Obituaries

Diana D. Plitt of East Hampton, a painter, watercolorist, and sketch artist who was a past president of the Artists Alliance of East Hampton, died in Southampton on June 4. She was 83.

In 1955, when she was 18 and still Diana Deutsch, her cousin Margaret Guissinger nominated her for the Miss America beauty pageant, and she was crowned Miss New York State. She went on to study at the Pratt Institute in Manhattan, the beginning of a distinguished career in the arts.

Connie Dembia of Wainscott and Ramsey, N.J., died on May 20 at home in Ramsey at the age of 98. Her family wrote that she had not been ill, “just very, very old.”

 Her interests and accomplishments were varied, from reading and sewing to politics, social issues, and social justice. As a child growing up in Brooklyn, where she was born Carmela Di Paola on Dec. 11, 1921, she was a champion handball player, and all through her life loved dancing. 

Vincent Christopher Carillo, the owner of Liars' Saloon and Offshore Sports Marina in Montauk, died at home in that hamlet on May 26. He was 80.

Mark Humphrey of the Mark Humphrey Gallery in Southampton died last Thursday of complications of cancer at the Kanas Center for Hospice Care in Quiogue. He was 71.

Arthur J. Cortes, who owned and operated Halfback Charters in Montauk for 30 years, died from a fall at his home adjacent to Montauk Downs State Park on May 28. He was 74.

Sportfishing and the ocean were Mr. Cortes’s passions, and he worked on many Long Island charter boats before moving to Montauk in 1991, because “that was where the fish were,” as he put it on the Halfback Charters website. He owned the company, which operated from a 39-foot Hatteras Express, from that year until his death.

Donald T. McDonald, a retired East Hampton High School science teacher, died on June 10 from kidney cancer at home in East Hampton, surrounded by family. He was 90.

Mr. McDonald was born in a house on Church Street in East Hampton Village on April 2, 1930, to Zena Petitpas McDonald and Elmer McDonald. He was the youngest of four brothers who came of age during the Depression. 

Gerald Thomas Stanley, who owned and operated Stanley and Son residential refuse service and G.T. Stanley cesspool service in East Hampton, died on May 26 in Canandaigua, N.Y. He was 95.

Isabel Margaret Rickard Spear died at home in East Hampton on May 30, with her daughters, Min Spear Hefner and Kay Spear Gibson, at her bedside. She was 96.

Born on March 1, 1924, in Sherborne in the county of Dorset, England, to Mabel and Reginald Rickard, she was one of six children. As a young girl she attended Lord Digby's School.

Beverly B. Smith of Amagansett and Manhattan died at Lenox Hill Hospital there on May 23. She was 86 and had taken ill with pancreatitis two and a half weeks prior to her death.

A summer resident of Amagansett since 1958, Mrs. Smith had been coming to the East End for many years to visit family members in Southampton. She married Roger Smith in 1956 and in 1960 they bought the same house they had first rented in 1958. Mr. Smith died in 1980.

Johanna E. Veiga of East Hampton died at home of respiratory failure on May 24, surrounded by her extended family and her companion of 45 years, Carol Ann Crasson.

Christopher Louis Ehring, a former executive director of LTV, East Hampton’s public access television station, died of metastatic penile cancer at home in West Barnstable, Mass., on May 8. The longtime Springs resident was 73, and had been ill for 11 weeks. 

Jake Rajs, of whom Reader’s Digest magazine said, “Not since Ansel Adams . . . has a photographer so glorified the American landscape,” died of cancer on May 25 at the home of his sister, Frances Wagner, in Scotch Plains, N.J. He was 68 and had been ill for five months.