shoreline in the vicinity of Mr. Niggles's launching site at Folkstone Road.

Along with Mr. Niggles's son and his father-in-law, other officers reviewed the locations of his other traps and coordinated communication with the Coast Guard vessel.

"We didn't have a hard and specific area; we didn't know for quite a while which fish trap we were going to go to," Mr. Michels said Tuesday. The Coast Guard boat checked several traps near Gardiner's Island, he said.

Officers were sent with night-vision goggles to Sammy's Beach to see if Mr. Niggles was at the traps he keeps in that area. By 2:25 a.m., the Montauk Coast Guard station was making a "phone search," contacting marinas, boats, and others from Three Mile Harbor to Orient Point to see if anyone had seen the fisherman.

By 2:50 a.m., according to Mr. Michels's timeline, the Department of Environment had requested a helicopter from the Suffolk County Police Department and Coast Guard Moriches had requested one from the Cape Cod station of the Coast Guard. Personnel on Gardiner's Island were called at 2:55 a.m. and asked to check the beaches for Mr. Niggles.

The county helicopter took off from Islip at 3:15 a.m. and spotted Mr. Niggles at 4 a.m. He was picked up by the Coast Guard boat within minutes. The Coast Guard helicopter then en route to Gardiner's Island was sent back.

Town Supervisor Bill McGintee said Tuesday that Mr. Michels was asked to appear before the board "to dispel any misinformation that is out there, and so the board has the opportunity to understand these protocols and how not just Harbor Patrol but all emergency services organizations work on these protocols."

"If the Coast Guard hadn't been in the area, you would have been in the lead until the Coast Guard would come in and relieve you," Mr. McGintee said to Mr. Michels. "The Marine Patrol will go out at night if the Coast Guard is tied up."

Mr. Michels had already reviewed the incident at a debriefing on July 6 attended by Mr. McGintee's assistant, Lynn Ryan, Officer Daly, Officer Pupo of the Montauk Coast Guard station, Town Police Chief Todd Sarris, and Councilwomen Pat Mansir and Debra Foster.

"My opinion was that it was an excellent operation, especially since we had seven different units, eight counting the men from Gardiner's Island," Mr. Michels said Tuesday.

Supervisor McGintee, a former police officer, noted that he had "26 years in law enforcement."

"In support of what Ed says," he said, "one of the things you don't want to do in a coordinated search is over-respond. You don't want everybody running to the same spot."

Councilwoman Foster, however, wondered if would have been better to send a Marine Patrol boat out anyway. "I understand," she said, "but there was a large area to cover. As a family member, I would jump in a boat myself."

"There was a Coast Guard cutter within a mile of where they believed the subject might be," Mr. McGintee said. "If you can't find him there, you're much better off having your resources ready and waiting" to check other areas.

"As long as protocol was followed, the only thing you need to look at now is, do you need to change protocol, and was there a communication breakdown. And the only thing we could determine was, maybe we needed more information."

Over the past several years, programs in English as a second language, offered on the East End by the Literacy Volunteers of America, the Suffolk County Board of Cooperative Educational Services, and Southampton College, have been besieged by an ever-growing demand.

This year, though, the flood has become a deluge - each program's enrollment is at least double last year's.

Most of the students are recent immigrants, mainly from Latin America but also from Asia and the Caribbean. The common thread is the need for survival English - the rudimentary skills that can get a person a cup of coffee, a ride on the bus, a job.

Waiting Lists

Close to 80 students are learning English at the college, including, noted Laura Lyons, director of its continuing education program, a growing number of Turkish nationals.

Between Literacy Volunteers, which offers free tutoring, and the adult education classes held at BOCES, also free, there are about 200 students and 35 teachers in East Hampton alone. Another 150 students are on waiting lists.

Altogether, across the five East End towns, Literacy Volunteers has some 200 tutors working with nearly twice as many students.

No Dearth Of Students

When Donna Frey became the group's Suffolk coordinator three years ago, there were five or six tutors and no more than two dozen students in East Hampton Town.

This year, 13 new tutors from Montauk signed on.

"I used to cringe when I got applications from Montauk and East Hampton," said Ms. Frey, "because I knew it would be months before we could serve them."

While the effort to recruit tutors and teachers never ends, there is little need to advertise for students. "One comes and before you know it the entire family and all their friends are signing up," said Ms. Frey.

The Busiest Tutor

Robert Schmitz, a retired insurance executive and art gallery owner who lives on Napeague, holds the Literacy Volunteers record for busiest tutor on the East End - more than 1,000 hours spent with more than 20 students since he began two years ago.

Most of Mr. Schmitz's students are Latino. He goes to the motels and restaurants where many work, encouraged by the owners to tutor there during off-hours. At the Huntting Inn, for example, he tutored six Colombians for a year.

Though the Literacy Volunteers mission is to help adults, Mr. Schmitz said he had his own way of doing things. One of his prize students, Milena Barrera, was 12 when she arrived from Chile, speaking no English.

Now, her tutor said proudly, she is fluent in the language and has a scholarship to Bridgehampton's Hayground School.

Sessions At Chen's

Three afternoons a week, after school lets out and before the dinner rush, he goes to Chen's Garden, a Chinese takeout shop on Pantigo Road in East Hampton, where he helps Jean, 21, John, 16, and Amy Chen, 18, improve their language and survival skills.

He began with tapes and books from Literacy Volunteers that translate Chinese to English but has since moved on.

"He helps us with everything. Pronunciation, grammar, driving," said Jean, who was given driving lessons last summer.

The Chen children came to the United States about a year ago. Amy Chen said they heard about Mr. Schmitz from some Spanish-speaking customers.

BOCES Adds Classes

This year, there are 125 students in four BOCES classes held at night in East Hampton High School and one daytime class at the East Hampton Presbyterian Church. There were three classes last year, said Judy Kahn, the program coordinator.

BOCES would need three or four more teachers to exhaust its waiting list of students, she said.

For Literacy Volunteers, the biggest problem is finding places for tutors and students to work together. The organization, with 399 affiliates nationwide, discourages tutors from using their homes, citing potential liability.

A Place To Meet

They rely instead mostly on libraries, but also on schools and churches, to provide a quiet corner with a table and two chairs. Here, the Montauk Library and the John Jermain Library in Sag Harbor have each offered a regular nighttime meeting place.

Ms. Frey said she once called every church in town asking for the same, but not one, she said, returned her call.

"It's frustrating. We have so many more tutors now - not enough to meet the demand entirely, but it really helps - and then it takes weeks to find them a place."

One tutor and a student were meeting regularly in a park, but it got too cold, she said.

At Senior Center

As a result, Literacy Volunteers formed a partnership a few years ago with the East Hampton Town Senior Citizens Center, providing trained tutors while the town provided a room, transportation for students who needed it, and day care for those with small children.

Joy and Richard Lupoletti, a retired elementary school teacher and a retired librarian who live in East Hampton, answered an ad for volunteers and became the first to tutor there.

Last year, Doris Charney, a retired business owner from Sagaponack, had 10 students coming to the Senior Center, most of them mothers of small children.

Rewards

"We felt it was giveback time. Life has been good to us and we wanted to help someone else," said Mrs. Lupoletti.

"This has turned out to be one of the most rewarding things we have ever done. These students are motivated, otherwise they wouldn't have searched us out, and any teacher will tell you it's the best to teach a motivated student."

Mr. and Mrs. Lupoletti work two hours a week with each of three or four students, she with beginners and he on the intermediate level.

"We're more than just tutors. We become mentors for them in this country," she said.

Paulina Bahamondes, a single mother from Chile, has been studying with Mr. Lupoletti for nearly six months.

Seeking Fluency

She has conquered survival English and found a job working in the kitchen at the Senior Center, but wants to be fluent.

She said she would like an American college degree so she can "someday be in my own profession."

Ms. Bahamondes was a social worker in Chile before emigrating in 1987.

All the teachers and tutors interviewed said they benefited as much from the program as the students, perhaps more. They are invited to christenings and weddings, asked to help smooth out immigration difficulties, and otherwise share in their students' lives.

Like Family

"They make me feel like family. I wish my own children showed me such respect and did everything I told them to," laughed Mrs. Charney.

The Chen family affectionately calls Mr. Schmitz "Bobu." Two Latino students have named him the padrino, - a sort of godfather - of their wedding.

"Nobody wants to let you go," he said. "You become like family. But when they can speak well enough, I try to discharge them to BOCES."

"A Blessing"

Donna Milazzo, a Sag Harbor resident and certified E.S.L. teacher who has been leading BOCES classes in East Hampton for three years, called the experience "a blessing."

Nearly all her students are Latino, most from Ecuador, "and they're taught to treat the teacher as they would their mother, with respect and appreciation."

"In a lot of adult programs, you have people who are going for their last-chance life skills, and they come with a lot of social issues that are acted out in class," she said. "I don't see that in E.S.L. They come to learn English. It's really wonderful."

Life Skills

Instructors in both the L.V.A. and BOCES programs allow their students to direct the classes by asking for help with Motor Vehicle Department regulations, applying for a job, or other practical matters.

"They don't need spelling or punctuation as much as they need to know how to answer the phone, talk to their boss, ask for a cup of coffee in a deli, find housing, deal with Motor Vehicles, get information about citizenship classes, find a good doctor for their children," said Ms. Milazzo.

She offers help with all that through role-playing and conversational exercises: "You're going to lose them if you just ram punctuation down their throats," she said, "and the degree to which they know their first language will determine how well they learn a second one."

Changed Lives

Doris Charney helped one student study for his citizenship test by recording the curriculum on a cassette tape he could play in his car. He passed.

Another man, she said, "was depressed because he lost his job. The Hispanics, they're not really accepted here, and their work is so seasonal. Learning English gave him a little confidence and now he has his own painting business, a beeper, some employees. He's very sophisticated now."

Mrs. Charney used to run a window-treatment business with her husband. "I feel I really should have been a teacher," she said. "My first student, Luz, used to tell everybody I was her angel. I feel I really changed her life."

Nonconforming Swan

East Hampton

November 29, 1997

To The Editor,

Regarding Ms. Butlar's anthropomorphic letter of Nov. 20. My interviews with the swan in Town Pond have made it apparent that his lifestyle is his own and constitutes a backlash to the fragmented cliquishness of the gossiping gaggle on Hook Pond. He has adapted by crossing party lines and socializing with the mallards who must look up to him. We have truly approached Camelot when we lobby for arranged marriages for swans to placate our notions of status quo as we buzz by at 40 miles per hour.

GERRY STARR

Broad Coverage

New York City

November 24, 1997

Dear Helen,

This is a hasty response to the question about adding profiles to the Star.

I really like "today's" paper, which admirably includes all of the population's broad spectrum, as well as property line disputes. If the majority of readers request profiles, I vote for continued broad-spectrum coverage.

Love

ANN ROBERTS

Excellent Writer

California

November 23, 1997

Dear Star,

Russell Drumm's article about three fishermen whose lives were teetering on the brink of disaster, is an excellent example of journalism. You should be very proud to have such an excellent writer on your staff. Keep up the good work.

JAMES GERAGHTY

Author's Query

Santa Monica, Calif.

November 25, 1997

To The Editor:

I am writing a book on the history of Huntington's disease, first described by Dr. George Huntington, an East Hampton native. Dr. Huntington noted that the presence in East Hampton of what was then called St. Vitus dance or magrums had first stirred his interest in medicine.

I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has any information about this or other related events, by E-mail ([email protected]) or by regular mail (225 Santa Monica Boulevard, #412, Santa Monica, Calif. 90401).

ALICE WEXLERB

Please address correspondence to [email protected]

Please include your full name, address and daytime telephone number for purposes of verification.

Harvey Shapiro has been an editor at The New York Times for 40 years. He first landed there in 1957, after serving in World War II as a gunner in a B-17, attending Yale and Columbia Universities, and teaching for a few years at Cornell.

That he became an editor was an accidental felicity; he hadn't planned on it. When Robert Warshow, the editor of Commentary, died unexpectedly, Mr. Shapiro, who had been doing part-time editing for the magazine, was given his job. After a year he joined The New Yorker, before moving on to become an assistant editor at The New York Times Magazine.

The New Yorker lived up to its eccentric reputation, according to Mr. Shapiro.

The Pencil Man

"In the morning, a guy would come in wearing a smock, with a tray of pencils," he said, "and you would pick your pencils for the day. It was an austere place; you hardly ever saw anyone in the hall."

"The guy with the pencils might be the only person you saw, except for messengers bringing manuscripts. There were no meetings. William Shawn, the editor, told me not to be surprised if no one spoke to me. He said that he had passed people in the halls for years, and that they didn't say hello because they had no idea who he was."

What many people may not know about Mr. Shapiro is that he is a widely published and respected poet. His eighth volume, "Selected Poems," was recently published by Wesleyan University Press. The novelist and essayist Cynthia Ozick has called him "the American urban poet."

After working as an assistant editor at the Times Magzine, he became the editor of The New York Times Book Review, from 1975 to 1983. In 1984 he returned to the Magazine as a deputy editor; since 1995, he has been senior consulting editor there.

Mr. Shapiro, who received a bachelor's degree from Yale and a master's from Columbia, received the Distinguished Flying Cross for his wartime service. He first visited the North Fork in the early 1950s, and had a house in Amagansett for many years. Today, he is a frequent visitor to East Hampton.

On a recent gloomy gray warmish day, Mr. Shapiro visited The Star office for a chat. He is an affable, relaxed man with an easy manner and a quick laugh.

Poetry As Work

Mr. Shapiro, who grew up in Brooklyn, went to school on the G.I. Bill. "I wanted to further my education, of course, which is why I went for my master's at Columbia. But also, I didn't have a clue as to what I wanted to do."

"The year after I got my degree, I went up to Cambridge for a year, living on G.I. self-employment funds. The Government would support you. You had to report to the Veterans Administration office once a month and tell them what you were doing, and they would supplement your earnings."

"I was writing poetry, and one of my friends said that in New York the V.A. wouldn't consider writing poetry as a serious occupation, but that in Cambridge they had no problem with it at all," he said, laughing.

Turned To Teaching

When the year came to an end, Mr. Shapiro realized he'd have to find something to do, so he wrote to a number of colleges and universities, getting their addresses from the back of Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.

As it turned out, Cornell University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Oregon were interested, and he took a job at Cornell, teaching there for a few years.

"In those days, it was impossible to have a real career as an academic unless you earned your Ph.D. There was some pressure on me at first to get the degree, but I wasn't interested in that. It's clearly the career to pursue these days as a poet, because reputations are made in the academy, not outside of it."

Back To New York

"But, looking back, although I've always enjoyed the process of teaching, I felt that it wasn't good for me to be inside a university - it was affecting my poetry. It was becoming too literary. So I left."

Mr. Shapiro came back to New York "with nothing much in mind." He taught some classes at Queens College and joined The Village Voice when it first started up, both selling advertising and acting as poetry editor. He also did commissioned writing for synagogues - choral plays and masques.

"Then, I fell into editing." Mr. Warshow of Commentary gave him a part-time job "putting articles by sociologists and academics into English."

When he joined The Times, "I had never had a job for more than a year or two. I was a Depression kid, and I was always worried about how I was going to support my family." Mr. Shapiro, who is divorced, has two grown sons.

"The Times was the first union shop. The union was quite strong in those days. I felt a kind of security there for the first time. You went through a six-month probationary period, and then, if they hired you, you were really hired - you were in. You didn't have to bargain about salaries."

"When I was at The New Yorker, I worked for Katharine White - E.B. White's wife and Roger Angell's mother. Salary discussions with her would begin with her saying, 'Well, Harvey, how little money do you need to live on?' The Times was quite different, thanks to the union."

Tricky Position

In 1975, Mr. Shapiro succeeded John Leonard as editor of the Book Review. With several published books of poetry to his credit and an established reputation, Mr. Shapiro was, it could be argued, in a tricky position: Many of his friends were writers, and everyone wants to see their work reviewed.

"In running the Book Review, I was putting together two parts of my life. I'd always tried very hard to keep them separate." When Mr. Shapiro had first come out of the Air Force and returned to college, his intention had been to do something for a living that was completely different from poetry, perhaps as a manual laborer.

He tried to get into the merchant marine as a radio operator, but there were no openings. That he became an editor was pure accident.

Not The Same

"Newspaper work is very different from writing poetry. To someone on the outside, they may seem to be similar pursuits. But there's really no similarity at all," Mr. Shapiro said.

"Running the Book Review, though, was something of a problem. Although I didn't write reviews of books by poets, some poets tended to hold me responsible for what was written about them."

"I ran the Book Review keeping the interests of the general public in mind, but also working out of my own interests. In order to be a good editor, you must keep your own interests in mind. I tried to cover books that were news to the public, but also books that were news to me."

Good, Clean Work

"It was a hard, but interesting job. I tried to read all of the significant books that came out. My days were filled with editing and I read every night."

In 1983, when Mr. Shapiro left the Book Review, The Times asked him to be a book reviewer for the daily edition. "But that would have been the end of my poetry," he said, explaining that the kind of concerns one brings to book reviewing are similar to those one brings to poetry. So he chose to return to the magazine.

"Editing is good, clean work. It's satisfying to help to shape and focus an article, or an issue of the magazine. And writing captions, writing headlines - all of these things are very satisfying," he said.

Shaped By War

Mr. Shapiro is particularly proud of a special issue of the magazine that he edited in 1995, commemorating the 50th anniversary of World War II.

That war shaped him and his contemporaries, and it was when he came home from overseas service that he realized that he was a poet.

"I wrote some fiction and poems before then, even when I was a kid. But when I was 19 or 20, and coming back from the war, I realized that this was something I would be taking seriously. It was a serious decision. No matter what else I've done in my life, I've always written poetry. Even if I'm going through stretches when I'm not producing a lot of work, the impulse is still there."

Keeps Going Back

"Public experiences have a different resonance than private experiences. The fact that you've shared something with an enormous number of people enables you to reach out more. You feel that you're dealing with something larger than yourself."

"The two experiences that shaped me - other than specific things that have happened in my own private life - were the war and being the child of immigrants. They are the two things that help to explain a lot of things for me, in my life. And they are experiences that you keep trying to figure out. I keep going back to them in my writing."

Mr. Shapiro's poems, like those of his friend the late David Ignatow, are straightforward and clear. It's an artful way of writing, to make it seem as if the poem has somehow appeared on the page effortlessly. Yet he has a taste "for the Elizabethans, for Hart Crane, for the complexities of rhetoric." Some of his early poems hearken back to the dense works of Crane.

Staying Power

"It seems miraculous to me that you can place words on the page and that they stay there for centuries," he said, referring to the work of poets such as Sir Thomas Wyatt. "It's always meant a lot to me that the voice can remain, so clearly, for so long."

Among Mr. Shapiro's other influences were his friends Charles Reznikoff and George Oppen, poets whose work is often noted for its strong images.

"Is this really a coherent body of work?" he asked rhetorically of his own "Selected Poems," which includes poems written over a period of 50 years. "I used to worry about that when I was younger. I don't anymore. The subjects of the poems change, the style may change, but the same themes are always there."

New York Note

Caught on a side street

in heavy traffic, I said

to the cabbie, I should

have walked. He replied,

I should have been a doctor.

One of Mr. Shapiro's most often anthologized poems, "National Cold Storage Company," written in the late 1960s, takes a building in New York and transforms it into a haunting metaphor. Characteristically, the poem uses everyday imagery in a startling way:

National Cold Storage Company

The National Cold Storage Company contains

More things than you can dream of.

Hard by the Brooklyn Bridge it stands

In a litter of freight cars,

Tugs to one side; the other, the traffic

Of the Long Island Expressway.

I myself have dropped into it in seven years

Midnight tossings, plans for escape, the shakes.

Add this to the national total -

Grant's Tomb, the Civil War, Arlington,

The young President dead.

Above the warehouse and beneath the stars

The poets creep on the harp of the Bridge.

But see,

They fall into the National Cold Storage Company

One by one. The wind off the river is too cold,

Or the times too rough, or the Bridge

Is not a harp at all. Or maybe

A monstrous birth inside the warehouse

Must be fed by everything - ships, poems,

Stars, all the years of our lives.

The State Board of Regents went too far when it voted last month to add a foreign-language requirement for a Regents diploma once the new Regents standards are fully phased in, by 2005.

Fortunately the Regents have come to the same conclusion: Their Chancellor, Carl T. Hayden, announced on Nov. 25 that the panel would rescind its decision that all high-schoolers study a foreign language for three years and pass a Regents language exam.

Instead the Regents will require that high school students either take one year of a foreign language or pass a simple proficiency test. Only those seeking a Regents diploma with "advanced designation," a form of honors, would need to follow the more stringent requirement. The Regents also will ask Education Commissioner Richard P. Mills to appoint a panel to study the future of language education.

"As an academic, I don't oppose a language requirement, per se," Anthony Correale, the East Hampton School District's assistant superintendent in charge of curriculum, said this week, but "it's too much all at once."

Not only are some students feeling the pinch of all-Regents-level course work, which the high school initiated three years ago, but so are faculty members. There simply are too few qualified language teachers around. New York City alone could use an additional 1,000, according to its School Superintendent, Rudy Crew.

Antonia Cortese, first vice president of the New York State Union of Teachers, has suggested that the Regents phase in instruction at the elementary level.

Of course. Elementary-aged children are quick studies in learning language. With that in mind, East Hampton and most other South Fork districts have begun offering a little French and Spanish - admittedly only the barest beginnings of vocabulary - in the second grade. Later, in grades seven and eight, students can earn one language credit and be boosted to the second level of instruction when they enter high school.

Curriculums surely can be adjusted to begin at the beginning. But the first major step in putting the foreign language horse before the cart will have to be to educate enough good foreign-language teachers to handle the growing numbers of students.

The sculptor Audrey Flack is no stranger to controversy, but the storm that has broken over her head in the past few months far eclipses any of your workaday art-world tempests.

The monumental "Catherine of Braganza" she has been working on since 1992, a six-story statue of a Portuguese princess who married an English king and became the namesake of the borough of Queens, is under mounting attack as "a racist symbol of slavery" - as the Rev. Al Sharpton put it not long ago.

As the time nears for the bronze statue to ascend its pedestal on the Queens side of the East River, the centerpiece of a planned commercial renaissance at Hunters Point, the Committee Against Queen Catherine is demanding it be scrapped.

Queen Under Attack

In the past month, Ms. Flack - whose work is in the collections of every major museum in Manhattan despite the critic John Russell's 1983 characterization of her Photorealist paintings as "irredeemably hideous" - has found herself several times on television, defending Catherine against charges that the Queen profited, even if indirectly, from the slave trade.

The statue's opponents, a coalition of African American neighbors supported by politicians and academics, maintain that the 17th-century queen "cannot be disconnected from her father and husband."

Slavery, they note, was the source of the Portuguese royal family's wealth, and England's King Charles II was also a "promoter" of the trade.

Slavery Enshrined

"To salute a slave mistress is tantamount to spitting in the face of everyone in Queens and everybody in New York," Mr. Sharpton declared in August. He has not spoken out publicly on the matter since losing to Ruth Messinger in the city's Democratic mayoral primary, but others have since joined the fray.

"At this time, when there are discussions about apologies for slavery, to bring this into the face of black people is unthinkable," said Betty Dobson of the Committee to Eliminate Media Offensive to African People, an ad hoc group based in South Ozone Park, at the time. "We're not going to have this thing foisted upon us at this time of our lives."

"It's one thing to teach the past, but we should be beyond enshrining the wrong history," a Long Island University professor, Jeffrey Kroess ler, said on Nov. 11 on the steps of Queens Borough Hall.

Art Politicized

Mr. Kroessler, a historian who teaches at L.I.U.'s Brooklyn campus, has also attacked the statue as anti-feminist, pointing out that Catherine's dowry included Bombay.

"Is that an ideal of womanhood we wish to hold up to our youth?" he asked - an ironic question, surely, for the statue's staunchly feminist creator, who once told a rally to defend battered women that Medusa was a victim of male violence.

Ms. Flack sees the escalating controversy as "the politicizing of art," she said on Saturday. The sculptor called Catherine "a true symbol of the U.S. melting pot, certainly for women."

Caring And Tolerant

"I wanted it to look like her, yet relate to large numbers of people," she said. "She doesn't look Caucasian. She has very full, sensual lips." Catherine is said to have had olive skin.

"She survived in treacherous times," Ms. Flack continued. "She was intelligent, strong, attractive - a role model, and also an image of healing, not of violence."

And, said the sculptor, the Queen, whose royal husband had at least 14 children by a lifelong procession of mistresses, was "a good, sweet, caring, tolerant woman" to boot.

New Evidence

The Friends of Queen Catherine, the nonprofit group of Portuguese and Portuguese-American citizens and institutions that commissioned the $1 million monument, has begun fighting back against the charges that she condoned slavery.

The group was bolstered recently by as-yet-unpublicized testimony from a University of North Carolina scholar that Catherine of Braganza, far from acquiescing to the practice, seems to have opposed it.

In a letter to the Director of Cultural Affairs of the Borough of Queens, Aida Gonzalez-Jarrin, Frank T. Melton, a specialist in 17th-century England and the author of many books and articles on Catherine and her court, wrote on Nov. 12 that he could find "no evidence that she owned slaves or that there were slaves at her court."

To Free Slaves

In fact, according to Mr. Melton, Catherine actually left money in her will to free slaves, directing that "Little Boys or Girls shall be the first which shall be redeemed, and if there be none, the women shall have the preference of the men, for that in this manner the remedy may be applied where there is the most danger. . . ."

"There is a positive aspect" to the attack on the statue, said Manuel Andrade e Sousa, the founder and president of the pro-Catherine committee. "Support has grown."

"The Portuguese community in Jamaica is much more active" on the monument's behalf, he said, since the challenge to the monument began. Mr. Sousa has characterized the charges of the Committee Against Queen Catherine as "ridiculous."

Centennial Unveiling

The statue, which will be the second-tallest in New York City, next to the Statue of Liberty, is "about to go into mold" at the foundry in Beacon, N.Y., where Ms. Flack has been working since 1992.

The plan is to unveil it next year, as part of centennial celebrations marking the consolidation of the five boroughs into New York City.

"Catherine will come floating down the Hudson, trailed by a flotilla of small boats and, perhaps, Portuguese sailing ships," said Ms. Flack.

What The Globe Means

The statue is shown holding a globe, or "orb," which Mr. Kroessler, the L.I.U. historian, regards as a symbol of all that he finds wrong with it.

"When a royal figure holds an orb," he wrote in a Newsday essay, "it suggests not multiculturalism, but a divinely sanctioned claim to territories and peoples as personal property."

Ms. Flack strongly disagrees. For her, the globe symbolizes the connection between the Old World and the New.

"You can look up at a cloud and see an angel," she said, "or you could look at the same cloud and see a slave ship. What did the person see who smashed Michelangelo's 'Pieta'?"

"You can read into art whatever you want."

The 28 physicians and 35 nurses from the South Fork who so far have signed a statement against profit-driven health care may differ on the particulars of reform but are unified in the belief that their profession must be dedicated to "the relief of suffering, the prevention and treatment of illness, and the promotion of health."

Their protest echoes those of the ad hoc Committees to Defend Health Care that are forming around the country. Together, the movement is a reaffirmation of the Hippocratic Oath.

The South Fork statement echoes the national one. It notes what we are increasingly aware of - that the takeover of health care by "for-profit, market-oriented companies [has moved] health care from a covenant to a business contract guided by the bottom line."

Managed-care companies have forced doctors to be guided by financial incentives when considering their patients' medical care. The barometer is no longer what is best for a patient but what costs least.

While a goal of health management organizations is to bring better preventive care to more people, the news carries horror stories about patients with serious illnesses that went untreated or undiagnosed because of a managed-care policy or an unprofessional decision. The East End is no exception: Two weeks ago, The Star reported that an East Hampton family had to take Oxford Health Plans to court in order to get necessary care for an infant.

Some of the physicians involved in the protests may be motivated by the financial threat to their incomes. If they join H.M.O.s they make less money and tend to see more patients; if they do not sign up they lose patients to doctors in the plans.

The common ground, as the physicians' statement makes clear, is that the "pursuit of corporate profit and personal fortune has no place in care-giving" and "access to comprehensive, affordable, and quality health care must be the right of all."

If only the Amagansett School Board had been able to explain to School District residents exactly how it means to use the Meeting House Lane property it is hoping to acquire, Tuesday's vote on the purchase might have occasioned little notice.

As things stand, however, no one - not the board, not its long-range planning committee, not even the professionals hired to design the school's planned expansion - seems to know quite what the .42-acre parcel will be used for. A school bus loop? Classrooms? Athletic fields? Parking? Some or all of the above?

The resolution taxpayers will vote on Tuesday calls for an "unrestricted purchase," meaning the School Board can do as it chooses with the land. Despite opposition from Meeting House Lane residents and members of the Amagansett Citizens Advisory Committee, there is a possibility that the board could decide to put in a driveway there, allowing school buses to come and go on the narrow residential street.

This is troublesome. While it makes good sense for the School District to acquire vacant land when possible, as a hedge against future needs - particularly at the favorable price being offered in this instance - more of an effort should have been made to allay neighbors' concerns.

One of those neighbors, who proposed to buy the parcel and give the school an easement for buses, got little more than a perfunctory hearing before being shown the door. Sensible alternatives may emerge from a new expansion plan that would obviate the need to encroach on Meeting House Lane.

Time constraints notwithstanding, the School Board should have had a plan for expansion ready before putting the acquisition up for a vote. At this point it is unclear whether this parcel will be essential to that plan. Under the circumstances, it is hard to urge a "yes" vote.