The History Project News Letter

FIRST GROUP OF TRANSCRIPTS DONATED TO THE EAST HAMPTON LIBRARY

     "One year ago all we had was a grant proposal and a dream," said Martha Kalser on December 5th, when the first group of transcribed and cross-indexed oral history interviews were presented to the Pennypacker Long Island Collection during a reception hosted by the East Hampton Library. The presentation consisted of 30 audio tapes, representing 26 interviews, and 232 pictures and other items of printed material donated by the interview subjects.
     The reception was attended by about 100 people including members of the East Hampton Library Society, the benefactors and sponsors of The History Project, members of its Board of Advisors and other invited guests, including Supervisor Cathy Lester and Lyn McDonald, Cablevision's Director of Community Affairs.
    In attendance were many of the people whose interviews were turned over to the Pennypacker Long Island Collection, including Lib Davis, Lee Hayes, Carleton Kelsey, Norma Edwards, Sherrill Foster, and Hatter and Al Pontick who were represented by their son Bud.

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Martha Kalser (above) acknowledged that The Project owes its greatest debt to the many people who have shared their stories in the 115 interviews conducted to date. She stated, "They've given us more than anyone else could."

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L. to R. Ann Chapman, Tony Prohaska, Dick Wolf

     Also donated were interviews with Perry Duryea, Peter Garnham, Tony Duke, Shank Dickinson, Russ Hadel, John Erickson, Everett Miller, Barbara DiSunno, Carl Jennett, Sue Steele, Abigail Field and E. Monroe Osborne.
     Ann Chapman hosted the reception for The East Hampton Library and welcomed the guests. Tony Prohaska told the gathering about his original concept for the Project. Mr. Prohaska's speech is reprinted in this Newsletter. Martha Kalser introduced Dick Wolf, The History Project's award-winning videographer and then thanked all of the people who were so generous to the project with their time, advice and contributions.
     After the presentation, Mrs. Chapman led a group of interested guests on a tour of the Pennypacker Collection.

REPRINT OF REMARKS BY
TONY PROHASKA AT DECEMBER 5TH
EAST HAMPTON LIBRARY RECEPTION

     Now that we've done a year's worth of interviews and are making our first presentation to the library, I'm glad to report that our project is becoming everything I thought it could be.
     I have to say that I'm having a great time doing it. This is something I've always wanted to do.
     We began the project knowing that oral history has a long tradition and that recorded, archival oral history is a large and growing field. There are many people who pointed the way for us. Years ago my mother gave me a small book of letters by an ancestor named Gene Schermerhorn. The introduction was written by Brendan Gill and began my interest in connecting personal history to the larger world. Mr. Gill wrote, "Every scrap of the past is worth preserving, and not least for this reason: that from one generation to the next we can never be certain whether the value of a given object -- a coin, a book, a bundle of old letters, is great or small." He goes on to say... "Voices are perhaps the most precious souvenirs of the past that we inherit."
     The work of Adelaide DeMenil and Peter Matthiessen in their book Men's Lives, which focused on one segment of our population, has been a great inspiration. More recently, the 350th Anniversary Committee produced Vic Teich's wonderful video and is about to publish Averill Geus' new book. Both ventures include a broad historical sweep.
     I admit I had some high-minded thoughts while I was conceiving this project. One was that each region, or place, has a collective voice; a voice that could be heard if a large enough cross-section of its people could be recorded. I realized that our project, to be professional and legitimate, could not be primarily creative. We had to, in fact, be true to oral history guidelines and to the population and the times. Its goal must be to inform rather than to entertain.
     I felt that if those of us who have lived the 20th Century in East Hampton could be held in an extended conversation with one person with a consistent point of view (in my case one of unabashed affection), it would create a coherent narrative similar to that of an epic novel. I think I was right.
     Even allowing that some individuals have probably gotten some facts wrong; that most everyone has left something out; something painful, something they considered shameful; or maybe just something they found too embarrassing; or even something not considered important enough; I think there is an essential honesty in all of these stories. It isn't just that in a sense all history is fiction, or that all good fiction is at least in some sense true. It's more than that. The people in these transcribed recordings and videos and photographs, all wanted deeply to pass on their experiences and knowledge; the humor, the struggles, and the occasional heroics of their lives.
     I'm grateful to everyone who has helped us come as far as we have.

RECOLLECTIONS ...

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Ed Osborne, age 93, remembers that years ago there was a trotting track on Long Lane. "I used to sit between my father's knees in the sulky when he took practice runs around the track. In winter, they raced their sleighs on Main St., usually starting at Newtown Lane and ending at the flagpole. It was a dirt road then and there were no cars around to bother them. It was really a sight to see those horses sleigh bells and clots of snow flying.

RECOLLECTIONS ...

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Perry Duryea tells about the day his mother was ready to give birth to him. "She called Dr. Dave(Edwards) and said, 'I think I'm ready to deliver. Why don't you come on down?' In those days the highway from Amagansett to Montauk was cinder, it wasn't paved. So, Dr. Dave sped in his car to the house and looked her over and said , 'Well, you have a while to wait, so I'm gonna take my shotgun and go down to Oyster Pond and kill a black duck or two."

In 1983, my mother gave me a book. It was a compilation of old letters that had been found in an attic in New York City. The letters were from a man named Gene Schermerhorn to his nephew. They described New York during the mid-1800's. Schermerhorn was a relative of my mother. The book, LETTERS TO PHIL, Memories of a New York Boyhood, 1948-1856, began my interest in connecting personal history to the larger world.

The introduction to the book was by Brendan Gill and his words are the perfect preamble to The History Project. I would like to share some of them with you.

Tony Prohaska
Project Director

RECOLLECTIONS ...

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Dr. Al Pontick remembers... "One of the last picturesque scenes about the dairy business was the Goulds (On Toilsome Lane). They'd have a pasture on the other side of the road and they'd drive their cows from the barn, across the road to the pasture in the morning. And all the cars had to stop and see 50 cows go over to the pasture. And about 4 o'clock in the afternoon, milking time, all the cars would stop and they loved stopping and seeing all those nice cows there."

TRIP TO FLORIDA FOR BONACKER
REUNION

In January, we will be returning to Florida to do as many interviews as we can with former residents of East Hampton who have retired there and to again attend the Bonacker Reunion in March. On the way down we plan to stop in North Carolina to interview Charlie Keyes, Louise Edwards and possibly Dave Mulford. While we are in Florida we will be travelling to the west coast to interview Carl Erickson, Jr.

Some others we plan to see are:

Carl Dordelman	Janet Dordelman
Florence Miller Reed	Larry Gourlay
Elsie Edwards	Ruth King
Dick Edwards	Ted & Dorry Lyons
Ward Freese	Albert Cavagnaro
Jarvis Collins	Helen Loper
Shep Frood	Donald Gibbons
Emmett Gosman	Leon Rauscher
Sam Lester	Russell Hislip

If you have relatives or friends in Florida that you think we should see, please give us a call and let us know about them.

RECOLLECTIONS ...

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Hatter Pontick, wife of Dr. Al Pontick recalls when Lee Krasner said they couldn't pay their bill and she said, "Would you take one of my husband's paintings for your bill?" And you came down and talked to me about it and I said, "Al I don't want one of those paintings." And we turned it down flat. They did the same thing to Ed Cook when he was alive. They brought a picture in and asked Ed if he'd take it for the bill And Ed said, "Heck, I can do better than that."

ANNUAL FUND RAISING DRIVE

Those of you who are sponsors of The History Project will find our annual fund-raising appeal letter enclosed. We hope that you were pleased with our first year's results and that you will continue to support us as we enter our second year.

The Town of East Hampton has renewed our grant for 1999 and new corporate contributors for next year include North Fork Bank and the Bank of New York. We are ending 1998 with a deficit of $3,000, which we hope to make up in 1999.

We look forward to continuing our interviews and transcriptions during 1999, and toward the end of the year we expect to begin production of our interactive CD-ROM which will contain the transcribed interviews, photographs and other printed material, audio and video clips of our subjects and the index.

INTERVIEWS, INTERVIEWS, INTERVIEWS!

As our first year draws to a close, we are proud to say that we have completed 115 interviews including 16 videotapes. Now that we have presented the first of the collection to the East Hampton Library, we will continue to transcribe and index the remaining interviews and we will add them to the library collection at regular intervals. We still have a long list of people to interview and many more interviews to transcribe. So ... we plan to keep working on this project for at least another year or two.

Martha Kalser
Project Manager