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.

    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.

   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.

   Memories are embers that fade to ash if not tended. Last weekend I brought my father’s ashes to a cemetery south of Syracuse to reside beside my mother. It was his wish. The Ondondaga Valley Cemetery was cloaked in a gossamer fog pierced by the yellow tops of turning trees. Tall pines spread their bows evergreen above the stones.

    Dad’s ashes were contained in a cardboard urn, the cardboard to match his Yankee frugality. I carried the box inside a canvas duffle bag, a tan color with the words “Lt. R.M. Drumm” stenciled upon it. I found the bag in the attic with his green dress Marine Corps uniform that would still have fit his 98-year-old frame.

    We drove through Nedrow past what had been my mother’s family’s apple orchards, through Lafayette, and past the Onondaga Indian Reservation near the fields and wooded hills where Dad and I hunted rabbits and partridge in deep snow with shotguns, the nose of Bucky, our German shorthair pointer, leading the way. When dad played lacrosse for Syracuse University in 1936, a number of his teammates were Onondagas. I have a stick made for him by a member of the tribe, a man named Gibson.

    We hunted in winter, in deep snow, from early morning until late in the afternoon, warmed by our trudging and by the heat of the rabbits against our backs in the pouches of our game jackets, the heat slowly ebbing. Dad’s amazing accuracy, the smell of gunpowder in the cold air, Bucky so spent by day’s end we had to lift him into the car.

    Dad was an artillery officer assigned to protect a fighter squadron in the Marshall Islands during the war. He taught me the most difficult targets were the long ones flying straight away. He knew the trigonometry of it. I always wondered if it explained how he was hell on partridge and pheasant.

    In the weeks before he died one year ago tomorrow, his short-range memories lapsed as thought they didn’t matter. At the same time, he could name every kid in his high school class at the Valley Academy, the long ones flying away.

    My father always thought of himself as a soldier-poet, and he was. He wrote plays and poems. Art Buchwald was in his Marine Corps unit and the two of them created a newspaper, a mimeographed newsletter really, while on the island of Eniwetok during the war. They maintained a correspondence until Buchwald died in 2007.

    About a week before he died in his sleep, he began reciting from memory stanzas of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Day is Done”:

“A feeling of sadness and longing,

That is not akin to pain,

And resembles sorrow only

As the mist resembles the rain.”

Come read me some poem,

Some simple and hearfelt lay,

That shall soothe this restless feeling,

And banish the thoughts of day.

Not from the grand old masters,

Not from the bards sublime,

Whose distant footsteps echo

Through the corridors of Time . . . .

Read from some humbler poet

Whose songs gushed from his heart

As showers from the clouds of summer

Or tears from eyelids start. . . .

And the night shall be filled with music,

And the cares, that infest the day,

Shall fold their tents, like the Arabs,

And as silently steal away.”

    I read the poem in its entirety and placed in on the cardboard box in his grave. A handful of dirt. Embers to ashes.

Russell Drumm is a senior writer at The Star.

   “Did you see ‘Trouble With the Curve?’ ” I asked the nurse following my hernia operation at Southampton Hospital.

    When she said she hadn’t, I said, “Well you wouldn’t quite get it, but the scene at the urinal, during which Clint Eastwood remonstrates with his reluctant-to-pee penis, was as nothing compared to what I’ve been going through.”

    Initially, they said on the recovery floor I wouldn’t be able to go before I went. “Because they wanted to know that all systems were ‘go,’ ” an inquiring cousin from Pittsburgh was to say later during a phone conversation I’d engaged in after first saying “hello” into the TV remote and getting no response.

    “It was as reluctant as Romney when asked if he’d make his tax returns public,” I told Penelope.

    Standing there in the hospital, I had visualized all sorts of things: I was at the Augean Stables urinal at the Yale Bowl alongside hundreds of others in 1960, unselfconscious beer drinkers all; I was in the Yankees’ locker room during game five with the Orioles and Joe Girardi’s piped-in voice was saying it was my turn next at bat; I was listening to Durell Godfrey, who had said, with a self-satisfied grin, the day before the operation, “Did they tell you about the catheter. . . .”

    Another nurse said I was putting a lot of pressure on myself with all of the above, and that I should simply relax and deploy it.

    Finally, my doctor made the decision five or six hours after the procedure that I could go with or without the flow. He told me there had been three holes. I had been patched up like an inner tube, and since I was riding high on Marcaine, I took with equanimity his diktat that there’d be no tennis for me till Thanksgiving.

    I hadn’t even known I had an umbilical hernia in addition to the others when I went to the doctor’s office, I told my cousin, who replied that she had been similarly surprised years ago by a bulge while showering the morning after she and the other bridesmaids had wrestled down the bride’s girdle on her wedding night.

   There is still a surfcasting rod in the back of my truck, despite a sense, widely shared, that the striped bass fall run is fizzling out.

    Mike Solomon, an artist I know who fishes nearly every day, says that despite his best efforts nothing has been going on on the beaches for him. The last decent fish I know about from up this way showed up on Oct. 11 when John Musnicki caught a 36-inch bass in East Hampton. Montauk has been slow, with a couple of exceptions, since before Columbus Day. You hardly see gulls along the shore, the picking has been so slim.

    The lack of fish is not entirely unanticipated. Even though surfcasters here enjoyed good years in 2009 and 2010, there were warnings. For several seasons, regulators have noticed dips in the number of young bass in Chesapeake Bay. But the sudden differences between one fall and the next seem more about the vagaries of bait and water temperature than anything else.

    Just the other day, I was sitting in my truck at the beach just looking at the water when Larry Cantwell pulled up, looked at the fishing gear unused in the back, and laughed. That’s what you do when you’ve got the bug, but the bass just aren’t around. You can see it in the postures of would-be surfcasters, who sit slumped at the steering wheel, peering out to sea. Others stand on the sand talking, trading ideas about what the bass might take a swipe at if they come past. 

    Out at Montauk Point the other morning, the usual October crowd in the lower parking lot, where the campers are parked in rows when the fishing is good, wasn’t there. A few people on the beach cast listlessly or dozed on the rocks.

    It’s times like these, Harvey Bennett, who runs the Amagansett Tackle Shop, says, that customers start coming in and asking about clam rakes.

   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.”

   A child’s bucket, full to the top, of mantis shrimp sits in the office refrigerator. I picked them up on the beach early Tuesday, just after sunrise, before the gulls could get to them.

    There was a lobster, too, that I considered taking, but it was nearly snapped in two by the waves Hurricane Sandy pushed up, and it had already begun to smell. The mantis shrimp are destined for a cooking pot, provided I can get the sand off them.

    Oddly, until the bad winter storm of Dec. 26 and 27, 2010, I had not known that mantis shrimp existed in these parts. I had read about them and their remarkable snapping ability. After that storm, I found a couple of them dead along the beach; on Tuesday, the wrack line was strewn with them. I could have picked up hundreds.

    Several species of mantis shrimp — though not the ones we have here, apparently — have club-like claws they use to stun prey. Researchers have become interested in the appendages’ composition and structure, wondering whether what gives them remarkable strength could be useful breakthroughs in military or industrial applications.

    It is lucky that the Star office is in a part of town where we are among the very few on Long Island with electricity. This means that I can keep the rare haul fresh and presumably edible until we can have them for dinner.

    There is a range of interest in our family where shrimp is concerned. My wife, Lisa, is allergic to them; the 11-year-old loves them; the 8-year-old will eat a few, and Ellis, who is 2 and a half, spit them out the few times he tried them.

    Preparation, from what I saw on the Internet, is basic. You just throw them in a pot or on the barbecue for about five minutes, peel them, and eat with soy sauce. As the frenetic pace of post-storm reporting and activity subsides, I hope to find a moment to get them on the table. We’ll see what the family says — that is, if I can get rid of the sand.

   How do you write a column when a bad hurricane is on its way . . . and your power is likely to go off before deadline time? You could try to write about something else, something light and humorous. (For instance, I’ve been planning to get a column out of my husband’s odd fascination with casseroles, and how he made one of his own creation that was so massive we had to freeze quarts of leftovers.) But with the tension in the air, and the gravity of what could possibly happen, such thoughts get blown away with the wind.

    And so I decided to write about hurricanes past.

    I remember my first. The year was 1960, and the hurricane was named Donna. I’m sure we must have driven out to have a look at what was happening on the ocean beaches as the storm approached, but what has stuck with me all these years is the sense of excitement, the adrenaline rush, as we stood at the head of Three Mile Harbor being battered by the wind.

    I remember Gloria, in 1985, when we were without power for 13 days, and had to read by oil-lamp light. Being without power was — as I remember it, anyway — actually a lot of fun, like traveling back in time.

    I also remember the only hurricane — before Sandy — that scared us enough that the family evacuated from the house on Gardiner’s Bay. The year was 1976, and it was Hurricane Belle. Ev and I, our three kids, and our dog were invited, along with other friends, to join the Morrises in the big house at the corner of Buell Lane and Main Street in the village. Like this week, we were concerned about the projected storm surge and flooding.

    In those years, the 1970s, our house on Gardiner’s Bay was many yards farther from the shore, behind the protection of more dunes, and higher dunes, than remain as we go to press. Part of the reason we thought it safe to put the house there was that old-timers had told us the area had not flooded in 1938. (Unlike much of Napeague, just to the east, which went underwater.)

    Fortunately, Hurricane Belle weakened by the time it hit Long Island, passing over Jones Beach. The kids roasted marshmallows in the fireplace and a swell time was had by all. Still, the winds were strong enough to bring a large limb down onto the roof of the house we’d evacuated to; it fell on top of the room where we had gone to sleep. We all thought it was pretty funny that, as it turned out — because of all the trees in town, and the lack of trees in Promised Land — we had inadvertently put ourselves in harm’s way.

    In those days I drove a big Cadillac with a white hard top and an odd, beige-ish body color. (It was never my style, but I chose it because I thought it might afford a measure of safety for the weekly trips I used to make in and out of the city.) In the midst of Hurricane Belle, my Caddie, which a friend called the Brown Cloud, was elected to drive to East Hampton Town Hall on some errand or other. I don’t remember any feeling of exhilaration that time.

    Now, we wait for Sandy. The generations who live now in the house on Gardiner’s Bay have gone for the duration to a house in the woods. Here on Edwards Lane, in the village, I hope I am benefiting from experience, having stocked up and heeded all the tips about how to survive without power. My son Dan and I waited patiently on line at the supermarket, hardware store, gas station, and bank. In fact, it was almost as if civility — so obviously lacking in our day-to-day rush, push, and hustle, in recent decades — had returned to town.

    The mood of those on line at the ATM I went to was actually jolly. “Mayor Bloomberg said to get cash,” a man said, adding a crack about Mayor Bloomberg being de facto mayor of East Hampton, too.

    “But there’s nothing to worry about,” he assured those of us behind him in the line. “My mother’s down on the beach right now giving the storm a hex.”

   I met Elton John once. He had come to Quad Studios to play on a session for Mary J. Blige’s 1999 album, “Mary.”

    The song “Deep Inside” is essentially the two-chord riff of Elton’s “Bennie and the Jets,” with Ms. Blige singing/rapping over it. In the penthouse studio high above Seventh Avenue, he recorded a piano overdub, playing hot licks from the “Bennie” riff with one hand as he adjusted the headphones that kept slipping off with the other.

    I’m not really a fan of hip-hop or contemporary R&B, but I had to admit, it was pretty cool. Ms. Blige is a fantastic singer, and she was very nice. I was grateful for the experience.

    But it also made me depressed. Here was yet another classic song remade with cheesy, synthesized drums and bass, and various additional keyboard-generated noises thrown into the mix.

    By that point in pop-music history, the actual had fully, finally given way to the virtual. The capture of natural sound waves — the thump of a bass drum, the crackle of a snare, the vibration of a stringed instrument, even an electric guitar’s amplifier — was out; recording was now characterized almost entirely by digitized samples and ersatz emulations of every imaginable sound.

    Today, a virtual orchestra can reside within a personal computer, the vocal tracks on almost every hit song have been manipulated by pitch-correcting software, and popular music is marked by unfeeling, unchanging loops and sterile samples.

    That session also got me wistful about long-ago Thanksgivings. Every year when I was a child, my family would drive from Montauk to my aunt and uncle’s house in Calverton, where my uncle was the pastor at Baiting Hollow Congregational Church.

    The church had an adjacent building used for Sunday school and other activities. Inside was a huge, open room, boomy with long reverberations, and in one corner stood an old jukebox. There, in the lull between Thanksgiving dinner and dessert, my brother and I would explore its many offerings, over and over.

    All the little 45-rpm records stood vertically in a rack. By punching the right buttons, a mechanical arm grabbed the selected disc and lowered it onto the turntable. The needle dropped and glided through the groove, sound pouring forth from the big mono speaker, and lifted when it reached the end. The arm lifted the platter and put it back into its slot, and then moved on to the next selection. It was mesmerizing to watch.

    Today, I can remember just one song from that old jukebox, though I must have played all of them. It was Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” from the album of the same name (which also featured “Bennie and the Jets”). A reference, of course, to “The Wizard of Oz,” the lyrics of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” suggest a rejection of opulence and yearning for a return to simplicity.

    The plaintive falsetto wail leapt from the scratchy vinyl disc: “You can’t plant me in your penthouse/I’m going back to my plough.”

    I still get goose bumps at the memory, kneeling in rapt attention in front of that big old jukebox as the beautiful sounds filled the huge, empty room. But that was a long time ago.

    Christopher Walsh is a reporter for The Star.