Van Kay Quick, who retired as a captain after a 35-year career in the East Hampton Town Police Department, died at home in Daytona Beach, Fla., on March 1. His death came as a surprise, as he had seemed to be “perfectly healthy,” his wife, Terrie Quick, said.
Mr. Quick, 75, served on the town police force from 1970 until 2005. He received many commendations for his work, including being named officer of the year, and had been a president of the East Hampton Police Benevolent Association and the Police Association of Suffolk County.
When he was promoted to lieutenant, the department moved Mr. Quick to Montauk to oversee its new precinct there. “That was kind of our start to community policing,” recalled Todd Sarris, a former town police chief who served with Mr. Quick throughout his career. Montauk residents had long complained that the hamlet was treated “like an appendage to the Town of East Hampton,” Mr. Sarris said, and the new precinct was one effort to change that. Mr. Quick, he added, “was very well liked and very well thought of” there.
Terrie Quick, who grew up in Montauk, said her husband seemed to know even more people in the hamlet than she did.
Mr. Quick was born on March 23, 1948, in Hanceville, Ala., to Cecil Herman Quick and the former Bobby Nuffman. He grew up in Hanceville and graduated from Hanceville High School. His older brother was stationed in Montauk with the Air Force and also worked for the Duryea lobster company. As a teenager, the younger brother followed the older boy here to work for Duryea’s in the summer.
It was there that he met Terrie Beckwith, whom he married on May 4, 1969. The couple lived in Montauk for two years in an apartment on Main Street and then moved to Springs, where they raised their two sons, Van R. and Steven. They lived there until retiring full time to Florida in 2015.
While living in Montauk, Mr. Quick tended bar in the evenings at the Shagwong Tavern and got to know a number of police officers, which gave him the idea of joining the force himself. He went through the police academy and furthered his education at Suffolk Community College, where he earned an associate’s degree.
“His first arrest was a streaker down Montauk Highway,” Mr. Sarris remembered with a laugh.
Mr. Quick was credited with convincing the Town Police Department to begin computerizing its records in the late 1980s, and he oversaw the effort. “We were skeptical, to say the least,” Mr. Sarris said.
The department had a single Radio Shack TRS-80 computer, but “there was only one secretary here who could operate it, and when she got sick, it sat there for three months without being used,” Mr. Quick told The Star in early 1989. Then-Chief Thomas Scott authorized his training on the new technology through the Board of Cooperative Educational Services. “I began keeping an arrest file on the machine and doing monthly reports, and then I really started hammering the chief to get a more sophisticated system.”
“The computer system was a big deal,” Mr. Sarris said. “It really brought us into the 20th century.” It also allowed Mr. Quick to spearhead the creation of a program that would automatically call elderly or homebound people at a certain time each day to check on them.
Mr. Quick and Mr. Sarris were close both on and off the job. “He was my best friend for almost 35 years,” Mr. Sarris said. “We worked together, we painted houses together, we coached Little League together, we were row cops together, detectives together, we were bosses together, and eventually we ran the department together.”
Among the biggest cases of their earlier tenure was a marijuana bust in the 1980s that “at the time was the biggest drug seizure in the Northeast,” Mr. Sarris said. “We seized a dragger-load of marijuana” off Melina Drive in Northwest Woods, “somewhere around 40,000 pounds.” Mr. Quick, a detective at the time, was “ultimately responsible for identifying the day we thought the shipment was coming in,” having noticed two U-Haul vans parked in the driveway of the house that was under surveillance.
Mr. Quick was also a Mason and a past president of the East Hampton Kiwanis Club.
“He was just a really special individual,” Mr. Sarris said. “If you ever needed him, he was always there.”
In his retirement here, Mr. Quick worked in security for the Maidstone Club and much enjoyed one of the job’s perks: complimentary golf.
The Quicks began wintering in Florida before relocating there full time. Mr. Quick golfed there two or three days a week. He made a great group of friends in Florida and also connected with East End friends who had moved south, his wife said. He was a member of the Eagles, a social club, and of the Moose Lodge.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Quick is survived by his sons Van R. Quick of Smithtown and Steven Quick of Pasadena, Md., and by five grandchildren and his siblings, Jerrel Vikers and Roland Quick of Hanceville.
A celebration of his life was held last month in Daytona Beach. Another service will be held on May 13 at 11 a.m. at the Montauk Community Church. Mr. Quick’s ashes will be interred at Fort Hill Cemetery in Montauk.
Memorial contributions have been suggested to the Wounded Warrior Project, online at woundedwarriorproject.org, or the Tunnels to Towers Foundation, t2t.org.
