Those of you who pay attention to what goes on over the East Hampton Town line have no doubt heard of Bridget Fleming, a Southampton Town councilwoman. Having now won a Democratic primary to run for the New York Senate, however, she has to think about name recognition.

    The First Senatorial District is big, reaching from Montauk to Brookhaven, and her opponent, Kenneth P. LaValle, has been the district’s senator for 36 years! I’m the last person to suggest that someone who has been in a particular post for a long time should move on (I’ve been at The Star since 1960), but in this case I think it’s warranted.

    Ms. Fleming’s credentials are remarkable. She has 16 years of courtroom experience and was an assistant district attorney for nine years in Robert Morgenthau’s Manhattan office, where Linda Fairstein, the attorney and author, was a colleague. Her work as an A.D.A. was on weighty issues like welfare fraud and sex crimes, and she is obviously brainy. Her law degree is from the prestigious University of Virginia, and she graduated summa cum laude from Hunter College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Alpha Theta, the history honors society.

    These are some of the professional facts. On the personal side, Ms. Fleming has lived on the East End for the last 10 years and is married to a building contractor. She was a stay-at-home mom for six years, and her son is now a fourth grader at the Sag Harbor Elementary School. You would expect her to be strong on women’s issues, and she is. She describes having been the only woman “at the table” time and time again. She points out that Mr. LaValle is anti-choice and against same-sex marriage. But when she campaigns the issues she is apt to talk about — taxes, state spending, the environment, education — are broad.

    Senator LaValle is the head of the Senate’s Higher Education Committee. Ms. Fleming is quick to fault him for the state-aid formulas that she believes are unfair to eastern Long Island, and for failing to secure Southampton College’s outstanding “sustainability” curriculum when the college became part of Stony Brook University. She argues that Mr. LaValle has allowed the Long Island Power Authority to extend its contract with National Grid, which she claims abets the rise of electric rates here to almost twice the national average level. She also accuses her opponent of wasting “more tax dollars on office expenses, including campaign-style mailings, than any other legislator in Albany, spending $510,598 in just six months.”

    That people will be heading to the polls next month to choose a president will no doubt improve voter turnout, in general. It is unclear which candidate for State Senate will benefit from the coattails of the man the First Senatorial District supports for the Oval Office. Ms. Fleming is realistic. If she doesn’t make it this time around, she said, “I’ll be coming back in two years.”

   Last Thursday was perhaps the most beautiful day we’d had over the last several weeks, perfect for a midafternoon bike ride to Atlantic Avenue Beach.

    As always, I pedaled down Miankoma Lane and, as always, slowed as I neared the house, just past the school where, now as then, children ran and played in the magnificent autumn sunshine.

    The house looked different to me now, so many years on, but in the mind’s eye, the interior was just as it was in the countless hours I spent there.

    It was the largest room I had ever seen, and at the far end, in front of an impossibly long, high stage, not one but two grand pianos faced one another, their sleek contours almost joined — reminiscent, in a way, of the yin-yang symbol of Chinese philosophy.

    To a 7-year-old growing up in Montauk, particularly in the pre-Internet or even cable TV days, Miss Matsuki was the most exotic being imaginable. A Japanese-American woman almost 70 years older than me. I steeled myself, that first day, for an hour of dreary discomfort. But a piano had arrived at our house in Montauk, I had promptly developed an obsession, and mercilessly demanded that my parents let me take lessons.

    The otherworldly Miss Matsuki was, however, warm and welcoming, even captivating (“a gracious woman with a delicate sweep of hair,” The Star wrote upon her passing, at 92), and I quickly grew to cherish the hour we’d spend together each week in Amagansett. Side by side at the keyboard, she revealed the secret. Through her patient instruction, and two hands gnarled by arthritis, the coded messages on the page in front of me were deciphered, the new language learned. A simple melody, then a chord, then another, and another. Major, minor, diminished, augmented. Melody, harmony, and, soon, simple pieces by the masters: Bach, Handel, Lennon and McCartney (the latter two at my insistence).

    Sometimes we would just talk over milk and cookies. During the war, she confided, she was barred from playing in the officers club because of her heritage. She lent me a book about Mozart; I was mesmerized for months. In this little town at the end of the world, she opened the door to an undiscovered universe of knowledge, experience, and mellifluous, glorious sound. Like the greatest teachers, her influence is incalculable.

    Maybe it’s too easy to say that I’ve come full circle, but I just moved into an apartment a proverbial stone’s throw from Miss Matsuki’s house. Late in my 20-year run in New York City, during which I’d been a penniless guitarist, staff writer for Billboard magazine, amateur recording engineer and would-be music producer, and gotten both married and divorced, I took up the piano again. Like so many things today, my piano is digital, but with a little imagination its close-enough emulation transports me back to those sunny afternoons of childhood.

    I pedaled up Atlantic Avenue, turned left on Bluff Road, right on Miankoma Lane, back to my new abode, and sat down to practice.

   Christopher Walsh is a reporter at The Star. His first piano lesson with Tsuya Matsuki at the former Miankoma Hall took place on the afternoon of Oct. 8, 1973.

    Mary Ellen Hannibal talked about her new book, “The Spine of the Continent,” in a Star interview in September. In it, she describes the effort by some 30 nonprofit organizations to recreate a 5,000-mile corridor for wildlife from Alaska through the Rocky Mountains to the Sierra Madre Occidental Mountains in Mexico. She called it “the most ambitious wildlife project ever undertaken.”

    Two weeks later, in an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times, she wrote about biodiversity and the interconnectedness of living things.

    Mary Ellen grew up in East Hampton, so she is “one of ours” even though she lives in San Francisco. I got thinking about her dedication to the health of the planet recently after an e-mail arrived from Defenders of Wildlife on behalf of Florida’s panthers — not the ice-hockey team, but the 100 or so remaining big cats in the last breeding population of panthers in the United States. Donations were sought to further the organization’s advocacy for the expansion of the panthers’ national refuge in Southern Florida and for the enforcement of pertinent local laws.

    I am also plugged in to the National Resources Defense Council’s work to preserve wildlife (on land and sea). Recently, it has joined other environmental groups in a court challenge against the federal government’s intended removal of Wyoming’s small wolf population from the protections of the Endangered Species Act, citing negative consequences.

    Mary Ellen mentioned this in her Times piece, which summarizes the ways in which wolves and other predators serve an ecological purpose: “The wolf is connected to the elk is connected to the aspen is connected to the beaver,” she wrote. And, “Keeping these connections going ensures healthy, functioning ecosystems, which in turn support human life.”

    (A light went on when I read a passage in which she described how, along with smaller animals like raccoons, panthers prey on white-tail deer. Instead of allowing them to die off in Florida, perhaps they could be captured and shipped north. By the way, wolves were unwelcome residents here in colonial times, as they were along the East Coast and in Europe. I am told the early East Hampton Town Trustee records describe the obligation of every man to help dig or maintain a wolf pit, or trap.)    Too often the preservation of the environment or of specific species becomes a plea or litigation against destructive actions, but the wildlife-corridor project described in Mary Ellen’s book is an example of positive action. The creation of something.

    Big Bird aside, we haven’t heard much so far about the wildlife or the environment from the candidates for president in this fall’s election run, and more’s the pity. I hope you join me, and Mary Ellen Hannibal, in pushing these issues to the front of our minds. Time is running out.

    The house is quieter now that the storm windows have gone up, an annual task that I was able to complete on Sunday. Not that there are really all that many windows with removable storms to take care of. There are five full-size panels to put in and two screen-door inserts.

    Our house was cobbled together after my parents had a portion of it moved from Three Mile Harbor in 1960. The relatively newer part of the house has Andersen casement windows — you know, the crank-out kind, which are well beyond their useful life and in need of full replacement. The old double-hungs, the ones that were probably old even before the house was lifted up and hauled by truck to Cranberry Hole Road in Amagansett, remain in good order.

    The newest window in the house, another Andersen, which a friend and I installed only about 10 years ago, is failing, however. Its crank barely works anymore, and the exterior trim, made of that junk that passes for wood these days, is rotting in places. Garbage, really. Expensive garbage.

    Looking around the house, none of the 1960 Andersens are worth restoring. The glazing putty is cracking away, half the hand-cranks no longer crank, and their insulating properties are close to nil.

    As for the old double-hungs, they are in good working order — with no rot — even if they face the bay and north winds half the year. On Sunday, when I took them out of the basement and inspected their glazing, no repairs were needed. I spent a little time sanding the raw spots, then hitting them with primer and a coat of leftover paint. I removed the screens and brushed the sills while they were drying. That was not so on the newer part of the house, where the glazing and frames of both bay-facing and landward Andersen windows were equally beyond hope.

    To me, the difference between the old and the new is astonishing and says a lot about Americans’ willingness to put up with something less than high quality from its industry-leading manufacturers. Then again, collectively, we move around a lot, leaving behind failing windows and junky trim — someone else’s problem.  

    I guess we are all aware of breast cancer, thanks to a month filled with dyed pink ribbons, T-shirts, and even the cleats on the feet of the New York Jets. We are aware that it is a prevalent disease, especially on the Island on which we live, but is that enough?

    Our community has the best of intentions, with a strong desire to support those who suffer from the disease, as was apparent at a fund-raiser last weekend in Amagansett, and we all hope for a cure, but that is not enough. What about prevention?

    I regularly hear medical care providers, i.e., oncologists and gynecologists, disguise mammograms as a form of prevention, while I hardly ever hear about research proven to reduce incidents of the disease.

    In support of those who suffer, and with a lump or two of my own, I attended two 5K benefits last October. Aside from the exercise provided, which more and more research supports as a major factor in reduction of the disease, I gained little else but anger. I walked away from the race furious about the gift bag that I received from the oncologist-sponsored event containing chemical-filled lotion and a plastic water bottle.

    Am I the only one who has read the research about hormone-disrupting chemicals in body care products and dioxins from plastic water bottles being linked to this disease?

    The idea of taking advice from those who make their living from selling pharmaceuticals or surgery to those with disease has never made sense to me. With no talk of prevention or possible environmental causes, I become more skeptical.

    I reached my boiling point two weeks ago when I was asked to preview a Hamptons International Film Festival entry that dealt with breast cancer. “Mondays at Racine,” a short documentary, led me to watch the minutes on the clock, waiting for its end. It pained me to see women removing their body parts and shaving their heads, while their relationships with their significant others were also destroyed. I wondered why the film and everyday conversations never reflect that course of treatment as being a choice. Losing hair is not a side effect of breast cancer, it is a side effect of chemotherapy, which kills all rapidly dividing cells, good and bad, including those in bone marrow, the digestive tract, and hair follicles.

    I sucked it up, called it work, and forced myself into writing a review that made no mention of what I thought was an important omission. I focused on the touching personal glimpse of Long Island women who suffer and those who seek to support them. The salon owners in the film are to be commended for offering complimentary treatment and holding the hands of women who must shave their heads because it is less traumatizing than chunks of it falling out as a side effect of chemotherapy.

    When I had the chance to meet the film’s director, Cynthia Wade, at a panel discussion prior to the screening of her film, I wondered if I should express my opinion or ask a question. Luckily, I didn’t need to. She said it herself. After filming these women for months, it had occurred to Ms. Wade, who said she had “no interest in fiction,” that a cure may not be imminent, or even the goal.

    The audience got involved too, wondering whether a tritium leak from Brookhaven National Laboratory could be to blame, as was documented in another film, “Atomic States of America,” whose director was also part of the panel. “Is it in our water? Air?” attendees wondered. People in attendance also talked of a doctor’s influence on decisions via intimidation or just being a doctor that a patient trusts.

    I know from my own experience that it is quite difficult to defy doctors’ advice when they recommend a procedure, such as a mammogram, which I refused.

    My “awareness” has come from international research that I have found online and through hard-to-find local doctors who are aware of it and willing to share it. I have learned about treatments that get to the root of the cause, that include following a diet based on blood type, following a chemical-free diet, exercise, and natural supplementation.

    “You’re going to do nothing?” I have been asked. Yes, nothing traditional of the medical and pharmaceutical industries. My nothing, so far, has included a thermography — detection of heat in the body that would be evidence of cancer — which many do not know exists and that insurance does not cover. I also take the time and spend the money and energy to use water filtration and glass reusable bottles for it, and purchased a stand-up tanning bed for increased vitamin D levels, which are almost always low in those with cancer of all types. I limited my body care products, which were already of the natural type, bought nontoxic cookware, and increased my exercise and intake of organic fruits, vegetables, and meat.

    To note my results, I had an ultrasound, and the results of the follow-up six months later confirmed a reduction in size of the lumps, but the strongly urged recommendation, in a certified letter that created a moment of panic, was for a biopsy, which I refused.

    I do not recommend that anyone follow the path that I have chosen, but I believe that awareness should include choices and information about prevention. I will continue to do nothing . . . that will add increased toxicity and fear to my body and mind. I am choosing health care instead of disease care from an industry that profits from it. I want to know why something has occurred and what my body wants me to do about it.

    I do not believe it is an extremist position to have some faith in the body’s healing abilities. You can watch it in action when you cut yourself, and see its ability to grow and feed a child on its own. I believe in eliminating things that cause it to malfunction. Adding toxins and killing good cells is not the way for me, and it should not be pushed upon anyone.

—

    Carrie Ann Salvi is a reporter at The Star.

    Recently I had the opportunity to spend several hours with Frank Tuma Jr., now 88 years old, at his home alongside the Montauk Downs golf course. We talked about Frank’s young years in Montauk and his varied life experiences.

    Frank’s dad, Frank Sr., first came to Montauk in 1919 with the Coast Guard. His mom, a Baker from “under the bridge” in East Hampton, was from a large family who helped to settle much of what is now Springs. Frank Jr.’s middle name, Nathaniel, comes from the Baker side of the family.

    Frank Jr. has lived in Montauk all his life, but was born in the Swedish Hospital in Brooklyn. He grew up in the old Montauk fishing village on Fort Pond Bay, near Belber’s restaurant and the original Bill’s Inn (since moved to Fort Pond and named ENE).

    Many of the Tuma family, including Frank’s cousins Bob and Burt, lived near the bay as boys. According to Frank, the old fishing village was divided into sections — there was the area past the Union News Dock where a few locals lived, the Portuguese section of the village, and the area where the French Canadians lived and built wooden fish boxes for the local fishing fleet. One can only imagine the rich blend of languages and cultures that surrounded young Frank in those days.

    Frank attended the Montauk School, at that time located in a one-room house near the Montauk Firehouse. He went on to East Hampton High School and enrolled in the same class as his future wife, Marion (they would meet more formally at Trail’s End in 1948, after Marion’s first husband had passed away). Frank’s younger sister Vivien, who would subsequently marry Carl Darenberg, was in the first class of the new Montauk School after it relocated to Upper Shepherd’s Neck.

    While in high school, Frank spent a lot of time on the water, as a mate for the charter captains Harry Conklin and Carl Erickson. Upon graduating from East Hampton High, Frank enrolled at Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y., but would not graduate from college until 1947 due to his military service.

    As with many men of his generation, Frank felt the pressures of World War II and enlisted in the Navy. He went to Officer Training School at Cornell in Ithaca, N.Y., and graduated as a lieutenant at the head of his class of over 200 men. A large part of his actual service was sea duty in the Mediterranean, shuttling troops between Sicily and Marseilles. Frank recalled with a smile taking military leave along the beautiful French Riviera and hearing the heavy artillery of the U.S. Eighth Army engaging in battle at the front in nearby Monaco.

    As the action in Europe wound down, Frank’s ship was sent to Bayonne, N.J., to be outfitted for the Pacific, but then word came that the war was officially over. Frank went with the boat to Jacksonville, Fla., to have her decommissioned, but rather than re-enlisting he returned to Colgate to finish his courses and graduate.

    Upon returning to Montauk, Frank worked as a mate and swordfish lookout on boats sailing from the Montauk Yacht Club. Even today, there are pictures hanging on the wall of the yacht club showing a younger Frank and other anglers with swordfish, marlin, and tuna. Frank had obtained his captain’s license at a young age, and in the late 1940s his father helped him buy his first charter boat. He would subsequently build his own boat, the Gannet, and fish her until 1952.

    A large part of Frank’s reputation as a Montauk businessman came out of his employment with the Montauk Beach Company. Lindsay Hopkins, a major shareholder in the Beach Company, had directed the purchase of much of the Montauk Beach Development Company from the pioneer developer Carl Fisher. In Frank’s words, “the Beach Company in the ’50s was Montauk — there was no chamber of commerce before 1952, and people came to the Beach Company for everything from directions to parcels of land.”

    Carl Fisher had built the Montauk Manor, the yacht club, the Surf Club, and the Montauk golf course as enticements for getting people to go to Montauk and buy property there. Having taken over all of Fisher’s holdings, the Beach Company actively marketed large subdivisions from the Carl Fisher era. Frank was hired by Glen Kissel, a member of Beach Company management, and worked as a salesperson for the company until 1956.

    In the mid-1950s, Jerry Wouk bought the Beach Company and renamed it AllState Properties. AllState holdings at that time included the Montauk Manor, the Surf Club, the Montauk Yacht Club, and the Montauk Water Company. Though each entity had its own manager, Frank was appointed overseer of all four operations, a rather notable position. With the death of Frank’s dad in 1961, Frank was now responsible for four separate businesses, plus the family fishing charter business and bait and tackle store at Tuma’s Dock.

    In-season, Frank’s day would start at 3:30 a.m. at Tuma’s Dock, where he would book charters and oversee the store until his mom came in several hours later. Frank would then go home to change clothes and report for work at AllState by 9 a.m. Frank’s stature as a real estate salesman in Montauk was solidified by that time — he told me that when the Montauk Yacht Club was sold to Jerry Finkelstein in 1965, it was the only major Montauk deal that did not go through his hands.

    In 1966, the Israel Discount Bank, run by Mort Hyman, bought AllState Properties from Jerry Wouk. Under Hyman’s guidance, the Circle in the center of town was sold to Suffolk County, and the Montauk Village Association was deeded much of the underwater land in Fort Pond and Kirk Park. Shortly thereafter, the Montauk Downs golf course was sold to New York State.

    Several years earlier, Frank had sold the land now occupied by the Montauk Airport to Perry Duryea Jr. In a much larger transaction, all the land from Third House through the Indian Fields, and all the way to Shagwong Point — over 1,000 acres — was sold to the county for $750,000. In retrospect, it is clear that Frank Tuma Jr. played a large part in defining much of what is present-day Montauk.

    By the late 1990s, much of what had been Beach Company property had been sold, and Frank left the firm in 2001. He would then open the Tuma Agency on Main Street in Montauk to trade in real estate, having sold Tuma’s Dock to another party in the early 1990s.

    Frank recalled with pleasure the many trips he took with both my grandfather and my father to the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He always asks me how the hunting was after a trip I take now, and sometimes when I return I bring Frank and Marion a fresh-killed goose, already cooked.

    I could not help but be impressed by Frank’s grasp of Montauk history and his close relationship with nature and the sea. He said his mom was one of the first postmistresses ever to serve in the U.S. Postal Service, and she worked in the Montauk Post Office for over two years.

    In another anecdote, he said that every year that he can remember, Montauk has always had a big storm around or shortly after Labor Day weekend. That observation made me a bit uncomfortable, but I’ll bet he’s right. He remembered walking down the street from high school in East Hampton during the 1938 Hurricane and seeing huge trees strewn around the sidewalks.

    As we wound down our conversation, I asked Frank what he thought of all the changes in Montauk, the influx of new people and new ideas. “Time goes on,” he said, “and progress is inevitable — but I don’t have to like it.” That’s a forthright and honest statement from someone who has done a lot and seen a lot in his lifetime here.

______________

    Perry Duryea III runs the Perry B. Duryea and Son wholesale seafood business and restaurant in Montauk.

   When I think of what I’d like this country to be, I think, as probably many others here do, of Bonac.

    It is no Eden — as was particularly evident in the apparent suicide of a young Latino high school student here this past week — but one gathers that despite the anguish and contention (my father once said, based on his reading over time of this paper’s letters to the editor, that ours was the most contentious community in the nation), there is within the populace a sense of possibility that transcends the more mundane (yet legitimate) concerns of survival and advancement, however one wants to define it.

    Yet the majority, the great majority, here do seem to care about one another, especially when someone is dealt a cruel blow.

    That this is a beautiful and, at times, serene place may have a salutary effect, inclining our by-and-large lucky residents, sharers of so much natural wealth, to be more generous when it comes to contributing financially or in kind to the welfare of others.

    In this regard, it was interesting to read in this paper not long ago that wealthy residents on the East End donate 8 percent of their income to charities (local ones, it is hoped), an exception apparently to the “rule” that the richer you get the stingier you become.

    Bonac’s widespread communal spirit is evident, moreover, in our fire departments and ambulance squads, our lifeguards, the Ladies Village Improvement Society, Meals on Wheels, the food pantries, the Old Montauk Athletic Club, the Kendall Madison Foundation, East End Hospice, Ellen’s Run, the Hamptons marathon,  and the Artists-Writers softball game, for starters — one of the more recent examples being the successful Springs Booster Club drive which raised in just a few weeks more than the $35,000 needed so that Springs School could continue to be combined in certain junior high sports with the East Hampton Middle School.

    Indeed, Bonac is far from Eden; though at its best it is, I think, the best America has to offer.

   My unbroken streak of roughly 30 years’ driving without running into a deer came to an end Sunday night. I was at the wheel with a full load of family a couple of hours after dark, heading east on Pantigo Road. I noticed a vehicle, which was coming the opposite way near the Hildreth’s department store, suddenly slow, then a moment later a crashing thud came from my side of the car. Our middle child, who was seated behind me, started to weep; she said she thought someone was trying to kill her.

    The deer we struck Sunday did a fair amount of damage to the door behind  the driver of my wife’s leased Chevrolet. We were lucky that no one was hurt, though our daughter Evvy was mildly traumatized. I caught a glimpse of the deer in my side-view mirror as it staggered off the road; I don’t know how it fared after that, but I can guess.

    October and November are considered the period of the year during which contact between deer and vehicles is most frequent. This is when the bucks are afoot looking to mate, and the does run scared — often right into traffic.

    By coincidence on Tuesday morning, I was reading about the deer statistics in the Virginia-Maryland-D.C.-region on The Washington Post Web site. They were alarming, particularly for motorcyclists; an article said that seven had been killed after striking deer since 2009. In a report based on numbers compiled since 2009, I learned that an insurance industry group ranked West Virginia as the state with the highest likelihood that a motorist would strike a deer. New York was the 21st most-likely, though you have to wonder where eastern Long Island would rank on its own since the statistics are skewed by the high number of drivers in the state’s urban areas, where deer are fewer.

    Over the days that preceded our incident, I had been up and out of the house early to fish and check the surf, and I had seen remarkable numbers of deer. After the fourth or fifth encounter, I noticed that all the does I had seen were being followed by a fawn or two, and a fair number seemed pregnant.

    We may think the deer population is bad now, I thought, but just wait until this year’s doe fawns start having young of their own — while their mothers are still in their own prime breeding years.

    The state advises New York motorists to slow down in the dawn and dusk hours from now until the end of December to reduce the chance of running into deer. Beyond that, there is not much we as individuals can do. And, though many people may object on emotional grounds, as the animals’ numbers continue to rise, stronger methods of control — including more hunting — must be pursued.

   Do you remember “The Piano,” a film starring Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, and a girl named Anna Paquin? Described by Jane Campion, the filmmaker, as a “Gothic exploration of the romantic impulse,” it was a hit at the first Hamptons International Film Festival in 1993, and, as they say, the rest is history. A part of that history is Ms. Paquin, 11 at the time, winning an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

    Enjoying, as I did then and have every year since, the opportunity to choose among many unusual movies, especially documentaries, and to see them more or less down the block, I am a HIFF fan.

    The festival that year was off to a smashing start, setting a pattern of screenings and seminars and, it may surprise you to know, enticing Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese to the stage at Guild Hall to talk about movie-making and film pre­servation.

    From the beginning, the festival also made room for films with a local connection, including one starring a half-dozen local residents: Frank Borth, Ed Ecker, Hugh King, Cal Calhoun, and Tom and Katie Browngardt. The Star columnist Patsy Southgate said the film’s message was “that you have to know when to quit.” I wish they would rerun that one.

    The first year was not entirely without problems. The most serious was the resignation of Joyce Robinson, the sparkplug who started the festival with a few others, working from her East Hampton basement. The artistic director, Darryl Robinson, stepped in. There was some initial grumbling among residents that the East Hampton Town Board contributed $10,000 to the effort, but most people had a wait-and-see attitude about who and how many the festival would attract. As for The Star, we gave the festival a welcoming hoorah and an editorial titled “Break a Leg,” way back then, and we feel the same way today.

    The envelope of newspaper clippings in The Star’s archives about that first year is thick, as are annual files up to about 2006, when the digital era took over. We expect the entire Star to be digitized eventually, but the old files are still more fun to pick through.

    Among them are copies of Take One, a four-page sheet of reviews, profiles, and gossip that The Star published for four years, from 1997 to 2000. It allowed the staff to play Hollywood reporter for a few days. Each edition boasted a pen-and-ink drawing, or caricature, by the illustrator Van Howell. Looking back, my favorite is of Meryl Streep, who starred in “Music of the Heart,” the closing-night choice in 1999. (In preparation for the role of a woman teaching schoolchildren in East Harlem to play the violin, Ms. Streep took lessons and practiced four to six hours a day, or so Take One says.)

    My only problem with the festival in recent years has been that I can’t take off enough time to see as many films as I would like. No matter. Two of the remarkable films I saw this year, “Orchestra of Exiles,” about the founding of the Palestine Symphony as World War II was brewing, and “Koch,” with the longtime New York City mayor on hand to answer questions afterward, reminded me of why the festival means so much to many of us. 

   When it came time to take a photo following a recent interview with Patch’s Oliver Peterson, I struggled to fit around my neck the myriad press passes I’d accumulated over the years, along with the chain I once wore as Jacob Marley’s Ghost in a Christmas parade, and wondered at how ironic it would be were I to be strangled in the process.

    More likely even, I told him, was that I’d wind up buried under stacks of back issues (my ever-encroaching filing system) as in an Ionesco play, staring fixedly at my 1953 UNIVAC.

    “That was a bit embarrassing,” Paul Friese said, when I asked him if he’d seen the antique word processor in the background of the photo that Patch ran with my East Hampton High School Hall of Fame induction story. Oliver said he hadn’t seen such an ancient computer. Nor such an ancient sportswriter I’ll bet.

    But enough of mordant wit. It was great fun to read and to hear all the kind things people had to say on the occasion of my apotheosis. I won’t have to wait until my obituary for that then. My ears burned as Hughie King traced the foundation of my success to a total lack of ambition, and said he liked it that rather than use The Star as a springboard I had fallen for Bonac and the Bonackers.

    My greatest achievement, however, he said, was that when things got nasty, I could always turn my hearing aid off.

    At lunch at Citta Nuova, my daughter Emily said in a toast that I was so loved that “after he wrote a column claiming — falsely — that none of his daughters had helped him shovel snow from the driveway, I was lectured and shunned all night by the local athletes at Superica.”

   “I’ve tagged along to countless games and races with my dad over the years, events I really had no interest in — I just wanted to be near him.”

    “All the essential lessons of life I learned through the way he covered and talked about local sports,” she continued. “He roots for the underdog, he celebrates females as equals, he ignores celebrities, he loves all athletes regardless of skin color, he tries to find the best in people, he will do all he can to make you funnier than you are, he captures your best angle, he always gives to causes he believes in, he’s 72 years old and still takes tennis lessons, and, more than anything else, he has chosen a career that makes him happy.”

    “If I were still covering the town board,” I had said to the audience (most of whom I’d written about at one time or another) “they’d be tapping me on the shoulder now to say, ‘Jack, Jack, wake up . . . the meeting’s over.’ ”

    “But thanks to the infusion of exuberance and joy that I’ve always felt in covering sports here, it’s not, ‘Jack, Jack . . . it’s over,’ but ‘Play on! Play on!’ ”