As I sifted through competing recollections recently about a mysterious shark fin in Town Pond almost 50 years ago — read about it separately in this week's edition — I thought about my own memories, more recent ones at that, of my first six months, almost to the day, of reporting for The East Hampton Star.
I'm lucky. When I was younger, I would occasionally walk from the Southampton School Intermediate School to the Southampton Press office, where my mother has worked for some 30 years. Walking in, the newsroom was filled with an eclectic and funky set of people, in all the best ways. (At least, that's how a curious middle schooler with an active imagination saw it.)
Now, I am one of them, and while there are more hard parts to the job than I imagined when I was 12, the camaraderie is certainly not one of them.
On Election Day, for instance, I was at an event for Suffolk County Republicans until around 1 a.m. Reporters from outlets large and small descended on the Patchogue music club, all running on pizza and coffee. I made eye contact with one toward the end of the night who muttered something which, suffice it to say, indicated she had just had enough for one day. I laughed. To borrow the oft-maligned Covid-19 cliché, we were all in it together.
Speaking of memories, my father worked for The Southampton Press — where he met my mother in 1995 — and The Waterbury Republican-American back in the day, before moving on to greener, though often more stressful, pastures.
Now, however, he is at the Central Pine Barrens Commission, and I recently went to the commission's Westhampton office to discuss the effect the fall drought might have on wildfires with its expert on the subject. After the interview, I spoke to my father outside.
For him, everything had come full circle: I was reporting on the probability of a future wildfire right across the street from where, 29 years ago, he had covered the Westhampton wildfire that decimated the Central Pine Barrens preserve, where he now works.
No doubt, 30 years had passed, and things had changed — newsrooms are smaller, for one — but there's some strange comfort in holding overlapping memories, in being able to think back to the past for guidance.
So, as I thought earlier this week about memories and parsed some from 50 years ago, trying to handle the feeling that I made a mistake by neglecting to make a phone call, my father offered an insight from one of his editors many years ago: When things like that happen, it's just a reminder that you have an important job.
Three decades later, people still care, and that makes the job worth doing.
Jack Motz is a reporter at The Star.