The summer of peace and love was also a summer of war and incendiary strife, from which East Hampton, a “backwater” then, in which every now and then ripples of the great national issues of the day were felt, was at one remove.
Maybe it was because there was only one TV station you could get out here, Channel 8 in Connecticut, I think it was. At any rate, I was happy to read in Chrissy Sampson’s recent, and very good, account of those days, that that year’s East Hampton High School seniors, some of whom she interviewed, were keenly aware of this country’s duality — of both its seemingly eternal promise and its seemingly eternal failures of spirit.
And, of course, of the duality of life itself, its beauty and anguish, which some, I gather, are able to allay for a time, but which most, I think, cannot.
At any rate, it was still a small town then, of fall days when the high school football team played in Herrick Park, for all the passers-by to see, and when you knew — or at least were on a nodding acquaintance with — most everyone, and when hardly anyone put on airs, except perhaps on the letters page. There was, as there is now, no hoopla, no glitz.
As for ripples: I wrote of a 20-foot-high sculpture, “Lunar Suite-Pax,” made of 100 silver-painted tire rims by Montauk artists, moon disks, which they, in a celebratory mood, installed one summer day on Cartwright Shoal with champagne all around. Did the Gardiners own it? Oh well.
A Vietnam moratorium vigil, convened by Horty and Ralph Carpentier, among a few others, drew 200 the first night to Hook Mill and 100 the second, as eight veterans stood by silently on the sidewalk. Tom Paxton sang the first night, Chris Johnson the second, John Conner held the American flag, and it wasn’t entirely clear whether those driving by, flashing their headlights, were for or against the war. A short account appeared on page three.
Likewise, I don’t recall all that much rhapsodizing, at least in print, when it came to the moon landing, other than noting, on the front page, that two of the Apollo flight’s gizmos were made in Sag Harbor, at the Grumman plant there. Nor was any mention made in the paper that I can recall of Woodstock.
Racial strain was very much in the local news that summer, however, especially in the aftermath of East Hampton’s first-ever bank robbery and the cops’ subsequent descent upon Morris Park. That incursion provoked a march, and an off-duty deputy sheriff was said to have fired in anger some shots skyward on his lawn as the marchers passed, an allegation later to be dismissed, but that led to some good inasmuch as East Hampton hired its first black police officer, Robert Cooper, soon after.
The most important thing that summer insofar as East Hampton went — the moon landing, the antiwar protests, and Woodstock notwithstanding — was Walter Hackett and Ralph Gould’s announcement (again the story was on an inside page) that Head Start, as the Eleanor Whitmore Early Childhood Center was then known, would operate the year round. Maureen Wikane, its latest director, who died recently of pancreatic cancer, was accorded a moment of silence before the Artists-Writers Game began. It should have been more than a moment.