Villages

The East Hampton Village Fire Department doesn’t usually respond to fires in the middle of the Ozark Mountains, but in a sense, after donating a Spartan pumper fire truck, replete with 4,000 feet of hose and a 500-gallon water tank, to the Eminence Area Volunteer Fire Department in Missouri Friday, it’s done just that.

It was 1899, and Telegraph Operator McCord called it quits. Plus other tidbits from The Star of Yore.

Michele L’Hommedieu Hofmann had no idea until retiring last fall and starting to research her family history how prominent a role her great-great-grandfather James H. L’Hommedieu had played in Long Island’s late-19th-century architecture. On a trip to New York that included a stop at an East Hampton house he designed for Robert Southgate Bowne, a founder of the Maidstone Club and first president of the Long Island Rail Road, she and her family got a crash course in L’Hommedieu’s work.

On July 16, 1889, while staying in Lenox, Mass., Sarah Diodati Gardiner Thompson wrote to her daughter Sarah Thompson Gardiner, who was vacationing at Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. Family news was top of mind.

Window strikes kill up to a billion birds annually and rank up there with cats and habitat destruction as the leading causes of recent steep declines. After the recent death of a much-watched Eurasian eagle-owl that was set loose from the Central Park Zoo, a bill calling for bird-friendly building measures has been revived in the New York Assembly and Senate.

The Maritime Folklife Oral History Collection at the East Hampton Library contains interviews and transcripts with Dan King and his crew, among other fishermen and their families. The transcript seen here shows a discussion with Dan’s wife, Marsha King.

Holy Week services begin on Sunday, and churches here have special schedules throughout the week. 

Steve (Puck) Dolan retired from the Montauket in December after 38 years, but Montauk isn’t done with him just yet: He will serve as grand marshal of the 62nd Montauk Friends of Erin St. Patrick’s Day parade, which will liven up the hamlet with belated Irish cheer on Sunday starting at noon. 

A barber moves his shop downtown over a century ago and finds much success. And other notes to charm and delight from the venerable Star.

The mystery over a painted bronze statue of John Steinbeck and his dog Charley, which suddenly appeared in Sag Harbor’s Steinbeck Park this week, has been solved. 

After successfully completing her 27,759-mile solo nonstop sail around the world last Thursday as part of the Global Solo Challenge, Cole Brauer received myriad thank-yous from near and far for having not only inspired a generation of young women (and at the beginning of International Women’s Month, no less) who might not otherwise have taken up a historically male-dominated sport, but also for having inspired everyone — young and old, male and female. 

Another missive from the Prohibition-era rum wars, and more drama ripped from the pages of the venerable Star.