The Mast-Head: One of a Kind

On the one hand, I enjoyed it when Stuart Vorpahl phoned the office. On the other, there was usually a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach when the front office said he was on the line because he almost never called when he agreed with something we had written.

“You got that wrong, bub,” he’d say, then explain a particular historical detail or geographical nuance we had reported in error, at least to his way of thinking. But though Stuart could be cranky, years of reading local history and a lifetime on the water here made his word as good as it gets.

As I recall, I had first gotten to know Stuart back around the time he was recuperating from an early heart problem and needed help setting out trap stakes. One spring day he picked me up early, and we headed out to Lazy Point in his truck.

Unlike most of the other trap fishermen around here, Stuart favored steel trap stakes over wood. He would set them from a barge, which he had welded himself. Stuart moved the barge around with a smaller powerboat; I can’t at this point remember much about it other than that he had rigged up a self-made autopilot after a fashion: a sash weight with a hook that allowed it to hang on the boat’s wheel.

I only lasted as a deckhand about a day; I twisted an ankle when I slipped on a stake and couldn’t stand the following morning. For years afterward, a sense that I had missed out on something important bothered me.

If that day with Stuart marked an unfortunate start and end to my commercial fishing career, he never busted my chops about it. There were always bigger matters to talk about when we spoke.

Stuart knew as much as anyone about colonial agreements between the East Hampton Town Trustees and the royal authorities. These, in his eyes, allowed town residents to fish without state licenses, and he was disappointed when he never had a chance to prove the point in court. 

It was on the occasion that we had printed something in The Star that might have cast a shadow on these early rights that I last heard from him. The phone buzzed, and a voice from downstairs said, “David, Stuart Vorpahl’s on line one.” And I knew I was in for it.

At Stuart’s funeral on Tuesday at the Amagansett Presbyterian Church, Hugh King compared him to Fishhooks Mulford, an early-18th-century colonist who sailed to London to challenge a tax on whaling, saying Fishhooks was Stuart’s most important political forebear. Hugh said that it had taken 300 years for East Hampton to produce a second visionary of Fishhooks Mulford’s stature and that he hoped it would not take 300 more for there to be another. It was likely, he said, that Stuart’s truck, an ancient Willys that had, like its owner, defied the odds for a long time, would still be running.