On Sunday morning, I awoke to the sound of running water. Actually, I had noticed a soft flowing noise Saturday night, but decided I was imagining things. After all, a plumber had been to our house to fix the furnace and one of the toilets that very day, so surely nothing could be amiss with our pipes. By Sunday breakfast time, however, I realized I needed to investigate. Peering down the cellar steps, I saw a flood. I put on my cracked old boat boots, crept down, and found half the concrete cellar floor covered with water. It was five or six inches deep in one area.

    The standing joke between my husband and me, when I prove to have a woefully inadequate grasp of something mechanical or electrical, is that his “father was an engineer” (and therefore I should step aside and leave it to him). Nevertheless, it fell on me that morning to take action about the water in the cellar. I waded around trying to figure out whether I could somehow stop the water from getting into any of the fuel-burning elements down there. But I gave that up rather quickly, came upstairs, and called the answering service of the plumbing company that had repaired the toilet and furnace — which burns oil to heat water that feeds our old-fashioned radiators — the day before. I was told a “technician” would call back and let us know when to expect a visit.

    Now, this company had been extremely accommodating on Saturday, and the plumber they had sent then had gone so far as to drive to Bridgehampton, halfway to the company’s headquarters, to meet another employee, who brought him parts we needed to fix a corroded valve or some such. But despite that good service, I was impatient and growing a bit alarmed on Sunday. When no one called back within an hour, I phoned again . . . two, three, four times.

    I was about to call in a different plumber — even if it meant paying someone to fix something that was someone else’s fault, as I speculated it was — when, a little more than four hours after my S.O.S. went out, the nice fellow from the day before arrived at the door.

    He, too, seemed to assume he was at fault. I heard him ask himself, “Where on Earth is the leak?”

    Truth will out. Five or 10 minutes later, he surfaced. The truth was that a garden hose on one side of the house, which had been inadvertently left on months earlier, had frozen and burst, then started flowing when the weather moderated. Water had saturated the foundation and a steady stream was entering the basement. He was relieved; I, abashed and exceedingly grateful when he offered to pump the basement out.

    As he wrote up the bill, he told me that he had been on call throughout the long, deep freeze of the first half of January. We kibitzed a bit. He told me that he used to enjoy deep-sea diving in Florida (quite a plumber-ish activity, I thought), but that he got tired of swimming with sharks and alligators.

    He told me he lived in the Mastic- Shirley area. What was most aggravating, he said, was that sometimes he would be on the highway after a long day, within striking distance of home, when a new urgent call would come in and he would have to turn around and drive back east again.

    “This is nothing,” he said. He had been at work till midnight over the weekend, coping with burst pipes and cellars with water as deep as swimming pools. One East Hampton house had water in the basement up to the ceiling, which was coming down, he said.

    I had been ready to assume the worst and curse the company for which he worked (a company, by the by, that had taken over a local business some time ago), but it turned out to be a lesson in the dangers of hasty judgment, not to mention New-York-minute impatience in general.

    The plumber had been employed with his company for many years and was dedicated, skilled, and willing to go the extra mile in difficult circumstances. It turned out that ours was his eighth emergency call on Sunday.

    They say a good man is hard to find, but I imagine there are many of them in the trade parade that plies the highway every morning and evening. I wonder: These days, when few skilled workers can afford to live east of the Shinnecock Canal, how many good people like him have been priced out of the neighborhood? (And how many sharks and alligators have come to take their place?)   

    It was a quiet Saturday afternoon, and Ellis, who will soon turn 4, and I busied ourselves preparing one of the old kitchen chairs for some regluing. It was the pig’s fault.

    One of the more annoying things that our pet house-pig, Leo, does is flip over things when he is bored. Since he is mostly confined to the first floor, where the kitchen is, much of his apparent adolescent piggy angst is directed at the chairs. Already, he has broken two outright, and a third, the one Ellis and I went to work on, was coming apart at the joints. We’ve taken to leaving the chairs on their sides to save the wear and tear.

    His rooting demands at our ankles when he is hungry or looking for a scratching have become so annoying that we have taken to keeping a spray bottle at hand to drive him off. Thing is, though, that he takes the directed water streams to mean only that it is time to move from, say, the left ankle to the right. And he screams bloody murder when we try to push him away from our feet.

    Even though he weighs in at a mere 30 pounds, his snout is so strong that he can lift an entire loaded dishwasher rack. Just the other day I noticed tiny tusk marks on the entryway door, apparently from when he wanted to get in and someone was not moving fast enough for his liking.

    There was a time, back when he was a wee piglet, that we worried about leaving him on the lawn unattended. “What if a hawk flew in and swept him away?” we worried. Nowadays, it is pretty clear Leo would be having any hawk that tried  for lunch.

    Part of the problem now is that it is winter. Leo would much prefer to be outside, eating grass or snuffling around in the leaf litter. Like human kids, who whine about there being nothing to do, it seems all he wants is to be entertained. If I pick him up and set him on my lap while I am reading the newspaper, he nuzzles contentedly under my elbow.

    Lisa and I hope that as Leo ages he will mellow. Until then, Ellis and I will keep the sandpaper and glue handy.

    I had thought I’d been sleeping unduly long — 9 to 11 hours at times if I can get away with it — until I read a report in the weekly science section of The New York Times on the so-called glymphatic system, which takes out the trash, as it were, from the brain while one is in Never-Never Land.

    “So what is removed from our brains as we sleep?” I asked Mary, who is as much of an insomniac as I am a narcoleptic, this morning.

    “I don’t know,” she said. “Read the article. I’ve saved it. It’s in the computer room.”

    “Is the brain’s janitorial service getting rid of my thoughts?” I called after her. (She was hastily getting ready to drive to work.) “But no, that couldn’t be, for I usually let you do my thinking for me. . . . As for the rest, maybe I’m being brain-washed.”

    Indeed. That’s what the article (which, deprived of Mary’s customary sustenance, I did actually read) says, to wit, that the interstitial spaces within the brains of laboratory mice swelled with cerebrospinal fluid that removed toxic proteins (some of which have been associated with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia) while the mice slept or were anaesthetized.

    This “glymphatic” system is said to be similar to the lymphatic system, which removes toxins from the rest of the body after physical exercise.

    Since one apparently needs uninterrupted periods of the kind of sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care for the janitorial glial cells to remove the brain’s waste, and thus, presumably, to obviate, or at least forestall, the onset of . . . of . . . yes, yes, Alzheimer’s . . . those who are sleep deprived (as the article says 80 percent of Americans are) would seem to be at risk.

    The brain studies — two were cited in The Times article — presage, perhaps, two avenues pharmacological companies may take in the future — one that would “make certain that our brain’s sleeping metabolism is as efficient as it can possibly be,” and one that would “promote the enhanced cleaning power of the sleeping brain in a brain that is fully awake,” a noxious possibility to my somnambulant mind, one that could well cause this idler — who would have, as a result, even more time on his hands! — to lose a lot of sleep.   

    On Sunday nights, our entire street goes dark. We used to be among the weekend families, the ones who packed up their lives and returned to the city midday Sunday afternoon.

    Having children changes everything.

    A year before my husband and I married, we bought a house, nestled in the Northwest Woods of East Hampton, about a five minutes’ drive from the center of town. At the time, it was our weekend retreat, where we would arrive late Friday night, each having battled long workweeks, and where we rested our weary bones and summoned enough stamina to do it again the following week.

    Flash forward to May 2012, when we moved out for an extended summer, this time with our 6-week-old son in tow. Never having spent more than an entire week in our house, we planned on staying until Labor Day. I distinctly remember leaving behind my sweaters and coats. Not only would they have found an impossible time fitting over my new, ample-sized body, it was simply inconceivable that we wouldn’t be returning to the lives and the seasons where such items were worn.

    But by Labor Day, we hadn’t really made much progress in our return to the city. And with a semester-long parental leave for my husband, and occasional side projects as a freelance writer, there wasn’t any particular rush to return to our former lives. By late October, though, friends had grown worried and the call of the world ultimately felt too great.

    So, we moved back for the months of November and December to our two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side. We were quickly and quite surprisingly miserable. After long walks on the beach every evening near dusk, our apartment felt tiny and claustrophobic by comparison. City life with a baby, and later a toddler, proved worse. My friends in Williamsburg might as well have occupied another city given how little I saw of them. Between nap times and limited child care, we started to live our lives in a span of 30 city blocks — and often far less.

    A year ago, we moved out to the house, with the intention of giving it a full calendar year. There were more than a few occasions last winter when I felt like a modern-day pioneer woman, tasked with keeping the elements at bay. My husband experimented with what it meant to commute two full days a week into the city, and I started working at The Star part time, an alternative that allowed me more time with my son, while also keeping a vital toehold in the working world.

    All this time, we’ve kept our apartment. But those days, we’re finding, are numbered. Each trip feels like visiting a former life. The bedroom where I first kissed my husband and the shower where I labored are still there. Our plates and utensils, too. But I firmly believe this next stretch of our lives is about committing to one place, about our family, now the three of us, deciding where to make our home.

    Nevertheless, the decision of where to be has proven an agonizing one.

    Sometimes, it feels strange to have chosen to make your life in such a desolate part of the earth. I like to joke with my mother, who lives in California, that there really wasn’t much farther east we could have gone.

    I moved to New York after college, as a lot of young and ambitious people do, to live out their dreams. Those 10 years, filled with equal parts magic and heartbreak, they went by in a flash.

    A few weeks ago, my husband and I drove back into the city for a long weekend, our son fast asleep in the back seat. It was one of those stark Manhattan nights, when the lights of the city seemed to appear out of nowhere, stretching on as far as the eye could see. The city seemed massive in a way that I couldn’t fully penetrate. In those moments, I felt as though I had barely scratched the surface.

    I hope for these next 10 years, wherever it is they take us — possibly here, possibly not — that at the end of it we arrive at a place that feels more like home. A place where we can say there was a deeply felt sense of community, of purpose, where we came away with an abiding sense of being known.

    Maybe more than I want it for my child, I want it for myself, too.

    Amanda M. Fairbanks is a reporter at The Star.   

    I want to thank Mr. Ira Rennert. Really. 

    Years ago when he began work on his compound in Sagaponack many were outraged. How could he take that lovely unbroken vista, Fairfield, and build something on it?

    Rumors swirled as more and more work was done in this huge ex-farm field overlooking the ocean. People tried to get a look at it. They flew over it and crept up from the beach to try see what was going on.

    There were stories: a garage for 100 cars, a footprint the size of Grand Central Station, hundreds of windows, tens of thousands of square feet! It would be a hotel, a hostel, a yeshiva, a corporate retreat, a university. Who needs a house that big, the neighbors wondered.

    People talked and whispered, and the traffic slowed to a crawl on the nearest roads. The work continued and continued.

    The fences went up and the sets of security gates. It was taking years to complete.

    Technology finally caught up with the project and satellites photographing every inch of the coastline enabled the curious to finally see the outlines of the parterres and allées and courtyards and driveways and accessory buildings. It was, in fact, huge, very sedate, very formal, with zillions of trees and acres of sod.

    Passers-by were positive this project would ruin the look of the area. They huffed and they puffed and they sort of hoped they could blow the whole thing down.

    And yet, it turns out the visual impact on the landscape is basically nil.

    The huge expanse of sand colored buildings are nestled snugly into the property and while the volumes are astounding when viewed from the air (or diagonally from a side road) the structures aren’t really any taller than the allées of trees. The Rennerts do not have any ungainly towers, swooping porches, portcullises, porte cochers, assorted mismatched rooflines, or encyclopedic variations on window sizes and shapes that can be found elsewhere locally.

    Folks, the Rennert house is subdued in its hugeness.

    I thank the Rennerts for buying the property and preventing the predatory developers (you know who you are) from making clusters of generic faux Shingle Style trophy houses for the nouveau, nouveau nouveaux.

    Across the street from Rennert-land, the sky is pierced by a combination of gambrel/mansard/pyramidal/hipped and semi-hipped, and simultaneously cross-gabled rooves sprouting more chimneys per structure than trees in the yards.

    Many of these faux-architectural specimens sport very tall stonework turrets at the corners of the shingled starter castles, with eyebrow windows breaking the hundreds of square feet of cedar shingles or terra-cotta tiles or both. MelangeHampton. Neighborhoods of flat ex-farm fields sprout tight groupings of spec houses spaced like suburbia — the Hamptons version of Levittown. Is this preferable? If you build it, they will come, and they have, and they will, as the land fills up with ticky-tacky.

    And then there is the previously scorned Rennert property with its low-slung European-style villa, formal gardens, and amazingly nonaggressive presence. Yes, the Rennert place is huge, but the compound is nowhere near as dense as those clumps of developer houses, or the watchcase factory mini-village in Sag Harbor.

    So thank you, Rennert family, for not letting that little piece of heaven sprout at least 480 English-style brick chimneys on at least 60 shiny new bad reinterpretations of the Shingle Style. Thank you for only having one tennis court and one pool, and not overstressing the land. (Each mini-castle in those developments has a pool and tennis and a septic and multiple dishwashers and triple machine laundry rooms.)

    Thank you for leaving room around your buildings for trees and grass. Thank you for keeping your house low so you don’t block the sunrise.

    Yes, dear reader, it’s big. But the alternative to the Rennert big is lots and lots of big. The farm fields will be growing more and more of those very big, generic houses they call McMansions, filling up the vistas with massive rooflines and hedges.

    The Rennerts have finished their building project, and what they have is better than what we imagined it would be and preferable by far to what it could have been.

    Thank you, Rennerts, and by the way, could I come over and borrow a cup of sugar some time? Maybe you could give me a little tour?

     Durell Godfrey, a contributing photographer for The Star, has photographed dozens, possibly even 100 or more, houses and gardens for the paper and its special sections.

    It was 17 degrees that morning, so maybe the reason the conversation turned to warm water sailing was to put our minds over matter. I had been coiling a heavy orange extension cord, which was no longer needed near my desk, and announced rather smugly to a co-worker who happened to be standing nearby that I knew how to coil lines correctly because I had spent a lot of time on boats.

    “You got all but two turns right,” he said rather seriously as he took the cord to put it away. That my score was only fair was embarrassing.

    For anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about, keeping the lines on boats stored without kinks or twists is one of the first things sailors learn. A line that doesn’t flow out when it’s needed to, say, tie up at a dock or throw to someone who’s fallen overboard can cause trouble, indeed.

    So I told Paul, my co-worker, a story that I had repeated to others over the years about how little I knew about boats before I came to live in East Hampton. “I was afraid of rowboats in Clove Lake,” I would tell people, referring to a park on Staten Island that my friends and I frequented as teenagers from nearby Bayonne, N.J.

    One of my first lessons in what real boating was all about occurred when my husband-to-be and I sailed to Greenport in an old wooden catboat he had just bought, the first of several we eventually were to own. As instructed, I jumped onto the dock at which we were about to tie up, holding a heavy coil of line. I then stood there befuddled as he yelled — twice — “Take a turn around it.” A seafaring man of considerable experience, he was able to get on the dock, grab the line from my hand, and wind it several times around a heavy piling before the boat crashed into anything.

    Our winter conversation then turned logically to tying boats up at moorings rather than docks, and the tension that might ensue. Paul laughed and told me how he and his partner had rented a boat that was bigger than they had experience with, and how difficult the necessary communication became when they had to pick up a mooring in a crowded anchorage. Nowadays, Paul’s boat is of a size they manage quite well. But even though it is usually moored in a cove near their house, he runs a pick-up line between the real buoy, anchored into the harbor bottom, and a second one, providing an easier way to hook on.

    Before we got back to work, I had another story to tell. One fall day in the 1980s, I, my daughter, and a Star reporter took out our family’s last cruising catboat, which we kept at a small marina on the cove near the entrance to Three Mile Harbor. We were coming into our slip under power when the engine conked out. My daughter sailed the boat in with ultimate grace, evoking approbation from a few people on shore. That she was good at sailing was almost genetic.

    The conversation was then about to veer to ice-boating, but we decided that subject was better left for a hot summer’s day.

    In fewer than the allotted 140 characters, someone  took to Twitter to make note of an obituary that appeared in The Star last week, but it was a first. Social media has become ubiquitous, but somehow, to my knowledge, no one had tweeted before on what we had written about a loved one who had gone.

    For those of us in local news there is the knowledge that we have far more readers now than we ever had before, thanks to the Internet. What we write now has a long reach and an extraordinary degree of persistence.

    The comment about the late Yolanda Gross came from a nephew who recalled her as a lovely person. He directed his Twitter followers to our website. Two others responded to the obiturary with tweets of their own, spreading word a little further.

    I took particular interest in this, as I guess I am The Star’s web-geek-in-chief, something I can trace back to a beginning computer class at East Hampton Middle School around 1976. John Ryan Sr., I believe, supervised a small group of us as we took turns phoning in to a remote computer, storing little programs we wrote on yellow paper punch-tape.

    Equally, though, I had taken note of Ms. Gross as information about her life had come into the office the previous week. A retired teacher, sometime Springs School librarian, accomplished cook, and classical pianist, she was the kind of person we would have liked to profile in the paper while she was alive. Hers was the best kind of obituary, one that leaves us wishing we had met.

    It is funny to contemplate how far technology has come from those days in the mid-’70s when remote users could connect to distant time-sharing computers, but not to one another. Not that many years ago, it might have been weeks before Ms. Gross’s relatives and friends elsewhere saw her obituary in a clipping sent by mail. Today, word of a death can be instantaneous once it is published online.

    We now realize we are not just writing for a local audience, but that the whole world can look in. Or, as with Yolanda Gross, a wide and affectionate circle of family and friends.

    I can’t imagine anybody working at a newspaper suffering from the condition known as writer’s block. At a newspaper, you live by a simple creed: Write or die.

    Writing has always seemed natural to me. Whether I was writing copy for advertising or writing a poem or a play, it has always been about hearing the words, then writing them down. Hearing the words, and voicing them.

    Everyone has a voice.

    Today, we all write constantly, a waterfall of words. We tweet and instant-message and blog and email, using single letters and symbols for words and expressions of thought. But I wonder in this waterfall of words, if we don’t, at some point, drown out the sound of our own voices.

    The following letter came out of a large cigar box filled with papers from a Missouri family. How it got to East Hampton, I have no idea. It is a letter home from a Union soldier during the Civil War, Adam O. Branstetter, a private in the 49th Regiment of Missouri.

    I have dutifully researched the writer of this letter. He was born on May 19, 1834, in Pike County, Mo. Son of an innkeeper, he became a hatter. He married Carolyn Little in Wellsville, Mo., on April 1, 1862. On May 16, 1863, his wife gave birth to their only child, a girl, Stella A. Branstetter, whose father enlisted in the Union Army in August 1864.

He wrote this letter in a fairly neat script, but his spelling was hit-or-miss. I added punctuation and paragraph breaks, but left spelling as is.

    A couple of the words I couldn’t make out, but they are just words.

    March 17th 1865

    Dauphin Island Alabama

    Carrie Branstetter

    Wellsville, Mo

Dear Wife,

    I answer your letter dated March 2. I have bin sick for four weeks but am well at this time. I look as gaunt as a race horse, you would not know me. I had the leinil Diarear, it give me fits.

    I am sorry to hear that the baby is sick and father is blind. It grieves me to hear such news.

    We have done some hard marching since we left. Now we lay on the lake for three days in a storm. We have plenty of fresh oysters here by gathering them.

    This Island is about 12 miles long and one mile wide and covered with soldiers. I saw William Motley from Louisiana, he belongs to the Thirty Third Mo. Reg, and several others that I know.

    I expect we will start to Mobile in a few days wher we will have some fighting to do.

    I see something new every day. After we left New Orleans we crossed the Lake Ponchertrain and Mobile Bay. We saw the Bubbles gun boats on picket and we passed Fort Powell.

    This Island is covered with pine. It is a beautiful place and very healthy. There is not a woman on this Island.

    We are only 28 miles from Mobile. We can here the cannon every day. It sounds beautiful.

    I sent a blanket and over coat and one pair of drawers and some other little things. I would like to know if you got them or not, and all the general news, and if the Ualilha has been called out. I never hear a word about Miram Louis’ Family.

    You must be saving of your money for I don’t expect to get any more till my time is up. That is along time. I do not know what you will do for money.

    Nelson is well, so is Peyton, Ben, and Tom is well also, and all the balance of the Boys.

    Give my love to Miram’s Family and Brother Andrew’s family. My love to Father and Mother and Sister Poly Tell  Moly and Bud to be good children, and kiss that sweet little Babe for me. Tell the Babe to kiss its Mother for me.

    You must excuse this bad writing for I am to week. I cant hardly write. I must close.

I Remain Your True and Affectionate Husband Till Death

A.O.  Branstetter

Direct your letters Co B 49th Reg Inft

Mo Vol. 16 Army Corps 3 Division

2 Brig

    Adam O. Branstetter died on May 30, 1865, in Montgomery, Ala. He was first buried at the Montgomery National Cemetery, then exhumed and reburied in Marietta, Ga., at the Marietta National Cemetery.

    On July 23, 1866, the Treasury Department’s second auditor awarded Carolyn Branstetter $145 as a war widow, “less clothing overdrawn, $1.67.”

    T.E. (Tom) McMorrow covers police and crime for The Star. 

    Main Street in East Hampton will never be the same for many of us now that Cam Jewett is gone. Mrs. Jewett was 102 when she died of pneumonia on Jan. 27 at Southampton Hospital — and what a fine, long life she had.

    I first got to know Cam, as she was known by just about everyone, when I was just a child. My grandmother would take me over to Cam and Edward Jewett’s house to play backgammon. The house, where she lived right to the end, is just to the south of the Maidstone Inn, overlooking Town Pond.

    To me, a boy of perhaps 10, the Jewetts seemed impossibly aged, which is funny to think of now, as they were then only in their 60s. Then again, I do not recall Cam’s appearing to age from then to the last time I saw her, perhaps at the front gate of the Ladies Village Improvement Society Fair last summer.

    After my grandmother’s death, and during the years I was away at college and working in New York City, I certainly did not see Cam much. But once I returned to East Hampton, and to the Star office in particular, we had frequent chances to chat.

    One thing that I could entirely depend on was that if and when a car ended up in Town Pond, and I walked down for a look, Cam would be there, usually with her camera. She told me she believed that she had a photograph of every single vehicle that had plunged into the drink there since she and her husband first lived in the house. Cam said she had a box of the photos somewhere and that one day she was going to dig it out for me to take a look at. For years afterward, she would recall this when I ran into her here or there and again promise to find it.

    If there is a secret to longevity, thinking about Cam suggests that a sunny disposition must be at the heart of it. She was unfailingly upbeat, ready with a smile, and a pleasure to talk with. As I have with many older people here, I had made a mental note to stop by and maybe have a cup of tea with her. I also intended to remind her about those photos.

    I’m sorry I did not get to say goodbye, but the decades of hellos that Cam and I shared were lovely enough.

    I saw a film the other night, “Riding the Rails,” and, on re-reading some of my old interviews this weekend, I came serendipitously upon one with Alex F. Dzieman, whom many of you, I hope, may remember as “The Lone Defender” on our letters pages years ago, whose letters were signed “From the Mountaintop.”

    “. . . Mr. Dzieman, who was born in Sag Harbor, reared in Southampton, and who left school at 14 to go to work, said that he and two friends, Joe Arnister and Johnny Miller, ventured forth in 1937 from the Secaucus, N.J., railroad yards, and journeyed to just about all but the New England states and Georgia on top of, within, and in between box cars.”

    “ ‘It was very, very educational,’ Mr. Dzieman said of hoboism. ‘I think I learned more there than at any other time in my life. You learned to love thy neighbors, or get the hell knocked out of you. . . . I couldn’t say there was any meanness. Nobody carried knives or guns. There were so many decent people, so much you had to learn. One thing I learned from the road was to share, to help others out.’ ”

    “ . . . Returning here, at the age of 26, he caddied for a season at Montauk Downs, the former Montauk Beach Company golf course, and recalled fondly the fishing village at Fort Pond Bay: ‘It was beautiful. Their homes were shacks, but it was beautiful.’ ”

    “ ‘The goddam old-timers were nice people. They were Swedes and Norwegians mostly. The wives worked along with their husbands. They were beautiful girls. They could put a dory out to sea like the men, but they still had the human instinct. They were very lovable, even with their boots on,’ he said with a laugh.”

    “. . . ‘Nothing’s changed with the baymen, the clamdiggers, the scallopers, the Bonackers. These people never change. There’s no ostentation of wealth, no show-off. The snow might be blowing through the walls, but they share what they have. It’s a way of life.’ ”

    “Asked what he viewed as man’s worst failing, Mr. Dzieman, lighting up a cigarillo, said, ‘Worry about oneself too much . . . I think you never develop character unless you’re around poor people. Money is not the question — it’s not a life. . . . The worst Town is East Hampton. People there are very greedy and selfish. I call them foreigners. Brother Ev calls them second-home owners, I think.’ ”

    “As for his letter-writing, he said that he kept in his truck a pad for notes. On the Mountaintop he begins a letter to the editor, usually with a pen, works it over, sometimes for a few days, types it, and reads it aloud, memorizing it ‘word for word’ in the process. ‘It keeps me mentally occupied.’ ”

    “ ‘I must have ideas for 180 letters to the editor,’ he said, and confessed, ‘I started off long-winded. I try all the time now to condense. It’s trial-and-error with me. I have to do it the hard way. I try to develop my own way of writing. If I went to high school and college, I’d be what my professor taught me to be. I think it’s better this way.’ ”

    “. . . Asked why he called the Star’s editor Brother Ev, Mr. Dzieman replied, ‘If we treated everybody as a brother, we wouldn’t have this trouble. He gives me a chance to express my thoughts. He must be a nice guy. . . .’ ”