Some years ago now, I took a call at The Star from Jared Kushner, then the dewy-fresh owner of The New York Observer. Mr. Kushner had the idea that during the summer he might somehow bundle his paper with ours as a way to reach Manhattanites whom he might convert come fall to regular Observer readers.

We declined, thinking that there did not seem to be much of an upside for us. I can’t recall what, if anything, Mr. Kushner offered, other than what he described as added value for The Star. My recollection is that he was basically looking to get something without giving anything in return.

Now, I am not saying that this was the best business decision on my part, but something about the vacuous-sounding Mr. Kushner irritated me. I did not think again about him until his father-in-law announced that he was going to run for president.

Since then, Mr. Kushner, an unpaid adviser to the president with a security clearance problem, has been in the news a great deal.  Recently, the press has paid attention to the way his family real estate company may have lied to officials about rent-controlled apartments in an attempt to keep city inspectors at bay. 

Getting less attention is a story about how a Kushner-owned property in Brooklyn had five suspiciously started hallway fires during a period while it was undergoing renovation. The account, posted on  Medium.com, came from Amanda Guinzburg, whom I met once at a party. She lived in the building, and her story was quite something.

According to Ms. Guinzburg, while fires were breaking out and construction dust was choking residents and building staff, the property management company increased rents, did loud work on Saturdays, and cut off the water supply to the point that about two-thirds of the tenants just gave up and moved out. Meanwhile, a man who lived there who had spoken about suing was evicted and his apartment quickly demolished.

The Associated Press broke another story on Sunday, reporting that the Kushner company had duped city regulators by claiming it had zero rent-control tenants in its dozens of buildings, when there actually were hundreds. As in Ms. Guinzburg’s building, tenants had to deal with extensive construction, banging, drilling, dust, and leaks they believed were targeted harassment to clear the way for higher-paying tenants.

Now, I can’t say how much of this is true. Ms. Guinzburg seemed trustworthy enough when I met her, and the A.P. knows how to report a story accurately. All I can say is that I spoke to Mr. Kushner once, and I decided he was not someone I wanted to do business with.

Copies of The Star’s 100th anniversary edition were dug out recently for the edification of several new staff members, and we found ourselves reminiscing about people who worked here over the years. 

Our centennial issue was published on Dec. 26, 1985 — the actual anniversary date, to the very day. Some of the memories the centennial issue brought to mind were wistful, some humorous. 

One indelible memory was of a man named Chester Browne, a former U.S. Marine who had been wounded in France in World War I and who worked as a Linotype operator and proofreader at The Star from 1923 until the late 1960s. When he died in 1977, he was remembered in his Star obituary as a real American archetype, a character you might read about in Dos Passos: 

“As a printer of the old school, he deplored the appearance of vulgarisms in type, and on one occasion fought long and hard, without success, to prevent the use of the colloquial verb ‘skunked,’ in the sense of having been held scoreless, in a sports story. He was equally affronted by improper hyphenation, and perhaps fortunately had left the business before the advent of electronic typesetting, in which word breakage is sometimes left to an illiterate computer.”

In a photo from 1930 reprinted in the anniversary edition of 1985, Brownie, as we all called him, is seen in the building at 78 Main Street where the paper used to be composed.

One of our favorite stories, back in the old days, was of Brownie. One day, he arrived at work before every one else and was surprised to see folks gathering across Main Street at Guild Hall. He couldn’t figure out what they might be doing at Guild Hall at that hour, but as time passed and no one else showed up to work, it slowly dawned on him: He had fallen asleep after dinner that night and, waking up to glance at the clock, saw that it was 7:30, and rushed off to work. It took a while for him to realize that it was 7:30 p.m., not a.m., and that he still had a long night of sleep ahead. 

We laughed about this for years. The deadlines of newspapering do make a person anxious.

Looking at our special edition also made me nostalgic for the processes and equipment that went into putting The Star together many years ago. Even the 1985 anniversary edition itself seems like a relic at this point. When we said “cut and paste” in those days, we actually cut and pasted! 

“When we think of small-town newspapering as it was,” the 1977 Star obituary for Chester Browne continued, “Brownie will be there, wearing a clean white shirt, a brown apron, and a small smile, and bearing a galley-proof.” Those of you who, like me, enjoy a good trip down memory lane might appreciate knowing that the East Hampton Library has already scanned and digitized every copy of The Star from its inception through 1968, which is as far as they got before the grant that made the project possible ran out. (Perhaps new sources of funding will be found sometime soon to complete this expensive project; I have my fingers crossed.) 

If you go online to nyshistoricnewspapers.org, and click on The East Hampton Star, at right, you will see how easy it is to look up old friends, old football games, old birth announcements, with a simple key-word search. You not only see the text, but can zoom in on high-resolution images of the page. Try it, you’ll like it.

My son had already begun sketching out his Pinewood Derby car when word came that the Shelter Island Cub Scouts had invited the Girl Scouts — his older sister among them — to take part this year. 

Jasper was not pleased, but Jade was thrilled. We had a genuine battle of the sexes under our very own roof. He immediately claimed it was “not fair” and that she would copy his design. Just as likely, he was worried her car might be better and faster than his. At the same time, he had enjoyed the special attention he got as he talked out his plans with his dad. Jade had plans of her own, however, and they looked nothing like his. She decided right away that hers would be a unicorn car, in spirit if not in appearance. 

To help out, my husband took the lead researching the technical details, and I turned to Pinterest to pull up a vast catalog of potential designs. I tried to give the kids the space to plot out their cars without much interference, because I know my self too well: Once I got the bug, it would be hard to hold back my own strong opinions about how they should form and decorate their cars. I mean, who wouldn’t want to help cut the pine block just so and sand it to the perfect smoothness, paint it with a steadier hand, and carefully attach the wheels for maximum speed? I had so many great ideas!

Scout parents out there, don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. Go to any Pinewood Derby in the country and you’ll see those cars that look too refined to be made by the hands of a 7 or 9 or 12-year-old. 

It was hard, but I resisted the urge to butt in and take over, offering support only (or mostly only) when asked. 

The Pinterest Pinewood Derby boards were astounding. Judging by the array of finely crafted vehicles with professional flourishes and aerodynamic lines, the Pinewood Derby seed, once planted, continues to grow and flourish long after young scouts graduate into adulthood. Many a budding automotive engineer must have gotten his or her start with a simple block of pine. 

In the end, no matter how beautiful the creations, the derby winners are determined by speed. Which of those little cars, weighted just right and propelled only by gravity, will cross the track’s finish line first? 

Looks may not count, but it sure is fun to check out what everyone comes up with. 

It’s tempting to say that this moment of reckoning in America, which has women across industries demanding that their voices be heard on matters far more serious than the Pinewood Derby, had something to do with girls being invited to this year’s contest. In this case, I think it was sheer numbers — or the lack of them — that spurred the inclusion of girls in this generally boys-only arena. There were just eight boys set to take part. Seven girls took up the challenge. Double the fun. 

Boys and girls raced in separate timed heats. The top three boys and the top three girls won trophies. So close in speed were the eight boys’ cars that a mere three-tenths of a second separated the winner from the eighth-place finisher. 

And the girls? The fastest of their cars was even faster than the boys’ first-place winner. 

Next up, an adult Pinewood Derby, something I hear the Shelter Island Fire Department is considering as a fund-raiser this fall. Sign me up!  

Carissa Katz is The Star’s managing editor. 

Midafternoon on Tuesday, as the snow seemed to be tapering off in East Hampton, I headed out from the Star office to have a look around. Though the roads were clear, few drivers were about. A couple of cars were parked at Main Beach but only one at Georgica when I stopped to watch the surf.

Main Street was empty, too, as was Newtown Lane. All the boutiques were closed. So, it appeared, was the hardware store. The food market across the street was open, but that was it; Mary’s, Villa, the lumberyard, Hampton Country Market, the new beverage place, the electric supply store, the library, Guild Hall, and everything else was dark.

Two village plow drivers pushed snow around at the beach; another cleared the Chase bank parking lot. It was quiet. I passed very few other trucks. Ice broke free of the branches above and hit my windshield with a loud thwack.

It’s hard to know if my memory is right, but I recall that a snowstorm like the one we had this week would not have shut down East Hampton quite so much. If you could get around, you would work. Now we hear about bombogenesis in the North Atlantic. Ordinary winter storms get cutesy, post-millennial sounding names that bring to mind contestants on “The Bachelor” or something. We stock up, hunker down, and catch up on shows we missed.

The kids, though, know better when the ground is white and there is no school. Ellis and his cousin and a friend got together around lunchtime at my sister’s place on Accabonac Road and made what I gather were record-size snowballs and rolled boulders although the heavy snow was too sticky for sledding. They shrieked and ran around until they were too wet and out of breath to go on.

Maybe we had it wrong those decades ago when we showed up almost no matter what. If we nestle down on the couch in a soft blanket with a book while the dog sleeps nearby, the world will nevertheless spin on. The work can wait for another day.

Not long ago, during an idyll in Palm Desert, Calif., I was doing the crossword puzzle and the first clue I came across was: “ ‘Serial’ podcast host Sarah.”

No problem. I knew that that would be Sarah Koenig, who used to work here at The Star.

Usually, I’m out of it when it comes to topical questions in the puzzles, preferring the gossamer past to the lurid present.

“Do you know who Odysseus’ rescuer was?” I asked.

“How would I know,” said Georgie, who had been reunited with her twin, Johnna, following a long separation.

“. . . You’re right, Ino!” I said, looking up after some moments of reflection.

As it turned out, Georgie and Johnna were my saviors that day because they are of a younger generation, which, at long last, I’ve begun to listen to, and could therefore fill in the gaping gaps of my knowledge of current events. 

“Who wrote ‘Hamilton’?” I asked out loud. “Lin . . .”

“Lin Manuel Miranda,” Johnna replied.

“What’s the backdrop to AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’?” I asked, at a loss.

“Zombie apocalypse,” Georgie said, laughing.

Done.

And so, back to reality, though I’d rather not. 

From wit to shit. Our other daughter, Emily, a veteran teacher, was, I learned on our return, up in arms concerning the move to arm teachers in the wake of the massacre of 17 students at the high school in Parkland, Fla. 

“Now they’re telling us we have to be police officers and security guards too?” she said when I phoned her. “We can carry a gun, but we’re not allowed to turn up the thermostat? Where were the bonuses for all the supplies we’ve been paying for out of pocket all these years — for books, markers, pencils, crayons, copy paper? I could go on and on and on. ‘There’s no money,’ that’s what the answer’s always been. But now, all of a sudden there is money! Not more money for social workers and psychologists, but for guns. We had one social worker at a school of 960 kids in an impoverished community in crisis where I taught in Chicago. One. We’re always telling the children to pick the best possible answer from among several possible ones. Well, this is the worst possible answer.”

“Everything’s always been put on the teachers,” Emily continued. “Turn out sterling scholars, lifelong learners, outstanding citizens, fix poverty . . . and now we’re to solve gun violence?! I can’t go to a math conference because there’s no money. There’s no money for education, but there’s money for guns. It’s so sick. I can’t believe people are voting for this. It’s like a wildfire. I want a bonus for the other stuff I, and all the other teachers, do.”

“Frankly, it terrifies me. I don’t want my sons going to a school where there are guns. I’ve never allowed guns in our house. It was all I could do to say yes to a lightsaber.”

“Can you imagine a teacher shooting a former student? Are teachers going to wear holsters? If a gun is locked away, might not a student find a way to get at it? What about teachers and students being shot in crossfires? Have they really thought all this out? Maybe some teachers might be good at this, but the school would not be a safer place if I had a gun. I didn’t sign up to be a security guard. I don’t want to shoot anyone. I’m not wired that way. I just want to do what I love to do, which is teach.”

Thirty-two years after the fact, they’ve come up with a name for what I have been doing since the winter of 1986: Digital Nomading. 

According to a piece called “The World Is Your Office” in a recent Sunday Times Magazine, digital nomads are people who “travel the world while working remotely over the internet.” Entire industries are growing up around these wandering telecommuters, from international housing complexes to shared office spaces with gyms, spas, juice bars, and other Googlish perks, all built on the advances in communications technology — the article cites smartphones, roaming data plans, and cheaper air travel — over the last few years.

In the year I’m thinking about — which I remember well because it was one of the last jolly ones on the island of St. Croix before Hurricane Hugo destroyed an up-and-coming economy that never recovered — we went down for Christmas vacation with three kids, me lugging an Altima (not a Nissan sedan but an early make of laptop). It weighed maybe nine pounds, with a slot that took a 5.25-inch floppy disk and another where you could plug in a state-of-the-art umbilical cord called a modem.

Ah, the modem. It was the late Stephen Hahn of East Hampton, a gifted physicist who, had he lived long enough, probably would have figured out how to turn lead into gold, who introduced the Star staff to the modem, that magical dial-up data transmitter that worked, back in the day, only over a phone line. (If a call came through while you were using the modem it would break the connection; you couldn’t use them both at the same time.) Steve, an escapee from the Holocaust who never lost his German accent, called the thing a mo-DEM, so, knowing no different, everyone else here did too. 

I was his guinea pig the night he first tested the modem connection, he in East Hampton, me in Manhattan staring at the Altima’s blank screen. I’ll never forget it. First came a hummy little wait-for-it sound, then green words racing across the void: CAN YOU SEE THIS IRENE? 

STEVE I SEE IT! I typed. STEVE I LOVE YOU.

Because what he’d just done, after months of tinkering, not only made it possible for all of us to write and edit from afar, but for me to work year round, not just in summer as before. Crosstalk, a lightning-fast file processor the Star used for the next six or eight years until email came along, could condense entire stories into a single word and zip them across the miles via the simplest of commands — “send a:robbery,” for example. The story would arrive on the screen full-blown as from the brow of Zeus, and depart, edited, the same one-word way. Like those early years of the web, when AOL had barely a thousand subscribers, Crosstalk was too user-friendly to last.

Anyway, about that Christmas in the Caribbean. I remember, one beautiful sunny St. Croix morning, writing something along the lines of “Another snowstorm is predicted here this weekend, to be followed by a plunge in the thermometer that will likely leave local roads in dangerous condition. Beware of black ice!” 

Helen Rattray accused me of writing it under a palm tree with the laptop on my lap and a glass of Cruzan rum and Coke nearby. She was dead right.

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large.

The animals and birds at the Living Desert Zoo/Gardens in Palm Desert were not all that lively the day we went to see them. Aside from the birds, who drew our greatest sympathy, they didn’t appear to be cramped, they had some room, though you wondered if they wouldn’t be happier freed from us.

I tried, without success, to get the laughing kookaburra to laugh, reciting catchy Rodney Dangerfield jokes: “I was so ugly when I was born that the doctor slapped my mother!”

“I’m telling you, ugly, I was ugly. My mother used to feed me with a slingshot.” I was constricted, though he just sat there on his perch, apparently unamused.

I fantasized about Mary freeing the vultures, until I read that sometimes they made away with small children. That gave me pause inasmuch as we were visiting two of them, ages 2 and 1 — the 1-year-old, Lucy, being an Aquarius like me. Mary is not a great believer in astrology, by the way, especially since I told her that we were “givers.” Make that “a giving taker,” then, in my case. 

We celebrated Lucy’s birthday a day early, on Super Bowl Sunday, an occasion made all the more merry by the fact that the Eagles won.

We wanted to free the bald eagle and the golden eagle they had at the Living Desert Zoo/Gardens too — all the birds, in fact, though it is worth the visit to see the native desert plants if nothing else.

There is nothing much left of the desert now. Mary said she wished she could have shown it to me in the 1970s, when she lived there, a single mother in Morongo, with infant twins, one of whom is the mother of the aforementioned 1-year-old, who has that dimpled wide-eyed look Johnna herself once had. Instead of tumbleweed, it’s house house house now, and malls, many, many, many of them. 

It seems as if millions live there. Johnna said she wasn’t sure. A million maybe in high season, in all the desert cities ringed by mountains, some with snow on top — Palm Springs, Cathedral City, Rancho Mirage, Palm Desert, Indian Wells, Bermuda Dunes, and La Quinta among them. 

She and her husband, Wally, and the children live within a gated community in Bermuda Dunes, though it’s not as easy to get into as the Living Desert Zoo/Gardens. 

I’ve railed against gated communities in the past, though I see her point: Its relative isolation and the constantly patrolling security service assures her pretty much that the kids will be safe when they are playing and riding bikes.

Even at that they’re never far from the madding crowd. The traffic’s horrendous, The Times is scarce, and it was hot for this time of year, in the high 80s and low 90s, not auguring well for the summer, when, as we do in the winter, the natives hunker down. But the margaritas they were good.

One of the big surprises about the woods on the East End is that they are full of nearly invisible life among the leaf litter despite so much development and other changes. The deer have opened up the understory vegetation, sending certain birds species elsewhere, but the amphibians persist. 

Andy Sabin, who founded the South Fork Natural History Museum, is considered the king of salamander hunters here. He is leading a series of nighttime walks this month for museum guests during which encounters with these secretive creatures are all but certain. I tagged along on one such outing some years back; they are quite something and not to be missed.

Guests assemble at the museum to be led to a location kept on the down low for fear of poachers. Yes, apparently, there are people who want to collect rare and endangered amphibians and might pay to obtain them. On the night I went on the walk, we parked at a cul-de-sac in a hilly section of woods and embarked, headlamps and flashlights lit, into the gloom.

The salamanders specific to the Northeast have evolved a particularly innovative breeding strategy. As snowmelt and winter rains fill low places with water, they emerge from hibernation to lay eggs in so-called vernal pools (a lovely phrase or earthly drag-queen name, perhaps). Once the eggs hatch, young salamanders creep off into the woods to forage on their own, grow, and get ready to return to the pools years later in winter’s ebb to mate.

Andy has chased their seasonal rounds for decades. During the exploration I attended, he pulled on hip boots and, with a dip net, waded into a thigh-deep pond to ladle a few tiger salamanders into a white plastic bucket. They were large, larger than I thought they would be, draping their black and yellow-blotched forms well over Andy’s cupped hands as he showed them to the roughly 15 of us taking part. 

Andy will lead three more salamander searches this year. Information about how to join him is available from the museum.

It would be great publicity for all involved, if anyone reads it. That was part of my thinking this week on a story about a portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis whose ownership is disputed in a federal lawsuit.

One of the indisputable truths about media in these times is that readership is fractured into innumerable discrete groups. Television news, which once was confined to the big national networks and their local affiliates, matters far less than it once did. Newspapers’ monopolies on the public’s attention ended with the rise of radio. On the internet, social media spoon up news your friends “like” and little else.

The Jackie O painting story was first reported by The New York Post and Daily News on Saturday. Other news outlets picked it up, and by Monday it was everywhere, or so it seemed. The story, I assumed, was interesting enough that, at least locally, it would cross over into general consciousness.

In short, the suit alleges that a small painting of the future first lady was stolen from the Beale house, otherwise known as Grey Gardens, in the 1960s or early ’70s. What is not disputed is that Terry Wallace, who runs a gallery in East Hampton Village, bought the painting from an unnamed antiques dealer in about 1988.

A Beale nephew, who lives in California and who has not been shy about trying to cash in on the family name with a line of fashion accessories, wants the painting for himself and has sued in federal court seeking its handover.

That the suit is with the feds is notable in and of itself. T.E. McMorrow, the reporter who wrote our story, pointed out that there is a $75,000 threshold to bring a property claim before a federal judge. The nephew’s lawyer says the painting is worth at least that much. T.E., or Tom, as we call him, is skeptical; none of the portraitist’s works has gone for more than $850, he said.

But federal court is federal court, and it makes for better headlines and a greater likelihood that, as happened, multiple news outlets pick up a story. Still, at my usual Java Nation stop on Tuesday morning, none of the news-junkie regulars had heard of it. Even Andrew, who runs the place and knows everything, was in the dark.

So the question was what The Star should do. Should we wait for it to appear in print before putting it on our website or just go for it? We put it up, pushing the story out over Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. Interest was steady, if modest. A small item we had posted a few days earlier about the New York City restaurant chain Il Mulino held an insurmountable lead, followed closely by our coverage of a seal pup found scooting along a road in Amagansett in January. Everybody had heard about that.

As to the publicity value of the Jackie O painting, the nephew wins either way, by seeing his name go cross-platform from New York to London’s Daily Mail. And Mr. Wallace, who says the portrait is his legally and not for sale anyway, does too.

As far as I recall, our little ARFan is the first dog I’ve ever taken on walks. In the old days, whether we were living in Amagansett or here in the village, we simply opened the door and let our dogs roam free. This was the common practice well into the 1990s. Even when we were at our house down on Gardiner’s Bay — and when the door was opened our dogs had unchaperoned access to a wide and usually desolate beach — they didn’t take off. They knew where hearth and home was; it was as simple as that. 

In years gone by, the village had a number of Main Street canine celebrities. Min Spear Hefner, our advertising manager, reminds me that a mixed breed called Ruxton was considered the mayor of the village for quite a long time and that there was a famously peripatetic bassett hound who used to be almost a mascot at the East Hampton Middle School on Newtown Lane. 

I’m not sure exactly when modern dogs stopped seeming trustworthy enough to be let loose — niceties of modern-era pooper-scooping aside. We do have more traffic on the roads these days, it’s true, but the speed limit today is actually lower than it was back then. In any case, as the years went on, freelancing canines became a less-common sight, and it became more common for helpful neighbors and bystanders to swing into alarmed action when they came upon one unaccompanied. 

It was quite a long time ago, maybe as late as the year 2000, when someone last called the Star office to ask whether the lonely black dog hanging around in front of Guild Hall belonged to the Rattrays. Was it Tanya? Or Goodie? I cannot recall which previous ARFan it was. But can you imagine what would happen today if we were to just open the front door and let our dogs come and go at will? Certainly, the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons would recall the dog, for starters. A good Samaritan might even try to press charges.

One of the reasons Sweet Pea, our current ARFan, has to be taken out for proper walks, rather than just let out into our well-fenced yard for a spell, is that we adopted her in winter. She had come to ARF from Puerto Rico in the wake of one of the hurricanes, and was adamantly opposed to the cold and snow. Even on sunny and snowless days, she was completely unwilling to step through the door, and if we managed to carry or drag her through, she would just turn around, plunk down on the steps, and stare back in at us with a tragic expression. She hated the ice so much that she would try to walk on two paws, instead of four, lifting her limbs into the air like a circus performer.

The upshot is that Sweet Pea and I  regularly take walks around the neighborhood, which have not only added a beneficial 25 or 30 minutes of healthy activity to my morning routine, but a pleasant dimension to daily life. Even though we live only a short stroll from the business district, my longstanding habit has been to jump in the car when running an errand upstreet. Out walking with Sweet Pea, I’ve gotten to know some of my fellow sidewalk regulars — a pair who march purposefully each morning toward Main Beach with Starbucks coffee cups in hand, the cookbook writer out for a constitutional, a couple who call Sweet Pea by name. 

I’ve also begun to feel again that I actually live in a village, a village made up not just of buildings and landscapes but of people. It brings a certain ineffable sense of well-being, and I love being reminded how pleasant village life was and still can be. My word to those suffering from internet-age social isolation: Get a dog.