Bridgehampton High School’s all-time leading scorer in basketball, two late coaches who contributed greatly to that small school’s winning tradition, and two graduates who have given back generously over the years to their community and school were inducted into Bridgehampton’s Hall of Fame Friday.
One of the posthumously honored coaches, Merle Wiggin, oversaw a six-man football team that won four straight county championships between 1954 and 1957, and basketball and baseball teams that won three straight county titles — decidedly singular feats for a school that in 1957, pretty much as is still the case today, had 18 students in the senior class.
Ray Charlton of Deer Park, himself a former basketball coach, at Central Islip and Bay Shore, who played on the Wiggin-coached 18-0 league championship team of 1963-64, said that while his former mentor had been “a very, very good and successful coach, he was an even better person. . . . He wanted us to give 100 percent all the time, in whatever we did. That we maintained a good character, however, was the most important thing.”
Wayne Rana, who also spoke for Coach Wiggin, whose tenure at Bridgehampton spanned 1940 and 1967, said he still remembered him saying, “The difference between champ and chump is you.”
As for Roger Golden, a friend of his for 45 years, “I miss him every day,” Rana said.
Carl Johnson, who recently was inducted into the state’s basketball Hall of Fame following an unmatched career as a player and coach — having won three state titles as a player and four as a coach — said that Golden, who died three years ago, had been more than a mentor to him, recalling that at an awards dinner in his senior year, Coach Golden had said he’d be proud to call him his son. It was Golden, seeing something in him that he himself hadn’t, who got him into coaching. “I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for Roger Golden,” Johnson said.
Coach Golden’s daughter, Dwynn, who lives in Cooperstown, N.Y., spoke on her father’s behalf as well, and accepted from the school’s athletic director, Michael DeRosa, his plaque.
Just as he had benefited from Golden’s mentoring, so too did his brother, Bobby Hopson — another honoree that night — benefit from the late John Niles’s guidance, Johnson said during a telephone conversation Monday morning.
Hopson, who is in Wagner College’s Hall of Fame, holds Bridgehampton’s all-time scoring record, at 1,720 points, and its single-game scoring record of 52, which is the number on his retired jersey.
The only other retired jersey in Bridgehampton’s banner-bedecked bandbox gym — a gym that probably ought to be on the National Register of Historic Places — belongs to his older brother, who, in an aside, said the honoree had never beaten him in a game of one-on-one, adding afterward that he had called off the competitions once Hopson, Wagner’s fifth-leading all-time scorer, began playing in college.
Vicki Tiska, who works for Albie McCoy, who could not make it, accepted his plaque. The owner of the McCoy Bus Company, which has served the district for 45-plus years and the Montauk district for almost as long, had been “very generous over the years,” the plaque says in part, adding that “through it all, Mr. McCoy has remained humble, crediting his hard-working bus managers, drivers, monitors, and mechanic for making it happen day in and day out.”
“He leads by example — ask any of his employees,” Johnson said of the inductee during Monday’s conversation. “Ever since coming back [from George Washington University in 1986], he’s given back.”
Likewise John L. Halsey, “an 11th-generation Bridgehampton farmer and dairyman” (and owner of the popular Milk Pail farm stand in Water Mill).
Long a proponent of farmland preservation, “John has been generous in sharing his farming experiences with the community,” his plaque says. “His farm tours give our schoolchildren a glimpse into what it takes to grow food on a farm . . . the Halseys’ apple orchards draw hundreds of U-pickers in the fall. He has donated an orchard that stands near our school’s greenhouse and is very pleased that the school embraces and supports local agriculture. . . . He admits his greatest pleasure in life has been to grow food for people to eat.”
Nature, Halsey’s daughter Amy, said, had played “a role in all of Dad’s life.” He loved it, she said, “in so many ways . . . plants, animals, seasons, all those things given by God. . . . His hobbies are all nature-related too — rowing the whitecaps of Mecox in the summer, walking in the neighborhood he’s watched grow and expand, iceboating Mecox in the winter, and, of course, living on the farm.”
She thanked “this community for supporting my dad along the way as in turn he has supported us, and has taught us the great meaning of community,” of working “together as one.”