The History Project News Letter

TRANSCRIPTIONS PROCEEDING AT AN EXCELLENT PACE

Michelle Allison, the new employee of The Pennypacker Long Island Collection of the East Hampton Library began helping us transcribe our taped interviews last November. Michelle comes to us highly qualified for this work. She has a BFA from Parsons School of Design, majoring in crafts and textiles and was Director of the Center for the History of American Needlework in Pittsburgh, which involved doing oral history about textiles and their makers and “grassroots” history in general. She has lived in Springs for 5 years and is an artist and herbalist.

Michelle has become a dedicated fan of The Project and tells us that she is enjoying her work very much. She comes in each morning, anxious to hear more of the taped lives of our subjects. She said it’s exciting because she never knows what she will hear from day to day.

To date, 35 transcribed and indexed interviews have been donated to the library, along with 383 historical photographs and other items of printed material. 130 more interviews remain to be transcribed, indexed and added to the collection, along with over 1000 additional photographs.

Your continued support is needed.

Even with the library’s help, we still need funds to cover our expenses, which include tapes, batteries, paper, computer supplies and other administrative costs.

THE TOWN OF EAST HAMPTON AND NEWSDAY CONTINUE THEIR SUPPORT OF THE HISTORY PROJECT.

The Town Board has announced that The History Project will be included in the Town’s 2000 budget, for the third year in a row. We are extremely grateful for their continuing support.

Newsday has renewed its $500 grant for the coming year and we look forward to more articles featuring the lives of East Hampton residents.

FROM THE DIRECTOR….

Nowadays, the phenomenon of celebrity races across the landscape like a time-lapse photography shadow, darkening everything in its path. What level of saturation by a population with seven figure incomes and private screening rooms will it take before the process of local legend-making is snuffed out? Or has it already happened? Once, in small towns like ours, there were heroes and legends walking the earth. In fact, the more local people I talk to as part of The History Project, the more it seems to me that the world we lived in back then was one of mythical proportions.

There are people we remember that were larger than life in a way that could never be duplicated by the contrivances of contemporary media hype. Harry Steele. Kip Farrington. Jimmy Reutershan. Babe Erickson...”Doctor Dave” Edwards. We had local cowboys. And we had rum-running heroes, like Budd King, and his cast of thousands (or at least dozens) of adventure-loving local Robin Hoods. We had legendary swordfishermen like Johnny Erickson; Carl Erickson, and his father-in-law, Harry Conklin. Many of those harpooners had heard the stories of offshore whaling, a heroic way to make a living by any stretch. And we have our own cadre of “Greatest Generation” heroes who encircled the world fighting bravely in the Second World War.

Earlier this winter, Mickey and I were sitting with Mary Louise and Bucket Daniels watching the Christmas boat parade on the Intracoastal Waterway outside our new home in Delray Beach. I’d been on a spy kick, having recently read a book about the Whittaker Chambers case. Bucket allowed as how they sold their house in East Hampton to Isabel Johnson, Alger Hiss’ girlfriend; and how Hiss ended up living in Bucket’s old home. This hit me as only one exciting example of how our local people’s lives intersected at times with those of people at the center of earthshaking events.

My hope is that future generations will use The History Project as a bridge back to this fascinating time in East Hampton’s history.

……Tony Prohaska

TWO MORE YEARS OF WORK AHEAD

At the end of 1999, we completed our second year of work on The History Project and although we would like to interview a few more people, we are substantially finished with that stage of our work. We expect transcriptions, editing and indexing to go on for another two years, well into 2001, until we have all 165 interviews, or more, and their accompanying photographs and printed material in the East Hampton Library Long Island Collection.

RECOLLECTIONS
Eleanor Rae Hall, (Born 1926) recalls how self-sufficient local people were in the 30's and 40's.

"So in the summer we always dug clams and we had an iron stake out there, just far enough out so that when the tide was low you could…the ground wouldn't be exposed but you could walk out there with your boots and dig your clams up from around the stake. And during the winter that's what we did. When it was miserable, too miserable to go dig clams, we just had to go dig em from around the stake, because they don't move, of course. And when it was time to go pick up scallops, we went to Lake Montauk or down to Hands Creek and we picked scallops. And wow, there were scallops there. What do you know? And there wasn't any brown tide and there wasn't any red tide. There were scallops. And then when we wanted oysters we did the same thing. We either went down to Montauk or we went down to Hands Creek and we walked along the shore when the tide was low and right down the rocks were the oysters. It was wonderful.

And then in the spring, we went in the woods when the blueberries were on the low bushes and we picked blueberries. And along about August or September we went down to Napeague by the towers or down near the camp and we picked the highbush ones. And in between there, somewhere in July we went down to Montauk and picked blackberries. And later in the fall, about September to October, we picked beach plums. And a little later still we went and gleaned cranberries.

Uncle Joe (Zenger) always had a very big garden. When we lived on Abram's Path we had all that space between the house that the Ryans now live in and the railroad track. And the new chicken house was up in the back. It's still there. And all that space in between was garden. Big space.

The chicken farm, we sold chickens. I can remember him coming home from work at the gas station, at Corwin's on Newtown Lane and be out there in the dark dressing and picking chickens. And we had this special Frigidaire with the thing on the top. Funny thing on the top, in the back entry to keep the chickens until people came to pick em up. And also eggs. And then there was a gas stove out there where they heated the water to scald the chickens.

Uncle Joe always used to go shoot ducks, and Dr. Doris even went when she was grown. She loved to go with her father and go duck hunting. And, we ate ducks, wild ducks and geese. We canned coot. Now maybe we canned other kinds of ducks too, but we also canned coot. Now most folks wouldn't touch coot with a ten-foot pole. But Aunt Maude used to dress them. She'd just take the breasts and maybe the legs. Took away the skin, cause the skin is where the worst taste is, I guess. And, there's not much of anything on the remainder of the carcass anyway. So we'd have the two breasts and the two legs. And Aunt Maude would parboil em and, with an onion in the water, I think, and maybe some baking soda. And maybe she soaked them before hand. I'm not sure. It's quite possible that she soaked them in brine before hand. Anyway, she parboiled them and then she used to brown them in the skillet and then she used to pack em in the jars and process em. And there's a many a one I've eaten.

And we canned tuna. Uncle John (Sweeting), Lois' (Winslow) father, who captained the boats for private fishermen. He would bring, he had a little pickup truck and he would come like with two fishes that absolutely filled that truck up. And Aunt Maude would can all she wanted and the rest of it went to the dump. But as long as it was available, we always went down to the dock. Because once the chaps had their picture taken with it, that's all they cared and so we canned it. And so we lived off the land, you might say. We really did. And Uncle Joe shot rabbits too."