We could all use some good role models … and guess what? We’ve had plenty of local heroes we can celebrate and perhaps even emulate on February 26, which is Set a Good Example Day. First is Richard Gilmartin, seen in front of the Montauk Lighthouse in the photo above. A dedicated historian and sport… Read more »
George Watson bought a dive bar he would later call The Dock from Bob Fitzgerald in 1973 after a handshake deal over 9 a.m. shots of blackberry brandy. “It was a cinderblock building. It was kind of raw looking,” he recalled during an oral history interview late last year. “And one of the first things… Read more »
Is there anything sweeter than a community cookbook? Often compiled to raise money for a good cause, they tend to be stuffed with all manner of extra ingredients. Corny jokes, endearing illustrations, poetry, sage advice, tips for hunting, gathering, and fishing, the names of book committee volunteers and recipes from others fondly remembered, even celebrities… Read more »
“When I struck the Napeague road I thought I had come to the abomination of desolation,” said Florence Sammis in 1967 of her first trip to Montauk, in 1918. Interviewed in 1976, Martha Greene remembered a similarly lonely landscape when she commuted from East Hampton in the 1930s as a secretary for the Montauk Beach… Read more »
Brrrr! Bill Gosman recently donated this icy image to the Montauk Library Archives, along with 16 others depicting activity on the harbor as far back as the 1920s but primarily in the 1940s and ‘50s. Bill is, of course, a member of the Gosman family who over several generations built a popular harborside empire… Read more »
Santa looks like such a contented fellow. The red and green color scheme, the Dalmatian pup, the fishing lures placed inexplicably on top of a drum. Fred Guardineer, the illustrator, lived in Babylon and wrote a “Fish & Game” column for The Babylon Beacon. So what does he have to do with Montauk? Fishing lines… Read more »
“Are you contemplating a ‘good ole summertime’ vacation?” asked a letter to customers of the Wavecrest Motel and Apartments in anticipation of the summer of 1961, which was personally signed by the resort’s owners, Franklin and Lucille Jarmain, as well as their children. “Now is the time to look forward to that special week or… Read more »
This shot from Jane Liebell’s collection of photographs donated to the Montauk Library in 2005 says everything about seasonal celebrations in November: the Girl Scouts are at the firehouse, and have just cooked a delicious Thanksgiving turkey! (Although “the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” as they say.) We know that a Boy… Read more »
Funny – considering it was she who advocated, in “A Room of One’s Own,” for a peaceful, quiet space to write – that it was Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that made it possible to provide just such a space for writers and visual artists here in Montauk. In the 1960s, after Albee… Read more »
A friend wrote recently to ask if there were ghosts at the Montauk Manor. About 20 years ago, he said, his sister and her husband stayed in a room on one of the upper floors — perhaps one built into the roof level, as she remembered a sloped ceiling – in the massive, four-story landmark…. Read more »