“Ms. Crasky’s long life was chronicled in the pages of The Star,” the East Hampton weekly noted in its obituary for Josephine Crasky after her death, at age 101, in April of this year.
The obituary listed a number of examples: “an announcement of the Amagansett School’s 1939 commencement exercises, a 1942 note about her wedding and another, the following year, on the birth of her daughter, and a 1959 report on the American Legion Auxiliary in Amagansett, where she served for more than 66 years, among many.”
Ms. Crasky clipped such items from local newspapers, preserving them in scrapbooks along with programs, bulletins, newsletters, calendars, and other memorabilia she collected. The Amagansett Presbyterian Church played a particularly significant role in her life.
“Ed started attending our church, and after a time we two Catholics became proud Presbyterians, and on March 30, 1958, joined the church,” she wrote in a commemorative bulletin. “There is love in our small church. We both found a home away from home and all the love that we needed. It has helped me through all these years.”
Josephine lived through the Depression, the Hurricane of 1938, and World War II. She spent most of her years in Amagansett, where she met Edwin Crasky, who went on to become a longtime civilian employee at the Montauk Air Force Station. After her husband’s death in 1996, Josephine lived for 10 years in Montauk with their daughter, Sheila Ray, who died in 2023.
Josephine had worked at her father’s farmstand and as a housekeeper, an Avon saleslady, for the Amagansett Farmers Market, and for the pianist Tsuya Matsuki, who was featured in at least one of the clippings in one of Josephine’s scrapbooks. The bayman Stuart Vorpahl, the Amagansett Life-Saving Station, Amagansett’s early Italian settlers, the Montauk developer Carl Fisher, and the old fishing village on Montauk’s Fort Pond Bay were among the other subjects she took time to chronicle.
Ms. Crasky was repeatedly recognized by East Hampton Town officals for her community spirit and her longevity, including on her 100th birthday. In June of 2017, when she was 93, The Star was taken to task when it failed to print a photo taken at an “Over 90 Party” at the East Hampton Senior Citizens Center.
“The generation that was celebrated is also the generation that has kept scrapbooks of events for decades,” Nancy Peppard wrote in a letter to the editor that Josephine also scissored from the paper. “Those books do not include printouts from the internet; they are browned with age from articles found in newspapers.”
The looked-for photo did appear the following week in The Star, however, and it was clipped and preserved just as Nancy Peppard had predicted. (And so was a Senior Citizens Center calendar featuring Josephine Crasky in a July Fourth vest.)
Josephine gave the Montauk Library scans of 37 photographs that her husband had taken at the Montauk Air Force Station in 1980, one year before it closed for good. When she moved from Montauk to the East Hampton home of her friends Mary and Kyle Vorpahl, where she stayed until the end of her life, she also donated five neatly organized scrapbooks, booklets, and similar remembrances. Commemorating almost a century of milestones, her memorabilia offers a window into the life of a single centenarian as well as people in the community who surrounded her.
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