Big Kickoff on Sunday

Everyone who lives in the Town of East Hampton, everyone who has ever lived there, and everyone who just happens to be passing through the town on Sunday has been invited to Guild Hall to help celebrate the official kickoff of the 350th anniversary of the town's founding.

The Main Street cultural center will be open to all comers from noon to 4 p.m. that day. The free event will begin at about 1 with welcoming remarks from dignitaries: Henry Korn, president of Guild Hall, Bruce Collins, chairman of the 350th Anniversary Committee, Paul F. Rickenbach Jr., Mayor of East Hampton Village, Cathy Lester, East Hampton Town Supervisor, and Hugh R. King, the official town crier and a member of the anniversary committee.

Part of Sunday's formal program will take place outdoors. The Long Island Companies of the Third New York Regiment, with fife and drum and a real musket salute, will lead the celebrants to the flagpole at the village green following the opening remarks. There, the brand-new blue-and-cream 350th anni versary flag, bearing the official seal designed by Frank Borth of Montauk, will be raised.

Afterward, there will be an opportunity for a last look at "The Moran Family Legacy" in Guild Hall's galleries. The retrospective of work by members of a prominent East Hampton art family, which has been on display since October, will close at the end of the day.

The new Children's Museum of the East End, which is housed at Guild Hall until it finds a permanent home, will be open as well.

Sunday's is the first of a great many anniversary-related events to be held in the coming year. Complete information about all of them, as they approach, will be found on this page throughout 1998.