Bummy Davis was shot four times. He was only 26 years old. A lot of people thought he could have become a welterweight champ. His manager and trainer, Johnny Attell, thought that Bummy could have gone right to the top.

One of my mother’s cousins grew up next door to Bummy in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn in the 1920s. I quizzed cousin Joe about his memories of Bummy Davis, for I have been a boxing fan since age 12 and have been a sponge when it comes to soaking up boxing information. My knowledge of Bummy had been, at best, sketchy, and I wanted to learn from an actual witness. Here’s what I was told:

“Bummy’s real name was Avrum Davidoff, but he was known to the kids in the neighborhood as Al. His dad owned one of those old-fashioned candy stores; you know, ones with soda fountains and a row of twirling stools and racks of comic books. You’d buy an egg cream or a cherry Coke and thumb your way through some comics. Old man Davidoff never made us pay for the comics, unless we didn’t put them back on the racks. He really didn’t need the money from comics: He had better sources of income.” 

“It was during Prohibition, and Davidoff was selling bootleg booze out of the back of the store. Little Bummy was his lookout. If a cop was passing by or coming in for a pack of cigarettes, the kid alerted his dad, who would shut down the back of the store. Old man Davidoff never got caught, and, though all the neighbors knew what he was doing, no one ever squealed on him.”

“Al had two older brothers, and it was thought that they might have been working for Murder Inc., not as killers, but as debt collectors. Of course, if they came calling, debtors knew who backed them up, and so they always paid up. The collectors got a percentage, just like collection agencies do.”

“Bummy never had anything to do with that mob, was never interested in joining them. He always wanted to be a fighter. One day, when I was a teenager, I saw Bummy actually bump against Abe Reles on the street. You know who Reles was? He was known as Kid Twist for the way he killed people for Murder Inc. Well, Reles cursed at the kid, and Bummy told him to fuck off. Reles knew that Bummy was a tough kid, on his way to becoming a professional boxer, and so he just walked away. You can imagine what that encounter did for Bummy’s reputation with us kids!”

“Eventually, my dad moved us to the suburbs, where he had bought a nice house. Though I didn’t see Bummy in Brownsville anymore, I would go to his fights. The most amazing was against Fritzie Zivic. Right away, Zivic thumbed Bummy in one eye, then the other. And the ref did nothing. Bummy complained about it, but still the ref did nothing. Bummy said the hell with it and went after Zivic, pounding him with several low blows. This time the ref stepped in and wanted to give the fight to Zivic. That infuriated Bummy, so he kicked the ref, and all hell broke loose. Fans were screaming and throwing objects into the ring. Cops were called. Bummy was fined and his boxing license was revoked. He eventually got it back, but his career had its highs and lows. In 1945, after he got out of the Army, he fought Rocky Graziano and suffered a technical knockout. He had one more fight, then quit the ring.”

“Bummy had wanted to retire for a few years, but his manager always convinced him to continue. Bummy was tired of fighting, but he wanted to build up a nest egg. He always felt the crowds were against him, especially after he knocked out Tony Canzoneri. He was ready to hang up his gloves and he did. He bought a bar; I think it was called Dudy’s.”

“Well, one night he’s sitting in the back room of the bar with some old pals, including an off-duty cop. I think they were playing cards and just bullshitting, when four holdup punks came into the bar. Bummy saw what was going on and confronted them. You know he was the kind of guy who would punch first and not bother asking questions. He knocked one guy to the floor, and a second guy shot him in the neck. The holdup guys took off, and Bummy put a napkin or handkerchief to his wound and ran after his attackers. He was gaining on them, when one of the thieves turned around and fired three more bullets into Bummy. He died on the sidewalk and became a hero in all the news stories. The off-duty cop ran out of the bar and wounded one of the punks, but he could not stop them. They got away, but not for long. The cop was a good friend of Bummy and he tracked down the killers.”

“How did Al get the name Bummy?” I asked, changing the subject.

“I’m not sure, but I heard that Johnny Attell told him that Avrum Davidoff didn’t sound like a tough guy fighter and so no one would come to see him box. He renamed him Al (Bummy) Davis. And you know what? Bummy, regardless of his name, was a genuine tough guy, and not just in the ring and when facing down Abe Reles, but especially when he chased those punks who tried to stick up his bar.”

“After the cop tracked down the killers were they tried and sentenced?”

“Yup. They all did major time in prisons and never forgot that they had made a big mistake when taking on one of the toughest young fighters who came out of Brownsville, which you know produced a number of tough boxers. But of them all, Bummy was unique, a true original.”

Jeffrey Sussman is the author of “Max Baer and Barney Ross: Jewish Heroes of Boxing,” published by Rowman & Littlefield and recently optioned by an independent film production company. He lives part time in East Hampton.

Each of us who is hard of hearing faces a dilemma. We dislike conceding or explaining our deafness, and we want to hear as much as we can. We can’t have it both ways, advertisements of miracle miniature hearing aids notwithstanding.

We can’t do our best to comprehend what we are hearing and hide our hearing defect. Not for long. King Goa VI of Portugal might have come close to it in the early 1800s when he commissioned an acoustical throne with ear trumpets concealed behind the decorative lion mouth entries to the arm rests. The device emerged at his head as tubes he snugged into his ears. The king could sit back and hear in regal repose while the “lions” amplified the voices of his kneeling subjects. But certainly occasions arose when the king, on or off his throne, had to bend to hear. We all do.

In response, we develop a kind of aural foreign policy we refer to when deciding how much we will bend. We use it to resolve two questions: Under what circumstances do we conceal, concede, or actively discuss our deafness? And under what circumstances will we strive to hear or allow ourselves not to hear?

The decisions we reach in such matters are always lonely. I dislike mentioning this, as hearing loss is not fatal or disfiguring. However, what we must contend with is far more crippling than the hearing population realizes. We are more than a little bit cut off from the world, from the sounds that help make us whole, that please us or warn us of danger or that spoken softly by mothers and lovers assure us that we are cherished. No matter how “moderate” or “mild” our loss is classified, we can rarely participate in lusty conversations or dinner table chitchat, follow dialogue in a movie, or hear the songs of birds or the punch line of a joke when the joke teller’s voice tends to drift into mumble. 

Equally troubling, our shortfalls of comprehension are often taken personally by people addressing us, arousing anger and assertions that we could really hear better if only we’d try harder. It is no accident that the word “unhearing” can mean either deafness or not listening.

In determining my aural foreign policy, I have learned much from people who are deaf, who have virtually no residual hearing and find it difficult if not impossible to communicate by voice even if they have lip-reading proficiency and hearing aids.

The deaf refuse to cringe or conceal. Rather, they are declaring with their conspicuous hand sign language (which just a generation ago was widely maligned by lip-reading-oriented educators as coarse and “inappropriate”) that they are truly interested in knowing what one is saying to them and that they require equal respect in return.

Deaf groups are astonishingly successful advocates for their cause. With less than 5 percent of the hard of hearing’s population and modest financial resources, they have brought the country captioning for TV, telephones, and cinemas. They were in the forefront, along with the mobility-impaired, as lobbyists for the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990. And when the board of their university, Gallaudet in Washington, D.C., declined to appoint a deaf president, as if no deaf person could be competent to lead an advanced institution of learning, the students went on strike and won.

On the other hand, an overwhelming number of us who are hard of hearing allow ourselves to be glibly psychologized by the hearing-aid industry, audiologists, and otolaryngologists with pseudoscientific, financially self-serving theories that we all prefer hiding our loss to hearing competently. As a result, we pay $8,000 for a pair of hideable hearing aids that the Veterans Administration pays barely $1,000 for and that probably between the two of them contain less than $40 worth of parts.

In my experience, these tiny aids, for all their technological sophistication, are less effective than a low-tech hearing aid I easily assemble myself for less than $400 from off-the-shelf microphones, amplifiers, and earphones that are available from audio parts suppliers. Consider trying this. Believe me, I am no techie. If I can assemble a superior device for meetings and noisy social occasions, anyone can. It’s as simple as plugging in a lamp.

In addition, we accept mumbling speech from TV personalities. Chuck Todd, Andrea Mitchell, and Chris Matthews of MSNBC are fine examples of inaudibility. Matthews rata-tat-tats as if he’s calling a dog race. We also settle for indecipherable speech from overseas call centers that even normal hearing operators on my TTY printout system often report to be “inaudible” to them.

The next time Staples presents you with a sales agent you cannot understand, ask to speak with a supervisor about it and within a minute you will be hearing a crystal clear sales agent from our Midwest or Nova Scotia.

Most seriously, I believe, we too readily accept the denigration that we could hear well enough or read lips well enough if we’d only try hard enough. As an old fart raised during the Depression, I am foursquare for effort. But though helpful, lip-reading is not up to the job. Too many sounds look identical on the lips, “p,” “b,” and “m,” for example. Many others, such as “ka,” “ga,” and “ah,” come from the back of the mouth and are not visible.

We can start standing up for ourselves right here in East Hampton, where hearing access provisions of the Americans With Disabilities Act and our own town disabilities code, enacted in 2002, have long been disregarded with bipartisan complacency inertia by a sequence of town boards, justice court officials, and our inert town disabilities advisory board.

Last winter, when I was in court, the legally required FM assistive listening system was so distorted I had to lend Justice Tekulsky my handheld FM transmitter in order to know what he was saying to me. Also contrary to the law, no signs were conspicuously posted announcing the availability of assistive listening devices for those who need them.

Perhaps we can start there, with proper signage and maintenance.

To me, it’s a matter of my survival as a whole person. When we don’t hear enough to converse with our friends, neighbors, and elected leaders we are fenced in, apart from our community, and excluded from our rights as citizens.

According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, approximately 8.6 percent of the U.S. population over 3 years of age is hearing impaired. In East Hampton, that’s about 1,800 year-round residents.

Let’s not be defensive about it. The laws are on our side. Their implementation would not be expensive or difficult.

Richard Rosenthal’s hearing was damaged by the noise of gunfire in World War II. He lives in East Hampton.

I have Zillowed the house I grew up in at 70 Seventh Avenue in San Francisco’s Richmond district. The building consists of two six-room flats that my parents paid $12,500 for in 1937, which would be $200,000 now. Zillow’s current estimate is 22 times that, $4,407,925 to be precise; its estimated monthly rent $13,171. We rented out the lower flat for $60 a month, less than $1,000 now.

The website describes the house as “elegant, spacious, sunny with a master bedroom — a nice little back yard — [and] built in book cases [flanking] a decorative fireplace.”

But except for a modernized kitchen and laundry setup, the house seems just as it was 80 years ago. It wasn’t notably sunny when I lived there and still stands nudged between a similar house and an apartment building, so I don’t see how it can be now. The “nice little back yard” is surely the same one that was so small my father bought the shortest hose he could find at Woolworth’s to tend its one proud resident, a hydrangea bush. The bedroom was small, too, and became decidedly cramped when my mother without my father’s input switched from a double to twin beds with ornately initialed bedspreads declaring which bed was whose. And a call to the building’s agent confirms my expectation that the “decorative fireplace” still means as it did in 1937 that you’d really better not light a fire in it.

We were poor for a while, but I never felt it. We had enough food and heat and a sweetly functioning old Nash sedan. For 10 cents I attended movie matinees at the Coliseum on Clement Street, where one Saturday I won a drawing for an angel food cake and a bulging quart of Blum’s scoop-and-pack ice cream. Ten cents was also the kids’ price for the ballpark where my friends and I would watch the San Francisco Seals’ Dominic DiMaggio race with the lightness of a dandelion gone to seed to catch line drives in deep center field.

Don’t get me wrong, we’d have relished being rich, but to most of us on the block middle class was fine and pursuit of riches a waste of family quality time. Put another way, we didn’t think that bothering to get rich was cost-effective.

I vividly remember the built-in bookcases that are pictured in Zillow’s promotional literature. They were the inspiration of Irving Silberberg, my father’s first cousin who lived out of the closet with his gay partner, Bill Mitchell, for decades before it was really safe to do this in an area that still clung to gruff frontier ways.

The bookcases, bare in the Zillow photo, were stuffed with novels and histories of the Old West, some of their hard covers depicting heroic scenes of monks in the desert and explorers in the mountains. My mother favored John Muir and Willa Cather, my father Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain, whom he read to me every Saturday when I was ill and bedridden for a couple of years.

Dick Warren, my best friend from around the corner at 620 Lake Street, I think it was, also enjoyed the books. One rainy afternoon when we were 13 he gleefully came upon a passage in a Fannie Hurst novel referring to the beautiful breasts of a bathing 15-year-old girl. He found this much more meaningful, as well as less expensive, than the $5 hard porn illustrated palm-sized booklets, available in the Roosevelt Junior High schoolyard, which claimed, on their bedraggled pink covers, to have been “Published in Persia.”

Dick was short, happy-go-lucky, and a perpetual adventurer. He was much braver than I at riding the Big Dipper at Playland at the Beach and bolder at snagging baseballs at the annual Seals Stadium ball scramble for kids. Sometimes on a Friday night after the movies, we’d go to Laurel Hill Cemetery, where he’d lead me past the grand tombs of senators and bandits to gravestones behind which we could crouch and peer through my mother’s opera glasses into back bedroom windows on Presidio Avenue in hopes of seeing a female schoolmate undressing. We failed. Whenever one of us thought he saw something significant the other snatched the glasses and had to refocus them, by which time the opportunity, if there really had been one, had passed.

But Dick was much more than a normal adolescent boy. He had a daunting moral courage. He was the only one in our group, including me, and as far as I saw the only non-Asian in all of Lowell High School, to eat lunch openly in the schoolyard with Nisei students after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He wasn’t in anyone’s face about it. He just did it. And while no one emulated him, no one criticized him either.

He also, humiliatingly, robbed me of home runs in the street baseball games we organized on spring and fall afternoons after school.

We played at the dead end of a street that stopped abruptly at a low stone wall separating Seventh Avenue from the Presidio, then a sparsely developed old military base established by the Spanish in the late 1700s. There were six of us, three to a team — Bob Katz, Dick McFarland, Dick Schaefer, Dick Boyle, who was to pitch for St. Ignatius High, Dick Warren, and me.

Sometimes, we’d let Larry Kahn, who was a couple of years younger, in the game to pitch for both sides and get a couple of at-bats that didn’t count. Mr. Sheehy, who I believe was looking for work — we were still in the Great Depression — would come home and volunteer to catch so that foul tips didn’t roar down the hill to Lake Street and its speeding traffic.

Our parents were never there or otherwise monitoring us. They were either at work, looking for work, or home preparing dinner, which we were required to be present for, hands and faces washed, by 5:30.

In my memory’s eye the wall was about 200 feet up from our chalk-designated home plate. Balls that cleared it were home runs. I never did clear it. Never hit a home run. I was a line-drive hitter and number-one window breaker. The few times I connected well and straight enough for a homer, Dick, who was on the other team, would run back to the wall, propel himself way up, catch it back and bare-handed, and bring it down, grinning and chiding me that I’d never slug one past him.

I didn’t take this at all well and actually started doing stuff I detested, like push-ups and lifting weights. I was going to hit that home run.

But we’d played our last game. December 1941 came and with it the war. We’d briefly be going away to college and then into the Army or Navy.

One evening in 1942 when we were almost 17, Dick, who was eager to become a Navy fighter pilot, came over and sat down carefully in one of my mother’s wobbly antique chairs facing the bookshelves and decorative fireplace to check out a test for colorblindness that was in our current issue of Reader’s Digest. On each of about 10 pages were gobs of differently colored dots one cluster of which formed a letter or number. If you weren’t colorblind you were likely to identify all of them. If you were, you’d likely miss them all. As Dick did.

When I came home from the war four years later, filled out and stronger, one of the first things I did was retrieve my old bat and a ball from my closet and set up a little game.

Larry Kahn was there to pitch, a new kid on the block offered to catch. I cleared the wall on my second swing, but I wasn’t at all sure I’d hit it high and far enough to get it past Dick. I’ll never know. He couldn’t be there. Unable to fly for the Navy because he was colorblind, he’d joined the infantry and been killed in Germany, in the grim, frigid Battle of the Hurtgen Forest, shortly before the war in Europe ended. He was 19.

Richard Rosenthal’s articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and New York magazine. He lives in East Hampton.

If life can be compared to being on a teeter-totter, the longer you live, the more unbalanced it becomes, with the memories you have accumulated, the experiences, good, bad, and indifferent, outweighing your present, causing you to rise, metaphorically, higher in the air . . . and off the ground. With feet dangling, your viewpoint of the world is more expansive: You see more, and you see farther. 

It is the vista that produces nostalgia — the melding of a foreseeable future, where you might go, and your realized past, where you have been. And your ability to stay in that moment — to balance the mix of emotions that sweep in like opposing currents — eventually determines the ultimate angle of the teeter-totter; that is, how you will feel about, and thus lead, your life. 

Right now, I am rising — in age, that is. And with it the gap to the past is getting larger. Sometimes the memories are hard to pull up, sometimes they are not. But mostly they are fluid, bouncing through the “thought stream,” a term often used by mindful meditation practitioners to cite one’s continually running engine of a mind. 

I’ll share one such memory, or flurry of thoughts, I experienced last summer when I stopped at the Sagaponack General Store, the once post office of my youth that over the years had turned into a place for coffee, bagels, the newspaper, and more. What I always liked about the store was its whimsical, beach-swept look, and the way, no matter its evolution toward a trendy nosh spot, it retained much of the old feel, including rows of old postage slots visible in the large front-right window. To me it bridged the old Hamptons and the new, and it was a comfort to know that the part I remembered from my childhood remained. 

But more than anything, the store sold my favorite drink — Hampton Dairy Lemon Flavored Iced Tea, originally made by Schwenk’s Dairy in East Hampton, a brew colloquially known in the area as Bonac Tonic.

On that day, I realized, with a start, that sometime over the winter the store had vanished — not physically, of course, but it had been taken over by Pierre’s restaurant in Bridgehampton. I had strode in with my head down, but once I looked up I thought I was lost: The inside had been reconfigured, brightly painted, spiffed up, looking like a swank New York City bistro. I was shocked and more than a bit dismayed, but still I trudged on to the back refrigerator, looking for the item I came for: Bonac Tonic. 

In one word, I can tell you why I liked this tea so much: sugar. I had the pleasure of touring North Carolina extensively at one time in my life, and during my visit I drank so much sweet tea my molars hurt for weeks after. But I loved the flavor, the artificial pick-me-up, and even the eventual crash after, because I knew, right around the corner, at any barbecue joint that was open, I could get my fix. 

The Sagg Store, purveyor of Bonac Tonic, was my outlet for that same high, and I savored it during the summer months when I was out in the Hamptons, after playing basketball or taking a long bike ride, or after a nice day at the beach — a refreshing, saccharine treat before dinner.

But Pierre’s, to my horror, did not carry Bonac Tonic. What they had instead was an assortment of fine-looking iced tea varieties housed in pretty, ornamental bottles. This was in great contrast to my beloved brand, which came in a plump green paper container, somehow constructed so that whenever I opened the spout a good portion of the sweet stuff spilled out on my hands. 

Tempering my dejection, I selected a bottle that looked the most decadent and went to the counter. There, a pretty young woman with an angelic face and looking prim and proper in her Pierre’s uniform frowned when I set the bottle in front of her. She then added a quick headshake to the grimace.

“Don’t drink that,” she said, in what I interpreted as an Eastern European accent.

I blinked back at her. “Why?”

“It’s not good. I tried it and didn’t like it.”

“Really?”

“Better to try something else.” 

It seemed like a reasonable suggestion, so I went back to the refrigerator and chose another brand, this one in a less shapely bottle. I set it in front of the woman and she smiled.

“That’s very good. I’ve drank that. That you should get.”

I paid, thanked her, and left. It was only outside, right before I opened the bottle, that I had an epiphany — while many things have changed in the Hamptons, and in my life since my youth, including the passing of the old Sagg Store and its bounty of Bonac Tonic, what remained was human camaraderie, a looking out for one another, and, on a personal level, new beginnings. 

Let me explain. In the early 1920s my grandmother and grandfather, separately, left Ireland and came to America, finding themselves, after a few years, working on the East End, in Wainscott specifically, on a wealthy estate in Georgica. They set roots, had two boys who grew up and set roots in the area, as did their children. Walking from the store, I had the feeling that this young woman might be starting a similar journey, perhaps forging her own future in Sagaponack and, on the way, in the present, helping someone who was looking back enjoy a new brand of tea.

Which, just as she promised, was very good. 

John McCaffrey is the author of “Two Syllable Men,” from Vine Leaves Press, and “The Book of Ash,” a science fiction novel.

After my first bout of puppy love, I began to question the meaning of true love. I yearned to find the love of my life.

Like most girls growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, I mooned over movie stars, cut out their pictures from fan magazines, and longed to feel a grand passion like those portrayed on the silver screen: Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty in “Splendor in the Grass,” Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Kirk Douglas and Jean Simmons in “Spartacus.” 

“You’ll fall in love,” my gramma assured me.

“But how will I know?” I wondered.

“Oh, honey, you’ll just know. You’ll feel something special.”

Still, Gram’s words were too vague for me. I wanted examples, stories, details.

“You’ll think you’ve been hit over the head with a sledgehammer,” Sandra Dee’s mother told her in the movie “Gidget.” Well, I thought, that doesn’t sound too promising.

At college, we debated the question of true love in a freshman religion course. I was as perplexed as ever. The professor defined love: “Love exists in the presence of caring for someone more than you care for yourself.” His words left me cold. Where was the talk of fireworks, sparks, ardor, attachment, eroticism?

I continued in my angst. If love was like my mother and stepfather’s relationship, I wasn’t interested. If love meant fights and reconciliations, like I’d experienced with a boy in high school, I wanted no part of it.

Of course, I did fall in love — my junior year. We were to be married, but Vietnam intervened. 

It would be several years (and therapy sessions) later that I would fully understand that my complex issues with love and trust centered around one traumatic event in my childhood: my father’s abandonment of his wife and family when my sister and I were infants. He rejected us completely. We never saw or heard from him again. “Sperm donor” is how my sister refers to him now.

Today, I recall three great loves of my life. Yet, I’m more interested in finding joy and love and happiness in the moment.

Recently, I came across a card and a book my brother had given me on Valentine’s Day years ago. “I love you, sorta,” he had written. The book is “Love Is Walking Hand in Hand” by Charles Schulz. 

In the past few days, rereading this tiny tome has brought me pleasure. Schulz’s take on love is simple, yet profound. Love is in the little things — acts of kindness, sharing, being, caring. “Love is getting someone a glass of water in the middle of the night.” “Love is a phone call.”

I remember using the book in my kindergarten and first-grade classrooms long ago. Valentine’s Day was my favorite holiday at school, and I’d read the book aloud. The students would make valentine cards for their families and friends and write their own love essays. Here’s a glimpse:

Love is . . .

a nice, warm house on a cold day.

someone you can trust no matter what.

holding your puppy in your arms.

helping an old lady across the street.

being together in a family.

having a friend when you need it.

having someone to lay your head on.

whispering in a friend’s ear.

your baby brother hugging you.

sleeping in your own bed.

when people say “Hi” and smile at the person.

being nice and not calling names.

a party on your birthday. 

playing together. 

singing songs together.

when you care.

when something is hurt and you save it.

when your friend talks up for you.

knowing that a person likes you.

dancing.

a private life.

making up with someone.

a deep and tender feeling.

And, my favorite, love makes me feel good inside.

Here’s wishing you love in each moment of every day, whether you’re alone, with your family, or with the love of your life. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Dianne Moritz writes children’s books from her home in North Sea. She has had poems and stories recently in High Five and Hello, from the Highlights magazine group.

“If my friends could see me naaaow . . .”

And many of them did, and family too, at the 2017 Ms. New York Senior America Pageant held last week at the State University at Old Westbury, where I competed. 

Ms. Senior what?

Never heard of it, have you. You’re probably not alone, most folks haven’t. So let me give you the short form, but be sure to check out newyorksenioramerica.org to learn the many fascinating details of this organization. Who knows? Maybe you’ll be a contestant in 2018. Tell them Rita sent you. 

It was in 1972 that Dr. Al Mott came up with the idea for a pageant that would honor the accomplishments, dignity, and inner beauty of women over 60, thereby coining the term “the age of elegance.”

And that’s the beauty of the pageant. Focusing on poise, a positive philosophy of life, and talent, the competition stresses the inner you rather than the measurement of your waist and hips. Yes, there’s a message there. Not only to seniors, but to all women, and to young girls who are forming their attitudes and ideas of themselves — am I good enough, pretty enough? — and who every day are bombarded with sexual imagery and model-starved bodies as an ideal. 

Enter Ethel Bennett, now just shy of 95 — and that’s the only thing shy about her. A dynamic, engaging woman of great personal style, she is the quintessential symbol of positive aging. At 1985’s Ms. New York Senior America Pageant Ethel became its first state director, a position she held for 25 years before handing it over to Marleen Schuss.

You want engagement? You want guidance? You want a stylish shoulder — where does she get those clothes? — to lean on? A lady who’s got it all? You want Marleen, empress of all things pageant since 1972, the go-to gal who runs the show with a little help from Bob Geltman. 

And I do mean show, a yearly production of senior talent that includes the Seasoned Steppers, a group of former contestants, all 60-plus to mid-80s, whose high kicks and spirits set the pace for the pageant’s afternoon events. But enough about them. Let’s talk about me.

It was my yoga teacher, Doris Bodine, last year’s first runner-up, herself a marvel of movement and inner strength, who suggested one day last summer that I apply to the pageant. She said I’d fit right in with the Cameo Sisters. A group of former contestants, energetic, positive women all, they give new meaning to over-60. Briefly outlining the events of the day, one of which was the talent piece, she encouraged me to be part of it.

“Talent piece? I don’t sing or dance,” I said. “What would I do?”

“Aren’t you a writer?” she said. 

“Uh-huh.”

“Then why don’t you write something?”

I had lost my husband the year before, packed up and sold both my homes, and bought and moved into a condo. I was making a good adjustment, but there definitely was a hole in my life. Always game for a challenge, I was up for a new experience, and the idea of meeting these like-minded women appealed to me.

I sent for the application, filled it out, showed up for the audition, and performed my required 2-minute-and-45-second talent segment for a panel of judges. Would my monologue about perceiving God as a woman be too outré? Would the judges get that it was meant in fun? 

Actually, I have thought about God as a woman. And why not? Who knows what or who God is? Men wrote the Bible and they gave the best part to Him! No surprise there. But has He never heard of term limits? Maybe it’s time for a change. Transsexual is in! If Bruce Jenner can do it, why not God? 

Got it the judges did, and I was accepted as a contestant. Wow! I was now in a pageant. 

That was December. The pageant was in April, giving me months of thinking and worry. Was I right to take this on? Should I tell people? A pageant? You’re in a beauty pageant?

Rehearsing and pacing, pacing and rehearsing — I think better when I move — I set to committing my monologue to memory. Two minutes and 45 seconds of headwork may not sound like a lot, but for me it was practice, practice, practice. It didn’t get me to Carnegie Hall, but it got into my brain. 

And then there were the two gowns I needed. One in royal blue — got that one online from Nordstrom. Don’t you just love internet shopping? The other, in a color of my choice, I rounded up in convenient Macy’s in Manhasset. I love fashion, but I don’t love going far for it. And then the diet to fit into them. There’s more to life than how you look. When did I say that? 

I did not take home a tiara. I did not win, place, or show in the pageant. But Doris was right. We are amazing women. Each and every contestant, both past and present. We are all winners, because it takes a winner to take on a challenge. To put yourself out there in front of an audience of 400 — the pageant was sold out this year — to sing, and dance, and talk, and play an instrument. To do your thing, whatever it is. To silently sing to those watching and listening, “I am woman, hear me roar!”

Rita Plush, who had a house in East Hampton for many years, lives in Bayside, Queens. She is the author of the novels “Lily Steps Out” and “Feminine Products.”

I am one of those single, childless people who exhaust all their maternal or paternal instincts on their dogs. Scratch that, they are not even my dogs.

I can explain, but first: Sugar is a kind, 65-pound brown dog who is perpetually smiling and looks like she is wearing mascara. I like to think she is a chow-golden mix, but she is probably “just a mutt,” as a random woman at the Springs Dog Park once insensitively pronounced in clear hearing range of Sugar, who, like most rescues, can be self-conscious to begin with. 

Sugar belongs to my old landlord. Penny, a 2-year-old boxer mix with nice white socks, is owned by my old landlord’s neighbor. They are both loved and well-cared-for dogs. The owners are appreciative of the added exercise the dogs get when I come by for our constitutional, but we all know they’re doing me a favor, as the dogs are complete antidepressants. Seeing them run around in the great resource that is the Springs Dog Park gives me unmitigated joy every time we go. 

And we go: I have been taking Sugar to the dog park, rain, snow, or shine, often twice a day, for four years now, and Penny for close to two years. I am lazy by nature and would not do it if it were an inconvenience.

I am not alone. East Hampton loves its rescues. The Springs Dog Park is full of happy people whose lives have been augmented by dogs, a lot of them mutts. It appears to me that a majority of the dogs there are rescues, and many seem to have barely escaped kill shelters, so it is a mutual appreciation, dogs and owners alike happy for the new lease on life.

The dogs are from all over, but most seem to come from down South. They don’t just appear, as we know, most of them come from established rescue organizations like the Animal Rescue Fund of the Hamptons and the Southampton Animal Shelter, where staff members work tirelessly to vet them, get them meds and shots, and find them good homes.

When I was walking one morning I found out that there is another worthy rescue organization out here run by locals. It has been flying under the radar and now needs help. 

Save a Dog a Day was started in December 2007 when Colleen Fennell, an almost ridiculously likable woman who worked in the East Hampton School District for 25 years (and graduated from East Hampton High School in 1971), became aware of the disturbing realities of animal shelters in the South. In the United States as a whole, she learned, more than four million healthy animals are killed each year. Other than lethal injection (which is the most humane method used to euthanize them), many shelters continue to gas them or administer a heart stick, which is not only extremely painful but also illegal.

Part of Colleen’s challenge is to eradicate these cruel practices while maintaining a working relationship with the shelters. Using the internet, she began to share information about dogs that were within days of being euthanized, trying to find people willing either to temporarily care for them or permanently adopt them as their own. Colleen teamed up with like-minded individuals and started rescuing dogs, with a goal of saving at least a dog a day. She soon had more than 50 volunteers and became an official 501(c)(3) tax-deductible charity.

Colleen wants to raise awareness about shelter issues and the grotesque euthanasia of so many discarded dogs. Volunteers donate their time, energy, money, and homes to this cause and spend endless hours rescuing at-risk dogs and aiding in their removal from shelters. They advertise dogs on the internet and in newspapers and put up posters. Many volunteers have been known to nurse dogs back to health, bathe and groom them, and even buy and deliver dog food to families that adopt them.

“Our volunteers will jump in the car at a moment’s notice to rescue a dog that only has one day to live,” Colleen said. “We arrange for free transportation, moving the dogs from shelters to homes and adoptive families. As a last resort, when volunteer transports are not available, we utilize commercial animal transport services. However, 95 percent of our transportation is donated. It requires volunteers to drive or fly hundreds of miles uncompensated in what resembles an Underground Railroad for rescued animals.”

They also use Pilots ’n’ Paws, an organization of pilots who donate their time and planes.

Serendipitously, I occasionally produce small comedy shows for nonprofit organizations. I know a comic named Joey Kola (he used to be Martha Stewart’s sidekick), who, among a lot of other material, does a ton of dog and cat jokes, and so I asked Colleen if she wanted to try to do a show. I called Joey, who lives in Suffolk, and we’re on for April 15 at 8 p.m. at 230 Elm Street in Southampton, all the proceeds going to keeping Colleen and friends doing what they do: getting sweet, healthy dogs out here to better our lives.

Jeff Nichols lives in Montauk. His latest book is “My Life (Direct to DVD): How to Sell Your Self-Published Book to Hollywood, and Other Disaster Stories.”

Six neighbors were sitting in a circle when idle chatter began to edge into a discussion of hot-topic social issues — health care, budget proposals, public education, housing, employment, and the environment, just to name a few. Speaking quietly at first, the sharing became more animated, words spoken with increasing vigor and persuasiveness. And volume. Faces hardened and fists clenched, bodies thrusting forward. 

Differences of opinion, some significant, morphed from exchange into confrontation. Two, then three began speaking at the same time, competing for attention. 

Our surprise and concern about this escalation did not change the dynamics until our host raised her hand, the group quieting, and said, “We are becoming just like them.” 

“And who’s ‘them’?” a man, still breathless from the tumult, asked. 

“Those elected to make decisions about these things,” she replied. “And the news media reporters and commentators charged with keeping us informed and guiding our thinking.”

An unexpected hush fell over the gathered.

One of the younger in the circle took his smartphone from his pocket and placed it on a coffee table that, perhaps mercifully, separated the group. 

“Ten years ago,” he said, “if someone had predicted the very existence of this phone, even those in the high-tech world would have pronounced it impossible. But across that decade a gathering of very bright people sat in a circle, not unlike ours, and pooled their genius, each bringing his or her expertise and each listening intently to the others. They may have been of political views as opposed as ours. They may have been of dramatically differing ideologies. They were likely ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse. But they shared a common goal and were committed to a collaborative process — of producing the unthinkable: this phone.” 

Only that claimed their full and undivided attention. A silence settled on the group, so he went on.

“What if developing a health care system that covered everyone at reasonable cost took the place of that phone? There is a growing population of geniuses in the health care and financial management worlds who, if opinions that divide could be set aside, collective wisdom emerging, would inspire the ability and will to create that system.”

“What if developing an educational system that creates a level playing field of all our youth took the place of that phone? We have an abundance of players from the educational, psychological, and business management worlds who, if they worked collaboratively rather than competitively, embraced a both/and rather than an either/or paradigm, could stir the capacity and determination to manifest that system.”

“What if developing an economy that provided meaningful and fairly compensated work for all took the place of that phone? There are plenty of business professionals, labor advocates, and cutting-edge economists who, if they set political partisanship aside, let left or right loyalties subside, and let loose a common mission and passion, would bring that system within our reach.”

A person from the circle versed in group process dynamics and systems thinking asked for a moment to revisit a decades-old group exercise that demonstrated that collective wisdom almost always surpasses individual wisdom, commonly called the NASA experiment. The group nodded assent. 

Participants were given a list of 20 rather unsophisticated items: a flashlight, a shovel, a watch, and a tent, for example. NASA had produced a “rank order of importance” of these items if six people, for whatever reason, found themselves stranded and isolated, with assistance miles and days away. 

Working first as individuals, each one produced a ranking. Then, working as a group, the exchanges usually animated, even contentious, they produced a consensus ranking. When the NASA list was revealed, the group wisdom virtually always exceeded the wisdom of even the best individual lists. 

Back to the phone and those three issues. The unthinkable, unbelievable, beyond imagination smartphone was a result of ardent collaboration. Had its creators vied for dominance, even using their best individual gifts, there would be no phone. 

Setting aside real but inevitably distracting differences, working as teams with mutual respect, and pooling a wisdom they possess only together, what would it take for our circles of geniuses to produce the impossible in the decade ahead?

Howard E. Friend is an organizational consultant, teacher, and former pastor of the Montauk Community Church. He lives outside Philadelphia and remains a regular visitor to Montauk.

We have a home invasion every winter. Outsiders who seek refuge at our house. The mice affectionately refer to us as “the suckers” because of our tolerance level. At first we saw them through a cartoonish lens, but their cuteness soon faded.

We’ve put up with Rocky the squirrel on our roof and Ricky the raccoon in our garage, but the toughest challenge of them all is always the mouse — not Minnie or Mickey or that cute Italian fellow Pepino. And definitely not Mighty, because no one ever comes to save the day.

I cringe when the outsiders come inside, as it takes weeks to get them back out where they belong. Oh, you must be saying to yourself, that’s not how to handle it, and, practically speaking, I can see why. But the guillotine? No way. Without the heart to end the lives of these small creatures, I continue to stand on stools with a broomstick and shriek.

I had to come up with my own techniques of mouse removal, as most methods seemed inhumane. I recall one night when our kids were small, my husband was asleep, and I, with insomnia, stayed up playing PacMan (I was a pro at killing off those little dots). Anyway, I heard a noise coming from the kitchen, and I tiptoed in to see two beady eyes staring back at me from under a stovetop burner. I eventually went to bed, but could not sleep. “What if? What if I fall asleep with my mouth open, and the mouse is looking for another dark place to hide?”

I had no choice but to get out of bed again and put my genius plan into action: I filled the kitchen sink, a couple of feet from the burner, with water and left a trail of breadcrumbs leading to it.

I waited in bed and watched the clock, singing in my head “Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock.” No, I had to get those cute images out of my head. At 3 a.m. I tiptoed back into the kitchen. 

Aha! Gotcha. There he was, swimming in circles like a miniature seal. I scooped him up with a plastic container, quickly put a lid on it, and happily let him go outside my front door while I hummed “Born Free.” I looked up at the beautiful night sky, at large snowflakes, and then I looked down again at the wet mouse, which took three steps and froze solid in his tracks. I cried. (There’s no setting on my microwave for defrosting a mouse.)

One year, I blew a mouse clear out the French doors at the back of our house with a giant leaf blower. I’m pretty sure he survived, but he must have landed in Oz. That was one of my successful mouse-rescue-and-release episodes that I am still proud of to this day. 

The worst house invasion was a few winters ago. He or she (found out — she) must have come through a basement vent and left poopies (not cute) in the oven trays under the gas burners. I didn’t want to gas her, and I was so grossed out that I didn’t want to cook at all (which of course I milked).

One day I had a long talk with the man at the hardware store, who sold me a plastic non-kill mousetrap. My husband (not handy) and I read the instructions (we usually never read instructions until after we fail) and thought we had it down pat.

The next morning, to our relief, the trap’s door was closed, but when we picked up the trap, it felt empty. Perplexed, we opened the door and saw that the cheese was gone, but no mouse; he had outsmarted us again. This went on for weeks, and once in a while I’d see the mouse scurry by as we watched television. 

“Um, Bruce,” I said to my husband. “Looks like the mouse has put on a lot of weight.”

“Really? Is it still wearing those jazzy red Disney shorts and large yellow shoes?”

“No, it’s totally naked this time, except for the little white gloves. But the fur’s a different color now.”

It dawned on us that was not the same mouse. We had more than one. The following day we bought many traps (one of them had to work) and lined them up in the food pantry and waited once again. Finally, success. Every day we’d catch another mouse and let it run free in the woods next to our house. Unless . . . unless each time we released it, it just came right back into the house for meals.

We then made executive decisions: Each time, we’d actually drive the mouse a few miles away to a horse farm. We weren’t sure if we should take the mouse inside the car with us, because if the trap’s door opened we’d crash into a tree, or tie the mousetrap on the roof of the car. We ended up duct-taping the trap and letting the mouse go after we got out of the car. 

Ah, what a relief. Hope the horses are happy with their new tenants.

After weeks of sterilizing our kitchen with Lysol, and no sign of mouse poopies, we were content that Mickey or Minnie or whoever and their extended family were gone.

Eek! The bad news? I had to start cooking again.

Janet Lee Berg is a previous contributor to The Star and the author of a new historical novel, “Rembrandt’s Shadow.”

Recently, there has been a mischaracterization of science as a partisan issue, which seems to have given policymakers permission to reject overwhelming evidence. The March for Science on April 22 in Washington, D.C., was planned to emphasize that scientific findings should not be ignored by policy makers.

Scientists’ findings deserve respect because they follow procedures that should ensure neutrality. Even if researchers would prefer a specific outcome, those adhering to the scientific method do not change their results to fit their preferences. Their ethics and professional standards require them to be honest to have credibility in their field. (This is not to deny that there are occasional dishonest practitioners.) 

Partisanship, politics, and religious beliefs should not affect the methodology followed and results obtained by well-trained, ethical scientists. They may be Republicans, Democrats, Independents, or have no party affiliation, but results should come out the same. The scientific method, properly applied, minimizes the role of bias in research. Good science is the foundation for sound public policies, based on evidence rather than opinion.

Many in the general public don’t understand fundamental science and may deny findings of legitimate research because the findings don’t agree with their beliefs or opinions. There are major differences between scientists and the general public on various science and technology issues. Scientists have a higher regard than the public for what science has accomplished, with 92 percent of the scientists agreeing that scientific achievements in the United States are either the best in the world (45 percent) or above average (47 percent). However, only 54 percent of the public considers scientific achievements in the U.S. either to be the best in the world (15 percent) or above average (39 percent).

Is this because scientists are overly egotistical, or because the general public is less well informed on the issue? Scientists have traditionally been very bad at public relations — conveying their results to the public and explaining their importance. I hope this is changing. 

We should also acknowledge that people’s hesitation to accept scientific findings may come from not only lack of knowledge about the research, but from confusion about the level of uncertainty in science. Uncertainty has been exploited by various industries and politicians to confuse the public about scientific knowledge, as demonstrated by the tobacco companies’ propaganda throughout several decades, during which time thousands of people died of tobacco-related illnesses. The same phenomenon goes on in the field of climate science; the climate deniers and petrochemical industries learned from the tobacco companies. 

In his second week in office, Donald Trump issued an executive order that for any new regulation to take effect, two or more existing public protections would have to be eliminated. This means the elimination of existing rules (that were developed based on science) to offset costs of new rules (while ignoring their benefits) even if the existing rules are entirely unrelated. The executive order makes it nearly impossible for the government to carry out its duties under laws like the Clean Air Act, the Motor Vehicle Safety Act, and the Occupational Safety and Health Act. The order will mean more contaminated food, more dirty air and water, more toxic chemicals, and an accelerated rush to climate catastrophe. 

Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, not only doubts that humans and CO2 cause climate change, he also has rejected the advice of his scientific staff about the risks caused by the pesticide chlorpyrifos. (The Office of Pesticide Programs of the E.P.A. is very conservative and reluctant to ban a chemical — so there must be overwhelming evidence of neurological damage in young children from chlorpyrifos.)

The administration’s proposed budget has severe cuts to environmental research programs at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the E.P.A., and moderate cuts in the National Institutes of Health budget that funds biomedical research. Naturally, scientists are unhappy about cuts in funding for research, but these funds are not meant to line our pockets, but to improve public health, strengthen national security, protect the environment, and provide safety from natural hazards such as hurricanes. 

The concern is not limited to a single appointment or budget decision, but to the whole tone of the administration. Most positions in the Office of Science and Technology Policy (the president’s science adviser) have not been filled, and it is doubtful they will be.

Here on the East End, science is critical for sound coastal management and protection. NOAA, which runs the Coastal Zone Management Program, is slated for extensive budget cuts. NOAA is the home of Sea Grant, which is set to be phased out altogether, and the National Hurricane Center, with satellites and forecasters — important for people who have waited to see where a hurricane was going to make landfall. Science seeks solutions to problems. 

Most of the debate in Washington is based on opinions. Everyone is entitled to his or her own opinion, but opinions won’t solve pressing problems. Coastal communities facing sea level rise, pollution, loss of sea grasses and/or marshes, or approaching hurricanes need facts, not opinions. Ignoring scientific findings can be dangerous, and politicians must not benefit from ignoring or distorting science. 

Public awareness and action should translate into support for public officials who want to support science, and the public should inform other politicians that they are paying attention to their actions.

Judith S. Weis is professor emerita in the department of biological sciences at Rutgers University in Newark. She has a house in Springs.