This week’s Throwback Thursday gets much explanation from the description that also appears in the image, information that was supplied by Gert Murphy, who donated the photograph and who also, unknowingly, donated the clothes to her sister, Peggy Murphy Connery.
Kevin McCann, a photographer who grew up in Montauk, is currently doing research on the windmill houses of Montauk. He remembers passing this statue as a youngster, bicycling along the cliff paths. One of those paths is visible in the inset photograph. A second Native American statue appeared on the other side of this estate.
Kevin lost a large body of his photographic work, as other artists did, to the fire that tragically took down Peter Beard’s house and barn (the barn was used to store photographic negatives, etc.). This fire is explained in the handwritten caption that appears in the framed photograph.
Reconstructing the history of the Sandpiper Hill (Rheinstein/Beard) residence is allowing McCann to resurrect a missing portion of his past. And although Peggy Murphy Connery is no longer with us, her sister Gert is very much alive. She recently donated a great piece of ephemera to the archives: her work contract with White’s Drugstore from the 1950s.
3 Comments
I am trying to recall-was Dan Rattiner son of the pharmacist at White’s?
Yes
Yes. His parents were the nicest people to me and my wife who was from montauk. We were very young and no money and when we needed a prescription filled and couldn’t pay for it they just wrote what we owed on a piece of paper and told us to pay when we could. I was stationed at the Air Force radar site.