Two cups Indian, one cup wheat;

One cup sour milk, one cup sweet;

One good egg that well you beat; half cup molasses, too;

Half cup sugar add thereto.

With one spoon butter new;

Salt and soda each a spoon;

Mix up quickly and bake it soon.

Then you'll have corn bread complete,

Best of all corn bread you meet,

If you have a dozen boys

To increase your household joys,

Double then this rule, I should,

And you'll have two corn cakes good.

When you've nothing in for tea

This the very thing will be.

All the men that I have seen

Say it is of all cakes queen -

Good enough for any king

That a husband home may bring;

Warming up the human stove,

Cheering up the hearts you love;

And only Tyndall can explain

The links between corn and brain.

Get a husband what he likes

And save a hundred household strikes.

KING LEADS THE WAY

The concept was Clarence E. (Kelly) King Jr.'s, and his children, David M. King and Deanna Tikkanen, have taken on the execution of the project.

The elder Mr. King, whose roots in Springs run deep, thought it would be a good idea, during East Hampton Town's 350th anniversary year, to gather together a trove of old photographs from the trunks and attics where they have been reposing, and to exhibit them in some public place as part of the celebration.

Clarence King, who has quite a respectable photo collection of his own, started the ball rolling. David King and Ms. Tikkanen, a Springs representative to the anniversary committee, hope others will be inspired to ferret out their family photos as well, whether they are filed in albums or in Granny's Schrafft's tin.

The old images will be given new life before being returned to their owners. John Reed of Reed's Photo in East Hampton has been photographing each picture to create new negatives, which can be used to make fresh 8-by-10-inch prints. The prints will be framed, gratis, by Nina Battaler of East Hampton Picture Framing.

David King hopes to mount an exhibit by Memorial Day. As more photographs come in, they will be added to the show, which will remain in place until the end of the tricent-quinquagenary.

Between 40 and 50 local photos have been collected so far. There's a shot, for example, of a World War II honor roll plaque that used to sit on Main Street in East Hampton in front of the Veterans of Foreign Wars building. The plaque was likely made of plywood, Mr. King said, and probably perished in a fire at the V.F.W.

Another photo shows stores in the Freetown neighborhood "that I never realized existed," said Mr. King. "There were a lot more fires then, so things just burned up and were gone."

One old snapshot is a perfect illustration of that: Taken during a fire in the late '20s at Springs School, it shows a group of helpless onlookers, unable to stop the fire, standing in front and watching the school burning to the ground.

Then there is a picture taken from in front of Herrick Park on Newtown Lane, showing the old Schenck house across the street, where a block of stores now stands. "You talk about losing charm," said Mr. King. "That's progress. . . ."

Fred Yardley, the East Hampton Town Clerk, is lending a hand, and a number of photos, to the show. Averill Geus, curator of Home, Sweet Home and a 350th committee member who is compiling the official commemorative book for the occasion, will share some of her stores, and Carleton Kelsey, the Amagansett historian, is being asked for help. Village historical societies are being called upon as well.

In a real estate office recently, Mr. King noticed an aerial photo of the town taken in the early 1960s and decided to pair it with an earlier aerial view. He found one at the Suffolk County Planning Commission, which had a photo taken in the 1930s.

In that picture, said Mr. King, Springs's roots as a "very strong agricultural community" are clearly seen, with a "real to-do cow pasture" where Pussy's Pond is now and pastureland on the east side of Landing Lane, where cedar trees have grown.

He hopes to make a copy of that print, which measures a huge 8-by-12-feet, for inclusion in the show. He is trying to raise the $900 it will cost to have it made.

After all the photographs have been collected will come the formidable task of choosing the ones the public will see. A committee will be named to help with that responsibility.

Meanwhile, any and all submissions will be considered. The Kings, father, son, and daughter, may be reached at the C.E. King &Sons in Springs.

The Clan Galbraith, which went on the beach near Flying Point in Water Mill on July 22, 1916, was probably the largest sailing vessel ever grounded along this coast.

She was a four-masted iron bark, 282 feet long and upward of 2,000 tons, sailing from Bristol, England, to New York. Although a British vessel, built in Glasgow, Scotland, she was sailing under the Norwegian flag because of the war with Germany.

After going aground in storm and fog, she lay for about two weeks so near the shore that it was possible at low tide to reach, dry-shod, the rope ladder hanging over her side.

Carl and Dita Brownell were among those who motored over to see the beached ship. While they were on the beach they watched a 75-year-old sailor from Wainscott board the ship and climb to the top of the mainmast.

Her graceful hull and tall masts could be seen from afar across the flat East End landscape, and so many visitors came that, according to newspaper reports, the beach "seemed like Riverhead Fair in the old days."

The visitors came from miles around, some on foot, some on horseback, some even arrived in fancy carriages dressed in fine clothes.

Captain Olson and his crew of 22 were perfectly safe and a salvage team eventually floated the ship off undamaged. Less than two years later, the Clan Galbraith was sunk by the Germans in the English Channel, a victim of the Great War.

Two Pollock-Krasner Movies

Barbra Streisand has once again picked up the option to make a film based on "To a Violent Grave," Jeffrey Potter's oral biography of Jackson Pollock, the troubled and posthumously deified Abstract Expressionist painter.

Ms. Streisand's production company, Barwood Films, had held the option some years back in a partnership with Columbia Pictures and Robert DeNiro's Tribeca Productions but let it lapse two years ago. Barwood and Tribeca have now teamed up with Rocking Horse Productions, the independent company that held the option in the interim.

Pollock Research

Mr. DeNiro's father, Robert Sr., was an Abstract Expressionist painter who had a house in Montauk and was part of the New York art community that included Mr. Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner, also a painter. Mr. DeNiro reportedly remains interested in playing Mr. Pollock. Ms. Streisand is said to be eyeing the role of Ms. Krasner for herself.

"We love it. We'll never give up on it but right now nobody seems interested in doing a film about an artist," said Cis Corman, the Barwood president.

Don't tell Ed Harris that. For the last year or so, the star of "Apollo 13" and "Glengarry Glen Ross," who bears a slight resemblance to Mr. Pollock, has been researching the artist's life and work, telling The Star he was bent on playing the lead role in a film based on another biography, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith's "An American Saga."

Backing In Place

Helen A. Harrison, executive director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, has been helping Mr. Harris track down documentary footage and other research tools.

Meanwhile, Ms. Harrison said the paint-splattered floor of Mr. Pollock's studio has been photographed from the ceiling, using a special camera that can take a single, undistorted shot of the 21-square-foot floor, for an upcoming retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.

While Ms. Corman said the Barwood project is still in the earliest stage, courting potential investors, Mr. Harris already has backing for his film. Peter M. Brant, founder of the Bridgehampton Polo Club and chairman of Interview magazine, agreed to provide the financing. His Brant Allen Films did the same for Julian Schnabel's acclaimed film biography of the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.

And, Frances McDormand, who won the Oscar for her performance in "Fargo," is said to be interested in starring opposite Mr. Harris.

The Bay Street Theatre has brewed up a potful of red-hot surprises for its seventh season, including a fund-raising appearance by the pop megastar Bruce Springsteen, a new play from Jon Robin Baitz and Terrence McNally, a musical starring Twiggy about Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence, a new play from Horton Foote, and a premiere of Bob Kingdom's "Elsa/Edgar," about Elsa Maxwell and J. Edgar Hoover.

In addition to the Boss, those who will appear at an All-Star Tribute evening for Bay Street on April 4 include Edward Albee, Charles Busch, Betty Comden, E.L. Doctorow, Frank Galati, Adolph Green, Mr. McNally, Gary Sinise, and Elaine Stritch.

The occasion of the benefit is the dedication of the theater's stage to Elaine Steinbeck, a tireless supporter and trustee of the theater.

Steinbeck Tribute

The tribute will begin with a champagne reception and end with dinner at the American Hotel. Tickets for the evening are $500, or $150 for the reception and salute alone.

Proceeds from the event will inaugurate Bay Street's "Fund for the Future."

Mrs. Steinbeck and her late husband, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist John Steinbeck, moved to Sag Harbor in 1950, shortly after they were married.

She had been one of the first female stage managers on Broadway, counting among her credits the original production of Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Oklahoma!" and a production of "Othello" that starred Paul Robeson, Uta Hagen, and Jose Ferrer.

Elsa And Edgar

"Elsa/Edgar," which opens on May 20, will be the first of the season's four main events to appear on the new Elaine Steinbeck stage. The double act pits two notorious 20th-century bullies against one another: the tenacious social arbiter Elsa Maxwell and the baleful, sometimes paranoid head of the F.B.I., J. Edgar Hoover.

Horton Foote's play "A Coffin in Egypt," which will also be a world premiere when it opens on June 17, is a tale of passion, infidelity, and murder set in the deep South. "Noel and Gertie," with Twiggy playing Mrs. Lawrence, is a musical celebration of two British theatrical legends. It will run from July 15 through Aug. 2.

The season's closing play is "House," a collaboration between Mr. Baitz and Mr. McNally, which will open on Aug. 12.

Pre-Season Season

The season that launches the season - Bay Street's spring series - will begin next month, on April 18, with a concert by a leading klezmer band, Kapelye.

The Moscow Conservatory Trio will play on April 25 and the cabaret legend Julie Wilson will be on stage on May 2.

Theater fans may also want to note that Bay Street will feature fall appearances by the flamenco dancer Pilar Rioja and the comedienne Marcia Lewis, song from David Campbell and Karen Mason, music from the Eroica Trio and the Manhattan Rhythm Kings, and a series of play-readings.

The box office is open daily except Tuesdays to take reservations.

As an infant and a boy, my East Hampton was a place of summer cottages, grownups in white flannels with tennis racquets under their arms. At night in our upstairs beds my brother and I lay awake listening to dinner-party laughter. Sometimes we could feel the house tremble as waves fell hard on the nearby ocean beach. Back in the city after Labor Day alone in my room, I wished for those waves.

They were speaking to me. I knew it, even though I could not comprehend all they said. That came later.

I understood more after an early September adventure, a few days before I would have to leave for boarding school. I was 12, and Janet Morris piled my brother and me and her two sons into her station wagon for an afternoon of snapper fishing at Three Mile Harbor. We would fish from the breakwater on the channel's east side. But first, we needed bait.

A finely knit net of such small mesh it could have been crocheted, the bait seine had poles at each end. "Now, John," Janet Morris said, "hold the pole straight up and wade out. I'll hold mine on shore and together we'll pull the net along. When I tell you, swing around and walk your end back to the beach."

Wading into Gardiner's Bay until its waters lapped at my skinny shoulder blades, I leaned into that warm sea, tugging the net with me, feeling its weight as it bulged, bowed by the bay within.

After a sweep of perhaps 40 feet, Janet called, "Now come ashore." As I reached the beach, she moved closer, and together we backed up the slope of the shore. And as more and more of the seine slipped free of the sea, it came alive.

There under the brilliant afternoon sun of that diamond of an early autumn day, my life changed forever, its center discovered. For nothing I had yet seen had entered my consciousness as gloriously as the creatures that blazed silver in the heart of that net.

The way they caught the light as they tossed, the sheer surprise of their presence in waters I had never guessed held such treasures, the entire moment of discovery flooded me with a delight far beyond the reality of our haul.

There were spearing, the silversides that were our quarry. There were silver-dollar-sized sand crabs, spindly brown spider crabs, flat-sided infant butterfish, luminous, round as coins; strange, sand-colored fish with wide heads and spines, and a sand dab larger than my hand, its translucent thinness so acute I could see the patterns of its internal anatomy outlined in the pale mysteries of its presence.

I recognized my future, gleaming there at that small seine's heart. Feeling those cool, scaled, and silver creatures quivering at my wet palm, I knew. I truly did. For I had met for the first time what I once had been and would one day become.

Fifteen years later, after school, college, and a World War, I walked away from a good job in the city and headed for East Hampton, where I had no job. But I did have Jimmy Reutershan, a good friend, a best friend. That first fall and winter, he gave me a room in his Newtown Lane home and we began fishing together. For I was determined to discover more of the treasure I had glimpsed that afternoon at Three Mile Harbor.

My search lasted eight years, eight years of working on the water. And I discovered much more than fish. I discovered East Hampton. I found it when I clammed alone in my small skiff in Napeague Harbor right through December and January when the beach froze hard as marble. Digging with tongs for chowder clams as big as cobblestones, I could look out to the northwest over Gardiner's Bay and think about summer nights spent in Dick Hamilton's Jersey skiff with its runaround net piled in her stern.

Hamilton fished "on the fire," the phosphorescent wakes left by rocketing bluefish as they surged under our bow. Often I waited in the stern from sunset to sunrise, hoping for my captain's cry, "Let her go, Jawn!"

We fished off Gardiner's Island, where I once spent a summer clamming and laboring to improve the island's salt ponds. We fished off the Promised Land fish factory, where I worked another part of another summer mending huge purse seines set from bunker steamers skippered by fine fishermen like Capt. Norman Edwards, one of my heroes.

And when we did find bluefish, we tossed them in back of Hamilton's truck when we got ashore and rushed them to Ted Lester's fish-packing plant in Amagansett, where we washed and weighed and iced and boxed and tagged our catch in large, damp rooms slippery with pearly fish scales and cement floors awash in shining water. Many days and nights I fished and worked 16 or 20 hours.

I hauled ocean seines and rowed a net-heavy dory with Jimmy and Peter, pulling through the same waves that had once made the house tremble. I mated for charter boat skippers out of Montauk, yanking bluefish and striped bass and school tuna over the transom until my arms ached.

For I was obsessed by the sea and its wonders.

Yet I was not blind. I began to understand the strengths of the men and women I worked with. I came to comprehend their heritage: more than 300 years of fishing and farming from Mecox to Montauk. Every bay, every pothole, every pond, every point, every channel, every harbor, and, of course, the rolling, roaring sweep of the Atlantic . . . all of it the soul of that heritage.

I had learned next to nothing before those eight years. I haven't learned much since. Surely nothing as valuable. My life's course was set for me by those men and women, the sea and its wonders.

What I hope most is for those presences to endure.

John N. Cole now lives in Maine. He is a co-founder and former editor of The Maine Times and is the author of several books, including "Striper," about his fishing years here.

The sky was "light grease-colored," as Frank O'Hara once captured it, and it was cool and windy when Josh Dayton opened his door to a visitor last week.

Mr. Dayton, a good-looking man in his early 40s, has a relaxed, casual manner - not what might be expected from an artist whose work bears affinities with the emphatic, swirling style of 1950s Abstract Expressionism. For someone whose paintings are in major collections, he is surprisingly unpretentious, too.

Lunch, stuffed foccacia sandwiches, was on the table, and cats were wandering about.

Two Careers

Marco, a gray kitten who looked particularly well-fed, jumped onto Mr. Dayton's lap as he spoke about his two careers. As a painter who is also a building contractor, he finds a relationship between everyday work and art that most of us miss.

He grew up, with four brothers and sisters, in a family that built houses, and worked at Hardscrabble, the family company, for many years.

"One of my earliest memories of drawing was this huge roll of paper that my mom stretched out across the dining room floor, and we all drew on it. As far back as I can remember, we were always making things. I think I picked up something from that."

"My mom was a big influence."

Role Models

"And from my [maternal] grandfather, [Ray Townsend of Meadow Way, East Hampton], I remember making battleships from scrap wood when I was 8 or 9 years old. We'd spend a whole Saturday there."

The future artist found role models at East Hampton High School. "I was an average student in school. Art classes were what saved me, and certain teachers I had," he said, naming John Lonero, and Barbara Bologna, who now teaches at the Ross School, "and the encouragement I had from Francesco Bologna and Ralph Carpentier."

Mr. Carpentier, who describes his own work as traditional and says he doesn't "think the same way" as Mr. Dayton, is nonetheless a fan.

"He uses color in a way that is very authentic. His color comes out of his spirit. It has a richness that is very much his own."

Deep Feelings

Mr. Dayton does sculpture as well as paintings, drawings, and watercolor; he seems to slide effortlessly among media. In the last 20 years, he has shown in several New York galleries, and he is represented in East Hampton by Arlene Bujese.

His work is engaging in a way that much contemporary art is not - that is, it asks the viewer to respond from deep feelings, and there is nothing "pretty" or fashionable about it. It might be beautiful, but it's also disturbing.

"The key thing in art," he believes, "is emotion. Forget technique."

In the Abstract Expressionist tradition, Mr. Dayton is a painterly painter who nevertheless connects at first glance.

Ossorio Connection

As a teenager, he worked for the artist Alfonso Ossorio on the grounds of his estate, the Creeks, helping to install sculpture. Mr. Ossorio, who was among the first to purchase the work of Jackson Pollock, Jean Dubuffet, and Clyfford Still, was an early supporter.

"There's a guy out here right under our noses who is the real thing!" Mr. Ossorio exclaimed one day to his companion, Ted Dragon.

"He'd worked around the Creeks for years as a kid," Mr. Dragon recalled last week. "But his work suddenly smacked Alfonso. It had been years since he'd been affected by someone that way. It was just the way he felt when he first saw Still, and Dubuffet."

Sand And Stone

"Alfonso felt that he was one of his greatest discoveries, and he was proud of that," said Mr. Dragon. "Here was this kid doing manual labor - moving stones around, and so on - and then he turned out to be so talented."

"One connection they shared was the sense of knowing how to work with natural materials - that connection with sand, with stone. Josh is an artist who communes with the earth, who has a connection with nature."

By then, Mr. Dayton had studied at the New York Studio School and the Philadelphia College of Art, traveled to Hong Kong and Europe, and was working for his father full-time while painting whenever he could. He had landed a dealer, the Bologna-Landi Gallery, which gave him his first one-man show in 1986.

"Drawing In Space"

"Josh's work is vital and alive," said Mr. Dragon, whose extensive collection of contemporary artists includes a number of Daytons. "It's well thought-out, but it also has an element of spontaneity. It's meaningful and powerful work, and I never tire of it. Even his watercolors have the same strength as his other pieces."

In the last couple of years, Mr. Dayton has incorporated ceramic figures into his paintings, wiring them to the canvas so as to extend the image. The art critic Helen A. Harrison, director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, called this combination of painting and sculpture "a form of drawing in space."

"He amplifies the picture plane and makes it more vibrant," she said. "Ceramic by its nature is very pliant, and that amplifies the voluptuousness of his work."

Media Relations

"In my first year of study at the Philadelphia College of Art, I was still thinking about art as jewelry and ceramics," Mr. Dayton recalled. "I was looking for a career there. But the great collections of art in Philadelphia changed my look at art. I can remember the exact day when I decided to paint."

"Then I went to the New York Studio School to learn painting and drawing. It was extremely intense. Peter Agostini, Reuben Nakian, Sidney Geist - all those guys."

Every Possibility

"And there's an interrelationship between media that they appreciated. I could take Sidney Geist's class on sculpture, but we would paint sculpture - we crossed boundaries."

Michelangelo, one of his two favorite artists, was "driven to express something, something deep and serious, perhaps religious," said Mr. Dayton. "I see the same thing in Picasso," his other hero.

"Picasso wrote, painted, drew, etched, sculpted. He had an intense energy, and it poured out into everything he touched. He was fascinated by every material. And I think that is the ideal way to be - you should be open to all possibilities."

"Those are good heroes," said the artist. "Michelangelo and Picasso. And Larry Bird," he added, laughing.

The term agriculture is broadly defined in the East Hampton and Southampton Town Codes. This is as easily discernible in Bridgehampton or Water Mill, where the landscape near Scuttlehole Road is now marked by horse farms, as on Long Lane in East Hampton, where rows and rows of Japanese maples and ornamentals stand tall.

Potatoes no longer are king. Like other aspects of the economy on the East End, agriculture has changed with the times. The stables and outbuildings for a horse farm now going up on the eastern end of Scuttlehole Road look enormous and the surrounding agricultural reserve is mostly mud. But, like any building site, it will soon be finished and become part of a landscape of grass paddocks and grazing horses. It won't be potatoes or corn, but it's still rural and it's still agricultural.

The neighbors who surround the proposed Kilmore Horse Farm in Wainscott are strongly opposed to it, arguing that the use and buildings are inappropriate for the site. Many argued at a recent Wainscott Citizens Advisory Committee meeting that they bought their property because it adjoined a farmed parcel and that a 7,200-square-foot indoor riding ring, stables, and a garage would ruin the open space the agricultural easement was meant to protect.

David Eagan and Mary Ann McCaffrey's 14-acre site has indeed been designated as an agricultural preserve, which requires that the land remain in agriculture for perpetuity. Agricultural easements are designed to preserve good soils and open vistas when farmland is subdivided.

Farming, of whatever kind, is a business. Farmers can grow only so much corn and potatoes to satisfy the market. Those who choose to grow landscaping stock, rather than vegetables, or to board, breed, and train horses, are doing so because today's market calls for it.

A horse farm is permitted in an agricultural zone in East Hampton by special permit. Additionally, the Town Code sets a strict limit on the size of buildings that can serve any agricultural use: Only 2 percent of an agricultural parcel may be covered by buildings. In the case of the Kilmore Horse Farm, the applicants have agreed to meet that restriction.

A horse farm, like a potato farm, needs a barn. The barn in the Kilmore case, however, is described as having an indoor riding ring and this has been the main source of conflict. If the building is related to the "boarding, breeding, raising, or training of horses," then Kilmore is entitled to have it.

Several years ago, when a company called Equus proposed to raise, train, and sell polo ponies on what had been a potato farm, controversy erupted. Opponents ruled that polo matches were not an agricultural use; a judge, however, ruled that, if the "agriculture" was raising and training polo ponies, polo matches were integral.

The debate over the Kilmore Horse Farm comes down to aesthetic preferences. The neighbors would rather see traditional farming continue, forgetting that the use of pesticides sometimes contaminated the water supply and that the fields, at least in the old days, often turned into dust bins.

Ninety-eight percent of the 14-acre Kilmore Horse Farm is to remain as pasture. It's hard to find fault with that.

Tuesday, St. Patrick's Day, is associated in the minds of Americans with parades of Hibernian pipers along green-painted streets, a hearty consumption of Guinness, and an inescapable avalanche of shamrocks, leprechauns, and green plastic bowler hats.

In Ireland, St. Patrick is remembered for establishing Christianity there in the fifth century - the same Christianity that divides the North and has caused sectarian violence between Catholics and Protestants for decades.

Now, just when it looked as if as a peace process for that beleaguered province stood a chance, violence has broken out anew, causing Sinn Fein to be banned from the talks and hope for peace to fade.

It is said that St. Patrick banished snakes from Ireland. The best wish that could be made on his day is that violence and religious bigotry can also be banished, and a lasting peaceful resolution found.

Quasi-governmental authorities often spell trouble. Their members are given more autonomy than elected government officials, especially over the borrowing and spending of public funds.

Such authorities are often established, in fact, precisely to circumvent the kind of public oversight that is required when municipalities plan to encumber taxpayers with costly construction projects. The rationale is that in the long run the public will benefit from the authority's efforts. But sometimes it doesn't work out that way.

When last heard from, the East Hampton Housing Authority appeared almost poised to self-destruct. Furthermore, it has posed a threat to the town's credit rating ever since the Town Board agreed to guarantee its loans.

This week, however, with the authority seemingly frozen in indecision about how to complete its Accabonac housing project and having no plan to meet again until March 24, the Town Board finally took action. In a bipartisan decision, it agreed to hire its own auditors to get the financial mess unraveled. It's about time.

Anybody who seriously believes that Supervisor Cathy Lester conspired with former Councilman Tom Knobel and the former town attorney, Robert Savage, to conceal the whereabouts of $1 million or more in unaccounted-for Housing Authority funds ought to have their head examined. That is not to say that the use of funds for the beleaguered housing project has been explained satisfactorily or even that it was not illegally "diverted," as a disenchanted contractor alleges in a recent lawsuit. The first auditors hired to sort out the authority's accounts gave up in frustration, defeated by its twists and turns. Has anything of the sort ever happened here before?

If, however, the authority's newly proposed financial gambit - to renounce Federal Section Eight subsidies for the housing - actually occurs, it surely would seal the doom not only of the Accabonac project but would undermine its own reason for being. Can anyone have forgotten that its mission is to provide affordable housing?