Andy Sabin, the president of the Sabin Metal Corporation and a philanthropist who founded the South Fork Natural History Museum, has given $30 million to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The gift establishes the Andrew Sabin Family Fellowship Program and an endowment that is to fund two-year research fellowships.

The program, according to a statement from the  center, will encourage “creative, independent thinking and high-risk, high-impact research” in support of its mission to end cancer. The center is accepting applications for the inaugural fellowships, which will be announced early next year. Up to eight Sabin Fellows will be funded initially.

“MD Anderson is number one in the world,” Mr. Sabin, who has houses in Amagansett and Springs, said on Monday. “They are so compassionate, their bedside manner is great, and they are the best doctors at the forefront of research.”

Cancer researchers, he said, typically must devote up to half their time fund-raising. “If I can fund them, and let them spend their time in research, I’m hoping that eventually they will have 24 researchers in perpetuity,” he said.

“They’ve made huge progress in terms of people living longer, and being in remission longer,” Mr. Sabin said of cancer researchers in general. “That progress is huge, but they really haven’t found a cure. I’m hoping that my researchers come up with a cure for some cancers, which I’m sure they will.”

In the statement from the MD Anderson Cancer Center, Ronald DePinho, its president, called the gift “transformational,” one that “will nurture the genius and excellence of outstanding young scientists willing to push the boundaries in our quest to end cancer.”

Mr. Sabin, who also established Andrew Sabin International Environment Fellowships at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, became involved with the MD Anderson Cancer Center through former President George H.W. Bush and has served on its board of visitors since 2005. “They lost a daughter, Robin, in the ’50s,” he said of Mr. Bush and his wife, Barbara. Robin Bush was diagnosed with leukemia and died in 1953 at the age of 3. Mr. Sabin also lost a loved one to cancer, he said.

Mr. Sabin takes inspiration from Buddhist philosophy, he said, particularly Buddha’s “determination to save all living beings” and the “profound empathy that feels the suffering of all living beings as one’s own.” Cancer, he said, is “such a destructive disease.”

The future is a mystery, he said. “Tomorrow is never promised. Every day above ground is a good day. Count your blessings.”

Sara Struble and Michael Ritsi got en­gaged at sunset on the beach in Montauk on Nov. 14.

Ms. Struble, a sales representative for The Southampton Press, is the daughter of Terry and Walter Struble of Springs. Mr. Ritsi is the sports program director at Sportime in Amagansett and coaches junior varsity football and varsity baseball at East Hampton High School. His parents are Joanne Roge of Montauk and Joseph Ritsi of Jacksonville, Fla.

They live in Montauk with their dog, Lilly, and are planning a September wedding in 2016 or 2017.

Calling all lovers of clam chowder, clam rakes, clams on the half shell, and, especially, clam competitions: The East Hampton Town Trustees will hold their 25th annual Largest Clam Contest on Sunday at noon. The event was postponed from Oct. 4 due to Hurricane Joaquin, which at the time was intensifying in the Atlantic Ocean and raising concern that shellfishing areas might be closed.

In a sign of the event’s growing popularity, the venue is new this year. Having outgrown the grounds of the Donald Lamb Building in Amagansett, where the trustees hold their meetings, this year’s contest will be held at the American Legion Post 419, at the corner of Montauk Highway and Abraham’s Path in the same hamlet.

Councilman Fred Overton of the East Hampton Town Board will serve his renowned clam chowder, and those attending can also enjoy clams on the half shell. A clam chowder contest will be judged by a reporter from The Star and Lori Miller-Carr, the trustees’ secretary.

Twelve winners will be selected, including for the largest clam taken by both adults and juniors age 4 to 14 from Lake Montauk, Three Mile Harbor, Napeague Harbor, and Accabonac Harbor. An award will also be given for the largest clam over all. The best red, white, and overall chowders will also be recognized with a prize.

Competing clams can be dug through Saturday and brought to the Amagansett Seafood Store, Stuart’s Fish Market in Amagansett, or the Seafood Shop in Wainscott to be entered in the contest. Clams will not be accepted for entry on Sunday.

All winners will receive a package of prizes donated by sponsoring shops and restaurants. The trustees are still accepting donations, such as gift certificates for merchandise or services, from local merchants that will be presented to those with the largest quahog harvested from one of the above water bodies.

Kate Rossi-Snook of the East Hampton Town Shellfish Hatchery, and Kimberly Barbour, outreach manager of Cornell Cooperative Extension’s Marine Program, will deliver presentations on their work. The East End Classic Boat Society, which meets at the Hartjen-Richardson Community Boat Shop near the trustees’ office on Bluff Road, will display the Pooduck skiff it constructed this year. Members of the society will also sell raffle tickets for the 13-foot skiff, which includes a trailer, lateen sailing rig, and oars.

Prior to its postponement, Deborah Klughers told her colleagues at the trustees’ Sept. 22 meeting that she hoped to continue the “extreme recycling” initiative of last year’s contest, with 100-percent participation including the recycling of shells and beverage containers.

“Local folks show up every year,” Diane McNally, the trustees’ presiding officer, said of the annual event. “I hope we get a few more kids — that’s the intent, to try to get kids involved.” In the past year, trustees gave a presentation at the Amagansett School to explain the trustees’ governing role in the town, and they have discussed expanding that outreach to other schools in the town.

Noisy clubs, illegal apartments, overcrowded houses, drunken driving, booze on the beach, cab drivers sleeping in cars overnight at the train station, and trash, trash everywhere. 

Things may be quieting down as we head into the colder months of the year, but the hallmarks of summer mayhem are a year-round topic of discussion and one that the Group for Good Government will tackle on Saturday as East Hampton Town Police Chief Michael Sarlo and David Betts, the town’s director of public safety, talk code and law enforcement at the East Hampton Library. 

The discussion, which will run from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m., is likely to touch on many of the woes that keep residents and law enforcement on edge in the summertime and throughout the year, what with our ballooning transient and part-time population and shifting year-round needs. 

After hundreds gathered at a town board meeting in Montauk this summer to demand action, town officials approached the problem with stepped-up enforcement and promises of regulatory efforts that might curtail some of the summertime headaches. One controversial suggestion, which is the subject of a town board hearing tonight, was a rental registry to rein in illegal rentals. 

All of these were the impetus for the Group for Good Government’s discussion on Saturday, the goal of which is to “provide better understanding of our codes and the process by which they are enforced,” wrote Jeffrey Fisher, a founder of the organization. The group hopes its guests will tackle such questions as “How do we improve the quality of life through sensible codes and efficient enforcement.” It hopes those in the audience will come away with a better idea of the challenges of code enforcement and some examples of successes. Chief Sarlo and Mr. Betts will also take questions from the audience.

The Montauk Village Association got a bit of unexpected help on Tuesday from about 50 volunteers from the digital media group of Reader’s Digest Home and Garden magazine, who worked with it to clean up several small landscaped areas on the west side of the downtown business district.

The two groups, working with the crew from Mickey Valcich’s landscaping business, started on the pebbled island in front of 7-Eleven and worked on several areas up to John’s Drive-In to remove the small white rocks surrounding trees and other plantings, regrade the sites, and then add mulch. In spring, the spaces will be filled with roses and other potted plants.

A manager from 7-Eleven, watching from the store’s window, finally walked outside to see what was going on. He then sent out a case of water and sodas for the volunteers on the unseasonably humid day.

It’s a project that Nancy Keeshan, the president of the M.V.A., said has been in the works for a few months now and involves matching the west end of the district to the east end. Coming up will be an appeal for money to purchase the new plants and bushes.

Christine Masterson of Reader’s Digest said that each year when the group meets for its annual sales meeting, it reaches out to the community it is meeting in to offer assistance on a beautification project. The group, primarily from New York City, stayed at Gurney’s Inn for its three-day meeting.

Ms. Masterson said that when they researched Montauk they learned about the M.V.A., and she contacted Ms. Keeshan, who said she was pleasantly surprised to learn of the plan. The volunteers all donned matching blue T-shirts as they worked.

“What a cool thing for volunteers from New York City to make things better for the M.V.A.,” said Ms. Keeshan.

When Dell Cullum was asked to assume leadership of the East Hampton Group for Wildlife in August, he did so with the understanding that a potential opportunity could mean an abrupt resignation.

“Well, I got the job,” he wrote to members of the media on Sept. 28.

Shortly after Christmas, Mr. Cullum and Billy Strong, an artist and activist who works to educate and empower youth through his nonprofit organization the Green Explorer, will travel to South America to make a documentary film.

“We’re going to be on the last wooden fishing vessel in the Galapagos,” Mr. Cullum, a photographer and wildlife removal, rescue, and rehabilitation specialist who lives in East Hampton, said on Monday. “We’re going to live on this, doing something special as we go around the islands.”

Mr. Cullum and Mr. Strong revealed few details of their plan, but they intend to spend 30 days on and around Isabela, the largest island of the Galapagos, 563 miles west of Ecuador in the Pacific Ocean, including 15 on the vessel. The plan is to collect materials, make art, and work with the island’s children.

“It’s a huge opportunity to create a story,” Mr. Cullum said. “For me, it’s a dream come true.”

With the Green Explorer, “I try to teach kids and people that the way they treat their environment is the way they treat themselves,” Mr. Strong, who also lives in East Hampton, said. The connection between the earth and art, he wrote on his website, was essential to his artistic development. “While hiking along the coast of Costa Rica, the idea of capturing the energy from debris came to light,” he wrote. “I began there with natural materials, continued in Brazil, and by the time I reached India, the idea of adding plastics into my sculptures was realized.”

It was then, he wrote, that he also “understood the possibilities of taking debris and using it to educate people around the world about their relationship with the environment.”

Mr. Strong asked Mr. Cullum to accompany him to film his work. “I’ve done a few videos and documented some of my work in photos,” he said, “but this will be the first real movie.”

The plan, Mr. Cullum said, is to shoot and edit a film, which they intend to submit for next year’s Hamptons International Film Festival. They are also hoping to show it at the Mulford Farm in East Hampton next summer. “What he does is amazing, magic,” Mr. Cullum said of Mr. Strong. “Sometimes these kids are deaf or blind, and he really connects with them through his art.”

Mr. Cullum will take his drone and underwater video equipment to the island, which was formed by the merging of six volcanoes, five of which are active, and hopes to film the diverse wildlife of its land and sea.

“I’ve done a few films,” he said, “but this is really going to be my first serious, film festival-worthy documentary. I hope to do an episode of my TV show there as well” — “Imagination Nature,” which airs on LTV — “and am also going to record the whole experience for a book, down the road.”

Members of the Montauk Playhouse Community Center Foundation visited the Montauk Citizens Advisory Committee on Monday to unveil the foundation’s latest plan for the building’s aquatic and cultural centers.

Just about a year ago, the foundation switched from its original plan and decided to build the two pools on the upper level of the playhouse rather than the ground level. The cavernous space below, which is unfinished, was used in August to display art during the foundation’s annual benefit.

But residents did not respond well to building the pool on the upper level or using the ground floor for concerts, boat shows, and other large events, said Lisa DeVeglio, the foundation’s president.

“There was a lot of discussion about large events going in there, and they were right,” said Tom Griffin, a board member who was at Monday’s meeting.

The group then decided to hire a new architect and sought out Lee H. Skolnick Architecture and Design Partnership. Mr. Skolnick created the design of the new children’s section of the East Hampton Library and the Children’s Museum of the East End.

He created a design that places a smaller pool for children and water-therapy sessions on the upper level, taking advantage of the natural light and expansive feeling gained from a vaulted atrium ceiling. There is also room above for a cultural center, which can be used as a multipurpose performance space.

The large fitness pool will be built on the ground level, leaving enough room for a divided area that can be used for classes, meetings, and workshops. The two-story entry lobby provides space for exhibits and art shows.

Both the aquatic and cultural sections are expected to be self-sustaining, even during the winter months. The foundation has already raised $2.5 million for the project and needs about $5 million to $6 million more to complete it.

An informational meeting on the new design will be held at the playhouse on Saturday at 9 a.m.J.H.

Anna Pump, who was nationally known for her “Loaves and Fishes Cookbook” and its successors, as well as her Sagaponack gourmet food shop of the same name, was remembered this week after being struck by a truck on Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton on Monday

“Style and simplicity, that was the way she thought,” her friend Ina Garten said.

Ms. Pump’s first cooking position on the South Fork was in the late 1970s at the Barefoot Contessa, which was then in Westhampton Beach, with Ms. Garten.

Ms. Garten said this week that from the start, Ms. Pump had a European sensibility and an “extraordinary ability for quality.” Her cooking, the books, and her shop were “very country and very elegant at the same time.”

She bought Loaves and Fishes 35 years ago, in a modest, one-story building where Sagg Main Street and Route 27 converge. Locally, the store became known for its impeccably prepared take-away items, breads, and desserts. It gained some notoriety during the early 2000s for pricing lobster salad at a then-unheard-of $60 a pound.

Ms. Pump was nonplussed by the critics. She told an interviewer for The Star, “Yes, I know everyone uses it as a benchmark of high prices. It is the best lobster salad there is, but, yes, I know it is also the most expensive.”

Ms. Pump most recently wrote “Summer on a Plate” with Gen LeRoy, whom she worked with on two other cookbooks, “The Loaves and Fishes Party Cookbook” in 1990 and “Country Weekend Entertaining” in 1999.

Her childhood was spent on her family’s farm in Flensburg, a small town in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein that until 1864 had been part of Denmark. She and her husband, Detlef, and their two children, Sybille and Harm, moved to Frenchtown, N.J.

Ms. Pump studied cooking with James Beard and Maurice Moore Betty, and when the children went off to college, she and her husband bought a house in Noyac, which she described years later as an “absolute wreck with a caved-in roof.”

“Schleswig-Holstein has water on both sides, the North Sea and the Baltic Sea, and my parents grew potatoes, rye, rutabagas. It seemed so familiar here — the potato fields, the seagulls, the smell,” she said in the 2003 interview.

After working alongside Ms. Garten, Ms. Pump bought Loaves and Fishes from Devon Fredericks and Susan Costner in 1980.

“I work from 5 a.m. to 8 p.m.,” she said in The Star interview. “I wouldn’t be able to keep up that pace all the time, so it’s a relief when September comes and I can cut back to weekends only. Then, on Dec. 31, we close and I have three and a half months off.” During the off months, she and her husband would travel.

In 1986 her daughter, Sybille Van Kempen, finished cooking school and joined her at Loaves and Fishes and an associated cookshop on Main Street in Bridgehampton.

They opened the Bridgehampton Inn and Restaurant in 1994. The original 1790s building was in poor shape, and Mr. Pump set to making it right. It was recently expanded, and the Loaves and Fishes Cookshop, which Ms. Van Kempen runs, was moved to a new space in the restaurant building.

“Anna loved the store,” Ms. Garten said. “She was not an absentee owner. Her pleasure was the shop.”

Ms. Pump’s funeral will be private. Visitors will be welcomed on Sunday from 1 to 3 p.m. at 2964 Noyac Road in Noyac.

The weather was fine and the sky was that special September blue on the day in 1970 when people came together on the pastureland at George Sid Miller’s farm on Fireplace Road in Springs.

Normally, horses grazed alone in that field, but on this morning a crowd gathered at dawn where the Free Life, a seven-story hot air balloon, had been slowly filled with helium overnight and was scheduled to be launched with three adventurers aboard who were seeking to make history with a successful trans-Atlantic flight.

Rodney Anderson and Pamela Brown, a couple who for four years had pursued the dream of completing the crossing, and Malcolm Brighton, a British balloon pilot, would vanish into the sky, and later the sea, in what would ultimately be a folly that would end their lives.

They came to Springs just looking for a flat, open space for the balloon launch, and found a community that rallied round and supported their cause. From Dorothy and Clarence Barnes, who provided sustenance from their Barnes Country Store, to members of theSprings artist and literary enclave, such as Willem de Kooning and Jean Stafford, Springs residents got taken up by the venture.

Members of the Springs Fire Department, a fledgling organization at the time — it will be celebrating its 50th anniversary with a parade on Saturday — volunteered on the balloon launch crew. Numerous locals were on the ground crew, including Genie Chipps Henderson, still a Springs resident, who was a girlhood friend of Ms. Brown.

Over 1,000 people turned out to cheer the launch, which was delayed several hours by winds. They ran up to shake hands with the three passengers who reached down from the gondola as the ropes tethering the balloon to earth were cut and the craft slowly took flight up and over Accabonac Harbor at about 1:40 p.m. It sailed out of sight, heading northeast for Europe.

Thirty hours later, the orange and white balloon went down in stormy seas off Newfoundland.

Despite an extensive search and rescue effort, none of the passengers was ever seen again — nor was any part of the balloon.

A year later, a more somber group gathered in Springs for a service to remember the lost balloonists at Ashawagh Hall, where a plaque was placed at the foot of a memorial tree. That tree itself was lost in a storm, taken down by Hurricane Bob in 1991. Another memorial tree was dedicated to the ill-fated adventurers in 1995.

Over the years, those who were there, as children or adults, have remembered the dramatic event — the excited hopefulness of the launch, followed by the sobering news of the Free Life’s disappearance.

On Sunday, the 45th anniversary of the day the Free Life launched from Springs, the Springs Historical Society and LTV have invited those who were there, or who have tales to tell about it, to gather at Ashawagh Hall at 4 p.m. A film made of the launch will be shown, news articles covering the event will be on display, and memories, it is hoped, will be shared.

Moviegoers may have noticed a new sign at the East Hampton Cinema: “For the safety and comfort of all our guests: Backpacks and bags of any kind are subject to inspection prior to entry to this facility.” The Regal Entertainment Group, the largest movie theater chain in the country, recently announced the new policy on its website and at its entrances.

“You can’t be too safe,” said East Hampton Village Police Chief Gerard Larsen. The theater, said the chief, has “always had the ability, just like any private location has the ability, to search people’s items. If people don’t want it, they don’t have to go there.”

Chief Larsen said his department’s emergency services team had worked with the movie theater to develop tactical plans, as it has done with the East Hampton School District. “There is no real specific threats to the movie theater,” he said, “but a pre-plan is a good idea. You see what’s happening all over the country. It doesn’t take a specific threat to have a problem occur. I’d rather be proactive than reactive.”

Last month, a gunman killed two people in a movie theater in Lafayette, La. There have been other incidents as well, including a hatchet attack in a theater in Nashville earlier this month. Back in 2012, 12 people were killed and 70 injured when a gunman opened fire in a theater in Aurora, Colo.