125 Years Ago 1899
From The East Hampton Star, July 28
While reports of heavy yield, superior quality and ready sale at high figures for potatoes come from the eastern towns of Suffolk county, market gardeners on the western portion of Long Island will harvest only about one-third of their average yield. They are further disheartened by the fact that the tubers are much under size and unable to compete with the product of Southern states and so must be sold for fully 25 per cent less than their eastern brothers receive for theirs.
—
Snipe shooters on Hook pond and at Three Mile Harbor, over on the north shore, as well as those who wander over the bays and ponds at Montauk, are having fairly good sport this season. Fire lighting for soft shell crabs on Three Mile Harbor and other north shore inlets is a form of sport enjoyed on pleasant evenings. The crabs are attracted by a blazing fire on the boat's bow and rise to the surface in great numbers. Hundreds are caught this way in nets where but few can be taken by spearing.
100 Years Ago 1924
From The East Hampton Star, July 25
To Otto C. Temple, night operator at the local wireless station, should go the credit for first receiving the S.O.S. call from the steamer Boston, which was rammed Monday night by the tanker Swift Arrow, off Point Judith. Four persons were killed in the staterooms, which occupied the space where the great hole was made in the side of the Boston. Mrs. Oscar Green, Brooklyn bride, on her honeymoon trip, was killed.
Mr. Temple was the first to receive the steamer's call for assistance and he immediately issued the order to other broadcasting stations to keep quiet while he broadcasted the location of the distressed steamer.
—
Charles S. Stewart, son-in-law of Gilbert Bennett of this village, was arrested last Saturday for stealing Raymond Mott's Ford touring car from in front of the playground, on Newtown lane. The car was found abandoned on the Bridgehampton road, west of Esp's garage, with one tire flat. Stewart had used the automobile until it was disabled and then caught a ride back to East Hampton.
He had been out of Riverhead jail for about a week, where he served a thirty day jail sentence for disorderly conduct. At that time he appropriated a car for his own use.
He was taken Saturday before Judge Edwards, charged with grand larceny in the second degree. This will be a grand jury case.
75 Years Ago 1949
From The East Hampton Star, July 28
Detectives, working on the Southampton station robbery since July 7, have so far been unable to bring the culprits to justice. In their legitimate questioning, however, the investigators, failing to fasten the crime on anyone, conducted a hearing in such an unseemly and insulting manner that it gave the impression that they accused the station employees there.
—
Miss Adaline M. Sherrill, Cook Book Committee chairman for the Ladies' Village Improvement Society, is mailing out this week 71 copies of the Cook Book on one order — from Melville G. Penrose, Democratic State Chairman of Texas; he lives in Fort Worth. Mr. Penrose wrote Miss Sherrill that he had been in East Hampton on the Fourth of July and had read the "Three Hundredth Anniversary Cook Book" with keen relish. He enclosed a check and the names of 71 people living in Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Wyoming, California, Missouri, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and Mexico, to whom he wished to send the book.
50 Years Ago 1974
From The East Hampton Star, July 25
Complaints poured in all day Monday to the office of East Hampton Town Supervisor Judith Hope, and to the Star, that a low-flying helicopter was blanketing the Montauk area with dense black spray. The spray, said the irate callers, had settled upon the vegetables, their drapes and their dogs; what was it, and who was responsible?
Some answers, though not all, were forthcoming by late afternoon. The spray was not, as many people had feared, Diazinon, a controversial chemical whose use here against ticks has been held up pending a State investigation into its effects upon wildlife. It was Dibrom 14, sometimes called Naled, an organophosphate "contact" poison used to kill mosquitoes.
—
Several dozen 50-gallon drums of poison were seen lying around in Bridgehampton and Sagaponack last week. At least five of them, empty ones found south of Sagaponack Road near Sagg Swamp, had contained Vorlex, a soil fumigant which, according to Ian Marceau, director of the Group for America's South Fork, contains "a cyanide derivative." When injected into the ground, Dr. Marceau said, Vorlex "releases some form of cyanide gas."
Six more cans full of D-D, which like Vorlex includes "various chlorinated hydrocarbons," were sitting on the Town right-of-way at the corner of Potato Road and Daniels Lane, he said, and "if a car had run off the road, and they used that road as a speedway, it would have released this stuff into the atmosphere."
—
A judge told the East Hampton Town Planning Board Friday that it should have held a public hearing before approving, last February, a six-lot subdivision in Amagansett known as "Principi Park," and that its approval was therefore invalid.
25 Years Ago 1999
From The East Hampton Star, July 29
In a community where houses rent for six figures during the summer, a dearth of pocket change would hardly seem to matter.
But bank branch managers who order weekly allotments of coins from the Federal Reserve in New York are keeping their fingers crossed that a recent shortage of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters does not get worse.
"Each week, they call us and reduce the amount of coins we are going to be receiving," Margaret Meighan, the manager of the Bridgehampton National Bank's East Hampton branch. "This week we ordered an incredible amount with the hope that they would not reduce as much."
The plan did not work. While a recent order for $3,000 in dimes went unfilled, the bank was told this week it would only receive $1,000 of its $5,000 request for dimes. A similar shortage has affected other coins.
—
A 24-day-old piping plover chick was found crushed in a tire track on the ocean beach between Main Beach and Georgica Beach in the Lily Pond section of East Hampton Village last week. Authorities believe it happened late at night on July 20, or early on July 21.
The "taking" of the endangered bird, the second on the East End so far this summer, has reportedly got the United States Attorney's office piping hot and threatening drastic action.
"I got the call the other day, and to tell you the truth I wasn't taking it very seriously at first," Harold Bennett, East Hampton Trustee Clerk, reported to his board Tuesday night.
After all, the Trustees had done their part by agreeing to have the stretch of beach in question fenced to protect plover chicks until they fledge, with signs on the fences to warn beach drivers and pedestrians.
