The contemplative young woman in this postcard turns out to be Diane Duca Delprete, now 78 and living in New Jersey. She was about 13 or 14 when the photograph was taken in the 1950s, one of three decades when her family would spend two weeks each summer camping at Hither Hills State Park.
“It was an experience – it was our only vacation for all my growing years,” Diane said on the phone this week. Square-dancing, playground swings, the campground’s general store, all good memories. Even after she married at age 19, Diane continued to enjoy family vacations at Hither Hills.
When she was a child she and her parents and baby brother, Eugene, would travel from the Bronx, packing a tent, cots and blankets, an icebox, and a folding table and chairs. Diane would help her father pitch the tent, and they’d collect cold water in buckets: “You made your breakfast with that water [and] my mother used to bathe my brother in that water,” Diane said. She still remembers how scratchy the woolen Army blankets were and that she fought with Eugene for a flannel one.
Diane didn’t know how to swim – still doesn’t – and got clobbered by an ocean wave one time. “I was literally churning in the water, upside down and going over and over,” she said. A lifeguard pulled her out by her swimsuit straps. “Had he not been there I would have been a goner.” After that she and Eugene were allowed to swim only in the bay.
Diane’s family was at the campground when Hurricane Carol made landfall in 1954. Fearing that the ocean would overtake them — at one point it did breach the dunes and road, meeting the bay — they fled by car with only their blankets. They spent the night in the parking lot of the A&P in Amagansett, were turned away at the campground the next day, and then returned after spending one more night at a cottage in Amagansett.
“All the tents were up in the hills … except our tent didn’t go up,” she said.
By “the hills” Diane meant the spot where she is seen in the postcard perched on a stone wall. She remembers that day: “I was wearing my mother’s blouse. That’s why I looked a little baggy.”
“I was sitting up there just to relax and look at the ocean,” she said, noting how beautiful it was. “Our tent was right down those steps to the left.” (In the photo it’s the second tent east of the shingled bathroom, with a blue car in front).
“It was just a place where you could think, think about what you were going to do in the future … other than that, it was a quiet place because in a tent it wasn’t that quiet.”
“A woman came up to me,” Diane recalled this week. “She was walking down the steps. She stopped and asked, Can I take your picture? She said, Stay as you are.”
The photographer later introduced herself to Diane’s mother and father and said, “You’ll see this picture sometime in the future.”
“Her words were true,” Diane said. The photo became a postcard whose flip side credits Louis Dormand as the photographer. Diane said she was surprised to “see myself again” when the Montauk Library published a local history blog post featuring the photo in 2021.
Diane said she would love to get back to Montauk someday. The beaches in New Jersey, she said, are simply not the same.
Reply or Comment