This time of year always reminds me of The Star’s origins: The paper hit East Hampton on the day after Christmas in 1885. The Star arrived on the doorsteps of East Hampton Village residents even before the Long Island Rail Road had an East Hampton stop. Think of that! In 2020, we will count 135 years of newspapering, and are proud to say so.
My late father-in-law, Arnold Rattray, bought the paper in 1935, having married Jeannette Edwards Rattray, who grew up here and had started providing the then-owner, the Boughton family, weekly with a column, “One of Ours,” in 1923, describing her far-flung travels in Constantinople and Shanghai, where she was a girl reporter and occasional correspondent for a New York City journal. (Somewhere around here I have her account of being courted by a Chinese “warlord” — her description — around 1925.)
East Hampton is a town rather obsessed with its past, and our newspaper certainly promotes that impulse. On Dec. 26, 1985, we published a 28-page 100th anniversary special edition. Back then, we were still a true broadsheet, an enormous 17.5 inches wide, a size we considered nicely old-fashioned — especially in comparison to citified tabloid newspapers and glossy magazines that had begun flooding the streets.
I got thinking about all this history again recently, when our peripatetic photographer Durell Godfrey came into the office with the Dec. 19, 1940, edition, which had been found in the insulation of a house being demolished. Fun fact: Using newspapers as insulation or cheap wallpaper was not just something done by poor folks down in Appalachia; we’ve heard of several such cases locally, and, indeed, my daughter used to own an ancient saltbox house on Accabonac Road that had Star pages from 1886 in hidden spots and the attic stairwell.
We do keep bound copies, of course, and issues of The Star from the 19th century through the mid-1980s are available now as a digital archive accessible to anyone, allowing casual readers and serious researchers to study just about every article ever printed. But it nevertheless felt like a Christmas present from Durell when the 1940 edition arrived on my desk last week.
In 1940, the pages were divided into seven narrow columns with hairline rules between them. The Cub Scouts and the American Legion had front-page headlines, and “Christmas Music in All Churches Here” had the most prominent placement on the upper front page, “above the fold,” as did the doings of the Ramblers (a longtime women’s group that still meets to talk about educational topics). The East Hampton High School basketball team, the Maroons — note, not yet the Bonackers — had defeated Mattituck 26-19 on what was known as Jinx Day.
The venerable Martha’s Vineyard Gazette, which was founded before us, in 1846, remains 17.5 inches wide today — the genuine old broadsheet — but The Star was narrowed to a modern broadsheet width of 15 inches in the 1990s. We promise to keep that pleasingly unique size in the foreseeable future, even as the neighboring weeklies, The Southampton Press and Sag Harbor Express, presumably having succumbed to escalating costs of newsprint and postage, have become narrower.
The Martha’s Vineyard Gazette, remarkably, is even more traditionalist than The Star. We, in 2002, decided the time had come for a refreshed look and were lucky enough to call on the noted graphics expert Walter Bernard, a Bridgehampton part-timer. (Mr. Bernard is featured today, with Milton Glaser, in a stunning coffee-table size book called “Mag Men,” just published by Columbia University.) Mr. Bernard helped us produce our own style book, which provides precise measurements for everything from the length of personal columns to photo captions and headlines. Today it’s a curious artifact, but one worth perusing.
If you are interested in the general topic of newspapering, and in particular in The Star, come in and take a look at our 100th anniversary issue sometime. We’ll provide a pair of white gloves so you can turn the pages without fear of inkstains.