When I asked Carl Johnson the other day how many of his former basketball players — he has coached hundreds — remained in Bridgehampton, he said, “One . . . Ron White.”
Ron White, who played for Johnson on the terrific teams he had in the late 1990s, is the Killer Bees’ coach now. As for the neighborhood where Johnson grew up, gentrification’s seeping in. It is a year-round community that he desires, where people who work in the community live, not a part-time one.
It amused him, rather bemused him, that the Bridgehampton Child Care and Recreational Center’s application for a 10,000-square-foot gym with an Olympic-size swimming pool had taken so long to win approval from town authorities — a concern apparently being the percentage of the six-acre former farm that could be cleared of vegetation. It’s an absurdity when you think of it, when down the street still more mansions are popping up.
The need for a pool where kids could learn to swim is very urgent, he said, and the need for affordable housing is extremely urgent, lest Bridgehampton, as it has been known, vanishes.
I told him — as perhaps many others have — that he ought to run for the Southampton Town Board. I hope he does.
The Bridgehampton School to me has always been the summum bonum, a great example of what this country can be. I used to get that feeling especially in the old gym, the Bee Hive, where after basketball games everyone came out onto the floor. It seemed, I wrote after one of those games, as if an entire community, of all hues, had come together in a warm embrace.
It would be a shame if there were someday to be no Bridgehampton as it has been known, overgrown by big second homes, with everything just so, yet with its soul having shriveled and died.
There was a time when some of the well-heeled wanted to get rid of the school, and Helen Rattray, our Marianne at the battlements, said, in reply to one of the antis, who compared the cost of educating students there to Harvard’s, that, if so, it could well be worth it.