BONACKERS GATHER IN FLORIDA for the 10th Year in a row.

On Saturday, March 2nd, 80 present and former East Hampton residents gathered at Pete’s Restaurant in Boca Raton, FL for the 10th Annual Bonacker Reunion. Bill Bain, the former owner of Rowe’s Pharmacy in East Hampton, paid tribute to Margaret Nugent, widow of Dr. Paul Nugent who served the community for several generations. Bill recalled some stories from his childhood memories of the Nugent family. Mrs. Nugent, who is living in a retirement home in Sarasota, FL, was 105 on March 21st. Everyone present at the reunion signed a birthday card, which Bill planned to present to her.

Dorothy Jones, age 92, who taught kindergarten in East Hampton for 35 years, surrounded by some of her former students. Left to Right: Top Row: Bill Bain, Brad Leddy, Center Row: Mary Jane Anderson, Susan Leddy Idy, Kay Lycke, Dorothy Jones, Frances Bain, Pat LaCarrubba, Bottom Row: Barbara Darenberg, Linda Leddy.

TEAM SPORTS…
played a big role in the lives of East Hampton’s youth and young adults. Here are some of their stories

James Amaden, ca 1927, in his baseball uniform, in front of his mother’s house on Mill Hlll Lane.

EHHS 1945 Basketball Team

Top L to R: Craig Bell, John McGuirk, Bruce Collins, Paul Cook, Manager Stanley Bergman.
Bottom L to R: Bob McDonald, Carl Erickson, Donald McDonald, Richard Flach

We used to sneak in the school on Sunday afternoons and play basketball all afternoon. They worry about the youth today. In my time they didn’t worry about the youth. If you did something wrong, you paid the price. But we used to go down the school on Sunday afternoons in the winter, gonna play ball. I’d come down the street, same time every Sunday, almost two o’clock, and I’d see Anthony Bedell, the [Village] Chief of Police, walkin’ the other way. So we’d get in the school and nobody ever figured out how we ever got in there. But, uh, we made it, though. He came in and he said, ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we better go in and take a look and see if the boys are in there. They’re not supposed to be there.’ So that’s in the old school where the gym was, there was two platforms and the doors on both sides of these have swingin’ doors on the end where you went down to the locker room. We’d go in there and, uh, two doors would be swingin’ (laughter), two or three basketballs rollin’ around on the floor and he’d say in a loud voice, ‘Well, I guess there’s nobody here. (laughter) I guess I’ll go. I’ll come back in a couple hours and see if anybody’s in here.’ And we knew that we had another couple hours of play, and in a couple hours he’d be back and make the same speech.”…Walter Sheades

“Casper Rowe’s son, Eddie, was about a year older than me, and he played football with Johnny Gilmartin and that bunch down there. We had a good team. And he said, ‘Every time you win, you come down and have a soda on me.’ So, of course, we’d sneak in a couple of times, you know, but then we expanded it to the baseball team, and, eventually he took care of the whole basketball team.”…Donald “Gunk” Gibbons

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“Gunk” holding his 1938 East Hampton Fire Department shirt. On the back it says “Bonackers.

From a Slide
Show given by FRANK DAYTON:

“Next slide. Now this is the baseball field there, right where the East Hampton Medical Group is today. These are all horses there, watching the game. All the horses around, facing around, looking at the game. How about that! Everybody drove their horse and buggy down to look at the baseball game.” (Photographs of the game and the 1910 baseball team are available at the East Hampton Library. See Frank’s granddaughter, Diana Dayton, who is the Librarian of the Long Island Collection and an Advisor to The History Project.)

HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
CONTINUES TO GROW

In March, an additional 12 completed interviews and an updated index were deposited with the Long Island Pennypacker Collection of the East Hampton Library. This brings to 132 the number of transcribed and indexed interviews in The Collection along with 945 accompanying photographs and other printed material donated by our subjects. We still have 48 interviews to transcribe. We would like to complete the project by mid-2003, funding permitting.