My first “Connections” column appeared in The East Hampton Star on April 28, 1977. That was 17 years after I had married into the Rattray family, moved to the East End, and begun to help put the paper to bed. But despite the fact that I had been a resident of East Hampton for nearly two decades at that point, that that first piece definitely reads today like the words of a young woman “from away.” I wrote of my first impressions of the South Fork in the late 1950s before I began dating my future first husband, how I had known very little about Long Island, having never ventured beyond Kew Gardens in Queens, and that I’d been astonished by the open spaces and endless farm fields.
The graphics and layout of The Star in 1977 were not all that different from today’s paper. It featured a long-running column called “Looking Them Over,” by Jeannette Edwards Rattray, an Amagansett Edwards and my mother-in-law; Arthur Roth’s weekly “From the Scuttlehole,” and “The Fifth Column, which was written in wry style by my husband, the editor, E.T. Rattray. He had chosen its title not only because it was literally in the fifth column, reading from left to right, but because he was amused by the historic use of the term, which referred to sympathizers or supporters of an enemy who engaged in espionage or sabotage within official lines of defense. His voice was that of a true insider, and he had the courage of his convictions.
The paper also featured a weekly column titled “Point of View” by a still-youthful Yalie, Jack Graves, our esteemed and quite brilliant sportswriter, who has been a columnist for longer than I have and yet manages to continue to express himself in an amusing manner each week. A tip of the hat to him!
Looking back over the digital archive of The Star online, from my present perch at Peconic Landing, I guess it took me 17 years to gather the courage to stick my proverbial neck out in a column that bore my signature. But, as fate would have it, that late-April edition also carried a bizarre front-page story that left “Connections” in the shadows. Headlined “Severed Heads Mystify,” the story made metropolitan headlines.
Four back-and-white cow’s heads, which had, somehow and mysteriously, been sharply severed, had floated up on the beach off King’s Point Road in Springs. A young woman named Emily Blumenstein, who lived not far away, had found the recently butchered heads during a walk on the beach and alerted East Hampton Town Councilman Larry Cantwell. A call also went out to The Star, which dispatched a reporter — indeed, the very same Jack Graves! — post-haste.
Rumors of cow heads’ origin raced through town like wildfire (rather like the rumors that circulated when “the Montauk monster” washed up more recently). Some people were absolutely sure the cows’ heads were the byproduct of some nefarious experiment at the animal-disease laboratory on Plum Island, but a phone call by Jack to a scientist on the island cleared up that speculation: Not only was waste from Plum Island incinerated, if and when they did experiment with cows there, they used red-and-white cows “from a range in Virginia,” which did not match this description.
The town highway superintendent, John Bistrian, identified them as Holsteins. The Suffolk County Health inspector said they were immature. Incredibly, a young man who worked as a butcher and was out walking his dog in the neighborhood, came upon the investigative group and was able to add more details: This was veal, not yet beef, he said; the cows had been professionally butchered, but the closest slaughterhouse was in New Jersey.
As longtime readers will recall, the real origin of the calves’ heads was both more mundane and more amusing than the fevered speculation. Two renowned chefs who lived in Springs — the New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne and his famous French friend Pierre Franey — had been collaborating on a veal cookbook, and attempting “têtes de veau vinaigrette,” a rare delicacy. They also wanted veal gelatin for a mock turtle soup.
Apparently têtes de veau vinaigrette involved the time-consuming and, I dare say, unpleasant task of removing the skin form the calves’ heads. After an hour of hard effort, the men gave up. Craig’s house was on the King’s Point bluffs over Gardiner’s Bay, and they “tossed them to the gulls,” he explained to the bemused Star reporter. “We presumed we were not polluting the beach; we were feeding the gulls.”