Peter Greene once walked into the American Hotel in Sag Harbor wearing a cape and carrying a scepter. Whether that meant he was local bar scene royalty or just a local character out on the town, 30 years later it was the first thing a bartender there mentioned when the name came up.
Never mind the roughneck Black Buoy and the Sandbar, Sag Harbor was a different place in the 1960s into the 1970s — a gas station on seemingly every corner, odd little luncheonettes run by grumpy proprietors, and generally run down.
And that’s why Mr. Greene liked it, back when he first arrived in 1969, having taken a teaching position in the psychology department at Southampton College, a job he believed he was offered because he’d flown his own plane in for the interview. He landed at East Hampton Airport, where he would go on to keep a plane over the next half-century, and found his way down to the Wainscott beach, deciding, after one look, that this was the place to be.
It was at another airport, Gabreski in Westhampton Beach, that Mr. Greene died on Friday of a heart attack. The plane he had parked there was a small four-seater, low-wing Piper Cherokee that he’d been flying for decades. He was 85.
That job at the college didn’t last, but the flying did. A sailor himself, for years the owner of a catamaran and before that a sailboat he dubbed the Yellow Submarine, Mr. Greene became a regular of that scene as well, befriending boat captains and flying them between here and Newport, R.I., among other ports.
After Southampton, he worked in the admissions office at Bennington College in Vermont for a time, and then for a 10-year smoking-cessation study through Boston University called Mr. Fit, for which he moved to Mansfield, Mass., in the later 1970s. Before too long he would sell his mid-19th-century house on Green Street in Sag Harbor Village, which he’d bought in 1969.
Flying not only remained a constant, in the 1980s it became Mr. Greene’s livelihood, prompting a brief crisis of faith having to do with the difficulty of turning something he loved into the way he made money.
He got over it. For years he flew banners up and down the beaches of the South Fork in the summer and South Florida in the winter, an activity akin to an aerial rodeo in which a pilot tosses out behind him a three-pronged hook and then swoops down to snare a nylon rope strung across two fishing poles and attached to a lengthy banner laid out flat, peeling it off the ground as the plane sharply climbs.
And he managed to stay in the Sag Harbor area, in 1991 buying a small cottage on the Bridgehampton-Sag Harbor Turnpike.
Peter Clune Greene was born in Tuxedo Park, N.Y., on Feb. 7, 1939, the younger son of Edwin Greene and the former Mary Catherine Clune.
He grew up in Suffern, N.Y., graduating second in his class in 1957 from Suffern High School, where he was the point guard and captain of the basketball team, holding a scoring record for several decades, quarterback and captain of the football team, and where he set an unofficial school record in the mile that still stands, at 4 minutes and 39 seconds. Late in life he was inducted into the Suffern High School Hall of Fame, joining his father.
He studied psychology at Brown University, graduating in 1961, and at New York University completed all but his dissertation toward a Ph.D. in that discipline, getting awarded a master’s degree for his course work. He landed a teaching job at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., before moving here.
In 1962 he married Jean Lindgren, who now lives in Sagaponack, and they had two sons, Ryder Greene of Portland, Ore., and Baylis Greene of Noyac, who with his wife, Julie Greene, had Mr. Greene’s three grandchildren, Penelope, Griffin, and Bennett.
His first marriage ended in divorce. A second marriage, to Trudy Bialic of Edmonds, Wash., produced a third son, Russell Greene of Edmonds. It also ended in divorce.
He is additionally survived by a brother, Robert Greene of Kamas, Utah, two nieces, Kelly Lamberth of Nashville and Erin Greene of Switzerland, and a nephew, Forrest Greene of Austin, Tex.
Mr. Greene will be cremated and his ashes spread on the water he so enjoyed flying over. A get-together to raise a glass in his memory will be planned at a later date.
