Mary Gosman, 87, Matriarch

Mary Ellen Harrington Gosman, who helped spread the lilting poetry of the Irish brogue from her family's restaurant to the rest of Montauk and beyond, died of a heart attack on Saturday night at Southampton Hospital. She was 87.

Matriarch of a large family, owner with her husband of a fishing dock that grew into the largest restaurant complex in town, and a good conversationalist, Mrs. Gosman was also the pied piper who first brought to Montauk the young Irish students who have become the backbone of the summer labor force.

The first two, one a cousin, arrived in the early 1960s to work in the restaurant. The word spread, and now an estimated 500 arrive in town each spring. Their coming marks the true start of the season. Their departure in the fall, a month or two after the American students, marks its end.

Most of them still take the train to Montauk and get off asking directions to Gosman's restaurant.

Mrs. Gosman was born on June 17, 1909, in the village of Cloonkerin, in Mantua, County Roscommon. Her parents were Hubert James Harrington and Margaret Shannon Harrington. Her father's family had been "tailors for generations - some of the best in Ireland, if I must say so myself - and we lived on a farm," said Theresa Harrington Sarno, a younger sister.

Mrs. Gosman came to the United States in search of work in 1927, at the age of 17. She and a cousin were 10 days at sea between Queenstown and New York. She was sick for eight of them, she told The Star in an interview 30 years ago.

After two weeks selling gloves at Lord and Taylor, she took a job in a New Jersey hotel. In the summer of 1931, she came to East Hampton to work as a domestic for a wealthy family.

She met Robert H. Gosman, a young widower, at a party that summer, and married him the following January. They raised six children in a house on Devon Road in Amagansett. In the early years of their marriage, in the depths of the Depression, both made money however they could, Mr. Gosman as a carpenter on road crews. They managed to buy a house and a saloon nearby to fix up and rent.

They took over a small gas dock at the Lake Montauk inlet in 1943, when there was virtually nothing on the west side of the lake, and added a lunch counter to one side of a fish-packing shed three years later. Mrs. Gosman cooked, serving breakfast and her popular chowder to fishermen.

With eight seats at the counter and some tables on the deck, she hit on the idea of serving a meal on a beer tray. For $3, she laid out half a lobster, french fries, cole slaw, and some crackers. The lobsters pushed the tiny shack into success, and in 1951 the Gosmans moved an old house to the site and opened their first proper restaurant.

In 1958, the family grew tired of the commute from Amagansett and moved into the harbormaster's house at the inlet. With family members waiting tables, cooking, and doing every other job in the place, Gosman's expanded again in 1968.

The complex now comprises the popular seafood restaurant, two smaller eateries, a seafood distributorship, a fish-processing plant, a scattering of boutiques, an ice cream stand, and the dock. Some of Mrs. Gosman's children and grandchildren work there still.

"She was such a memorable personality, such presence. She was intuitive, very romantic, with a brilliant sense of humor, very Irish," said her son John, who runs the smaller restaurants. "She talked and talked. She sure kept the customers listening."

"She was very generous. First and foremost the mother," said her daughter Roberta Gosman Donovan, an East Hampton Town Planning Board member who runs the seafood restaurant.

In 1965, the Irish romantic bought a romantic house, known as the Windmill House, on Fairview Avenue. An architect had built it for himself in 1927, the same year she came to America, and it was later owned by Lindsay Hopkins, the president of Coca-Cola. The windmill, an architectural whimsy, does not function as such but contains the garage and a circular bedroom above.

Mr. Gosman died in 1983, some 15 years after the couple retired and began spending winters in Key West, Fla.

A member of the Montauk Garden Club and a Friend of the Montauk Library, Mrs. Gosman was honored by the Friends of Erin in 1982 as the first woman ever named grand marshal of Montauk's St. Patrick's Day parade. She participated in the parade for many years, in a pony-drawn carriage imported from Ireland.

She is survived by five of her six children, all of whom live in Montauk. Besides Ms. Donovan and John H. Gosman, they are Robert Emmett Gosman, William Shannon Gosman, and Richard Fleming Gosman. The sixth, Hubert James Gosman, died in his late 30s of cancer.

Mrs. Gosman leaves 11 grandchildren, all but two of whom are Montauk residents, and two great-grandchildren. Her sister Mrs. Sarno also lives in Montauk.

Four more sisters and three brothers live in Ireland: Brigid Brohan, Nan Quig ley, Una Herbert, Christine Noon, Patrick Harrington, Michael Har rington, and Hubert H. Harrington.

Visiting hours at the Williams Funeral Home on Newtown Lane in East Hampton were yesterday and continue today from 2 to 4 p.m. and 7 to 9 p.m. A memorial service will be held on Saturday at 11 a.m. at Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church in East Hampton, followed by burial in Fort Hill Cemetery, Montauk.

Mrs. Gosman was a member of Montauk's St. Therese of Lisieux Catholic Church, which is closed for repairs. The family has suggested memorial donations to the church building fund, to the Montauk Library building fund, or to the Montauk Ambulance Company.

In 1991, after an illness, Mrs. Gosman wrote a letter of thanks, published in The Star, to her many well-wishers. "I don't know how long I will be on this good earth," she wrote. "I know it won't be easy leaving Montauk. My Irish intuition tells me I will be back every now and then, not as a ghost, just a voice in the wind. Be sure you are listening."