Joseph Michael Fitzgerald, a custom home builder, died last Thursday of complications from pneumonia at Port St. Lucie Hospital in Jensen Beach, Fla. The former Amagansett resident was 83, and had been ill for three months.     

Herbert August, an architect and abstract painter, died on Feb. 25 at home in Water Mill. He was 90.     

Scott R. Bennett, an Amagansett resident and longtime commercial fishing captain, died at home on Feb. 25 after being ill for several years with multiple afflictions.  

Joan Harrison, who was employed for almost 20 years in East Hampton as the personal assistant to Anthony Duke, the founder of Boys and Girls Harbor, died on Feb. 27 at home in Fort Collins, Colo. She was 88.     

A proposal to relaunch the Peconic Jitney, a ferry service that provided a direct link between Sag Harbor and Greenport during its trial run in 2012, has been scrapped for this year, Jim Ryan, a manager at the company, told Sag Harbor Village Mayor Kathleen Mulcahy last week.     

As one of the warmest winters in memory nears an end, the Town of East Hampton’s energy sustainability committee looks toward a looming deadline: the town’s goal to meet 100-percent renewable energy consumption, communitywide in all sectors, by 2030.     

Despite a massive die-off of bay scallops in the Peconic Estuary last fall, many waters under East Hampton Town Trustee jurisdiction, though by no means all, were of a high quality in 2019.     

East Hampton Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said that advisories related to COVID-19 will be posted to the town’s website, ehamptonny.gov, and reminded residents that they can sign up for alerts via text message.

Suffolk County Legislator Bridget Fleming and her potential opponent come November, Representative Lee Zeldin, have garnered new endorsements.

Ten pieces of assorted lumber, stacked on sawhorses at Vincent Fiore’s Crassen Boulevard property, were stolen sometime between Feb. 15 and 18.

An East Hampton man was charged with misdemeanor driving while intoxicated last Thursday morning after his pickup truck hit a cement pillar, part of a small bridge on Old Stone Highway in Springs.     

No sooner did we begin writing about the differences in village and town sign-law enforcement than a new annoyance arose. If you’ve been out and about in the past few weeks, you’ve probably noticed them — new street-number signs placed by a certain home security company on which a red oval corporate logo is actually larger than the digits.

Now is the time for town and village officials in East Hampton to think about beach season and if existing bonfire policies are adequate. We believe they are not.

In 1918, the word “influenza” did not appear in The East Hampton Star until Sept. 20. On that day, the news from Amagansett led with a short note saying George V. Schellinger had been sick for several days. His was the first of many mentions over the next year and a half for the newspaper, which we have been looking through as a new pandemic looms.

The possibility of housebound quarantine to avoid Covid-19, the coronavirus, took me back to my childhood in Bayonne, N.J., where my family belonged to an orthodox synagogue. Each autumn at Yom Kippur, the holiest Jewish observance, the observant fast between breakfast and dinner. My family did do that when I was very young; and then, after World War II, did not.

You might almost feel bad for Mike Pence. You could almost see the color drain from his cheeks when he was tapped by the boss to lead the United States coronavirus response.

I tend to bristle when addressed as “ma’am.” Ma’am is so, well, elderly. Uh, except in Brazil?

I’m beginning to get it — “it” being how Puritanism, with its disdain for freedom of speech, religious tolerance, equality, et cetera, led to the Declaration of Independence — but my essential question as to how we got from Cotton Mather to Thomas Paine remains.

Craig H. Handler, Karen A. Hoeg, and Bernadette E. Tuthill, associates at the law firm Twomey, Latham, Shea, Kelley, Dubin, and Quartararo, have been promoted to partner, a spokesman for the firm announced this week.

The prices listed here have been calculated from the county transfer tax. Unless otherwise noted, the parcels contain structures.