125 Years Ago 1901
From The East Hampton Star, May 17
The laying of the gas mains is now finished, with the exception of a portion of Ocean avenue, and that will probably be completed in a few days. The machinist from New York has been in town several days awaiting the arrival of the gas machine, which it seems became sidetracked on its way here.
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The hair of the head was evidently intended by nature as a protection to the delicate brain substance, and it would no doubt answer this purpose admirably if it were given the opportunity, as we see it perversely do in the case of savages, football players and others, who need such protection little.
It is generally supposed that baldness, like gray hair, is a necessary accompaniment of advancing age, but this is only because the older a man is the more time he has had to neglect and abuse his hair, and so the more likely he is to have lost it.
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Fishermen report that the bays are full of menhaden this spring and that they are big and fat fish, too. One day last week about 210,000 fish were received at the Fisheries Co.’s factory at Promised Land. The menhaden season opens promisingly.
100 Years Ago 1926
From The East Hampton Star, May 14
Almost everyone, this week, has been talking about the rum ship that is said to have docked at Promised Land last Saturday. Everyone seems to know about it, indirectly, or at least to have some knowledge that other people are talking about it. Like Blind Man’s Buff, everyone can see excepting the boy with the hanky over his eyes. The boy in this case is none other than little old Uncle Sam. Officially, they say, there is no bootlegging on Montauk or any other part of Long Island, and the patrol maintains a strict lookout all along the Long Island shore from the base at New London.
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The Ramblers held their annual banquet at Seven Ponds Inn, Water Mill, on Tuesday evening. A delicious dinner of shrimp cocktail, cream of mushroom soup, roasted duck, creamed onions, asparagus, potatoes, salad, strawberry shortcake and coffee was served at 7 o’clock.
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The committee in charge of the Lions’ annual Ladies’ Night announces that it will be held this year at the Maidstone Inn, Wednesday, June 9th. The program calls for dinner followed by entertainment and a dance, with music by one of the best orchestras on Long Island. A large turnout is expected, including from members of the Riverhead and Southampton Lions.
75 Years Ago 1951
From The East Hampton Star, May 17
The Hampton Choral Society and the Guild Hall Music Club are helping to sponsor the Musical Evening which will be presented by Genevieve Greene, pianist and violinist, and Joan Rothman Brill, pianist, as a benefit for a concert grand piano fund tomorrow evening at 8:30 in the John Drew Theatre.
The program will consist of the following duo piano selections: “Sicilienne” by Bach, the Allegro molto from the Sonata in D major by Mozart, and the Waltz from Suite No. 1, Op. 15, by Arensky.
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Rev. John Paul Jones has been appointed by the New York East Conference of the Methodist Church to the pastorate of the Methodist Church of East Hampton. He follows Rev. Nat R. Griswold, who is now taking a sabbatical leave from the ministry to run the family farm in Arkansas.
Rev. Jones was born in Pittsburgh, Pa., on September 25, 1922, and graduated from Munhall High School in 1940 and Lafayette College at Easton, Pa., in 1948. He started at Lafayette in September 1942 but his studies were interrupted when he went in the Army.
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Many ideas gleaned during her six months’ study tour of this country, including ten days spent in Suffolk County, will be put into operation by Mrs. Kimi Tamara on her return soon to her native Japan.
Mrs. Tamara, who came here as a study visitor from the Japanese Red Cross Society, spent much of her Suffolk stay observing Red Cross work at the Northport Veterans Hospital.
50 Years Ago 1976
From The East Hampton Star, May 13
“Memory Motel,” a new song by the Rolling Stones, is named for the motel in Montauk where the English rock group has stayed, its proprietor, Esther Kline Agtas, said last week.
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A structure that could become something of a symbol, like a Statue of Liberty from fuel bills, or a Hook Mill updated, is being pondered by the East Hampton Town Zoning Board of Appeals. It would tower over the shore of Fort Pond Bay, Montauk, at the westerly end of the New York Ocean Science Laboratory property, which, according to the Lab’s application to the Z.B.A., “has been selected as a possible location for an experimental wind turbine to determine the scientific possibilities of the generation of electricity through wind power.”
The Zoning Board’s permission is needed because the Lab’s land is in a residential A zone, where the maximum legal building height is 35 feet. A windmill would be considered an expansion of a non-residential use, requiring a zoning variance, and would be more than 35 feet high, requiring another.
The machine the Lab may get would be mounted on a 100-foot tower. Its blades would reach a height of about 165 feet. The Statue of Liberty, by comparison, is only 151 feet high (not counting its 154-foot pedestal).
A hearing on the Lab’s application was held May 4 and a decision is expected Tuesday. “We seem to have been favorably inclined toward it,” reported the ZBA’s chairman, Lewis Mayhall.
25 Years Ago 2001
From The East Hampton Star, May 17
After remaining mostly in the background through the heated debates about farmland, preservation, pesticide use, athletic fields, and organic farming on his family’s property on Long Lane in East Hampton, Henry Schwenk ended much of the speculation over the future of his family’s farmland by agreeing this week to sell East Hampton Town not only the property’s development rights but the land itself.
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The ranks of people licensed to sell houses in East Hampton and Southampton have swelled to nearly 800 now — at least 25 percent more than only two years ago — their numbers nearly double the per capita concentration of real estate salespeople to the general population in all of New York State.
You see them year round now and everywhere — driving slowly on back roads, in new offices proliferating in the South Fork’s villages, on the Web, even at a Southampton car wash, where on video they tout their wares from a monitor perched high in a corner of the waiting room.
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They are sleek, charmingly curious, and have those big puppy-dog eyes, but seals, with their steadily growing population and collective appetite, have wrecked two traditional gillnet fisheries in this area already and could have a profound effect on fish stocks and shark behavior here in the future, some say.
Fishermen and scientists agree that the winter seal population has grown dramatically over the last decade.
