For almost four decades practicing medicine on the South Fork, Dr. Raymond Francis Medler made some 4,000 house calls. He was known to accept payment in the form of a striped bass or a basket of just-harvested vegetables, and to have made hospital rounds with a flask and two tiny glasses in his pocket -- the last of the region's old-style country doctors.

Springs School District officials on Monday announced that the school will soon start offering in-person instruction to larger groups of students four days per week instead of two, and in the interim will begin live-streaming classroom lessons.

A week ago there was just one known case of Covid-19 among East Hampton High School students, but that number has since risen to six and all of them are connected to a single recent indoor gathering, school officials said this week. The district's John M. Marshall Elementary School also reported a new case in a fifth grader.

Jeremy Goncalves, a lifelong resident of Springs who loved the outdoors and traditional Bonac pastimes like fishing, clamming, and duck hunting, died suddenly at home on Oct. 25. The cause was a heart attack.

Robert H. Meinke, a builder, former East Hampton Town highway superintendent and assessor, and lifelong resident of East Hampton, died on Oct. 28 at the Kanas Center for Hospice Care in Quiogue. He was 94.

Betty Sheldon Kane, who had been an agent at the former Sheila Devlin Real Estate firm here, died of heart failure on Oct. 20 in Scottsdale, Ariz. An Amagansett resident for many years, she was 87.

On-camera audition class at Bay Street Theater, Legos return, and art books all around.

Charlotte Egerton-Warburton has been busy during the Covid-19 pandemic with a project that helps the world in two ways. Charlotte, 10, makes and sells beaded necklaces that are handy to keep one's mask around the neck. She is using the sale as a fund-raiser for research into ADNP syndrome, also known as Helsmoortel-Van Der Aa Syndrome, a rare neurodevelopmental disorder that affects her younger brother, Rowland.

Last Thursday, Carla Chavez, the manager of the 7-Eleven, turned over 50 fake ID cards that store clerks had confiscated over the past month from under-age customers trying to buy alcohol or tobacco products.

Rainy conditions last Thursday morning at Montauk Airport were blamed after a small plane slid off the runway, through a chain-link fence, and across East Lake Drive, ultimately crashing into a wooden fence.

Three recent accidents on local roads all underlined the dangers of distracted driving.

The Suffolk County Health Department traced a cluster of Covid-19 infections to the early voting site at the Stony Brook Southampton campus, County Executive Steve Bellone said in press briefing on Wednesday.

Suffolk voters may be divided when it comes to which political party’s candidates they align with, but they nearly spoke with a single voice on Tuesday in rejecting a ballot proposal to change the length of county legislators’ terms.

This has not been a banner year for land buys using money from the community preservation fund in East Hampton.

With results uncertain as Tuesday rolled into Wednesday, many thoughts turned to the Electoral College.

The schools have done a good job dealing with virus cases and preventing wider outbreaks by strictly managing their internal practices. But once outside of the school buildings, the risk of uncontrolled transmission increases.

Insomnia is how I personally discovered the philosophical truth that “I think therefore I am,” a  couple of years before I heard the name Descartes and “Cogito, ergo sum” at boarding school.

Good for a hundred years, why in the world were New York’s old voting machines ever put out to pasture?

Every week I hike a Pennsylvania nature trail named for my late friend Jere Knight. It’s my thank-you to her for trusting me to write the first biography of her late husband Eric Knight, the English-American author of the novel “Lassie Come-Home.”

An East Hampton gym closes, and the Chamber of Commerce organizes a holiday shopping campaign to help local merchants.