Sometimes it's hard, while driving down Montauk Highway or sitting on the beach at Accabonac Harbor, to imagine East Hampton as it was when fishing families used the sugar pine from fish boxes to add on to their houses and wagon wheels rolled along the roads instead of four-wheel-drives.

But those who have lived here a long time, whose childhood, adolescence, and middle years span times of sweeping change, have often heard firsthand, from parents or grandparents, of such things. These people are the town's living links to the past.

Two oral history projects now under way are preserving the stories and voices of some of East Hampton's older residents, whose recollections, whose very mannerisms and expressions, conjure up a different day.

On Videotape

The Autumn Project, whose name was inspired by a John Donne poem, is being conducted by Kyril Bromley of Springs, a professional photographer, and Julia Mead, news editor of The Star.

"Albie Cavagnaro was probably the real impetus," said Ms. Mead. "I've had a couple of older friends who died. I've thought probably a hundred times that somebody should have tape-recorded him - he had this idiosyncratic way about him."

Mr. Cavagnaro, the longtime proprietor of Cavagnaro's Bar in East Hampton Village, died in 1995.

"I see this as being a sort of homespun, old-fashioned oral history project, but using videotape," said Ms. Mead. "People telling their stories."

Storytellers

"What we want to preserve is not just what they're saying, but how they sound and look," she said.

"Hearing someone talk - it's a different impact than reading something in a book," said Mr. Bromley. "It's especially important for young people in the next century."

The project, whose costs are minimal, is being underwritten by East Hampton Town's 350th Anniversary Committee.

Tony Prohaska, a longtime East Hampton resident, has teamed up with Martha Kalser of Amagansett, a video producer, to form the History Project, a nonprofit corporation which has also begun to record the life stories of residents with long memories.

History Project

Two who are already on tape are Carl Jennett, who was in command of the Amagansett Coast Guard Station off Atlantic Avenue during World War II when Nazi saboteurs landed within a mile of headquarters, and Barbara Lester DiSunno, who shared her recollections of Amagansett's Poseyville Lesters.

The History Project aims to conduct and film up to 50 90-minute interviews. The tapes will wind up eventually in the Pennypacker Collection of the East Hampton Library.

Computer Database

Historic photographs and print materials will be collected and donated as well. Early interviews recorded on audiotape will be transcribed.

The project intends to cover, among other things, farming and fishing, the Springs art colony, and the days of Prohibition.

Carleton Kelsey, the longtime Amagansett librarian and former East Hampton Town historian, who was one of those interviewed, sits on its board, as do a number of other prominent local historians.

Long-term goals of the History Project include the creation of a computer database with an index to subjects and topics. The project has been awarded a $2,000 grant from the East Hampton Town Board, and will seek Federal and state funding.

Milton Miller

For the Autumn Project's first video, Capt. Milton C. Miller of Springs, 82, sat down at his kitchen table to talk about his life and times.

Including trips to the Atlantic Avenue beach in Amagansett and to the boat he fishes from now, the interview lasts an hour and a half - longer, Ms. Mead said, than most of the others will be.

"Milt was such a good storyteller that we couldn't bear to edit it out," she said.

An interview with four siblings in the Walker family of Wainscott, Roger, Henry, Mattie, and Clara, was the next to be filmed.

A Family's Eyes

The format, which will be followed throughout the series, focuses on the storyteller, with cutaways to relevant photographs and visits to significant locations.

"What I'm hoping is that [the interviews] will give the history of a place, but give it through the eyes of a certain family," Ms. Mead said.

Many of those asked to participate react with surprise, she said. "They don't realize that they've seen history . . . they just think it's been their own lives."

When the camera goes on, however, "It's almost as if they've waited to tell the story."

Each interview was filmed and edited with LTV equipment and will be aired on the public access channel. Mr. Miller's was recently shown.

After several have been produced, Ms. Mead hopes to make them available to the public, perhaps through libraries.

Both the History Project and the Autumn Project seek to cover the gamut of the East Hampton community, both both its hamlets and its residents. Ms. Mead said she was particularly interested in obtaining interviews from black residents, "who have an interesting history that isn't told very often outside itself."

Sense Of "Urgency"

The Autumn Project has about 50 people on its list to talk with.

"Every once in a while I have to take a name off because somebody's gone," Ms. Mead said. "There are a lot of people born and raised here who are in their 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s who have a lot to say. Once that generation is gone, East Hampton becomes something completely different. I feel a sort of urgency about it."

Plans are to continue the venture beyond the town's anniversary year, she said.

Both series of tapes will form an archive that will help viewers to recognize and maintain, as Mr. Bromley said, "the presence of the past in the present."

"Writing biography will always be a speculative venture."

Surely few can speak with more authority on the art and science of biography than Frederick Karl, who has taken on no fewer than four daunting giants of literature - Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, George Eliot, and Franz Kafka - and is well aware of the pitfalls in trying to capture the ephemeral smoke of personality.

"I surround a subject with every possible context - social, literary, cultural, psychological, historical - but in the end, there's no way of knowing if you've really caught the person."

Breakthrough "Conrad"

Mr. Karl was in his 40s and a professor at the City College of New York when Farrar Straus published his first biography, a huge study of the life and work of Conrad.

He had written his dissertation on the author of "Lord Jim" and "Heart of Darkness," had been teaching about Conrad for years, and had collected some 4,000 of his letters (which he later edited and published in eight volumes).

"It suddenly occurred to me that I knew more about Conrad than anyone else alive," he said during a recent interview at his East Hampton house.

The breakthrough book was to launch him on a second career.

"Kafka" Disappeared

While "Joseph Conrad: Three Lives" was received with great acclaim, "Franz Kafka:Representative Man," subtitled "Prague, Germans, Jews, and the Crisis of Modernism," did not fare so well. Where the subject is a literary icon, a biographer must not only create a convincing and cohesive portrait but also overcome the prejudices of all those readers - and reviewers - who have already formed their own opinions.

The reception of this deeply felt and painstakingly researched biography - "the culmination of 30 years of thinking about and studying Kafka" - was, Mr. Karl admitted, one of the great disappointments of his life.

"I thought I'd written a great book," he said, "but it just disappeared." The reviews, he said, were generally positive but, like the one in the make-or-break New York Times Book Review, were buried on back pages.

Identification

The biographer felt a particularly deep kinship with Kafka, he said, with whom he shared an eastern European Jewish background.

In fact, said Mr. Karl, such was the degree of identification that he found he had "problems with countertransference" and had to take great care not to impose his own views and experiences on Kafka.

"It was a very precarious way of proceeding," he observed.

Rootless Childhood

Mr. Karl, who admits to being a workaholic, claims a rootless childhood figured largely in his development as a writer and professor.

He grew up in New York City during the Depression, and the family never stayed in one place for very long:

"The game in the 1930s was that you paid one month's rent and then you got to stay about six months before they threw you out."

He never had a chance to develop any social skills, he said wryly, and was always an observer, never a participant.

Temporary Years

With each move - sometimes twice in a year, once to as far away as Miami - came a new school. There was never time to make friends or become attached to a neighborhood.

"This is something that doesn't leave you. It's formative. You're really being shaped by the temporary quality of experience."

When he was a teenager, his parents finally settled down. Mr. Karl went to Flushing High School (as did two other East End biographers, Blanche Wiesen Cook and Edward Butscher), and from there straight into the Navy during World War II.

A Year Abroad

He was 19 when the war ended and never had a chance to leave the country. But his military service qualified him for the G.I. Bill, which took him to Columbia University, then to Stanford for a master's degree, and almost through his Ph.D. when he returned to Columbia in 1951.

By this time Mr. Karl was married and his wife, Dolores, was working while he completed his dissertation. Deciding they had enough money saved, and correctly forecasting that Europe would never again be so cheap, the couple took a year off from responsibilities to travel.

They lived in Florence and Rome, often sleeping on trains to save on hotel bills. Mr. Karl read the Bible from beginning to end ("perfect train reading - it's compact and it lasts a long time"). They spent a month in London, where it rained every single day.

For less than $20 a month, in a village outside Paris, they rented a wing of a deserted chateau. There was an echoing bedroom containing nothing but a bed, a bathroom "about a thousand miles away," and a two-burner stove.

If they wanted a taste of Paris night life, the lack of a late train home often meant sleeping in a park.

Back in the States a full-time teaching job at City College was waiting, with a big apartment, three daughters in five years, a house in Westchester - the life of family stability, hard work, success, and recognition that Mr. Karl must have dreamed of during his unstable childhood.

Academic Grants

The next time the Karls went to Europe, to live for two years in France and Italy, it was with the aid of Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships. More time was spent mending the children's bicycles than watching the dawn in the Bois de Boulogne.

Deborah is now a literary agent, Rebecca teaches history at New York University, and Judith works at the United Nations.

During those years Mr. Karl published "A Reader's Guide to Joseph Conrad," "The Contemporary English Novel," and a novel of his own, "A Quest," based on an episode in the life of one of his landladies.

In Florence in 1955, he and his wife stayed in a crumbling pensione owned by the brilliant, neurotic, and unhappy former mistress of Carlo Levi.

When Levi, the author of "Christ Stopped at Eboli," was in hiding from the Fascists, she concealed him for two years. Later, however, he abandoned her.

A great subject for a novel, thought Mr. Karl, but "The Quest" never really took off.

"It was a pretty depressing book," he conceded.

They Made A Deal

Returning to America in 1967, Mr. Karl became heavily involved with Students for a Democratic Society, in protest against the Vietnam War.

"The war was an atrocity," he said. "Nothing has ever hit me like that."

He and his wife, meanwhile, had agreed to a deal: She returned to work and he took over the house and children, while continuing to teach and write.

"It was a circus," said Mr. Karl, "That it worked at all was mainly good luck. We told the kids they couldn't get sick - and they didn't."

In time, Mrs. Karl became a vice president of J.P. Morgan. She eventually set up a business of her own.

Second Career

It was when the girls were older and away at boarding school, and his wife was on a banking assignment in London for a year, that Mr. Karl took up his second career as a biographer.

The success of "Joseph Conrad" enabled him, at the beginning of the 1980s, to move from City College to New York University, with a lighter teaching schedule.

"American Fictions: 1940-80," a cultural history of the nation seen through fiction, followed, and then the extremely influential "Modern and Modernism: The Sovereignty of the Artist," which covers the years 1895-1925 and takes in aspects of literature, art, and music.

When Mr. Karl began work on his 1,200-page biography of Faulkner, he settled in Faulkner country for a while and taught at the University of Mississippi in Oxford.

"Which was an experience in itself, seeing that everyone else was a heavy drinker - Willie Morris, Barry Hannah. . . ."

For the teaching year of 1990-91, the biographer was awarded a prestigious endowed visiting chair at the University of Hawaii.

Hawaii: "The Worst"

"It was more than boring," said Mr. Karl, groaning. "I didn't like the faculty, I didn't like the climate, the scenery, the lack of seasons. . . ." His wife disliked it just as much, and, since she was not committed to staying, didn't.

Nevertheless, in Hawaii - "the worst year of my adult life" - Mr. Karl wrote 1,000 pages of a biography of George Eliot in five months.

"I was getting a huge salary for doing almost nothing, so instead of feeling sorry for myself, I sat down and wrote the first draft. I also went on long walks and got in great shape. I walked all over Honolulu - you could kill three or four hours a day that way - and lived mainly on Kentucky Fried Chicken."

Happily Home

"I told my students to be sure not to miss the final exam, because two hours after it was over I was catching a plane out," said Mr. Karl, who remembers grading exam papers on the flight home to New York City.

Happily back now at N.Y.U., he is halfway through a cultural history of America in the 1970s: "Pop, high culture, sports, everything - the works."

Nine times a year, he gives a working seminar for professional biographers, although, said Mr. Karl, he will probably not write any more biographies of his own.

"There's no one else I'm interesting in writing about," he said firmly, and, among literary figures, "there's no one else who needs to be written about."

Although the facts are in regarding the addictiveness of nicotine, the lethal consequences of tobacco, and the cigarette industry's decades-long cover-up, American teens - many of them presumably rational in other respects - continue to think it cool to light up.

In 1998, however, East Hampton High School students and administrators, joining in a national project promoted by the American Cancer Society, the American Lung Association, and the American Heart Association, plan to fight fire with fire.

School officials have begun organizing large numbers of older students who, later this winter, will begin talking to younger teens here about the very real dangers of smoking. They will use "smoking machines" to demonstrate the deleterious effects on the lungs and circulatory system of inhaling cigarette smoke, filtered or no. The goal of the project, called Teens Against Tobacco Use, is to attain a "smoke-free" high school class of 2000 across the country.

Locally, tobacco use is reportedly high among this year's sophomores. If those in their early teens could be persuaded by their peers not only of tobacco's toxicity but also of the blithe unconcern that prompts the suggestion to smoke, they might well be able to resist. "If you are my friend," the response might be, "why is it that you want me to take up an addictive habit that in all likelihood will kill me and perhaps even some of those I'm close to?" And further: "Why are you hurting yourself?" And further: "Let me help you."

Teens Against Tobacco Use also suggests that high-schoolers, besides arming younger students with the facts and means to resist tobacco, lobby for "increases in excise taxes on tobacco products," demand the "enforcement of laws prohibiting tobacco sales to anyone under the age of 18," and work to "eliminate cigarette vending machines" among other things.

Eliminating vending machines - which provide minors with easy access to cigarettes - and monitoring compliance with I.D. requirements by convenience stores and gas stations would further attest to the effectiveness of East Hampton's new group.

The State Court of Appeals this week refused to hear a request by representatives of Dunehampton, a proposed village comprising the oceanfront land of three eastern hamlets in Southampton Town. The decision, which Dunehampton's opponents had expected, effectively stops the case from being considered any further.

In February, a State Appellate Division panel unanimously upheld a determination by Southampton Town Supervisor Patrick A. Heaney that a petition calling for a referendum on Dunehampton was not legitimate. Dunehampton's proponents then asked the State Court of Appeals to consider the case.

Thomas Butler, a partner in the law firm Chadbourne and Park, who represents the Dunehampton proponents, said they were very disappointed and "collectively considering our options." He also said he planned to review the impact of the lower courts' decisions on the case as a whole.

Such decisions could be instructive for the Dunehampton supporters, who have also filed a petition with the town to incorporate Southampton Beach, which would absorb more land in Sagaponack and farther inland along the coast.

The petition for Southampton Beach is in line behind yet another one, for a Sagaponack village. But if Sagaponack incorporates, Southampton Beach will lose all its Sagaponack territory, as well as the Sagaponack residents that Southampton Beach now claims on the petition that it has.

That, Mr. Heaney has said previously, will make the task of assembling 500 regular residents for Southampton Beach nearly impossible. He could not be reached for comment this week.

The Dunehampton village petition came in response to the Coastal Erosion Hazard Law adopted by Southampton in 2003. The law set limits on how much and what types of protection homeowners could use against erosion and limited how much they could rebuild.

Oceanfront property owners from Water Mill to Sagaponack signed on to form an incorporated village and devise their own laws.

Their petition was deemed "insufficient" by Mr. Heaney, who found that the list included names of people who were deceased as well as those who maintained another residence for voting purposes. The state requires those petitioning for incorporation to have as their primary residence the area that will form the proposed village. Voter registration at the time the petition is signed is one way to confirm such residence.

The Appeals Court decision will allow Sagaponack residents to have their own petition on forming an incorporated village proceed. Mr. Heaney had been asked by a previous appellate court not to consider the Sagaponack decision until the Dunehampton case had been definitively decided.

A hearing on the Sagaponack village petition was held last May, before the court's request was issued. Mr. Heaney would now be compelled to proceed.

Sagaponack's petition has been classified by residents and town officials as a mostly defensive measure to protect their beachfront from being co-opted by a third party - that is, Dunehampton.

This month the Sagaponack Citizens Advisory Committee started to prepare a response in case Sagaponack's petition is challenged by Dunehampton representatives. They were concerned about people who may have moved or died since the Sagaponack petition was signed. Even though its progress was thwarted pending a decision on Dunehampton, the petition has to be considered as it was originally submitted and cannot be updated by those who are behind it.

"We're looking at every and all options regarding Dunehampton and Sagaponack, but I don't have anything I can tell you yet," said Mr. Butler, the Dunehampton lawyer.

If Dunehampton challenges the Sagaponack petition, it is likely to take the same route through the state courts and appeals process. If, after this process, Sagaponack can get a referendum passed determining the boundaries that would be incorporated, there will be two years in which to decide whether to go ahead.

A Southampton man charged with sexually assaulting a 61-year-old woman on the beach in front of the Maidstone Club in East Hampton on Tuesday is also being charged in connection with incidents of sexual abuse and public lewdness going back three years, East Hampton Village police said.

Yesterday they charged John J. Giraldo, 30, of Montauk Highway with felony counts of attempted rape, assault, and unlawful imprisonment as well as public lewdness, a misdemeanor, and exposure, a violation. All charges were connected to Tuesday's assault.

Mr. Giraldo was taken to the Suffolk County jail in Riverside after arraignment yesterday before East Hampton Town Justice Catherine A. Cahill, who set cash bail at $100,000.

Police said the woman was walking alone on the beach near the Maidstone Club on Old Beach Lane at 8:45 a.m. when she was accosted by a naked man wearing a ski mask. He grabbed her from behind, pushed her to the ground, pushed her head into the sand, and then sexually assaulted her, according to police.

A 15-year-old cabana boy working for the Maidstone Club saw the struggle and cried out, causing the assailant to flee on foot across the dunes. Workers at the club called the police.

The woman was taken to Southampton Hospital, where she was checked for injuries and then released. She reportedly had cuts and bruises on her face.

After the assault, police set up road blocks leading to and from the East Hampton Village beaches and searched nearby dunes with two dogs from the Southampton Village K-9 Unit.

"He's been a thorn in our side," Chief Gerard Larsen of the village police said at a press conference yesterday afternoon at the East Hampton Village Emergency Services Building. Fourteen cases of public lewdness were reported in the village last year, and Chief Larsen said Mr. Giraldo has been tied to at least two of them. Charges have not yet been filed in the two cases.

Village Mayor Paul F. Rickenbach Jr. and police from Southampton Town and Village and the Village of Quogue attended the press conference, as did several East Hampton Village detectives, television crews, and reporters.

Detective Sgt. Herman Lamison of the Southampton Village Police said Mr. Giraldo would be charged later that day with felony counts of sexual abuse, assault, and unlawful imprisonment, as well as with public lewdness. These charges stem from an incident on May 12, 2004, in which a woman was sexually assaulted on the beach near Old Town Road in Southampton.

Southampton Town police also filed charges against Mr. Giraldo yesterday, Southampton Town Detective Sgt. Randy Hintze said at the press conference. Mr. Giraldo faces felony charges of sexual abuse and unlawful imprisonment in connection with a June 8 incident at Mecox Beach in Water Mill in which a woman was grabbed, pushed to the ground, and sexually assaulted. He was also charged with public lewdness as a result of another incident on May 6.

Detective Jason McMunn of the Quogue Village Police said Mr. Giraldo would be charged with public lewdness there as well.

The Southampton and East Hampton Village Police Departments tried using female officers as "decoys" with no success. Chief Larsen said the suspect was at first caught in several lies while being questioned, then "made admissions" related to Tuesday's crime as well as those leading back to January 2002. Southampton Village police said they had a D.N.A. sample that had not yet been analyzed.

"It was good old-fashioned gumshoe police work," said Mayor Rickenbach, a former police officer, adding that East Hampton was known for its beaches and that "the police have restored our ability to enjoy them."

"We feel that this arrest has removed a dangerous individual from our community," Chief Larsen said in a press release. "Mr. Giraldo has been a person of interest in several other prior cases where investigations are continuing."

Mr. Giraldo was apprehended within hours of the alleged attack. East Hampton Village Police Lt. Michael Tracey and Chief Larsen would not elaborate on how they tracked him down, except to say that he was arrested at a construction site. Mr. Giraldo is a house painter with a Hampton Bays company.

The suspect, who is married and has a child in Colombia, has lived on the East End for six years. The county district attorney's office said a Legal Aid Society lawyer would be appointed to represent him.

East Hampton Town police said what appears to be an unrelated rape was reported in Montauk at 5:40 a.m. on Monday. They were still investigating and said they had no further information at press time.

Last week, Karl Grossman, who covers county government for The Star and The Southampton Press, found himself invited to sit in on a private meeting of the group called Standing for Truth About Radiation with Brookhaven National Laboratory officials. To Alec Baldwin, the actor and activist who spoke at the session, Mr. Grossman appeared to be a member. A few others reportedly thought he was there in an advisory capacity. In his own words, however, he was there "as a journalist," having been invited because he had complained that he wasn't being kept up to date on the organization's activities and because he was anxious to learn as much as he could about what Brookhaven representatives had to say. Later, in his own words, he clarified his position, writing, "I have no membership or involvement in any political group. . . . I would not even join the Sierra Club."

That was not enough to satisfy Newsday, whose own reporter was barred from the meeting and whose James Klurfeld editorialized on it Sunday, referring to Mr. Grossman as among "phony journalists who can't separate themselves from a pet cause. . . ."

Karl Grossman is not only not phony he is about as real and independent a journalist as you can find. To be sure, Mr. Grossman combines activism and journalism in a way more common to the alternative press than to large corporate newspapers. As a stringer for several weeklies on county affairs, he always tries to include "the other side" in his coverage and he accepts our editing for comprehensiveness or balance without question. His own opinions, which often are strong, are expressed in a signed column, "Suffolk Closeup."

Mr. Grossman augments the little money he receives as a reporter and columnist with teaching, both at Southampton College and the State University at Old Westbury, and by writing and lecturing on the issues he considers most serious - nuclear issues. Aren't they?

If Mr. Grossman made a mistake last week, it was in his failure to leave the STAR-B.N.L. meeting when another reporter was being barred. His sense of Newsday's own biases and his concern about the seriousness of the issues at hand got the best of any expression of journalistic solidarity. That was unfortunate. In the end, the public will only be able to respond correctly to the Brookhaven saga if as many lenses as possible focus on it.

At the start of a yearlong celebration of East Hampton Town's 350th anniversary, the importance of honoring the past has never been clearer. In history lies wisdom, or at the least knowledge, for anyone willing to learn the lessons of the past.

East Hampton is, as this still-young country goes, an elderly community, with roots, traditions, and a firm sense of people and place that is unusual today except in parts of New England and the South. Farmers and fishermen, light and landscape, Lion Gardiner, Chief Wyandanch, Fishhooks Mulford, John Howard Payne, founding families whose names still crowd the telephone books - East Hampton thrives today because of its past, in fact in many ways it depends on it.

As the celebratory festivities get under way, The Star, which is beginning its 113th year as the town's newspaper of record, will publish a special page each week of related news and features. It will be a place for old-timers to reminisce, for scholars of history to show off their knowledge, for photographs of forgotten places, news of upcoming anniversary events, and recipes of yesteryear, for insight into the significance of local street and place names, for interviews with people working on celebratory events, for synopses of commemorative lectures, and for a calendar of late-breaking events as well as those already cast.

East Hampton is changing rapidly. Much of what we most prize is in danger of disappearing under the demands of an ever-increasing population. But each child who moves in and enrolls in a local school represents another chance for the future, if only he or she can be taught about the past.

Fifty years from now, today's schoolchildren will be planning East Hampton's 400th anniversary celebration. Their teachers have a golden opportunity this year to use the resources that the 350th-anniversary will summon, but also to continue to emphasize that history when 1998 comes to an end.

Charlie Niggles spent Friday night tied to a wave-battered trap in 25-knot winds, his sunken boat beneath him, off the north end of Gardiner's Island.

After five cold, exhausting hours, a Suffolk County Police helicopter finally spotted him, and at 4 a.m. a Coast Guard boat plucked the bayman from his trap. Since then, his family and fellow baymen have expressed anger and disappointment at what they say was the failure of the East Hampton Town Marine Patrol to respond.

None of the town's three patrol boats was launched after Ed Michels, senior harbormaster, was informed that a boater was overdue.

Mr. Niggles had left home to lift his pound trap, which extends from Bostwick's Point at the very north point of Gardiner's Island, late on Friday. Normally he would have waited until Saturday morning, but that was when his son, Steven, was going to graduate from East Hampton High School, an event he did not want to miss (and did not).

"He went to lift the trap at 7 p.m.," Mr. Niggles's wife, Lisa, said yesterday. "My son knew it would take him about two hours. When he didn't come home, he went down to Folkstone, where his father launches his boat. He saw the truck, but his dad was not in.

"I said, 'We'll give it till midnight.' It was blowing about 25 knots and we knew it was worse on the island."

Ms. Niggles said her husband later told her that his skiff had taken three waves over the stern. "Everything shifted, the waves lifted the top of the fish box, and with the weight of the fish" the boat sank, soaking the fisherman's cellphone and the engine battery in the process.

The bow remained above water, which is where Mr. Niggles perched, tying himself to the trap for safety.

"He's a licensed captain, a bayman, I knew something's not right," Ms. Niggles said. "He's not out with buddies drinking a six-pack."

She said her son and her father, Harold Snyder, spent most of the night at the Gann Road headquarters of the town marine patrol. "They showed the two harbormasters on duty maps of where the trap was. [The harbormasters] told them they don't go out until first light," Ms. Niggles said.

She said the officers called their superior, Mr. Michels, and were told to call the Coast Guard.

Mr. Michels said yesterday that he received the call from his office at about 1 a.m. He insisted that "the Coast Guard had the case," and that a longstanding protocol had been followed.

At about the same time, Ms. Niggles called East Hampton Town police. The police relayed the message that a boat was overdue to the Coast Guard, which happened to have a patrol boat returning from a routine boating safety patrol in Sag Harbor. By 2 a.m. the Coast Guard vessel was searching for the missing fisherman.

Joseph Billotto, an officer with the State Department of Environmental Conservation police, was on board and called for a helicopter, which the Suffolk County Police Department launched at 3:20 a.m.

"The Coast Guard called me at 3:30 and said they hadn't found him. I was frantic," Ms. Niggles said. "I talked throughout the whole night with the Coast Guard, to the Montauk station, and to the Coast Guard boat. They said they looked in the trap and didn't see him, but they must have been looking in the wrong one."

Pound traps, which are used to catch finfish, are made of netting hung from wooden stakes that extend into the water from shore like a fence.

While the Coast Guard was looking for Mr. Niggles, Donald Mackay, the captain of the boat that runs between Three Mile Harbor and Gardiner's Island for the island's owners, the Goelets, joined the search. He and members of the island's security staff trained their headlights on Mr. Niggles's trap.

According to a spokeswoman for the Goelets, this helped the helicopter locate him and radio his position to the Coast Guard vessel, which picked him up at about 4 a.m.

"His boat was pretty much sunk and caught in the fish trap. There were heavy seas and he was about 200 yards off Bostwick Point," Officer Billotto said. The fisherman was brought him to the town dock at Gann Road on Three Mile Harbor.

"He's okay, but it could have been a whole different scenario. It was not handled right. Steven and my father pointed out where the trap was. He could have been home three hours earlier, but there was nothing from out of East Hampton. Maybe Michels should have come down to coordinate," Ms. Niggles said.

Mr. Michels said the criticism leveled at him and his department was not justified. He said harbormasters did launch at night. "We respond when we have to. We have the ability. In this situation, the search was turned over to the Coast Guard because they had a boat in the area. I kicked it up to them."

The senior harbormaster said that longstanding search-and-rescue protocol dictated that, when the Coast Guard takes charge of a case, it is up to the guard to call for further help if needed.

"I trained the entire Island on this issue," he said. "Their boat was at Gardiner's Island when the call came in. I was told, 'When this boat is exhausted, we'll use [the town's] Marine One to pick up the search. Save the boat for first light," Mr. Michels said, relating his conversation with Coast Guard officials.

The senior harbormaster also questioned why the police, Coast Guard, or his office had not been contacted before 1 on Saturday morning, when Mr. Niggles was expected at 9 p.m. Friday night. He said he had not been told who was missing.

"I didn't know it was a bayman. That's important because we get five or six overdues every week," meaning recreational boaters who are more likely not to arrive on time.

"If [one] is due at 11 p.m., and he's not back at 1 a.m., I'm not sure that's a Mayday status. If I knew it was a bayman, it would be different. I didn't get that information. I did the best I could with the information I had," Mr. Michels said.

"This is a screw-up of major proportions," said Brad Loewen, speaking, he said, as the East Hampton Town Baymen's Association, not as a Democratic candidate for town board in the November election. "Ed Michels did not do his job, and by not doing his job, he imperiled the life of a fisherman. That's it in a nutshell."

"I'm very angry at that. He is the person responsible for search and rescue in this town. The boss. He should have had the boats leave the dock. Three-quarters of a million-dollars worth of search and rescue boats built for such an operation."

"I can't find fault if there isn't a happy outcome, but not to make the search is unbelievable. Thank God it was June. If it had been May, he would have been dead," Mr. Loewen said.

Ms. Niggles said that, while her husband might have made his way to shore by hand-over-handing his way along the trap's twine, "he had his rain gear on, and figured someone would be sent for him."

"He knew he was alive. It was a lot harder for us."

The East Hampton Village Design Review Board on Dec. 17 approved two houses already under construction in the Hedgerow subdivision on Sarah's Way.

The properties, numbers 6 and 14, are within the village's Main Street Historic District, created in 1986. Review Board approval, required before ground was broken, was overlooked by both the building code enforcement officer and the developer.

Robert Hefner, the village's consultant on historic preservation, told the board the development, barely visible from Main Street except for the rooftops, would "not detract" from the historic district.

Spacious "Cottages"

The houses, one at 9,000 square feet, the other 6,500 square feet, are both two-story, multi-gabled, "traditional" shingled structures.

Their size is not part of the Review Board's purview, Mr. Hefner said.

"This will be precedent-setting," announced Ina Garten, a board member.

Barnett Brown, Hedgerow's developer, who will live in 6 Sarah's Way and is building number 14, said none of the houses in the 10-lot subdivision would be less than 4,000 square feet.

All, he said, will have an "East Hampton cottage look."

Mr. Brown apologized to the board for overlooking the necessity to obtain a Review Board certificate of appropriateness. "My mind's overloaded," he said.

In other action, the Review Board approved a joint application from the East Hampton Historical Society and the East Hampton Garden Club to install a split-rail fence and plant several apple trees behind Rachel's Garden on the Mulford Farm, recreating a "remnant apple orchard."

The board also reviewed, but did not approve, an application by Power Test Realty Company, which owns the Getty station at the intersection of Montauk Highway and Toilsome Lane. The station's owners want to remove existing pumps, lighting, and signs, and replace them with new ones.

Board members were reluctant to approve the proposed lights, which would shine twice as brightly as the current ones, because the station is a pre-existing, nonconforming business in a residential neighborhood.

Ever since Gov. George E. Pataki vetoed legislation in September that would allow East Hampton Town to hold a referendum on a proposed 2-percent tax on real estate sales to fund open space purchases, supporters have been working behind the scenes to resurrect the issue.

On Friday, the Southampton Town Board held an informal hearing with Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. and a group of environmentalists, real estate brokers, and farm and business representatives to air opinions on a new measure Mr. Thiele plans to introduce to the Legislature in January.

The new legislation would expand the transfer tax to the five East End towns and include an exemption for the sale of farmland for agricultural purposes.

"All Issues" Addressed

When he vetoed the first bill, Governor Pataki cited the facts that the legislation only included East Hampton and that it failed to exempt farmland as major flaws.

"I think the bill addresses all the issues in the veto message," said Mr. Thiele. He said he had discussed "specific language" of the bill with the Governor's office and said he had no reason at this time to think Governor Pataki would not sign the law.

Like the first bill, the new legislation would also exempt the first $250,000 of improved property and the first $100,000 of vacant land.

Supervisor On Board

One reason the original bill did not include the other East End towns was the failure of their Town Boards to throw their support behind it in time. Supervisor Vincent Cannuscio said he did not want to miss the boat this time.

"I wanted to lead the way to make certain it is on the ballot," he said in explaining the reason for Friday's meeting.

Mr. Cannuscio said the transfer tax would complement the town's $5 million open space bond and a dedicated open space fund that is included in the town's real estate tax and expected to raise millions more over the next 10 years.

"Hotter Than Ever"

Mr. Cannuscio called the hearing "a nice conversation" that would "give board members the opportunity to suggest modifications to the Thiele initiative or let it go to the Legislature as it is."

A number of supporters said passage of the tax was critical. The East End is "hotter than ever," said Edwin (Buzz) Schwenk of East End Forever, a preservation group. "We're being eaten alive. If we don't move, it's going to be too late."

Mr. Schwenk, the former executive director of the Long Island Builders Institute, resigned his post two years ago in part because of the group's opposition to the transfer tax.

Funding Essential

He likened the tax to an "insurance policy" that will help preserve the East End's beauty for new home buyers.

Kevin McDonald, vice president of the Group for the South Fork, said the tax would allow the East End towns to produce "comprehensive plans" to preserve open space. At the current rate of development, there will only be 10,000 acres of farmland left in Suffolk County in 12 years, he said.

The East End "is either going to go suburban, or we're going to try to preserve it," he said.

"Without additional funding, we're dead in the water," agreed Lee Foster, a member of the Southampton Town agricultural advisory committee. "There's not enough money for what we want to do," added Paul Brennan, a managing partner of Sotheby's International Realty and a member of the town's environmental advisory committee.

Farmer's Biggest Asset

The changes in the proposed law will probably bring another ally to its roster of supporters. Even though the Long Island Farm Bureau has a policy of "opposing new taxes," Joe Gergela, the organization's executive director, said it would most likely support the new bill "if the exemption is added in." The Farm Bureau withdrew its support for the last bill when the farmland exemption was deleted.

Mr. Gergela said it was important to understand that a farmer's land is his biggest single asset. "At the end of the day there's not much left" after a farmer pays off his creditors when selling his land, he said.

"The purpose of this legislation is not to impose a tax," responded Mr. Thiele, "it is to preserve open space." He said he expected the exemption would make it into the final version of the law.

Some Contrary Feelings

Mr. Gergela said the Farm Bureau also wants a "recapture" provision added to make sure the tax is collected if exempted farmland is resold within a short period for development.

The need for the recapture provision was also cited by Gil Flanagan, the chairman of the Southampton Town farmland committee, in a letter to the board.

While the Town Board heard from supporters of the law, it also heard from detractors.

Bob Wieboldt, vice president of the Long Island Builders Institute, while proclaiming the institute "supported most of the goals" of the proposed law, said it nonetheless posed problems.

Predicts Disappointment

Mr. Wieboldt said the current exemption, while adequate for houses today, would be too low if "inflation kicks in" and called for a provision that would allow it to be increased.

He also questioned whether there were enough vacant parcels available for under $100,000. Having to pay the tax for a vacant parcel would make it difficult for a "typical Joe" to build a house, he said.

Citing a wish list of $300 million of property on the East End, Mr. Wieboldt said supporters would urge the towns to "buy, buy, buy." But if the towns count on a "steady revenue stream" from the tax, they will be disappointed when the next recession hits, he said.

Divided Opinion

He also suggested limited developments, such as clustered subdivisions with reserved areas of open space, "could save half of that for nothing, and it would still be taxable."

Frederick Mayer of the Hamptons and North Fork Realtors' Association, saying he felt like "Daniel in the lion's den," also spoke against the tax.

Mr. Mayer stressed his opinions did not represent the position of the association. A poll of its members had ended "50-50, right down the middle," he said.

The transfer tax would be an "excise tax" because it applies only to buyers and sellers, Mr. Mayer said. "It falls on too few shoulders. Why should the new kids on the block pay the freight for all of us?"

Some Wariness

He argued as more land was set aside for preservation, the price of real estate would rise, squeezing out the poor and middle class. He also cited fears the tax would be raised over the years, calling it "a sleeper that will become a monster."

Mr. Mayer also said the tax would be "recessionary" because it would eventually slow down the real estate market, one of the biggest businesses on the East End. "The power to tax is the power to destroy," he said.

Anne LoWaal, director of the South ampton Business Alliance, also cited fears about the tax. Ms. LoWaal said the alliance would like to see "a high threshold for business property" and called for a higher exemption for it.

While the alliance does not support new taxes, it will support a referendum to allow residents to make a choice, she said.