When my aunt bought land in Springs in 1962, she put her own aunt’s name on the deed, “just in case.” The house she had built was about as basic as could have then been made: single-pane glass windows, uninsulated attic, water heater rusting in a crawl space.

God the family had fun there.

My aunt’s aunt, Tante Anna, taught us to play cards, a game called 21. This was what casinos call blackjack. Tante (she went by that name to us, as she was the only Tante who mattered to my brothers, sisters, and me) would sell pennies to us so we could play cards after supper at night. Five pennies a hand.

In those days in the Town of East Hampton, there was no cable television. If you had a TV, like us, with rabbit ears, there was only one station to pull in, WTNH from New Haven, Conn. (The reception didn’t come in that well despite aluminum foil decorating the antennas.) When I think about it, that was probably a favor. One late night I started to watch the movie “A Summer Place,” which has a memorable musical theme but may be the worst film ever made. The signal from WTNH got worse and worse as the clock ticked toward 1 a.m. I stuck it out to the end. I am sorry I did.

Card playing was better, though it seemed that Tante always won. I see her in my mind’s eye sweeping a pile of pennies into a beaded purse, many of the coins formerly mine. This hurt a little bit extra because she was at her age what I would have called old, but nonetheless had a dazzling smile as she did the deed.

Tante had taught us to play fairly. Draw on 16. Stick on 17, 18, 19. It just seemed that luck always went her way. Her old hand kept sweeping in the pennies. My brother and I speculated that she cheated. But we could never catch her at it. She taught me a German word. On the rare occasion that she had 16 and drew a king or queen she would bitterly say “futsch,” which means “busted,” “gone,” “vanished,” or “kaput.”

There were a lot of children at the table who learned to mutter “futsch.”

The Hamptons weren’t “The Hamptons” then. We were in the country. My father bought us used bicycles for $3 apiece. My brothers, sisters, and I rode to Daniel T. Miller’s store and split a Coke.

Tante is long gone now, but here’s one more bit.

Sometimes we would walk across the street to watch the sun set over Gardiner’s Bay. For a while a house was being built there. I guess now one would call it a McMansion. Once we were there and a man pulled up in a long white Cadillac. He looked like a bad writer’s version of a Hollywood director with a scarf tossed around his neck in the middle of summer and boots pulled over his pants. He came to where we were standing on the bluff and said, “May I ask who you are and what are you doing here?”

Tante had had polio as a child and one of her legs was a good eight inches shorter than the other. She walked with a cane. She picked up the cane and pointed it at the man’s chest. “We are watching the sun set,” she said. “We’ll leave if it does.”

I felt like I hit 21.

Dan Marsh writes from Garrett Park, Md.

The back row of the East Hampton movie theater is kinda like your own studio apartment with a wide-screen TV on gym candy. Not only can you feast undisturbed in stocking feet on contraband Cracker Jacks, Raisinets, Strawberry Twizzlers, and a large can of Arizona green iced tea with a foot-long veggie delight made fresh by Joe the deli manager at Stop & Shop, but if the movie’s boring, you can nod out, if the movie’s romantic, you can make out, and if the movie sucks, you can sneak out without someone behind barking “Down in front!” 

But the night I caught “Birdman,” none of those three were the issue, except that the audio disturbed me — not its poor quality, but the faint click I heard in Riggan Thomson’s opening monologue, very obvious for someone who has edited video projects for 30 years.

Three months would pass until the East Hampton Library had a DVD of “Birdman,” so I rushed to get my free three-day rental and slowed it down where I found the audio edit, a section of monologue that was purposely cut out by the director. Curious, I called an ex-sweetheart turned actress in Sherman Oaks to get a copy of the first page of the script.

“Just the first page?” she asked.

“I may have unearthed the biggest cover-up since the grassy knoll,” I shot back.

And, as I thought, the original scripted monologue was much different from what was seen in the Academy Award-winning film:

FADE IN:

INT. RIGGAN’S DRESSING ROOM — THEATER — DAY

We slowly tilt up to discover the back of Riggan Thomson (55). He is in the proper Lotus position, dressed only in tight white briefs, and he appears to be meditating deeply . . .

MAN (V.O.)

Smells like — Rawlings, five ounce, made in Costa Rica, 108 double stitches, raised seams, white leather base — balls.

A slight twitch in Riggan’s neck.

MAN (V.O.)

We don’t belong in this . . .

Unaware of the passion for baseball in America and in his leading actor, who had a clause written into his “Batman” contract that should the Pittsburgh Pirates make the playoffs, filming would cease for the duration, the director struck out in red ballpoint ink all baseball references in the original script. 

Anyone who has ever run through a ball field of freshly cut grass, rubbed Mazola oil in the palm of his Wilson glove, connected on the sweet spot of a 33-inch wood Louisville Slugger, or jumped up and down with a bunch of equally minded guys atop a 15-inch clay mound after a hard-fought game, knows there is no scent as intoxicating, as euphoric, as orgasmic as the smell of a little white ball made in Costa Rica.

I love baseball.

Long before my gold Royce Union five-speed bike with banana seat and sissy bar, way before my first broken heart on 27th Street in Astoria, and ages before my four amazing kids entered my life, there was one friend always by my side, always with a smile, forever a friend, and still a friend today: baseball.

My earliest recollection of smells-like-balls occurred at 5 when my brother pointed at the TV, said the blond-haired, left-handed pitcher standing majestically on the mound for the New York Yankees was from Astoria, then lobbed to me a brand-new white piece of heaven he bought at E.J. Korvette’s. I was addicted for life to the smell and game of baseball, hoarding every penny in a Hellmann’s mayonnaise jar, collecting every Green Stamp my mother brought home from grocery shopping, until I’d saved enough and had filled Green Stamp books for a catcher’s or outfielder’s mitt, another wood baseball bat, or another Rawlings leather baseball with 108 red stitches. 

Richie Shubert stood more than 6 feet, but on top of the mound he could be the center for the New York Knicks, only meaner. William Cullen Bryant High School was Long Island City High School’s nemesis, and on a balmy April day in ’73 a nail-biter game was in progress as our ace pitcher, John Dinkelmeyer, proved a formidable warrior, mowing down batter after batter after batter with his 12 to 6 o’clock curve. I should know, I was his catcher and gloated over every missed pitch.

At 18, Richie threw upward of 90 miles per hour, and as a lefty was scouted by every major league team. When I stepped up to the plate in my seventh batting position, five of the preceding batters having struck out, I thought, “Make contact.” I knew he would throw heat, so I swung at the first pitch, sending a major league mile-high pop to the right side, foul, the first baseman missing it by inches. Surprised, I felt confident he’d throw me another fastball, and remember somehow making it to first base, a single.

Richie was drafted two months later in the second round by the Texas Rangers and John by the Detroit Tigers. It felt nice to catch with and bat against major league players.

I love baseball. 

My first full-time job was with Exxon on Sixth Avenue, where I quickly befriended co-workers around the world, getting invites every weekend, but none friendlier than Roger in Hamilton, Bermuda, where I traveled almost every month, thanks to my girlfriend, a Northeast Airlines flight attendant named Judy, who made me her “buddy” for free travel. I would sleep on Roger’s couch in a pink stucco house in Devonshire Parish surrounded by the smell of hibiscus. 

Carlsberg Elephant beer, Long Island iced teas, and dancing all night at Disco 40 on Front Street were my evening passions, but during the day I made friends playing catch, hitting fungoes, and shagging flies with guys I would never see again on ball fields across Bermuda.

I love baseball.

My mother was near death when she aspirated while eating breakfast minutes after general anesthesia from knee replacement at the Hospital for Special Surgery on East 17th Street, but as in the scene in which Adrian whispers “Win” to her husband, Rocky, she pulled me close and similarly whispered, “Go try out again for the Yankees, Frankie. You’ll make it this time.” 

Sadly, I was not the 23-year-old who’d tried out for the Yankees at Yankee Stadium 23 years earlier, but rather 46.

A baseball field is serene, temple-like, sacred, void of outside influences of everyday life — kind of like its own bubble, similar to Biosphere 2. Pick up a baseball anywhere in the world, have a catch, and you’ll immediately make a friend regardless of color, language, religion, gender, or which side of the aisle he votes.

Albert Einstein said, “I don’t know how World War III will be fought, but I know how World War IV will be fought — sticks and stones.” But when I searched the dark web for his exact phrasing, I stumbled onto Columbia University’s applied physics classified files, where I discovered words scribbled by “AE” on the back of a Topps Mickey Mantle rookie card. It read in part, “WWIV will be fought on a baseball diamond of 90 ft squared using wooden bats and leather balls (bd(90ft)squared + bt + bl = WW4).”

If the enemies of the world discovered the magic of the little white ball, perhaps the world would be a more peaceful place.

And now my son Paul pitches for the high school team, forcing me for an hour every day to our backyard, where he climbs his improvised mound constructed with pressure-treated 2-by-8s from Riverhead Building Supply to perfect his good heater and better splitter, hoping to improve his deuce (curve) at U.C.L.A. baseball camp in July.

He loves baseball.

So the next time you take out a free three-day DVD rental of “Birdman” from the East Hampton Library, listen close, real close, for the faint click during Riggan Thomson’s opening monologue, and you’ll know the secret behind smells-like-balls.

Regrettably though, you won’t see me anytime soon checking out movies or CDs or books or the must-see “Mork & Mindy: The Complete Second Season” at the library, as they blocked my privileges. I owe $14 in late fees.

Frank Vespe, a regular “Guestwords” contributor, lives in Springs.

You may have heard of the Sagaponack Village mayor, but let me tell you about the unofficial mayor of Sagg Main Beach.

Every year, from dawn until dusk, Lester Jary Elliston patrols the sands and waters of that beach. In fact, Lester stops by the ocean almost every single day of the year, and he is careful to take both a sunrise and a sunset photo of the beach. While he is there, he feeds an adopted seagull, Harvey.

Some days, the temperature dips below 30 degrees and the wind whips up in a steady breeze, making tears come to the eyes. On those days, Lester makes a perfunctory visit and then is on his way. On other days, there is a hint of spring, with 60-degree weather and a strong steady sun, and on those days, Lester lingers longer and dreams of summer.

Once May hits, the beach mayor shows up early in the morning with two matching beach chairs, an umbrella, several coolers, a supply of water, and maybe a matching beach outfit. Lester takes his job seriously and wants to look the part. He talks to anyone who enters the sand, introducing himself and finding out his or her purpose for being there for the day. He finds out names, the ports that they hail from, the names of their fluffy little dogs, and maybe their political and religious affiliations as well.

If a local issue is being voted on at a town meeting, Lester polls each individual and makes sure everyone knows how the results of the polls are stacking up. He speaks with lawyers and farmers alike. He is especially close to the lifeguards and beach attendants when they take position after the unofficial beginning of the summer, Memorial Day weekend. 

As a result of his daily rounds, Lester is frequently invited to fancy parties at oceanfront homes that only the people on the A-list expect to attend. He duly does his duty and shows up right on schedule to partake of the catered goodies. Sometimes he has to juggle three or more parties.

Back to his duties and obligations, Lester makes sure that everyone is aware of the location and treatment of the restrooms, when the ice cream truck will arrive, the strength of the surf, and the variations and dangers of the riptide currents. He makes sure that all attend the Dan’s Papers Kite Fly celebration in August and sign up for the annual caricatures. In tribute, he has an entire room devoted to these drawings of himself and his daughter, dated chronologically, with side art depicting whatever was foremost in his family’s mind in the highlighted year.

Some years there are exciting events to celebrate, such as the upcoming marriage of the daughter of a friend. Other years, there is the news of cancer or disease striking an acquaintance, or a beachgoer collapses on the beach and dies of a heart attack while the local E.M.T.s are valiantly attempting to save him.

Each of these episodes has been taken to heart by Lester, the beach mayor, as he quietly muses about the events and wonders if he could have been of more help in preventing a tragedy. He takes his job seriously and is a constant reminder that someone important is watching the fort, noticing and reporting problems, and forestalling any accidents, losses, or missteps by the many people who blithely dare to walk the sands of Sagg Main Beach.

Alice R. Martin grew up in Sagaponack and has roots there dating to the 17th century. She now lives in Riverhead.

I woke up from a nightmare with the television on. An evangelist was hustling cash. This man had been defrocked by his own church. He had cried on his television show asking for forgiveness for consorting with a prostitute. Then another prostitute appeared. His redemption slow­ed. But he sees himself redeemed by his Lord. And needs cash now.

There are different views on prostitution. Some see it as an evil, some as a victimless crime. I think it depends where the pimp in his sharp suit stands. After all, the televangelist in his midnight maneuver is holding a Holy Bible. And that’s where I learned at 5 years of age of prostitution; I don’t know about you.

The defrocked preacher’s son has of late taken over his father’s ministry. He is taking in $100 from Jay in New York and $300 from Mary in Maryland, who is asking for prayers. The more one gives, the more prayers said, apparently.

It was Emerson who wrote, “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”

Once I was sitting at a picnic table in a flyover state with my family, including a man who was also a close friend. We were talking about ranch riding horses (good and ill-tempered), and then he said to me, out of the indigo, “My father and grandfather were members of the K.K.K. in Indiana.”

I was eating franks and beans at the time and nearly choked on a piece of a Nathan’s hot dog from Brooklyn. “They lived outside of Indianapolis but traveled to burn down the houses of Catholics and Jews, to drive them out of other neighborhoods,” he said.

I pushed my food away.

I tried to have a good thought. I thought of a song by an Irish band, the Pogues. They sing, “The boys of the N.Y.P.D. choir were singing ‘Galway Bay,’ and the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day.” New York values, maybe.

As I walked back to our room with my wife past the saguaros so familiar from the films of my youth in which cowboys killed Indians, and kids in dark theaters cheered and had been taught nothing up to that point about a Trail of Tears, I was feeling, as Joni Mitchell once sang, “hollow like a cactus tree.”

This brings me years forward to today. The presidential election looms. (As one always seems to be in an endless spin cycle.) The candidates are shrill and, frankly, though some are very sharp individuals, sound idiotic. (This is because their handlers have told them to speak the language of the people.)

I saw in my newspaper the other day photographs made by Peter van Agtmael of members of the Ku Klux Klan. Though I am a Long Islander by birth and temperament, I live at present 12 miles as the raven flies from the White House in Maryland below the Mason-Dixon Line. The photographer nailed these robe-wearers hiding in their masks in houses and barns in Maryland and Tennessee. These are smallish states. One photo van Agtmael made was of a picture of Anne Frank that was tacked to a K.K.K. wall nearer to me than I would like that had this caption: “Hide and Seek Champion, 1942-1944.”

I rushed to a bathroom and puked.

Who stands for “truth, justice, and the American way”?

And what now is the American way?

Dan Marsh has been a “Guestwords” contributor since 2003. His writing has appeared in Newsday and Rolling Stone.

On April 12, President Obama expanded the national park system to include the historic Sewall-Belmont House in Washington, D.C. In designating the site as the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument, the president honored the trailblazers who fought for women’s rights. President Obama described the site’s significance as “a hotbed of activism, a centerpiece for the struggle for equality, a monument to a fight not just for women’s equality but, ultimately, for equality for everybody.”

The designation of a new national monument is particularly meaningful this year as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the date President Woodrow Wilson signed the act that established the National Park Service. It is a powerful signal that after 100 years, the park service continues to be a vital and evolving agency. Since its establishment, the national park system has expanded area by area, each new site adding integrity to the whole — another thread, another color, woven into the tapestry that is the story of this diverse nation. 

The fight for women’s suffrage is an important piece of the American story told by the park service, but there are more chapters to write, more stories to tell. Women’s rights and the park service have seen much progress in the last 100 years, but there is still work to do. President Obama’s designation of the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument is a step in the right direction.

Today, just nine out of more than 400 national parks have been established specifically to tell the story of women’s history in America. The Belmont-Paul monument is a terrific addition to this small number. I hope to see this number grow throughout my lifetime.

As a former National Park Service employee, I’m proud to support a park system that is growing to more accurately reflect the diverse range of stories and places in American history. We need to share the stories and struggles of past generations so that future generations understand our shared history.

It is essential that this president and those who follow him continue to use their authority to add new, significant areas that, in the words of the park service’s 1970 General Authorities Act, are “cumulative expressions of a single national heritage.” Alice Paul, Alva Belmont, and the National Women’s Party fought passionately and tirelessly for equal rights for women. The history of their fight will now be preserved in perpetuity by the National Park Service.

The Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument will offer visitors the opportunity to explore the nation’s most complete collection of suffrage and equal rights movement artifacts: the documents, banners, sashes, and lobbying cards that help tell the story of women in America. Preserving these historical and cultural treasures is a gift from one generation to the next. I believe with all my heart that our children and their children will, in the words of Stephen Mather, the first director of the park service, “become better citizen[s] with a keener appreciation of the privilege of living here” once they have spent time in national parks.

Each of us can and should find our own meaning in the national parks. From the glorious peaks and canyons to the sorrow-filled Trail of Tears, the authentic voices of our natural and cultural treasures speak to each of us individually. We need to make sure the National Park Service continues to grow to reflect the breadth and diversity of the American experience.

Jackie Lowey is a member of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks. She lives in East Hampton and serves on the East Hampton School Board.

On May 16, 1946, 70 years ago to the day I write this, I was in a Quonset hut in Camp Beale, Calif., sitting beside the desk of a graying sergeant who’d lost both his legs above the knees fighting the Japanese on one of those way-out-there Pacific islands. Typewriter keys whacked a form in the roller. He was processing my Army discharge.

“I see we sent you to Oxford for a term,” he said.

“I’m grateful for that,” I said. “I’m going back on the G.I. Bill to get a degree.”

“How’d you like to join up with the Reserve, Richard? We can get you a bar [an officer’s commission]. The Army needs educated men. War’s become very sophisticated.”

“It’s also become very stupid,” I replied.

He nodded slowly. “There are those nukes now,” he conceded.

And the words spilled out of me, as if I hadn’t been pondering them for months. “I’ve become a conscientious objector, Sergeant. Can you note that in my record?”

He told me he’d be glad to do that and handed me my discharge.

Clausewitz himself said it — Carl von Clausewitz, the enduringly eminent, hard-ass 19th-century Prussian general and military theorist. Friction and fog are intrinsic to warfare. By “friction,” Clausewitz meant that in war there is a tendency for things to go very wrong. Fog, its complement, is the uncertainty in battle, which breeds bad decisions. In short, we can never predict or control what will happen in war. There will always be fuckups.

We have a ghastly example of friction and fog in last October’s U.S. air gunship assault on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan. The mission was to attack a Taliban compound. According to the U.S. Defense Department report, as summarized in The New York Times, the following “chain of errors” caused the mistake.

To perform an added mission, the gunship was ordered to take off over an hour earlier than planned. The crew was insufficiently briefed. A database that would have allowed them to identify the hospital as a protected site was not uploaded. Then, the satellite radio failed, further stifling the crew’s ability to receive essential information.

Taliban fighters fired a surface-to-air missile at the plane, which veered off course to evade it, confusing the plane’s targeting systems, which directed it to an open field. The crew was left to ID their target visually, for which it was hampered by vague descriptions supplied by U.S. Special Forces and the coincidence that the enemy compound and the hospital had similar visual features and were located within 400 meters of each other.

The gunship, an AC-130, opened fire on the hospital, a total of 200 rounds before the end, some from a 105-millimeter howitzer. Forty-two people, all noncombatants, were killed — 24 patients, 14 hospital staff, and 4 caretakers. The chain of errors had become a tsunami.

Death-dealing confusion also reigned among our military leaders. The hospital telephoned and pleaded with U.S. command in Afghanistan to call off the gunship. But the attack was continued in full ferocity because a U.S. general, his name redacted from the Defense Department report, ruled that since the onslaught was already under way and had been approved by Special Forces, the hospital had lost its special protection status and bore the burden, the impossible burden really, of proving that no Taliban were there. The Defense Department later admitted that no Taliban had been present.

Details of the event’s duration are confused. Depending on which version you accept, the U.S. attack lasted anywhere from a half-hour to an hour and 11 minutes. The first shots were fired at 2:08 a.m. It was 2:20 a.m. when Doctors Without Borders reported the attack to U.S. Afghanistan command and to the Defense Department in Washington, which claims the assault was called off at 2:38, 30 minutes after the first shots and 18 minutes after the department learned of it. But at 2:56 a.m., 48 minutes into the carnage, Doctors Without Borders complained the attack was continuing and did not report a cease-fire until 3:13.

Nothing occurred in the Kunduz chain of errors that is unusual in warfare. Losing one’s way while evading enemy fire, neglecting to upload a guidance device, misidentifying the enemy, maintaining a violent assault on a mistaken target are commonplace. Friction and fog. What’s new from Kunduz is the stark revelation that there is no such thing as a fail-safe system, whether our purpose is the correct identification of a target or ensuring we do not stumble into a nuclear holocaust.

All of these things, all these little oversights, miscalculations, uninformed assumptions that multiply to become whopper screwups are indeed intrinsic to war. Always have been, always will be. The difference now is not that we have developed sophisticated systems that keep us error-free and safer, but that these systems can fail us as quickly as a car, washing machine, or computer grammar check.

Hyperbole? Well, it almost happened twice that we know of: during Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” shtick in the early 1980s and before that during the Cuban nuclear missile brinkmanship in 1962. On both occasions, we were spared by the not inevitable presence of careful people in crucial positions — John Kennedy, Robert McNamara, and Nikita Khrushchev in the ’60s, and in the ’80s a Russian colonel, Stanislav Petrov, who refused to credit notice from his early warning computers that the United States had just fired five nukes at Russia from our Midwest that were 20 minutes away from obliterating much of his country. Had Colonel Petrov accepted this misinformation, there likely would have been a massive nuclear “retaliation” on the United States.

We also know of the tragic shortfalls of fail-safe systems at nuclear power plants in Japan and Russia and our near disaster in the U.S.A. at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. And then there may be other near tragic mishaps that we do not know about. Of course, we must try, and keep trying, to perfect our capability to avoid civilization-ending mistakes. But it’s a struggle that we humans are not perfect enough to win.

With the possible exception of the unnamed U.S general who refused to call off the gunship when it became likely we were destroying a hospital rather than the Taliban, I can’t find it in my heart to demand, as many do, that the soldiers who participated in the Kunduz event be charged with war crimes.

In the German Rhineland, where I served in 1945 near the end of the European war, U.S. forces did not hesitate to level towns that we’d decided, not always with certainty, were sheltering German troops who wanted to continue the war. We were much too preoccupied with our own survival to consider the small chance that some tribunal in the remote future would be assembled to look back and punish us.

With all my 70 years as an advocate for nonviolent solutions, I am still not sure that in such a time and place as Kunduz, I wouldn’t have acted as the G.I.s in the AC-130 aircrew did. Indeed, God forgive me, I might even have relished it.

Being a conscientious objector may be a futile gesture, I know, especially in these days of president-candidate trash talk diplomacy. But it is one small thing I can do, keep as a part of me and hope that somehow it will matter.

Richard Rosenthal lives in East Hampton. A collection of his work, “My Writing and Advocacy, 1943-2016,” which includes his “Guestwords” articles and Star letters to the editor, is available at the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection and at the Amagansett Library.

I recently moved from New York City to the town upstate where my children and grandchildren live. It will likely be the last of my many moves, and I gathered a lifetime’s worth of books, writings, photos, mementos, souvenirs, and other accumulated stuff. As I began to sort through it all, hoping to pre-empt my children’s Dumpster, I came upon my college graduation book. Friends and fond memories returned, including a humorous history of our class, which began, “Nothing happened sophomore year.”

While mocking sophomores is classic college humor — “Even freshmen look down on sophomores,” my cousin quipped — in our case, I now realize, the witticism missed badly. Something extraordinary did happen in 1954. On May 17, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that “separate but equal” education for blacks, a common practice protected by law for half a century, was unconstitutional.

None of the serious historians of our college years mentioned Brown either, although among reminiscences of football, girls, favorite professors, and movies of the day, they did describe social and political events. They wrote of Joseph McCarthy (“We debated the McCarthy censure issue”), Billy Graham (“The campus was, for a week, a hotbed of religious inquiry”), and uprisings in Poland and Hungary (“We pledged money in large quantities for the immediate relief of Hungarian refugees”).

Nor were we unaware of racial conflict. When Eugene Cook, the attorney general of Georgia, defended segregation in a visiting lecture, “We discussed segregation and the problems involved.” Reports of Emmett Till’s brutal murder in Mississippi in August 1955, and of white students “our own age” assaulting blacks at the University of Alabama, produced in us a “willingness to discuss the problem frankly, in a troubled spirit of moderation.” And after graduation we expected to face “crises” — “in public education, in solving the problems of biracial existence, and in all areas of foreign affairs.”

I’m sure this all seemed reasonable to me. And yet, how did we miss the Brown decision?

The answer, I’m afraid, knowing what I know today, lies in what we meant by racial “problems.” In the eyes of privileged white boys in the 1950s, blacks had their roles in society — as baseball players, shoeshine boys, jazz musicians, waiters and maids, singers, actors, and soldiers — and filled them without problem. Nor was it a problem when Marian Anderson, with a voice that Toscanini said appears once in a hundred years, became the first black singer in the Metropolitan Opera in 1955.

I’m not sure we were aware that in 1939 the Daughters of the American Revolution had barred her from singing in Washington’s Constitution Hall, where seating was segregated, or that Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for her to sing outdoors at the Lincoln Memorial to 75,000 fans. But if we were aware, I believe we would have accepted it all — the segregated seating in our nation’s capital and the respect shown to a great black singer — as simply the way our society functioned. We might have applauded Mrs. Roosevelt’s resigning from the D.A.R., but for a Constitution Hall recital in 1955 we would have occupied our designated section, devoid of any black faces, without shame.

No, the problem for us was not the struggle between freed blacks and white society — a struggle that began in 1865 and was still engaged during our college years 90 years later. We were as blithely ignorant of that long history as of the Brown decision. The problems we recognized arose, rather, when the status quo was challenged, or, in the belligerent phrase still heard today, when “troublemakers” began to stir things up.

I don’t know whether such a view defined us as racists 60 years ago. For myself, what I’ve since learned about racial struggles has broadened my understanding of our nation’s history.

Most important, it’s clear to me that slavery itself has marked race relations, not only when Southern states fought to preserve it in law, but when, having lost the fight, they attempted to maintain at least its social structure. The claim that the South rebelled against an oppressive central government to defend “states’ rights” — a claim that many Northerners accepted at the time and still believe — is belied by the evidence. 

The government that 11 “Confederate States of America” formed in Richmond, Va., in 1861 was a mirror image of the government in Washington, with precisely the same legislative, executive, and judicial structures, and their Constitution was virtually identical to the 1787 Constitution, except for its protection of slavery. The same restrictions on the Confederate Congress are enumerated, except: “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves [my italics], shall be passed.”

Likewise, in planning for new “territory” and new states, the Confederate Constitution copied the 1787 Constitution whole, with one addition: “In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery [my italics] as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress, and by the territorial government.”

As for states’ rights, it is worth quoting in full the “supreme law” section of the Confederate Constitution, which repeated word for word the same section in the 1787 Constitution: “This Constitution, and the laws of the Confederate States, made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the Confederate States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding.”

In short, the vaunted “way of life” that some Southerners still claim they were defending, and what their Confederate flags supposedly “represent” — what in fact their way of life would have continued to be had they won the Civil War — turns out to be constitutionally pretty much the Northern way of life, but with slavery.

So it is not surprising that after the Confederate Army surrendered in April 1865, and the 13th Amendment ending legal slavery was ratified that December, Southerners began to consider how to maintain their way of life. The 90-year struggle was engaged.

It is impossible in a few words to describe the ebbs and flows of the long racial conflict that culminated in the landmark Brown decision. To anyone with limited knowledge of it, I recommend the following: “Simple Justice,” an indispensable 1975 book by Richard Kluger; “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” 1973, by C. Vann Woodward; the writings and the life story of W.E.B. DuBois, first black Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895, and the life of Thurgood Marshall, lead lawyer for the plaintiffs in the Brown decision. Here are only a few highlights, and lowlights, of those 90 years.

Education came first. The Freedmen’s Bureau, created by Congress to help four million slaves transition to freedom, built hospitals and provided medical care and food, but its major efforts went to building more than 1,000 schools for black children and to establishing colleges: Fisk University in Nashville in 1866, named for the general who provided space in a former Union Army barracks, Howard University in Washington, D.C., in 1867, named for another Union general, and in 1868, Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Va. Booker T. Washington, born a slave in 1856, graduated from Hampton in 1875 and in 1881 went to Tuskegee, Ala., to head the new college there. These institutions trained generations of professional black men and women and all remain flourishing universities today.

However, as critical as black schools and colleges were to improving many black lives, the Southern way of life continued to constrain most of the millions of freed blacks. And while the 14th Amendment (1868) extended the “equal protection of the laws” to blacks, and the 15th Amendment (1870) extended voting rights, they also marked the end of most federal efforts to impact race relations. There were no further constitutional amendments until 1913 (allowing income taxes), and the Freedmen’s Bureau was closed in 1872. 

Over the following decades, blacks in the South did manage to vote in sufficient numbers to elect hundreds of local black officials, and between 1869 and 1901, 20 black representatives and two black senators sat in the U.S. Congress. Still, Southern states continued to press for laws limiting black rights, and in 1896, with the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision, they triumphed. Plessy ruled that the “equal protection of the laws” clause of the 14th Amendment did not apply to segregation, which left Southern whites free to pass laws further constricting black participation in politics. The intended effect was immediate: Whereas 130,000 blacks were registered to vote in Louisiana in 1896, by 1904 the number was 1,342.

In the aftermath of Plessy, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was founded in 1909 by a coalition of whites and blacks, and it succeeded in restoring some voting rights. In 1936 Thurgood Marshall, a law graduate of Howard University, joined its legal staff to focus on educational equality for blacks. The decision he won in Brown overturned Plessy and established the constitutional requirement for equal protection of the laws as the basis for legal challenges to segregation.

Sixty years later, the gross mistreatment of our black citizens continues, in grade schools, legal defense, prison sentences, social services, and municipal infrastructure. I can only view it still as a privileged white, because that’s what I am. But knowing what I know, I would urge a new generation of Thurgood Marshalls to continue the fight for equal protection of the laws. I will applaud their successes.

Malcolm Mitchell, who until recently lived part time in East Hampton, is editor and publisher of Investment Policy magazine.

It used to be that if you called someone and he didn’t answer (and there was no answering machine), you could almost see the silence yawning at you. You placed yourself in that imaginary office or kitchen or bedroom and conjured either a void or something going on that was mysteriously alluring and that you were somehow being excluded from. Your wife, friend, or lover might be betraying you in that silence, but there was always an anchor, a place to which the ringing belonged.

Now the landline is going the way of the old Royal typewriter, thank-you notes written in cursive, and the un-air-conditioned car. Remember the smell of the ocean after driving for hours through choked highways to get to the beach on a summer’s weekend in a sweltering sedan? Now cars are like spoiled trust fund babies who don’t need anyone. The music is blasting, everyone is on a smartphone or iPad, and nobody even needs the sea.

The old rotary, which looked like a miniature cash register, the Princess, the touch-tone, even the battery-powered handset that you could walk around the house with are all victims of unplanned obsolescence — their half-lives foreshortened by Moore’s Law and the tsunami of cellphone technology that followed in its wake.

But the death of the landline is creating a revolution that was prefigured by developments in relativity theory and quantum mechanics many decades before. The idea of quantum entanglement is predicated on the notion that a particle can be in two places at the same time. A quantum universe, if such a phenomenon could exist not only among subatomic particles but human bodies, would give new meaning to adultery and cheating since in theory a certain equanimity would mitigate against favoring one body over the other. Promiscuousness itself would be rendered fairly benign as we would all inhabit a universe of multiversic perversity! 

Pretty soon few if any telephones will be ringing in a place. A phone number will be assigned to a person but that person will be the equivalent of a moving particle. In the past you could envision the geographic spot in which the phone was ringing. In the not too distant future, it will be literally a Pandora’s box in terms of possibilities. I might be persuaded you were picking up in Paris, London, or Moscow when you were, in reality, en route to Nice, Liverpool, or Leningrad. 

The phone, which was a creature of Newtonian l9th-century technology, has finally come into its own. The old version plugged into a jack in the wall created the illusion that space could exist alone. There was something stoic and intransigent about these anachronisms. Now the possessor of his cell truly navigates the space-time continuum, a moving body receiving electronic signals from other moving bodies whose positions are continually changing and whose final resting spot (if such a condition truly exists) is ultimately dependent on the motion of other bodies. 

I might, for instance, be drawn by the inertial force of an economic windfall sucking at me with the magnetism of a black hole. Its gravitational spell might be preventing me from making a desired appearance in London. At the same time I could be involved in a conversation with a new lover while catching a plane at Heathrow for the South of France. 

And where is the admissions office for the online university I have just enrolled in? Not even on the cellphone of a human being, but in the robotic intelligence digitally vetting my application in the ether of cyberspace.

Francis Levy, a Wainscott resident, is the author of the comic novels “Erotomania: A Romance” and “Seven Days in Rio” and of the blog The Screaming Pope.

Friends, I thank you for starting another piece from me on this topic; please don’t move on yet. Yes, my efforts to defend Social Security from government and media lies have become familiar, though I fear fruitless, for more than a decade. Still, revelations in recent years of ever more skullduggery by both parties make my efforts even more relevant. Remember Bob Hope’s quip: “No one party can fool all the people all the time. That’s why we have two parties.”

When it comes to bashing Social Security, the media cooperates with both. Two recent New York Times articles conspired to erode public confidence in what I call America’s collective 401(k). So, I’m once again into the fray.

The two articles appeared on the same day last December. A columnist for The Times wrote a front-page piece titled “Aging Society Changes Story on Poverty in Old Age,” and a news report from the presidential races was titled “Clinton Confidently Embracing Her Husband’s Economic Record.” The columnist, Eduardo Porter, wrote of demographic trends “expected to continue for at least the next 50 years” (expected by whom?). And he dismissed any proposed increase in the Social Security tax rate as “politically dead on arrival in Washington” (as though an increase would affect overall government spending). I’ll deal with those matters below.

First, if you wonder what the Clinton story has to do with Social Security, the answer is that Democrats still include “a balanced budget” among President Bill Clinton’s achievements. And that false claim depends on convincing the American people that the federal government doesn’t owe any money to Social Security.

Here’s the background. In 1997, the Clinton administration changed the way the Bureau of the Public Debt had been reporting the national debt for more than 200 years. Ever since Alexander Hamilton was secretary of the Treasury, the bureau has presented “Total Public Debt Outstanding” as a single number. Because Hamilton was as obsessive in crunching numbers as in dissecting arguments, the number has always been calculated “to the penny.” The first was published on Jan. 1, 1790, showing the nation’s debt in 10 digits: $71,060,508.50. Today, it takes 16 digits to show our debt of nearly $19 trillion. (You can view both on the bureau’s website — treasurydirect.gov/NP/debt/current.)

On Sept. 30, 1997, two additional numbers appeared for the first time on the website. (The federal government’s fiscal year ends on Sept. 30.) The numbers were shown alongside Total Public Debt Outstanding as subcategories of debt: “Debt Held by the Public,” representing Treasury bonds sold to individuals, corporations, and governments worldwide when the Treasury borrowed money, and something called “Intragovernmental Holdings,” defined on the bureau’s website as “Government Account Series securities held by Government trust funds, revolving funds, and special funds.” (I wonder who invented the word “intragovernmental.” My computer insists it’s a misspelling.)

The sum of those subcategories of debt — each calculated to the penny — equals Total Public Debt Outstanding. 

So what’s the scam? The Clinton administration claimed that Intragovernmental Holdings is merely money that one part of the government “owes” to another part. It’s as though, the argument goes, you owe money to yourself. (I’ve personally never met anyone who can explain what it means to owe myself money.)

Ignoring Intragovernmental Holdings, the Clinton administration used Debt Held by the Public to represent the federal government’s total debt. And (surprise!) in the four fiscal years between Sept. 30, 1997, and Sept. 30, 2001, Debt Held by the Public actually declined each year. That was the Democrats’ entire rationale for claiming a balanced budget. It still is.

Never mind that in each of those four years Intragovernmental Holdings increased, largely because the government was borrowing money from the Social Security Trust Fund — a total of some $550 billion over the four years. (More on this below.)

And never mind that Total Public Debt Outstanding — the one number that every administration before 1997, including Clinton’s own, had used to calculate the government’s annual budget surplus or deficit — also increased each year. Over the four years, the federal government’s total debt increased from $5.41 trillion to $5.81 trillion.

All of this data has been available on the bureau’s website. With the media turning a blind eye, however, Democrats believed they could get away with the scam. Apparently they still do.

Of course what Democrats began Republicans were only too happy to continue. In fact, years before George W. Bush became president, Republicans were telling the American public that Social Security was going broke. They still are.

The twin lies on which Republicans make their case were repeated in Eduardo Porter’s New York Times column. First, they claim to have identified, in Mr. Porter’s words, “inexorable” economic and demographic trends that will last “at least the next 50 years” and lead to Social Security’s inevitable demise. Really? Is Mr. Porter suggesting that he, or anyone, knows what the U.S. economy and demographics are going to look like in 2066 and beyond? Social Security’s actuaries don’t claim such prescience. Their fundamental test of “financial adequacy” — the relation between assets in the Trust Fund and promised payouts — is projected for just 10 years. Beyond that, projections are “uncertain,” as they explained in the 2002 Trustees Report: “The degree of uncertainty involved can be illustrated by imagining how difficult it would have been in 1925 to project the world of 1930, much less that of 2000.”

Since the actuaries have been instructed by succeeding administrations to make 75-year projections despite their uncertainty, their solution has been to make three projections: one “high cost,” one “low cost,” and the third, “intermediate cost.” Those projections, however, diverge widely as they extend further into the future. The American Academy of Actuaries, in a 2009 Issue Brief denouncing the futility of such long-term projections, wrote of “sharp disagreements among experts over projecting mortality rates for 75 years.” Projections would also have to be made 75 years out for inflation, interest rates, birth rates, employment, etc. (In the same Issue Brief, the actuaries signaled their frustration by quoting the famous Yogi Berra line: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”)

The Republican lie about long-term trends is built on an obvious fact about how Social Security got started. Contributions began to be collected in 1938 from millions of working Americans, but when the first benefits were paid in the 1940s, only those who had paid in and then reached retirement age were eligible. So at first, more than 40 workers were contributing to the system for every one receiving benefits. The contribution rate was therefore set at just 1 percent, paid equally by both employers and employees.

That 40-to-1 ratio naturally began to drop as more contributors reached retirement age. But by 1975 that trend was over. A stable ratio of workers to retirees was reached — roughly 3 to 1 — and it has remained there ever since.

The contribution rate also rose as the worker-retiree ratio stabilized. It was 5 percent in the 1970s and reached 6 percent in 1988. It has now remained at 6.2 percent for the past quarter century.

The Trust Fund meanwhile has grown to nearly $3 trillion, and as the baby boomers retire it will start to shrink. That is exactly how the actuaries planned it, given the spike in live births in the 1950s and the entry of the boomers into the labor force in the 1970s. By making new 10-year forecasts every year, the actuaries have successfully managed the flow of money into and out of the fund for 80 years.

So much for long-term trends that doom Social Security. The second Republican lie is that increasing Social Security benefits is anathema to lawmakers who want to rein in government spending. The truth is that the government contributes nothing to Social Security. The 1935 legislation establishing the system banned any government support, and that ban still stands. Social Security is a closed, collective, intergenerational system; every dollar in the system comes from workers’ contributions (the correct definition of FICA taxes), and virtually every dollar is paid out to contributing workers after they retire.

The exception is the cost of the Social Security Administration itself, for which the Trust Fund pays out less than 1 percent of its assets. The S.S.A. is the most efficient office in government, having kept track of hundreds of millions of individual workers for 80 years and having paid out every promised benefit to every retiree — including disability and survivor benefits.

The Trust Fund by law invests its money safely in U.S. Treasury bonds. It is unique among federal agencies in that it holds physical bonds issued by the Treasury Department. As the S.S.A. website puts it, “Just as in the case of marketable Treasury securities held by the public, all of the investments held by the trust funds are backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. Government.” So the government really does owe the money it borrowed from the Trust Fund — or rather borrowed from the millions of working and retired men and women in the system. That money in a real sense belongs to them.

On the question of whether Social Security benefits should be increased, I hope, my friends, you now understand that the only people who would be affected are those in the system. With many corporate pension funds struggling to fulfill their promises, millions of Americans expect to rely more on their Social Security benefits during their retirement years. A small increase in the contribution rate, unchanged for a quarter century, would greatly help. And the impact on the federal budget would be zero. 

Malcolm Mitchell is editor and publisher of Investment Policy magazine. He lives in New York and East Hampton.

I’m always a little embarrassed when procrastination pays off. I probably shouldn’t be, since I do it enough that the odds ought to provide a positive result once in a while. This time they did.

I discussed this proposed topic with Star editors almost a year ago. The title, “The Mighty Maxim,” has a clear subtext of “What Goes Around Comes Around.” Those of you who are members of the East Hampton Historical Society now know that’s the title of this year’s Winter Lecture Series. When the society’s announcement postcard arrived, my procrastination had to end.

Visitors to the Emergency Services Building who have gone upstairs into the large meeting room have seen the East Hampton Fire Department’s memorabilia displayed in cases and on the walls. One large wall has pictures of all previous department chiefs. Only Judson Banister is proudly shown next to a department fire engine, a 1928 Maxim hook and ladder truck. 

Jud joined the department’s Hook and Ladder Company No. 1 in 1919 and within a few years was elected captain, a post he held until 1930. As life and politics go, inevitably there comes a time when the younger generation decides to take on the established elders, and by the late 1920s this evolution had arrived at the Fire Department. Through a variety of team-building events, especially summer cookouts at his camp on Three Mile Harbor, Jud developed a large following from the members of his company, the department’s largest. 

In 1923 he ran against a longtime member and former chief, Felix Dominy, when the chief at the time, George Davis, a close friend, chose not to seek re-election and nominated Jud. Felix won by a vote of 51 to 49 and continued to be re-elected through 1927, a year when he again defeated Jud, 26 to 21.

The changing of the guard happened in 1928. Jud nominated Frank Conklin, known to have a large following of younger members. Chief Dominy was also nominated, and the final tally was 64 to 61 in favor of Conklin in a large turnout. Re-elected as captain of Hook and Ladder 1, Jud proceeded to work with the new chief to convince the village board that getting a new hook and ladder truck should be a priority. Funding would need voter approval. 

In June, village board members standing for election were re-elected, but the hottest issue turned out to be a proposal to allow movies to be shown on Sundays. It went down in defeat, while a proposal to raise $18,000 to buy two new fire trucks passed 157 to 125 despite predictions of failure. 

The Star’s Nov. 30, 1928, edition printed a picture of the new Maxim a week before it was delivered. In early December the 17-year-old Fulton truck of Company No. 1 was replaced by the impressive new hook and ladder engine soon to come under the charge of Captain Banister.

Less than two months later, on the first Sunday of February, it would be put to its first test during the Gregory Company Store fire. The four-hour battle was described in great detail headlining The Star’s Feb. 8, 1929, front page. The new truck was prominently displayed in a three-column photograph showing ladders taking firemen to the top of adjacent buildings. “The new ladder equipment,” the article said, “a part of the Maxim hook and ladder recently purchased, was used to very good advantage and every ladder but one was pressed into service.” 

As seems always the case, though, the significant and expensive purchase was controversial before the surprising town vote. In that same issue, Welby Boughton, The Star’s editor at the time, noted the controversy over the truck’s purchase, with many citizens believing it would become a “white elephant.” But he also pointed out that others thought its capabilities indispensable and offered, “From our viewpoint the ladders proved quite necessary and essential.”

Jud was elected chief in 1930 and was re-elected three more times before choosing not to run in 1934, when he was succeeded by Steve Marley. During his years as chief, the department organized a very successful competition team, winning a number of county and statewide trophies still displayed in the large meeting room. The Maxim was prominently exhibited during many of those competitions as well as in local parades.

Jud, encouraged to run for village mayor in 1936, won that election and went on to serve eight two-year terms. It was now his board’s turn to review and approve Fire Department elections, oversee budgets, and hear appeals for new equipment. Pending village elections during Jud’s last term, scheduled for mid-June 1953, brought up the prospect of a ballot issue to raise money for a new truck for Company No. 1. A brief front-page report in The Star just before the election reported “No Fire Truck Vote.” What happened?

Replacing the 24-year-old Maxim first came before the board at the November 1952 meeting. Berkley Bennett, captain of Hook and Ladder No. 1, explained some of the deficiencies of the aging Maxim, noting the company was in touch with the American LaFrance Corporation and recommended that a new aerial ladder truck be purchased. Board minutes reflect that Chief Walter Mansir and Captain Bennett were advised to gather sufficient information to bring the matter before the board as it developed the 1954 budget.

Harold Chapman, representing the department at the May village board meeting, told them the company, through either misunderstanding or misrepresentation, he was unsure which, had tried to get support for the new aerial ladder truck by direct petition. He was advised to proceed in the regular manner, getting approval first from the Fire Council and then presenting the request to the board. Further discussion revealed that while Company No. 1 was strongly in favor of the purchase, the department generally was not.

By late May 1953 the department secretary, Harry Parsons, wrote the board reporting a Fire Council vote of 7 to 4 in favor of purchase. Chief W. Adair Orr advised the board at its June meeting that this new truck, while having impressive capabilities and time-saving efficiencies, weighed 101/2 tons and would be prohibited from several roads and small bridges in the district. He recommended that the board contact the National Board of Fire Underwriters seeking advice as to the adequacy of the Maxim versus a new aerial ladder truck. 

A June 8 letter from the fire underwriters explained that based on discussions with Chief Orr on the Maxim’s condition and the nature of East Hampton’s buildings requiring protection, they could not “recommend any replacement at this time.” Parts of this letter were included in The Star’s report that the fire truck issue would not be on the June ballot. Nor did it come up in 1954 during Jud’s final campaign, which he lost.

What had gone around in the original purchase was to come around again while Jud was mayor — the desired purchase of a new ladder truck. It remained unresolved before he left office. A year later, a June 9, 1955, Star headline asked, “Is A 1927 [sic] Fire Truck Old Enough To Retire?” Answering its own question, the paper thought yes, saying, “For the safety of East Hampton’s firemen and the protection of property this 1927 truck should be retired from fire-chasing, according to talk among men up and down Main Street and Newtown Lane.” 

The Nov. 3, 1955, issue reported that the department got the new truck by direct action of the board and mayor. That new mayor? Steve Marley, who two decades earlier, in 1934, had followed Jud as chief when the mighty Maxim was very much in its prime. 

Do these issues ever stop coming around?

Steve Rideout regularly visits East Hampton to research family history. He lives in Shutesbury, Mass., with his wife, Carol Stanley Rideout. Jud Banister was her great-uncle.