This photograph from The East Hampton Star’s archive shows a group of eight lounging on the beach in front of the Maidstone Club cabanas. They look as if they escaped from an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, and the photo captures the spirit of a summer beach day.
The reverse identifies the group, from left, as Dorothy Nash Bennett of London, Catherine Robinson Burdick (1899-1978) of Glen Cove, Harriette Lawrence Procter Abbett (1898-1983), also of Glen Cove, Rosamond Castle Winslow (1904-1932), Margaret Hurt Isham (1904-1998), Reginald H. Bennett of London, Helen Wood Dodd (1899-1987), and Alan Francis Winslow (1895-1933).
The photograph is undated, but the subjects’ life spans, marriages, and attire, as well as the photo technology, all support a date of between 1928 and 1932. Harriette Lawrence Procter married Leon Abbett in 1928; she appears here to the immediate left of center in a hat. Seated next to her, eyes closed in the center of everything, is Rosamond Castle Winslow, who died of pneumonia in 1932.
Rosamond’s husband, Alan Francis Winslow, is at the far right, leaning on the sand with a towel draped on his shoulder, covering the arm he lost as an ace pilot during World War I. After the war, he worked as a diplomat, a stockbroker, and an executive for Pan American Airways.
A largely female social group was common on summer weekdays within the summer colony, since it was not unusual for men to have work commitments requiring their return to the city during the week.
It’s difficult to say how these lost generation socialites knew one another or how they ended up in East Hampton. Dorothy Nash Bennett’s parents were part of the summer colony, but the Abbetts, Burdicks, Ishams, and Dodds all appear to have lived at least part time in Nassau County, in communities like Glen Cove, Hewlett Harbor, Mill Neck, and Old Brookville.
Andrea Meyer, a librarian and archivist, is the head of collection for the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection.
