PETER BOODY PHOTO | Author Mac Griswold at the side door of the Sylvester Manor House.

Life prepared writer Mac Griswold to tell the world about Shelter Island’s historical gem, Sylvester Manor, the pickled-in-time plantation founded in the 17th century and occupied until 2006 by direct descendants of the founding family and their spouses.

Her latest book, “The Manor: Three Centuries at a Slave Plantation on Long Island,” just released on July 2 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, promises to spread the word to a wider world about what historians — the few who know about it — have called the only intact slave plantation north of the Mason Dixon line.

When she was a little girl in the 1950s growing up in the rolling terrain of north central New Jersey, Mac Johnston Keith would walk the two miles to Far Hills Country Day from her home near Bernardsville and along her way see the hulking estates of the last century’s industrialists and bankers, overgrown with vines and trees poking up through what had once been gardens, landscaped knolls and tennis courts.

“There were all these castles and towers and some were in ruins,” Mac, 70, explained during a chat this week at Sylvester Manor. “I explored them until I went away to boarding school in Virginia at age 12.”

She knew from her story-telling father that she sprang from a Southern family that had owned a great estate, too, a place with many slaves.
Over the generations, the Keiths lost wealth and clout: by the mid-19th century, they were drifting west, where land was cheaper. By the time her father was born, the family was based in Texas. (Mac, his mother’s name, isn’t short for anything.)

Mr. Keith was determined to make up for the family’s lost fortunes and he succeeded, making a fortune in the oil business, marrying a Boston-bred runway model who would give Mac her classically refined good looks, and sending his kids to Far Hills Country Day, where Mac learned to fox hunt on horseback and, on foot, run the school’s basset hounds after hares.

A knowledge of the land, a raw nerve about slavery, a sense of wonder for history, and a fascination with old gardens and landscapes as reflections of their times and cultures would all turn Mac into a landscape historian who is now well known for her books.

They include the landmark “Washington’s Garden at Mount Vernon: Landscape of the Inner Man,” as well as “Pleasure of the Garden: Images from the Metropolitan Museum of Art” and “Golden Age of American Gardens: Proud Owners, Private Estates.”

In the newest book, based on decades of research into family archives as well as evidence scattered from Boston to London, she tells the long story of the manor and its occupants, including those who labored for the Sylvester family.

She also tells how she discovered the place. Out in the Hamptons on a summer day in 1984, a friend took Mac — by then a divorcée with two daughters and the married name of Griswold, working for the Library of America — to Shelter Island, where they rowed a dinghy across Dering Harbor to Gardiner’s Creek. He wanted her to see something he knew she’d find astounding.

Coming to the head of the Creek, Mac spied boxwoods so gigantic she knew they must have been very old.  “A mudbank lies ahead,” she writes in the book, “lurking under shallow water, and we get stuck, briefly. It is only when we steer into the tide channel, stirring up silty brown clouds in the water as we pole ourselves with the oars, that we first see the big yellow house. From its hip roof and its brick chimneys to its well-proportioned bulk, the house quietly acknowledges its18th-century origins. I’m in a time warp.”

Mac learned who lived there — Sylvester descendant Andrew Fiske and his wife Alice — and wrote, asking for a chance to meet them. She became friends with both and worked with Alice, after Andrew died, to start the Sylvester Manor Project, an effort to document the estate and preserve its archives, under the auspices of the Shelter Island Historical Society. Through the process of having the ancient gardens surveyed to illustrate an article Mac was writing for the New England Journal of Garden History, she made connections to an archeologist at the University of Massachusetts, to which Alice eventually would give $650,000 to found its Andrew Fisk Memorial Center for Archeology.

About that time, Mac was working on her book about Washington’s Mount Vernon gardens. “That’s when I first got the picture of how slavery and the gardens were interconnected,” she said. “Every time Washington said ‘I did this,’ he meant the 300 people working for him did it.”

“That made me think of my visit to the manor in 1984,” she said, after the Fiskes had invited her over. “I was in the front parlor and I asked Andy where that door led and he said, ‘It goes to the slaves’ quarters.”

One of several differences between a Southern plantation and a Northern one, she said, was that slaves didn’t live in cabins on the grounds but up on the third floor, in the attic, as they did at Sylvester Manor.

She began her research for the book in earnest in 1997. In addition to poring through the vast Sylvester Manor family archives, most of which have been donated to New York University, the rest to the Shelter Island Historical Society, she traveled to Amsterdam, where manor founder Nathanial Sylvester lived for a time, to Africa to better understand the history of slavery and to Plimouth Plantation in Massachusetts, where researchers on English dialects were able to tell her how Nathaniel Sylvester talked. Mac, who bought a home in Sag Harbor in 1972, recently sold her house and moved to East Hampton. She has “Irish twin” daughters, (born a year apart) one a clinical therapist in Seattle and the other, who lives in Boulder, a media lawyer specializing in the environment.

She’s been making her living as a writer ever since the early 1980s, when she sold a piece to the New York Times magazine about a man in Harlem who made a garden out of rocks.

“I was stupid enough to quit my job” with the Library of America, the small nonprofit founded by Random House Editor Jason Epstein that republishes the works of great American writers. She did promotion, some production work and wrote the flap copy for the covers.
Somehow, she recalled, she had to come up with the right things to say in very few words and meet the approval of an advisory board of academics. When a grumpy Epstein one day complimented her work, she realized something: “It had never occurred to me I was a writer.”
She had studied English and history at McGill University and then went to New York and worked at various jobs, including sitting in a basement applying gold leaf to objects in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

She married investment banker Benjamin Griswold in 1967. They lived near Baltimore, where Mac raised her daughters. After an amicable separation, she moved with her two daughters and two dogs to New York in 1979, where she landed that job with the Library of America, where she worked for four years.

During that time, she commuted to Cambridge to attend a garden history program at Radcliffe; she later continued her landscape studies at the New York Botanical Garden’s horticultural division.

Writing magazine articles for a host of publications, from the Times magazine to Travel & Leisure, she pitched her first book idea featuring the gardens at the Metropolitan Museum, which she had come to admire but which, she realized, patrons largely took for granted.

Mac is now represented by the prestigious Andrew Wylie Agency. She had a contract for the manor book with Houghton, Mifflin, which wanted to call it “Slaves in the Attic,” but when the company changed hands she lost her editor there and a new editor wanted a book that focused exclusively on the manor’s 17th-century history.

It didn’t take any arm-twisting for her close friend Jonathan Galassi, the president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, to pick up the book. He was familiar with Sylvester Manor — he’d been there and knew Alice Fiske, Mac said — and let Mac write it as the more intimate and expansive history she wanted.

A proposal for her next book is in the works. “It has a couple of working titles,” she said, “but we’ll go with this one: ‘The Other Paradise: Gay Men and Their Gardens.’ It will explore the unspoken “elephant in the room,” she said, about how gay men lead domestic lives that are more beautifully articulated.”

PETER BOODY

Great controversies, for all their sturm und drang, very often fade away just as fads and fashions do and, like the Hula Hoop and Nehru jackets, often seem a little silly in retrospect.

Once upon a time, one such hot topic on Shelter Island was so-called “ Bridge Traffic,” drivers just passing through on their way from one ferry to the other. The Orient Point Ferry to New London was considered a major generator of local Bridge Traffic, attracting or dispersing South Forkers headed to or from New England.

These drivers did nothing for the Island except clog the roads, according to their local critics. They didn’t stop for supplies at Fedi’s or the hardware store. They didn’t stop for lunch. They didn’t volunteer for the fire department or the ambulance. They just drove right through town.

When I first came to work as editor of the Reporter in the year 2000, Bridge Traffic had been a hot topic for some time. One reason was that North Ferry Co. needed bigger boats to move its lines faster. People who considered Bridge Traffic a blight were aghast at the very idea of boats any bigger than the aging, laughably confined 14-car clunkers North Ferry was then running to Greenport and back. Bigger boats would simply generate more traffic, the naysayers said, just as a new highway or bridge not only would open up a once bucolic countryside to ugly sprawl but bring a new surge in vehicles.

Another reason was Cross Sound Ferry’s push for permission to operate a South Fork route to New London. East Hampton Town, which had the only South Fork harbors capable of handling big ferries, wanted nothing to do with it; the East Hampton Town Board amended the zoning code to ban ferry terminals as a permitted use.

That really got up the dander of Bridge Traffic critics, who complained that Islanders were being forced to bear all the traffic sent from the South Fork to Orient.

Back then, looking out my window at the Reporter’s new office in the Center, I kept looking for that awful Bridge Traffic I’d read so much about. Soon I began to wonder if the occasional pods of six or seven cars I’d barely noticed going by constituted the notorious blight that had been dominating the local news. They’d take less than a minute to go by and then all would be quiet again.

That was it? That was the notorious Bridge Traffic on which the Reporter had spent so much ink?

I live off Route 114 in North Haven so I’ve been used to South Ferry traffic for years. Sometimes, in the summer, I might have to wait a minute, maybe two, for the line of disgorged vehicles to go by before I can pull out of my community onto the state highway. That might be a little irritating when I’m in a mad rush but, gee, Islanders are never in mad rushes, right? How could a little wait for a few cars to go by ruin their lives?

North Ferry and South Ferry have been running bigger boats for more than a decade. I have noticed only an improvement in the quality of life, with shorter, faster-moving lines of idling cars in the Heights and in Greenport. And there’s no longer a grumble about Bridge Traffic.
I’ve seen many other fights fade into irrelevance over the years.

Back in 1998, some critics said a two-percent open space tax would depress the real estate market, deplete the tax rolls and force up real estate prices. After Shelter Island and the four other East End towns enacted and implemented the open space tax, the hot second home market continued roaring right along and local tax receivers continued to rake in the revenue, pretty much until the national bubble burst in 2007 and 2008.

Remember all the anguish about putting a cell tower at the landfill, ruining the scenic beauty of Shelter Island and exposing nearby residents to dangerous emissions? Remember all the resistance to the 4-poster? Maybe, for some critics and naysayers, the jury is still out on these and other sore points. But I don’t think the cell tower has ruined Shelter Island’s scenic beauty and I really doubt there is any more risk living near a cell tower than there is dealing with life in the modern world, such as letting your dentist take an extra x-ray of your jaw.

Looking back, I’m beginning to think an ironic pattern emerges when we look at the legacies of past controversies: It hasn’t been the things that happened in the face of opposition — things like bigger ferries, the cell tower and the acquisitions made through the town’s open space program — that have hurt our quality of life; rather, it’s the things that haven’t happened — like stricter zoning, tougher code enforcement, and funding for the continuation of a robust 4-poster program, as a few examples — that have hurt the community.

I think the lack of any dark skies requirements in the town code will fall into that category as time goes by; the failure to provide any more affordable housing stock since the successful Bowditch Road project will bite us one day, too.

The proposal to turn the Ram’s Head into a drug rehab center doesn’t fall into that category, however, does it? I suspect there’s another pattern worth noting here: as far as the welfare of any community is concerned, private proposals that are really all about making money need to face some fierce opposition to soften their rough edges and, in some cases, shoot them dead.

I like controversy. It’s a good thing — not just because it gives us news people something interesting to write about. It allows for ideas to be tested and explored in the public arena. Even when the critics look a little silly in retrospect, they deserve credit for forcing a healthy debate and for caring.

PETER BOODY PHOTO | Hamilton Fish V at home on Menantic Road.

When he’s on Shelter Island, Hamilton Fish V is a soft-spoken yet lyrically passionate sailor with a white farmhouse on Menantic Road where tomatoes grow by the pool and beach towels dry on the line in the side yard.

His 30-foot wooden yawl, Eliza, moored in Coecles Harbor, is named for his middle daughter. It was made by his boat-builder cousin Nat Benjamin, of the famed Gannon and Benjamin shop in Vineyard Haven.

Based in Manhattan, he and his wife Sandra discovered Shelter Island only a couple of years ago through friends in the city who have a house near South Ferry. After he’d spent years slogging from New York to Martha’s Vineyard on weekends to get to his boat, he learned there was a beautiful place a couple of hours away where the sailing is great and the concentration of Gannon & Benjamin boats is larger than anywhere outside Vineyard Haven.

“Sandra saw this house online,” said the bearded, curly-haired scion of a legendary New York political family, looking comfortably shaggy in jeans and well-worn black polo shirt and considerably younger than his 60 years.

“We didn’t even spend any meaningful time investigating it. We came out one winter day and just pounced on it. Last winter was our first. The experience of being here when the leaves are off the trees and every vista is a water view opened my eyes to how spectacular winters really are and we loved it from November to April.”

Google the name and scores of entries pop up including a substantial Wikipedia biography of Mr. Fish and of the former Hamilton Fishes. The current holder of the name is publisher of the Washington Spectator, a twice monthly political journal; a film producer; a fundraiser for progressive causes; a founder of an institution to support independent investigative journalism; an environmental advocate; a past congressional candidate and a “social entrepreneur” — as the Wikipedia entry describes him.

It seems he’s a man who has as many irons in the fire at any one time as some people do in a lifetime, all of them to serve progressive causes.

As he talked at the picnic table behind the house he and Sandra are renting form Maria Maggenti, Mr. Fish eventually revealed a few of his current projects: developing plans for celebrating the 150th anniversary in 2015 of the Nation magazine, the venerable journal he published for a decade after gathering the backers to revive it when he was in his mid 20s; the restoration and digitization of the 1976 film “Memory of Justice,” a documentary he co-produced about the Nuremburg trials and their relevance to the American experience in Vietnam; and an eight-part TV series he’s been working on with a team that includes former 60 Minutes producers about climate change called, “The Years of Living Dangerously,” which Showtime will broadcast this winter as “the first mainstream TV treatment of anthropogenic climate change,” he said.

He’s also in the midst of planning for the debut in New York this fall of “The Marfa Dialogues,” an art-based “public conversation,” as he put it, “exploring social and political themes” (climate change will be one theme) that he founded about eight years ago in collaboration with an arts center near his adobe home in Marfa, Texas, his wife Sandra’s native state. A lifelong gardener and market grower who has been delighting in the farm stands of the North Fork, Sylvester Manor and the Island’s weekly Island’s Farmer Market, she founded a regional farmers market herself in Marfa in 2005.

The first Hamilton Fish, born in 1808, was a U.S. congressman and senator from New York, the state’s governor, and U.S. Secretary of State under U.S. Grant. That Hamilton Fish’s father, a Revolutionary War major who married a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant, had named him after his dear friend Alexander Hamilton, for whom he’d refused to serve as a second after Aaron Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel. “He thought it would be suicide,” said Mr. Fish, as if passing on some family intelligence fresh from the parlor, “and it was.”

His ancestors, by the Civil War, were abolitionists and members of the new Republican Party. His Republican congressman father, who had three more kids in his Washington-based family to send to college, warned Hamilton V when he was a student at Harvard that there wouldn’t be any more financial support after graduation, nor a legacy of wealth.

“I think it was a helpful factor for me not to have inherited any money but I did have this inheritance, which is the name, and I’ve tried to deploy it for the various things I was trying to do,” he said.

He ran as a Democrat for Congress from Westchester in 1988 and tried again in 1994 from Putnam County. But that was the year of Newt Gingrich’s Republican sweep. Why the party switch? With a smile, he said his stalwart Republican relatives “needed some event to blame” and Harvard “was on the list.”

But it was more complicated than that. He came of age in an era of rebellion and protest. His opposition to the Vietnam War, and support for civil rights — for black Americans and women — inspired a commitment to political activism. He noted that the Republican Party used to be a progressive force, born in the fight for black emancipation and civil rights in the mid-19th century. A century later, his father cast the deciding vote to impeach Richard Nixon. “He was a Republican from a very conservative district in upstate New York for 26 years but his name is prominent in the history of civil rights legislation,” he said, adding that he is especially proud of his father’s work in favor of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which he believes has had a fundamental and lasting effect on American society.

After his own unsuccessful runs for Congress, “I went down a different path” from those chosen by the four previous men named Hamilton Fish, all of whom served in elected office.

Just recently he recruited some investors to try to buy the licenses of moribund public television stations — unlike National Public Radio, he said, PBS stations in most markets are doing a poor job and facing extinction — to create a new network that could counteract Fox news. “We failed” because the FCC wouldn’t allow it.

A relaxed conversation with Mr. Fish ranges far and wide, but tends to focus in the end on the American knack for forgetting history, such as the lessons of the Vietnam War. “The lines for the invasion of Iraq were laid down long before 9/11,” he said, “and it was well known the younger Bush felt the business of his father’s presidency had gone unfinished.” The media, the ownership of which by then had been concentrated in a few corporate hands, “was complicit” in leaving unchallenged the falsehoods on which the invasion was predicated.

Shelter Island, which he said “has such transcendent beauty,” is for recharging one’s spirits. As soon as they arrived on Shelter Island on Saturday, Hamilton and Sandra took the Eliza out for what he called a “blissful” sail on Gardiner’s Bay.

PETER BOODY PHOTO | Pat Binder in the backyard of the old farm where she and her husband Buddy moved in the 1960s and raised their five kids.

Pat Binder, a mainstay at this newspaper in the 1980s and 1990s who raised five kids on Shelter Island, not to mention the kids’ goats, chickens, ducks, geese and rabbits, lives in an old farmhouse with a beautiful, sunny backyard that feels as if it’s out in the country, not smack in the Center with neighbors just a stone’s throw away behind the trees.

Her youngest, Darrin, put in the beautiful pool outside the kitchen door when he was starting his pool company about 20 years ago and Dan built the deck. Pat planted the magnificent, perfectly manicured border garden inside the fencing and did all the weeding for years, not only in the garden but in the fenced-in vegetable patch.

A peach and an apple tree brim with perfect fruit, a big Rose of Sharon bush that Pat planted is full of blooms, and down at the foot of the winding, gently sloping lawn there’s a pond full of bass the egrets and herons hunt. They are the progeny of fish Darrin caught elsewhere and brought home in a bucket to put in the dredged-out former swamp when he was a kid.

Now her family makes sure the big lawn is cut and most of the weeding taken care of. Dan, with his carting company, handles the trash. The kids and grandkids are her support group. “I couldn’t survive here if it weren’t for the kids. I’m so lucky,” she said.

The property was all part of the old Oliver farm, which she convinced her husband Joseph Buddy Binder to buy in the 1960s, after they’d rented vacation places on Shelter Island for a couple of seasons. They lived in Valley Stream, where Buddy owned a gas station. They had gone to the Island on a one-day visit to see a friend and it had been love at first sight for both of them.

“Buddy was more practical than me,” said Pat, who seems highly organized, detail-oriented and very practical herself, having made lists before her interview of important dates in her life and the names of bosses, colleagues, part-time jobs, Reporter customers and friends she wanted given credit in her story. But Pat knows the newspaper business; there often just isn’t the space for everything you want to get in.

She convinced Buddy that they could afford a second home if they both quit smoking. “I think I was also thinking maybe we could skip feeding the kids, too,” she said. But soon it became clear they weren’t going to quit smoking anytime soon. Valley Stream was getting built up and the gas station wasn’t doing well so they made the choice to throw caution to the wind and move to the Island.

All five kids had been born by then and four are still on the Island: David, who works in the office at Darrin’s pool company now, was the first in 1952; Alison, a longtime former employee of St. Gabe’s Retreat, followed in 1954; Aimee, a former newspaper art director now living in North Carolina, in 1956; Daniel in 1959; and Darrin in 1964, “a happy surprise,” Pat said.

“I was always very happy pregnant for some reason. I didn’t know better,” Pat said with her usual dead pan.

Born in 1931, she had grown up Pat Rausch in Astoria, Queens, her parents both employees of the Sunshine Biscuit Company: he was a carpenter and she was a cookie packer. After high school, she got a job in downtown Manhattan with Guaranty Trust Co. in a filing job. She gave it a year and a day and then couldn’t stand it anymore — but she thinks it taught her to be precise and disciplined in her work. By then, she’d met Buddy, also from Astoria, on a date with other people. They were married about a year later.

Once on Shelter Island, the kids who were old enough all went to the Shelter Island School — they adjusted well, Pat said — and Buddy went to work at the Grumman plant in Sag Harbor. Later he worked for Rachel Carpenter, the A&P heiress with a house in Dering Harbor, and went on start his own lawn mower repair business and Snapper dealership. He and Pat were divorced in the 1980s; he passed away a few years ago. He had remarried happily, Pat said. She did not. “I’d had enough of that,” she said.

In the beginning, she took whatever part-time jobs she could find. Until she went to work for the Reporter in 1978, they included gigs at Charlie Kraus’s snack bar at Louis Beach, Vivienne Gershon’s House of Glass, catering here and there including Cackle Hill Farm, cooking for the likes of Alice and Andrew Fiske at Sylvester Manor and in the kitchen at Gardiners Bay Country Club, where she described her boss Len Bliss as “so nice”: He taught her she couldn’t make sandwiches for the members like those she fed her kids at home, she explained. “They had to be thick, with lots of stuff in them.”

Every fall in those days, she and Buddy, like so many Islanders, made extra money scalloping; the kids did the shucking. “It was pretty lucrative,” she said.

She interviewed at the Reporter with grizzled editor-owner Bob Dunne after seeing an ad for a sales representative. He was skeptical but she got the two-day-a-week job; soon enough, after she not only brought in some North Fork ads but also modernized the ad tracking and billing process as well as some production routines — like placing ads first, then laying in the stories around them instead of Bob’s other way around — she was full-time.

It was fun, Pat said, especially after Pat Cowles bought the paper in the late 1980s. She fondly remembers trips to press conventions in Albany and especially the year he chartered a bus to take his staffs at the Reporter as well as the Sag Harbor Express and Three Village Herald, which he also owned, upstate. Over the years, she heard Governor Cuomo speak twice, shook the hand of vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro and learned to play liar’s poker “and did quite well.”

She doesn’t recognize the Reporter now. “I think we were eight pages when I started,” she said.

After she retired at age 64 in 1995, she went to work at Darrin’s pool company. “I got fired,” she said, a few years later when son David took over that position after going back to school to become a notary.

A former Goat Hill board member and golfer, Pat these days keeps close to home because of meniere’s disease, which can cause vertigo. Four of her kids and all but one of her seven grandkids are nearby (four great-grandkids live in Virginia). Pat does a lot of reading (“real books,” not ebooks; “The DiMaggios” most recently) and crossword puzzles in Newsday and wherever she finds them. She watches Mets games whenever they are on TV, “Jeopardy” as well as “Downton Abbey” and, on DVDs from the library, which she loves, “Homeland,” “Southland,” and “Game of Thrones.”

It’s pretty quiet out back. There are no more ducks, rabbits or goats. But if you stop by, be careful when you get back in your car on the way out. Her sweet terrier mix Maisy “tries to go for a ride with everybody,” Pat warned.

PETER BOODY PHOTO | Janalyn Travis-Messer in her Island garden where she’s finally settled

Everybody on the Island knows Janalyn Travis-Messer. Whether it’s fighting for the 4-poster tick-killing device; serving as a top local, county and state official in the League of Women Voters; running the Chamber of Commerce Arts & Crafts fair; or selling real estate, she’s everywhere at once.

A lot of people may know she has some kind of Hawaii connection. Among the clues are her little pick-up truck, which bears “Live Aloha” Hawaiian license plate holders and her house on Baldwin Road, which has a lot of Hawaiian notes: pale pink interior trim, a beachy, airy island feel, and lots of art and framed photos of old Hawaiian scenes.

What people don’t know is she lived in 63 places — not just Hawaii, where she graduated from high school — by the time she moved to Shelter Island with her late husband, Jim Messer, in 1985.

“This is the longest time I’ve ever lived in one location and residence in my life,” Janalyn said at her kitchen table last week.

Janalyn’s mother Lynn, a top morse code operator for the Navy during World War II, had married a Dutch naval officer in Indonesia. When he was killed in a plane crash after the Korean War, his best friend, a U.S. Army officer, followed her back to Australia, where they were married. They soon moved to Pasadena, California, where Janalyn was born in 1954. Lynn, who landed a job as a personal assistant for the Gallo family of wine fame, divorced Janalyn’s father two months later.

Lynn soon married Don Travis, a New Jersey-born liquor and wine salesman whose territory covered five western states. They moved around a lot, first to northern California, then Oklahoma, and then Indiana, where they lived for four years. Along the way, Janalyn acquired a step-brother and step-sister.

After divorcing Don in 1964, Lynn took her kids to Perth, where she’d grown up. They later moved to Melbourne. “I don’t remember what she did for a living,” Janalyn said. “All I remember was we had a good time. I was 10 1/2.”

They’d been in Australia only a year when Lynn decided it was time to move back to the U.S., but she wanted to get there on a cruise ship, the Canberra, which made stops all across the Pacific. “We’d always sneak into first class,” Janalyn remembered, and enjoyed it until they’d inevitably get caught.

One of the stops was Hawaii, where her mother announced, “We’re staying.”

“I think she just fell in love with the whole place,” Janalyn said.

They stayed there for 14 years but hopped around the islands in different homes. Janalyn, though, found some stability attending a private prep school, Punahou, where President Obama was in fifth grade the year she graduated in 1972.

The apples don’t fall far from the tree: After two years of studying theatre at the University of Hawaii, she and her boyfriend took off on a long-planned trip to Europe. When they got to London, Janalyn loved it so much she proclaimed, “I’m staying.” She had $100 in her pocket, a return plane ticket, and told her boyfriend she’d be fine.

She enrolled in a theatre program and paid her tuition “working in a pub, as an au pair, whatever I could find,” and overstaying her visa — which in those days prompted only a wave goodbye from the customs people in 1976, when she went home and landed a job as a theatrical electrician.

She was married in 1977 to the technical director of a community theatre group; they were divorced in 1980. Meanwhile, she joined the electrician’s union and worked on jobs all over Hawaii, operating the spotlight that tracked one of the Jackson Five in a concert and setting up the scaffolding for the Eagles’ Hotel California tour.

She was working on the first road company production of “A Chorus Line” when the head electrician from the Broadway show came to Hawaii to make sure everything was up to New York standards. He was so impressed he asked Janalyn to come work on the Great White Way, where she wound up as the head electrician of “Death Trap” at the Music Box Theatre.

She moved from Manhattan to Long Island when the theatre’s house carpenter bought a place in Amityville and wanted roommates to help pay the mortgage. Later, she found her own rental in Bellmore. She had Monday nights off and didn’t own a TV, so when her favorites, the Denver Broncos, were going to be in a televised game, she went out to the first decent-looking bar she spotted, the Smithville Café. Jim Messer, a tall, handsome, divorced fellow who ran a vinyl siding business, was a regular with his own seat at the bar — but he’d never before come in on a Monday night.

He and Janalyn got talking, hit it off, and got married twice: once in Australia for her mother’s family and once more in West Hempstead for Jim’s family.

When Jim told her she didn’t have to ask before putting a nail in the wall to hang one of her own pictures in his Wantagh house, “That felt really good … That was pretty powerful for me,” Janalyn said.

His grandparents had owned a place in South Jamesport on the North Fork and, as he grew up, he passed through Shelter Island every summer on the way out, pressing his nose to the window, enchanted by what he saw.

He and Janalyn wasted no time looking for a house here but it took six months before Janalyn saw the place on Baldwin and declared, “That’s the one.”

That was in 1985. They sold the place in Wantagh and moved here full time, Jim commuting to work, Janalyn learning interior decorating and window dressing at Curtains & Home in Riverhead and later Curtain Barn in Seldon.

She was gone all day, six and seven days a week, and “in 1997, Jim started really missing me.” So she took a job on Shelter Island, replacing the retiring Pat Binder as ad director at the Reporter.

Three year later, she earned her real estate license and went to work for Griffing & Collins, the oldest real estate firm on Shelter Island, founded in 1947. She’s still there, one of the principal brokers. She owns a rental property in Hawaii, which she and Jim bought in 2002, and she visits regularly, doing a lot of the decorating and painting herself; and with a partner, she formed DJTM Enterprises and has built two houses, one for a client and one on spec in the Poconos.

As most Islanders know, Jim went on to win two terms on the Town Board; Janalyn went on to do volunteer work for the Historical Society, the Chamber of Commerce and the League of Women Voters, for which she served as local president as well as chairman of the Suffolk County chapter, which gave her a major role in the state organization as well.

Jim died in 2005, beating lung cancer, it seemed, until he had to go on doxycycline because of a tick bite and the threat of Lyme disease. After all the chemo, his immune system couldn’t take it. That’s what prompted Janalyn to join the town’s Deer & Tick Committee almost a decade ago. She believes her experience doing careful, thorough and unbiased research for the League of Women Voters on candidates and major issues helped the committee draft an authoritative report that convinced the Town Board to endorse a 4-poster program to kill ticks on deer.

PETER BOODY PHOTO | Nancy Cooley has always sought a life of change and adventure.

There are a lot of stories from her life that make it instantly clear what kind of person Nancy Cooley is, stories that her fellow Yacht Club and Gardiner’s Bay Golf Club members may not know.

Just after college at UC Berkeley, when she was in Europe and needed to get to North Africa to assist in an anthropological study, she found some sailors with a big yacht who offered to take her across the Mediterranean.

Although she and her future husband would go on to sail their own Doughdish out of Dering Harbor on summer weekends, she didn’t know a thing about sailing then except “which side to heave over,” as she put it in a recent chat.

She also wondered if the men who had invited her to sail on their 65-foot yacht “might be creeps.” She had stunned them when she’d asked them point blank if they expected some kind of quid pro quo. Spitting their coffee out and more than abashed, they assured her no.

They departed Greece even though a wicked storm had blown up overnight. Nancy could hear the trio — who turned out to be “perfect gentlemen” — talking through the walls of the stateroom they’d given her, predicting she’d flee before the morning’s departure. Not only did she stay for the ride, she realized they needed help on deck and proved an effective member of the crew, carrying out whatever tasks were thrown her way despite wind and roiling seas.

A sixth generation Californian, the child of a venture capitalist from the San Francisco suburbs who had been going to private schools all her life and, in summer, to her family’s big sheep ranch, she wanted to spend her last year of high school at a public institution, one with an effective bussing program. That ruled out her hometown near Palo Alto so she went to Menlo-Atherton, where she spent her free time helping classmates who had trouble with numbers and reading history books she’d conquered in grade school.

“I just decided I’d had enough of girls’ schools,” she explained simply. “No, it wasn’t hard.” She threw herself into it, as she’d thrown herself into her lemonade stands as a kid, serving as class president, or working with the Junior Red Cross and the elderly.

Before she went on to become a stockbroker, then a financial adviser and now a senior vice president at Morgan Stanley with her own wealth advisory team called the CMF Group, she was living in New York “and I decided I would be a baker.” So she got a job at Dean & DeLuca’s first store running their baking department. She was going to go on to John Clancy’s baking school but instead opened a gourmet shop at Ocean Beach, Fire Island with two friends.

The store, Fantasy Food, ran for nine years before closing. Meanwhile, Nancy had moved to Vermont with a boyfriend who was a surgical resident in Burlington. She landed a job in a women’s boutique, the owner of which had a back problem that soon left Nancy in charge of the place, including making the decisions about buying. It would turn out to be a lot like working in the financial industry, understanding trends and making decisions about where to put one’s money for the best returns.

“My standard answer to the question of how I became a stockbroker is it was an overreaction to heartbreak,” she said, explaining that when the relationship with the surgeon didn’t work out, “I went back to California and tried to figure out what I wanted to do next.” That, she said, proved to be a hard time — until she met a woman who had written a book about sales careers for women.

She read the book, got to know the author, and came to the realization that she was well suited to a career as a stockbroker. She had sales skills, for one thing. For another, success in that field would give her financial security. Also, the training would all be in-house, requiring neither the time or expense of further schooling.

After she had developed contacts in the field and interviewed at different firms, Drexel Burnham Lambert’s office in San Francisco called to tell her they were hiring somebody else. Her response startled them: “Big mistake!”

“What?” the caller asked.

“You’re making a big mistake. Not in hiring Reed but in not hiring me.”

“Why?”

“I’m going to be one of the best trainees you’ve ever hired.”

After defending her sales skills and her ability to work on a commission basis, she was told, “Come in tomorrow.”

Nancy met her future husband, Alan Benesuli, whose uncle Abraham Pinto had a home in Shorewood since the 1950s on Shelter Island. Drexel had sent her to the New York office by then and a friend in the firm had invited her here one weekend. Alan, a global securities analyst at Drexel, invited them over for a drink. A couple of years later, after Alan and his wife were divorced, he called her. They were married in 1988 and lived in Manhattan and on Shelter Island, as Nancy does now.

Alan brought two children to the marriage: Marina, now 40, who is a teacher at Horace Mann; and Alex, 44, a former hedge fund manager who worked for George Soros and is now taking time off in London before deciding what to do next. Their mother died when they were children so Nancy has been their only parent for years.

Alan and Nancy’s child, James, 22, recently graduated from college and was on his way to Beijing last week to study Mandarin. All three children went through the sailing program at the Shelter Island Yacht Club.

Alan is buried on Shelter Island. He died in 2004, just a few months after he was stricken during a family vacation in Spain with an inability to speak. The symptoms cleared but, after false hopes and wrong diagnoses, it turned out to be a fatal brain tumor.

“I was not at all prepared for that,” she said. “I can’t imagine that the everyday person is prepared for such a thing.”
As for her own future, she said, “I’m a person who likes to build and I want to build things that are going to last.

Something could happen to me so I really want my clients to be taken care of.”

She formed a partnership in 1997 with Falisha Mamdani, whose parents live on the Island and whom she’s known since high school; Falisha is in her 40s. Recently Jason Friedman, who summers in Southampton, joined the partnership. He’s in his 30s.

Nancy has much to say about the need for families to have a disaster plan, like those her wealth advisory team at Morgan Stanley helps her clients set up. “We work collaboratively and holistically” with families to understand their concerns, problems and goals and to develop strategies to address them, she said.

“Life is dynamic. People need a plan. There will always be transitions, some happy, some not so happy. That’s how my practice evolved,” she said, explaining that she had been become uncomfortable as a conventional stockbroker. For “industrial retail brokers,” who charge a commission instead of a fee based on returns, there is an “inherent conflict in managing clients.”

“These crises that come in life don’t have to be as tragic as mine. One should have a plan.”

PETER BOODY PHOTO | Joe Lauro and friend Jabbo on the Lauros’ front porch.

Ever since he was a kid growing up in Brooklyn and later Massapequa, Joe Lauro has marched to the tune of a different drummer. What kid in the 1960s would have been so fascinated by “The Jolson Story,” the 1946 biopic about the son of a cantor who rose to super-stardom singing in blackface about the Swanee River?

“I was nine years old when I first saw it,” he said during a front porch talk on North Ferry Road last week. “It really made an impression on me. I wanted to know about that era” of music in which Jolson had come of age.

“I used to get beat up in school all the time. Everybody got beat up — until you found your way.”

His way was to explore American music of the early 20th century and collect records, images and film clips from those early days. He’s still at it and, by the looks of things, making a good living with his company, Historic Films Archive, a service featuring historical footage of the nation’s greatest bands and musicians that has provided “hundreds of thousands of clips to award-winning documentaries, television programs, feature films, and television commercials,” according to the company website.

“I’ve been very lucky,” he said. “I’ve always been able to make a living out of the things I truly love.”

He’s also a documentary filmmaker whose works have been featured on PBS and who’s now at work on a film about Fats Domino for which he is seeking Kickstarter donations; an internationally known collector of “shellac,” which is to say 78-rpm records; and a musician with his own professional band, the Hoodoo Loungers, a New Orleans “Mardi Gras-style party band,” according to its website, that will be among the many bands playing at the annual Shelter Island Beach Blast, which is coming up at Wades Beach on the Saturday after Labor Day, September 7 from 3 p.m. to midnight to benefit the Island Gift of Life Foundation.

The event, which started out as a private party and jam session in his backyard at the barn known as the HooDoo Lounge, has grown over the years to become the landmark end-of-summer party for Islanders and fall fundraiser for a local charity that quietly helps Islanders in need.

Who knew in the early 1960s that Joe Lauro, the geek, would turn out to be cool?

“My ultimate revenge,” he said, was spotting the guys who had been “kicking the [expletive deleted] out of me” out in the audience, rocking along with everyone else when he performed as a musician with a band. By then he also knew how to fight, something his father taught him how to do.

A city corrections officer who became an administrator at the Brooklyn House of Detention, his dad, Joe, was one of a kind, too. He launched an arts program there, taking the “drugged out musicians, addicts and transvestites and putting on these shows with them. He was a real visionary. He got them books in a deal with the New York Public Library,” the younger Joe said.

His mom, Isabella, was a housewife and a “strong Italian” lady. She and Joe now live in Florida, as does Joe’s sister and brother-in-law.

He went to college at SUNY Plattsburgh, after which he applied for a job on Wall Street. He wore clogs to the interview.

Questioned about the footwear, he realized, “I just couldn’t do it. I was so damned lucky” not to fall into a career he didn’t truly love.

Instead he went to NYU’s prestigious graduate film school with the likes of the Coen brothers and Spike Lee, after which he went to work for Kino International, which operated a film archive service, and started living in the city. He connected through Kino with Patrick Montgomery, whom the company had hired to create modern trailers for some of the vintage art films it had in its collection. “We really hit it off,” Joe said. Montgomery, who had founded a stock footage and image service in the 1970s, hired Joe to run his archive service while he was busy making those trailers.

That’s how Joe learned to run the kind of business he’s developed over the years as Historic Films, which he founded with a partner in 1991. They soon moved the business from the city to the East End because the partner owned a home in Southampton. It’s now based in Greenport.

Joe met Karen Edwards, a member of a very old East End family who’d grown up on Shelter Island, at the Buffalo Road House in the city. He was playing tic tac toe by himself “and she joined me.” At the time, she was working as the manager of the Cornelia Street Café and had no plans to make Shelter Island a full-time home. But after she and Joe married in 1993, and he moved his company out east, it made sense to come back. They raised their son Oliver here. Now 18, he was about to head off to his freshman year at Ithaca College last week.

Joe finds archival material for his business, and old 78s for his record collection, by working his vast network of connections, listening to stories and exploring whatever avenues turn up. Taking a shot in the dark, he once wrote Don Kirschner, the legendary music promoter, hoping to represent him in licensing “Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert” TV shows. Kirschner eventually showed up in a limo and took Joe out for dinner at the Palm in East Hampton. Nothing ever came of Kirschner’s business proposal — it turned out he wanted to buy Joe’s company — but he did introduce Joe to his current partner, Andrew Solt, who owned the rights to “The Ed Sullivan Show.” His meeting with Kirschner also led, in a roundabout way, to his eventually offering a rock-bottom price for the rights to Kirschner’s archive at an auction and winning the bid.

The New York Times, Joe said, would soon print a story about his discovery of a trove of stereoscopic slides of famous performers such as Billy Holiday singing at tiny clubs, all shot in the years right after World War II by a professional photographer who happened to be a jazz fanatic. They came his way through a fellow record collector who sold them to Joe as part of a package deal.

Joe has produced several documentary films, including “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” about songwriter Harold Arlen, which was aired on PBS; “Louis Prima: The Wildest,” which ran on AMC; and “The Howlin’ Wolf Story” about blue giant Chester Burnett, which was released as a DVD.

He wants now to wind up his Fats Domino film, “The Big Beat,” for which the archival work, licensing and interviews are complete. The project, and how Joe developed it, is worth a story all its own. It all started when Fats’ friend, a lady named Haydee Ellis, liked Joe’s film about Louis Prima and told him, “You should do a film about the fatman.”
For details, go to http://kck.st/1a8npX2 or kickstarter.com and conduct a search.

PETER BOODY

I’ve allowed myself to get drawn in to a political effort to bring the 4-poster to North Haven. I’m helping with publicity and some strategizing. I’m also helping to arrange a conference on the 4-poster set for October 5 at Pierson High School in Sag Harbor featuring Mat Pound, one of its inventors.

I wouldn’t try if I didn’t believe, despite all recent signs to the contrary, that good public policy can be fostered through engagement and reason.

I live in that village just across the channel from Shelter Island, for which it was the control site when the Island — under the state DEC’s guidance and the Cornell Cooperative Extension’s management — conducted a three-year study of the 4-poster’s effectiveness and environmental impact.

Most people over here seem to think of the 4-poster as some kind of bizarre creation from outer space that will destroy the ecosystem if it is deployed, even though it’s old hat now on exotic, far-away Shelter Island.

Never mind the fact that thousands of properties on the East End are repeatedly sprayed with permethrin, the same insecticide used in the 4-poster.

Never mind that the county runs a “Vector Control” department whose job it is to spray insecticides in sensitive environments all over the county to kill mosquitos. It should be trying to kill ticks, too, which present a well documented and immediate health threat, but it doesn’t.

No, the 4-poster, with its concentration of permethrin in an oily base that is applied by paint rollers to the heads and necks of deer (where ticks concentrate) is a nightmare that will wreak environmental catastrophe.

Never mind that the oily base and the paint-rollers of the 4-poster provide a precisely targeted application system. Never mind that scientists who conducted the Shelter Island study found no traces of permethrin in the environment there but did find it in the environment at the control site, North Haven, where no 4-posters had been deployed but plenty of people spray their yards.

They also found that traces of the pesticide turned up in the tissue of deer on Shelter Island no more than they did in North Haven.

Not only that, the scientists found the Island’s 60 4-posters dramatically reduced the population of ticks on the Island after a three-year deployment. There’s no other way to kill them so effectively, short of burning down the village. So why don’t we use it?

North Haven is loaded with ticks, just like Shelter Island was and may be again if more 4-posters aren’t deployed. The big scourge these days seems to be lone star ticks. During the summer, my wife and I have found ourselves covered with red dots, just as we did for the first time last year. They are the bite sites of tiny lone star larvae, each smaller than a poppy seed and usually long gone by the time the little red welts have appeared.

Lone stars seem to be everywhere. Unlike deer ticks and dog ticks, lone stars can tolerate heat and dry conditions. They can survive out in the lawn. Mow the lawn, step in a recent hatch site, and say hello to those red spots.

So far, these bites — which many people, including doctors and pharmacists, erroneously call “chiggers” — have not caused an illness, unlike the bites of the deer ticks we and our dogs have suffered. We’ve both popped two doxycyclines as a prophylactic a couple of times this year after finding a deer tick on ourselves. When our dog this week began limping and developed a mild fever, the vet agreed it probably was his second case of Lyme disease in two years. So he’s on a three-week run of doxy now along with an anti-inflammatory drug.

A few years ago I had a bad case. I developed Bell’s Palsy. My left eye was blurry and itched. I also had trouble moving food from one side of my mouth to the other as I ate. It turned out the left side of my face was partially paralyzed; I couldn’t fully close my left eye and I couldn’t maneuver food to chew it on the left side. Weird!

Years later, there’s still a droop on the left corner of my mouth, as if I’d had a mild stroke.

So. I’ve got to act. Thanks to a neighbor who is leading the way, I’ve jumped into the fray to help her out.

I’ve always admired the people who have the guts and the energy to engage in politics. Even the people who aren’t very good at it or push agendas with which I do not agree. I am much more comfortable, however, playing the observer and reporting on the issues and personalities at play on the political stage. I’m good at that. I’m not sure I’m any good at politics. I lack the certainty in one’s own cause that political people need to lead and succeed.

But somebody’s got to do something.

I have city neighbors, very nice people who let their kids play all over the yard all day long. It’s lovely to hear their bubbly laughter but I worry about the ticks. “We spray,” they tell me. We did too, for years, but kept getting bites anyway, so this year we stopped wasting the money.

I mentioned having had erlichiosis once (at the same time that I had Lyme and babesiosis), which made me pee pink because I was anemic, sloughing off red blood cells.

“Oh! Did you know? Fred had to go to the hospital last week because he was anemic and they don’t know why!”

Could it be that a smart young weekender couple in North Haven could have so little awareness of the tick threat?

“Have you guys found yourselves covered in little red welts this summer?” I asked.

“Oh sure. We thought they were mosquito bites,” Fred said as he played with one of his daughters out on the lawn.

Oh, brother.

Something is wrong with this picture. The lack of knowledge, the lack of understanding, the lack of awareness, and — in the case of the 4-poster — the hare-brained opposition all strike me as nutty as the Creationists and the people who believe global warming is a liberal conspiracy.

It seems so clear to me. It should be easy to make the case. But in this new anti-science world of babble and myth, this is going to be no easy task.

PETER BOODY PHOTO | Cora and Don Bindler, happily at home in Silver Beach.

“I’m too young to take up golf,” Don Bindler tells a friend whenever he asks when Don’s going to start hitting the course. At 74, he still prefers tennis.

Back when he and some partners built the Shelter Island Racquet Club off Menantic Road in 1976, he played every day, sometimes multiple matches. A member of the Fordham varsity team and a player for the Army when he was based at Fort Dix, he went on to become president of the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, where he applied his business sense to turning around the failing club restaurant. That experience came in handy when he and a partner started a deli-restaurant in Carle Place.

He’s not playing tennis quite as much these days. Aside from his current work as a real estate agent in Melina Wein’s brokerage, his highest priority is seeking out the Island’s birds and shooting strikingly sharp and brilliantly composed images of them. Many of his pictures have appeared in the Reporter. Anyone can see them onflikr.com, searching by Don’s name or by “Pheasantwood,” the name on the sign that hangs outside his Silver Beach home.

“From this property alone, I’ve seen 100 species,” Don said during an interview in the screened-in porch behind the house, overlooking a large pool and a perfectly tended border garden overseen by his wife of more than 50 years, Cora.

He also takes a good swim every day in season, even though he was the one who thought his son Don Jr. (now a real estate hedge fund manager living in New York) and Cora were crazy to want the pool back in 1985. It would be “too much aggravation,” he said back then.

The Bindlers have been around Shelter Island a long time, part-time since the mid-1960s and full-time since the early 1990s, when he exercised a golden parachute from the Allen Group, Walter Kissinger’s Fortune 500 company, as it was about to be acquired by a corporate raider.

Since then, he put in 13 years of service on the Shelter Island School Board, after having been elected as a “budget candidate,” he said.

He headed a Town Board Police Committee about a decade ago under Supervisor Art Williams and, in a report to the board, compared salaries, duties and benefits with other regional departments. He was later recruited by a citizens group to run for the Town Board, again as a candidate who emphasized fiscal responsibility. “I didn’t win but I think I helped focus the conversation,” he said.

He also has served on the boards of the 10K Foundation and the Gift of Life foundation; Cora continues to serve as an officer of the Shelter Island Association.

During the same period, Don, who loves good food and wine as does Cora, opened the deli-restaurant and catering service in Carle Place, which and his partner sold after a few years because absentee ownership, Don said, “didn’t work.”

He’s also headed the sales staffs for WBAZ, the Press Newsgroup in Southampton and then Shelter Island Reporter. He joined Melina Wein’s brokerage several years ago after earning his real estate license.

“I should have done it a long time ago, instead of going to the Press,” said Don, where he went to work in 1993 with an option to buy.

That didn’t happen only because a family member at the last moment decided to take over the business.

They built their house, originally a one-store cape that has been expanded up and out, when he was only 26 and worried about the financing of his first home in Flushing. He was born there in 1939, the son of a Wall Street broker who never finished grammar school yet became a member of the New York Stock Exchange.

A friend of Don’s father on the Street, Lincoln Mack, was a member of the Island’s McGayhey family and introduced the Bindlers to Shelter Island, where they often visited as houseguests.

Growing up, Don demonstrated a passion for photography as well as an entrepreneurial spirit. In seventh and eight grade, he got permission from his principal to take photos of the weekly pageant each class put on and to sell prints to the parents.
Don went on to Regis, a private Jesuit high school in Manhattan, then Fordham, where he was captain of the squash team and played varsity tennis. His “pseudo-major,” as he put it, was broadcasting, and he worked for the college radio station, WFUV, putting on a regular interview program about campus issues.

But it dawned on him that the only good jobs in broadcasting were at the top of a very big pyramid with a vast base at the bottom, where the pay was terrible, “working as a disc jockey in Kalamazoo making $30 a week. I lost the passion for it when the reality hit me,” Don said.

A member of the Army Reserved Officers Training Corps, he was called up for a two-year stint when he graduated from Fordham in 1961. Before heading off to Fort Dix, where he would spend his time at a desk job in the morning and playing for the Army tennis team in the afternoon, he married Cora, whom he’d met in college. They lived off the base in an apartment their first two years together.

Right out of the Army, he had a job as an account executive lined up at the Wall Street firm where his brother Eugene was working. Don was there three years before he became sales manager at Purcell, Graham & Co., where he became a partner in the late 1960s.
Meanwhile, they planted their Shelter Island roots. Cora had spent summers in Maine as a kid, which was too far away for weekend jaunts, so Don had taken her to the Island for a visit in the mid-1960s. “Can we buy a place here?” she asked after a lunch on the beach.

In the late 1960s, he was offered a job in investor relations running the small New York office of the DiGiorgio Corporation, a California fruit-growing conglomerate. When he was offered a vice presidency a few years later on the West Coast, he decided “that wasn’t the company we wanted to move across the country for.” He chose instead to start his own investor relations firm.

But in 1976, at the grand opening cocktail party on Shelter Island for the racquet club he and his partners had launched, a corporate head hunter told Don he’d be perfect for a job running investor relations at Walter Kissinger’s Allen Group in Melville.

The advent of digital photography, and the access to so many habitats all around the Island, inspired Don to get back to his old hobby. And digital cameras made it easy and inexpensive to take hundreds of shots in order to catch the perfect moment.

“Almost every day, before I go to the office,” he said, “I head out to certain woods or spots I’ve picked out.” The result is a vivid record of the birds of Shelter Island.

“It’s almost migration time,” Don added as he bid farewell and looked at the sky. “The birding’s going to be great.”

COURTESY PHOTO | Joe Lauro and Fats Domino.

Shelter Island’s Joe Lauro, a filmmaker, musician, record collector, music historian and archivist, wants Fats Domino to see something — he hopes before the end of the year.

The genius boogie woogie pianist and songwriter from New Orleans who had sold 62 million records by 1962 with his musical partner Dave Bartholomew, the band leader, Fats is now 85 years old, living in his daughter’s suburban home. Bartholomew is in his 90s. And Lauro wants him to see it too.

There is not a lot of time to spare.

Lauro’s goal is to complete his latest film, a documentary called “The Big Beat: Fats Domino and His Band,” as soon as possible. It is now “three-quarters of the way complete. I just have to get it to the finish line,” Lauro said in an interview last week.

To get there financially, he has launched a Kickstarter campaign on the Internet to raise $20,000 in credit card-backed pledges by October 14. If that goal is not reached, no cards will be charged and Lauro’s project will get no funding. If the goal is reached, Kickstarter will take a 5-percent fee.

Meanwhile, Lauro and a partner in New Orleans who will edit the film, have funded the project, for which they’ve obtained an advance through a DVD deal. “But it’s not enough,” Lauro said.

Because many of the musicians who appear in the film are still alive, securing the rights to clips and their music is costly, he said. And even though Lauro’s own company, Historic Films Archive LLC, is providing some of the historic footage, “We just don’t have the money,” he said.

Lauro is building the film around a rare video of an entire Fats Domino-Dave Bartholomew concert recorded in 1962 by a French filmmaker during the Antibes Film Festival. After years of negotiations, Lauro has secured the rights to the video.

No such recording of a Fats concert survives in the United States because American TV shunned black music in those days except in very small, highly controlled doses, Lauro said.

Lauro’s film includes interviews and footage that will document Fats Domino’s boogie woogie roots in New Orleans. It will show how Fats and Bartholomew, performing as the Fats Domino band, merged American rhythm and blues traditions into popular rock and roll.

The interviews have been shot, the rights to most of the footage have been secured and Joe and his partner in the project are ready to begin editing. “We need more money than we have and I want to get this done before these guys are dead,” Lauro said.

To make a pledge, go to Kickstarter.com and search for the project by its title, “The Big Beat: Fats Domino and His Band.”

Joe Lauro has produced a number of documentaries over the years about American music. Among them are “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” about songwriter Harold Arlen, which was aired on PBS; “Louis Prima: The Wildest,” which ran on AMC; and “The Howlin’ Wolf Story” about blues giant Chester Burnett, which was released as a DVD.

The idea for the Fats Domino film came up during a premiere of the Louis Prima film in New Orleans about a decade ago. “I met a woman, Haydee Ellis, a little southern belle who is Fats’ best friend,” Lauro recalled. “She loved film and said you should do a film about the Fatman.”

“She took me over to Fat’s house … he lived in a little double shotgun shack in the neighborhood he grew up in,” Lauro said. Next door was “ a huge 1960s modern mansion that his wife lived in and he lived in the little shack. You had to go through his bedroom to get to the kitchen. This is Fats Domino! He’s in his bathrobe with his hair net on and people are in and out, they’re playing dominoes, they’re cooking crawfish. It was just such a parallel universe.

How could you not be intrigued?”

Katrina destroyed that old neighborhood. Fats now lives in his daughter’s suburban house “and all his friends are gone,” Lauro said.

PETER BOODY PHOTO | Cathy Driscoll at home on Smith Street.

Bronx native Cathy Driscoll is the right-hand woman at the Shelter Island Heights Property Owners Corporation and its subsidiary, the North Ferry Company, handling payroll and pop-up staffing problems, taking Heights residents’ questions and complaints, and doing whatever else comes up at the office by the ferry terminal.

She got the job 12 years ago answering a help-wanted ad in the Reporter and still loves it, she said during a recent interview, because “nothing’s ever the same. One day it could be a Beach Club problem — somebody needs a locker — or somebody’s leaves haven’t been picked up or, gee, there’s water running down New York Avenue. You know. Assorted things.”

Mother of two and grandmother of two, Cathy, 68, lost her husband Harold “Buzzy” Driscoll in 1999 to cancer. She’s been working ever since she graduated from high school, except for the years she was raising her kids.

Most of her career was spent in the development offices of two private high schools in New York City run by the Christian Brothers, Power Memorial Academy in Manhattan and Rice High School in Harlem, where she became director of development. She organized reunions and the annual fundraising appeal at the schools and handled anything that required computer skills, from progress reports and report cards to scheduling and getting out the bills.

While at Rice, she started a program called “Adopt a Student,” in which she’d seek out alumni benefactors to contribute to the tuition of a freshman and “hopefully get them to stay until graduation.”

Cathy was the daughter of a roofing contractor and a stay-at-home mom. She went to the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan because she had a talent for drawing. Always interested in biology, she hoped to become a medical illustrator “but for that I discovered you really had to become a doctor so I decided not to.”

She went to work as a telephone operator after graduating in 1962. By then she was dating Buzzy, who lived down the block. They were married in 1963 and moved into their own Bronx apartment in the Wakefield area. Their son Michael was born the next year and their daughter Debbie in 1966. Eventually they moved to a house in Throgs Neck, right on the water in a cozy neighborhood where everyone knew each other.

Right from the start, Shelter Island was important to the family. In the early 1960s, Buzzy’s parents had bought a place on Midway Road after a colleague at Con Edison introduced his father to the place. Buzzy and his father’s work shifts often allowed the two families to have the place to themselves.

“We came out here every chance we’d get,” Cathy said, and the kids grew up fishing and waterskiing from the family boat and going to Crescent Beach and Wades Beach.

Like a lot of second homeowners, the family didn’t have time to get involved in Island life other than its summer pleasures. “But I remember the Chicken Barbecue and the kids went to the terrific summer programs they had at the school,” Cathy said. “Getting more involved than that was not on the horizon. This was a retreat from work.”

After the kids had gone off to school, she worked as a paraprofessional at P.S. 68 in the Bronx, assisting teachers with whatever came up in the classroom. The city fiscal crisis of the 1970s ended that job but a priest told her about the position at Power Memorial. She landed it and remained there until the church closed the school in 1984, moving her to Rice.

Meanwhile, Cathy’s father-in-law had retired and moved out to Shelter Island full-time so she and Buzzy bought their own place, the cozy house she lives in now on Smith Street, complete with an indoor goldfish tank in the sunroom that the uninitiated might mistake for a hot tub. Her son built it for her.

In the early 1980s, after his own retirement as a New York City Police officer, Buzzy moved out full-time to care for his ailing father while Cathy and the kids remained in Throgs Neck except on weekends and vacations. Buzzy eventually got a job working full-time as Shelter Island’s bay constable.

In 1999, Buzzy was diagnosed with lung cancer. Cathy gave up her job, sold the house in Throgs Neck, enrolled the kids at Shelter Island High School and moved out with them to care for her husband. He died within a year.

Her first job here was managing classifieds for the Reporter, where she got to know Community News Editor Archer Brown and Office Manager Ethel Michalak, who recruited her for the ladies bowling team Ethel had organized, the Guttersnipes. Cathy is now captain of the team. Ethel gave all the players nicknames: Cathy is known as Chatty. She is now the only original player still on the team.

Cathy’s reputation as a highly organized, detail-oriented, no-nonsense, can-do person prompted Shelter Island 10K co-founder Cliff Clark to ask her this year to help Mary Ellen Adipietro and Jackie Tuttle organize the run. There are so many details to stay on top of, Cathy said she couldn’t believe how those two and the other volunteers pulled it off.

“It’s incredibly gratifying to work with these wonderful people,” she said.

She’s also chairman of the Finance Council at Our Lady of the Isle Catholic Church and a member of the church’s “Caring Council.”

After they graduated from Shelter Island High School, Cathy’s son went on to become a New York City police officer like his dad, and is now retired, living with his wife Lisa near Oneonta, an area his in-laws, Bill and Pat Barton (formerly of St. Mary’s Road) introduced him to. Debbie went on to nursing school in Albany, worked at St. Margaret’s School there and now works for San Simeon on the Sound near Greenport. She has two boys, Shane, 17, and Christopher, 13, and lives on the Island.

Amazingly, Cathy finds time to travel a lot — something she’s loved ever since she and Buzzy took the kids places including Colorado and the Caribbean. More recently, she’s taken the grandkids on a rafting trip to the Grand Canyon, an “ice hotel” in Quebec and to Yellowstone in the winter.

She’s been all over Europe, including bike tours of the Rhine and Danube valleys; set foot on Antarctica on the eve of the Millennium  in 1999; and recently took a river cruise from Amsterdam to Basel with Charlotte Hannabury as her cabin mate. Last year she and Charlotte sailed through the fjords of Norway.

This year they’ll be spending New Year’s Eve in Prague. “It doesn’t get better than that if you’ve got Mozart and fireworks,” said Cathy.

PETER BOODY PHOTO | Historian and author Andrew Scott Cooper at his Island apartment and writing studio.

If you want to know how much of the hit 2012 film “Argo” is true, just ask the fellow you might have seen riding his bike down Manhanset Road toward the Project FIT gym most days before lunch this fall.

The author of a 2012 book called “The Oil Kings” and now at work on a sequel, Andrew Scott Cooper is an historian who spent seven years researching American-Iranian relations, delving into documents never before made public.  He’s interviewed protagonists who have never wanted to talk about Iran before, from former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger and bodyguards of Ayatollah Komeini to former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and Empress Farah Pahlavi, the widow of the Shah whose own policies helped foster the revolution that destroyed him — with some help from the U.S.

Leading a monastic existence while he works under deadline in a rented Hay Beach garage apartment this fall and winter, Mr. Cooper’s still untitled follow-up book picks up where “Oil Kings” left off: the 1979 Islamic Revolution and its disastrous impact on American security interests in the region.

Of Ben Affleck’s 2012 film about a zany yet successful CIA plot to extract a small group of Americans marooned at the Canadian embassy in Tehran in 1979, Mr. Cooper said of “the entire opening, the historical set up, I will venture to say that every date and every fact is incorrect.”

“There was this scheme to get people out but it didn’t transpire in the way Affleck said it did,” Mr. Cooper said during an interview in his one-bedroom apartment, where he works from 4:30 a.m. at a built-in work station framed by large windows and covered with carefully organized stacks of notes, transcripts, clippings and documents.

“Historians get upset because we understand the power of cinema and we just hope filmmakers will do a little fact-checking,” Mr. Cooper said. “The reality of it is so much more exciting and dramatic than anything you could write in a Hollywood shop.”

Americans, he said, have no idea there were 50,000 of their fellow citizens living and working in Iran when the revolution came, leading ordinary lives, their children attending American schools with cheerleading teams and marching bands. In fact, there’s a collective amnesia here about Iran and its revolution.

That national blind spot, and the decades it has taken for contemporary documents to be declassified, and surviving participants to feel comfortable sharing their memories, has meant Mr. Cooper’s work is the first to delve deeply into the minutest details of American-Iranian relations as well as the most sweeping political, economic and cultural aspects of the period and its aftermath.

A 44-year-old New Zealander who became a U.S. citizen a decade ago, Mr. Cooper wrote the first book in Greece, where a friend invited him to come stay while he worked. For this book, he wanted to be back in the U.S., on the East Coast for easier access to American documents and sources, but couldn’t afford a city place. A friend he met when he ran the alumni office at the Columbia School of Journalism in the mid-1990s guided him to Shelter Island; she has a place here and knew about the seasonal rental above her neighbor’s garage.

“It’s absolutely perfect,” he said of his clean, well-lighted place. Shelter Island is perfect, too. “What a luxury to be at this age and have a book contract and living on a beautiful Island and to be out riding your bike to the gym while other people are sitting in their offices,” he said.

“This is what I was born to do,” he said of researching and writing history. But it’s not a job that pays. Other than his contract advance, “I haven’t made a dime from the book,” he said. So this next book, he thinks, will be his last.

“I simply can’t afford it. It makes me happy and I love doing it but you have to be mad at some point to keep sacrificing over and over again.” With big student loans to be paid, he’s got his eye out for a university teaching job when the book is done.

He knew at age nine he wanted to be a historian. Born in 1969 in Wellington, the son of an electrician and homemaker, he can remember his fear and fascination watching the TV news and seeing women cloaked in black with faces hidden. There wasn’t much to read about Iranian history so he dove into other big topics, first on World War II and the Holocaust. Moving on in his studies he discovered “it’s all connected.”

Eager to see the wider world, he talked a Wellington newspaper and Radio New Zealand into getting him credentials to cover Bill Clinton’s election from Little Rock as a stringer — paying his bills by waiting tables and working as a gardener.

That gig inspired him to apply to the Columbia School of Journalism, from which he graduated in 1994. He soon landed a job as a researcher at the United Nations. From there, Human Rights Watch recruited him to come to Washington to work as an investigator.

After a few years and another research job in San Francisco, he came back to New York to take the position at the alumni office at Columbia. But in 2006, after three years, he decided to go back to school to study history — and the oil industry in particular. He entered the master’s program in strategic studies at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland.

“I finally concluded that I was really the happiest studying history, but wanted to do more than study; I had to find my own niche within the history profession,” he said. “It’s not easy. You have to stumble across something new … and I needed a very big topic. I remembered my interest in the Iranian revolution all those years ago.”

When he wrote a scholarly piece on the revolution and published it in the Middle East Journal, the Los Angeles Times reported on it with a piece headlined “U.S. May Have Role in Shah’s Fall.” The story went viral.

After writing “The Oil Kings,” he went back to New Zealand to get his Ph.D. and to teach. There he wrote the pitch for his follow-up book, for which Henry Holt and Company gave him a contract.

His book, he said, will cover all the geo-political connections as well as the details, including word for word accounts of discussions held by the president, the secretary of state and the national security advisor in the Oval Office.

“I can tell you hour by hour what was going on in the White House and the Shah’s palace,” Mr. Cooper said. “I can also tell you what the weather was like, what movies were playing in Tehran on a certain day … Details are important to me. Readers want to know what daily life was like; they want to be on the street with everything happening all around them.”

PETER BOODY PHOTO | John Colby Jr. at home in Dering Harbor, command center of Bricktower Press.

Sunfish sailor, skier, fan of Glen Cove’s and Dering Harbor’s architectural history, John Colby Jr. of Dering Harbor is a one-man-band who serves as editor, publisher, buyer, IT guy and book-stacker of Brick Tower Press, a David that is suing a Goliath called Apple for its use of the “iBook” brand.

Mr. Colby, 54, has been using the brand for some of his books since 2007, when he bought several pieces of the late publisher Byron Preiss’s bankrupt businesses as one of its creditors. Preiss had first used the name in 1999, back in e-book pre-history, when he developed interactive titles that relied mostly on CDs.

As Mr. Colby explained it recently, the name originally derived from a 1938 comic book series called “I, Robot,” which Preiss invoked for a compilation he published of Isaac Asimov short stories about feeling, thinking robots. The celebrated sci-fi stories were the bases for the 2002 film of the same named starring Will Smith.

Now “iBooks” refers to hundreds of titles Mr. Colby acquired through his Preiss purchase. He’s not looking for a billion-dollar settlement. All he wants from Apple is a letter of apology and the chance to sell his titles through Apple’s iBook electronic bookstore.

He lost the first round of the suit. It’s now on appeal with arguments to be heard in January. “I don’t understand her reasoning,” he said of the summary judgment against him handed down by Judge Denise L. Cote, the same judge who found Apple guilty of conspiring to fix e-book prices with other publishers. “It just makes no sense to me,” said Mr. Colby.

It’s good for him that his dispute with Apple isn’t likely to come up at a Dering Harbor Village Board meeting in the village, where Mr. Colby serves on the Zoning Board of Appeals, of which he is chairman, and the Planning Board, of which he is a former chairman.

He and his wife Betsy and kids Marnie and John III (known as Cole) moved full-time to the village from Park Avenue three years ago after having been weekenders for about 20 years. Marnie and John both attend the Ross School now.

“When I get angry or upset, I volunteer for something,” he explained with a laugh during a talk on the porch of the shingle-style, high-peaked house with pool he designed himself more than 10 years ago.

The goal was to put up something bigger than the three-bedroom house he and his future wife had bought in 1988 in Hay Beach; after they married and their son was born, it suddenly seemed very small. He wanted something that looked as if it had been built at least 100 years before, like the so-called cottages and carriage houses that once dominated Dering Harbor.

He presented the plan himself to the Architectural Review Board. “They were more interested in the photovoltaic panels on the roof than the architecture and its influences,” Mr. Cole remembered.

The board approved his design but with a request: Wouldn’t he like to serve on the board? He said yes and he’s still serving on the ARB.
So it goes in village with something like 24 households.

Mr. Colby grew up in Glen Cove. His late father was a major name in the textile business, creating and selling the jean brands Sasoon and Guess. John went to local schools and had a paper route; the architectural relics around town of grand old country estates, where he delivered the Long Island Press, fascinated him. One of them was a brick tower where the granddaughter of one of the tycoons lived. That tower and the granddaughter would prove important to John, in both his business and family life.

John got to know Shelter Island — as well as the field of publishing — through his mother‘s sister, May Morse, who with her husband Ed owned a home on Bay Shore Drive for many years. The Colbys, who had built a house in Montauk but eventually sold it, were frequent visitors. May and John’s mother Jomarie now live at Peconic Landing; Ed and John’s father have passed away.

May came to the Island because so many others in publishing had places here; she had worked for Doubleday since the 1940s. When John Jr. decided as a student at Syracuse University that he wanted a summer job interning for the company, she helped him land a place in the royalty department in Garden City, where sales and returns were marked on cards by women who had been with the company since the 1930s.

A finance major, he continued with Doubleday full-time after graduation, working in various departments in Garden City and later on Fifth Avenue overseeing the company’s transition from manual to computerized record keeping. Sent to a graduate program at CCNY by the company, he became a master of algorhythms used to predict book club sales, which were crucial to profitability.

As chief financial officer and secretary of the bookshops division, he developed the digital “architecture,” as he calls it, that connected Doubleday’s 50 or so retail stores with headquarters so sales could be tracked in real time. Only Doubleday could do it back then — the only reason why the company knew to buy more copies of an obscure title called “The Hunt for Red October” by an unheard-of fellow named Tom Clancy. Doubleday’s buyer had bet the book would be a hit and had bought 1,000 copies from its publisher, the Naval Institute Press. That was half its meager print run.

The buyer was right. Mr. Colby’s data proved it so the company knew long before it ran out of inventory it needed to buy more copies.
Doubleday was sold to the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann in the late 1980s, and in 1990, the day before he and Betsy Brabb (a fellow skier he’d met on a trip to Killington) were married, Bertelsmann sold Doubleday to Barnes & Noble. They already had a CFO so Mr. Colby got a job with the British Company Dorling Kindersley, helping to create its American imprint.

“In 1991, we did 21 titles and the next year we did 60,” he said. “I thought, doing all this work, that I wasn’t having as much fun as I’d had at Doubleday. And that I could do it all myself. All I needed was an author and a couple of books. So in 1993, my wife wrote the first title, a cookbook” called “American Chef’s Companion.”

He knew cookbooks never get stale — they keep selling forever.

Brick Tower Press was born, named after that old brick tower in Glen Cove that was an architectural relic of the old J. R. Maxwell estate. Living in the tower was one of his Long Island Press subscribers, Maxwell’s granddaughter Marnie, for whom John had mowed the lawn and done other chores over the years.

His daughter is named for her and there’s an urn by his driveway that was one of a group of cement urns that adorned the estate’s main gate.

A sense of the past is important to Mr. Colby. “Being a publisher,” he said, “you have sense of what came before, how you got to where you are. That’s especially important in Dering Harbor,” where he designed a house intended to fit in with they way it used to be.

PETER BOODY PHOTO | Linda McCarthy at home off South Midway Road. She cleared the property herself before the house was built.

If she weren’t so well organized, ever ready with dates and the spelling of names of people and places, Linda McCarthy’s story of her life could be a dizzying experience.

There’s a lot to it, from running marathons; fixing her parents’ dock every spring and clearing her own building lot some years later; boating in her own 31-foot 1956 Owens mahogany cruiser as a young single woman; marrying a career Marine; raising two daughters here, in Hawaii and elsewhere; and working as a phys ed teacher, admissions officer and now real estate salesperson at Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International office on Shelter Island.

The story goes all the way back to a Norwegian fishing fleet owner named Peder Larsen who started her paternal family story. When all of Great-Grandfather Larsen’s boats were wrecked in a storm, he came to the U.S. to rebuild his fortune, starting a real estate and insurance business in Montclair, New Jersey, which his son Louis and later twin grandsons, Peder, and Linda’s father, Paul, would continue to operate.

Born in 1959 in Montclair, one of three girls, Linda played lacrosse at Montclair High School. In summers, it was off to Cape Cod, where her mother’s family had a place and where Thanksgiving is still celebrated, and to Shelter Island, where Grandpa Louis and Nana had a place, to swim, clam, fish, boat, water ski — and work: helping rebuild the family docks each season, shoring up the foundation of their cottage, digging the trench for the electric line to their dock.

She had jobs, too: working as a chambermaid and short-order cook at the Pridwin and driving a dump truck at Shelter Island Sand & Gravel, her cousin Peder’s business.

Her grandparents discovered the Island when a friend told them they’d like it better than the Jersey Shore. They did indeed like it, buying land in 1938 on Menantic Creek that sons Peder and Paul later augmented when each bought cottages to the north and south, just next door.

Grandfather Louis died at the South Midway house, still known as “Nana’s house,” drying the dishes one evening in 1953. His son Peder, the father of Linda’s cousin,  or “Pedie” of Shelter Island Sand & Gravel fame, died about a decade ago. Linda’s father Paul is 91 and alive and well, as is her mother Doris, living in Florida in the winter and in summers on South Midway. Linda’s older sister Alice Deupree, who lives in New Jersey with her family, now owns a home on South Midway.

A former marathon runner with a best time of 3:26:17 who still kayaks, paddleboards and bikes with her husband Peter McCarthy, a retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel who has been teaching the Junior Naval ROTC Program at Riverhead High School for 11 years now, Linda studied health and physical education at Rutgers, going on to teach phys ed in Far Hills and later Clifton.

She got her master’s at Montclair State and went on to work in the admissions office at Wagner College on Staten Island. She had met Peter, who then headed the Marine officer candidate recruiting program in New York area schools, on a field trip to Quantico for city educators. A runner, he got Linda into marathons and triathlons.

They dated for fours years before getting married at Union Chapel on Shelter Island with a reception at the Island Boatyard.
By then, she’d owned her boat for years — that nifty Owens twin-engine inboard she fondly remembers taking friends everywhere in.

After she sold it in 1989, because she and Peter would be moving away, the new owner allowed it to go to pot and sink at its mooring.

“My only regret in life is letting that boat go,” Linda said the other day at her home on four acres, hidden from view in rolling, wooded terrain between two kettle holes off South Midway. “She was a labor of love. I learned a lot from her.”

Linda also had already bought property on the Island with her dad’s help in 1987, later swapping for the land on which she now lives. She did the lot clearing herself with chain saw and brush hog, felling trees and pulling down vines after returning full time to Shelter Island following Peter’s Marine Corps retirement in 2003. Her architect sister helped with the house plans. Cousin Pedie did the excavating. Linda did the landscaping, from rock walls to step and plantings, all by hand.

Before that, they had lived in Hawaii — “The only one place that compares to Shelter Island as paradise” — from 1989 to 1994, during which time Peter also served in Somalia and Kuwait; in Edison, New Jersey for three years, where daughter Morgan was born; at Quantico for a year, where daughter Kenna was born in 1997; then back to Hawaii until 2001. It was during that stint that Linda ran her best marathon.

“I was very proud of myself,” she said, showing a scrapbook of Reporter clips documenting her finishes in the Shelter Island 10K.
Through it all, Linda had worked, too, including as membership coordinator for the Better Business Bureau of Hawaii, running corporate fitness programs for a bank and for Johnson & Johnson and Merck in New Jersey.

Peter’s final assignment was at Marine district headquarters in Garden City, where the family lived until 2003. As Pete’s retirement approached, their goal was to find a way to live full time on Shelter Island. Landing the Riverhead High School post was the key.

Daughter Morgan, now at Geneseo and the 2012 salutatorian at Shelter Island High School, entered school here as a third grader, Kenna as a kindergartner. Linda got very involved in the school herself, working as an aide for Haley Sulahian, taking on duties with the PTSA, and then joining the boards of the Mashomack Preserve and the Shelter Island Red Cross.

No wonder Carol Tintle and Dougall Fraser of Daniel Gale Sotheby called her one day five years ago, asking her to join them and another great prospect, Debbie Binder, for lunch. They were looking for sharp, community-minded people to become salespeople in the Shelter Island office. Both women took the training and got their real estate licenses together.

“It can be all consuming,” she said, especially on weekends — and especially lately, with 2013 turning out to be “a very strong year.” But the office’s family atmosphere, the community focus and the usually flexible hours, Linda said, have made it a perfect job for her.

With Kenna headed for college in a few years, there’s no room for getting lazy at the McCarthy household — but then laziness isn’t their style, is it?

PETER BOODY PHOTO | Hans Schmid outside his home on South Cartwright Road.

Everybody knows Hans Schmid, the inveterate biker, bowler and baker’s son who has been taking care of the roads and everything else that has needed maintenance, repair and tinkering in Shelter Island Heights for 30 years.

But younger Islanders, and other more recent arrivals, probably have no idea Hans was born in southern Germany, in a town called Eislingen on the Fils River east of Stuttgart.

He visited Germany once in the late 1970s with his father, George, who showed him the room where he was born in an apartment over a tavern that had been his grandfather’s before it was his father’s.

They visited his mother’s family in northern Germany but they had a much better time when they headed south to Eislingen.

“Somebody told me that in north Germany, if there’s a table for 10 and eight people are sitting there but they don’t know you, there’s no room,”

Hans said during a chat at the bar in his downstairs pool-and-storage room, where there’s barely enough room for the pool table he salvaged from St. Gabe’s Retreat 25 years ago. “But in the south, if it’s a table of 10 and there are 11 people sitting there, there’s still room for you.”

He continued to sing the praises of the town of his birth. “All we did was play pinochle and drink schnaps” with a church group he had expected not to like. In the early morning, after two cops shooed them from the church, they went to someone’s house nearby and had noodle soup and schnaps for breakfast.

He came to America with his two older sisters and his parents when he was 13 months old. The family started out in Huntington, where his father’s sister was living. The old country tavern had been buried in his grandfather’s debts and, in post-war Germany, where his oldest sister Heidi could remember living on grass soup during the war, his parents had been unable to make ends meet. Hans’ father, George, had expected back pay for his German Army service, including four years as a POW working for a French farmer. But it turned out his father had cashed all his son’s checks and spent the money.

Here on Long Island, George went to work at a bakery in Elwood. He later bought a house in Kings Park, where he started his own bakery. Hans went to elementary school there and to Long Island Lutheran in Brookville for high school.

Everyone in the house knew how to speak German except Hans. “I only learned the dirty stuff from my parents,” he said, so he took German in high school.

“I almost didn’t pass,” he remembered. The problem was he was being taught “haupt Deutsch” at school, he said, but at home they spoke a southern dialect. “They’d help me with my homework and I’d come back [to school] and say, ‘Hey, come on, man, you got it all wrong!’”

His father wanted to retire one day on Shelter Island, where Hans’ sister Rosie had gone to live after her marriage to Charles Wissemann, whose father was in the baking supply business.

The Schmids moved here in 1969, the year Hans graduated from high school. They lived in the house on South Cartwright where John and Carol Hallman live now. It’s right next door to the log house Hans and his wife Debbie — now Debbie Speeches, they divorced after Hans developed his interest in motorcycles — would build for themselves in 1984 and raise their two children, Tanya and Jeremy. It’s where Hans lives today with a couple of cockatiels, an errant rooster from a neighboring property and a friend-and-boarder or two.

In 1969, his father opened a bakery with seating for lunch and dinner in the building now occupied by Maria’s Kitchen at the corner of Jaspa Road and Route 114; later he built the structure on South Ferry Road that Vine Street Restaurant has expanded in recent years and moved his bakery there.

Hans went to college for a year at the Church College of Hawaii, a Mormon school, of all places. Why? “Because even with two round trips, it was cheaper than living at home and going to Southampton,” he said.

But that fall, Hans pulled number 79 out of 365 in the first national draft lottery, which meant he would be losing his student deferment and, most likely, wind up in Vietnam after the school year. So he enlisted in the Navy to avoid the infantry.

He likes to joke that he did manage to see combat. Based in Boston, he spent time in a part of South Boston called “The Combat Zone” that had some good bars.

When he came home, he worked for his father, cooking and serving. He also had jobs doing whatever had to be done at John Michalak’s restaurants at Goat Hill and before that the Dory. In the winter, Hans headed to Florida, where among other jobs he made heroes and served beer at a place called Heidi’s Hoagies.

Retirement wasn’t in the cards for Hans’ father. On Shelter Island, he worked harder than ever, 18 hours a day, and sleeping on the couch during the holidays when the orders for gingerbread houses and stollen came pouring in. When he was diagnosed with liver cancer, the end came quickly both for him and the bakery. The family searched but there were no recipes left behind; they all had been in George’s head.

Hans’ first major job was working for Glen King on Shelter Island building docks. He did that for six years, then spent a year “painting and doing whatever needed to be done” at Coecles Harbor Marina and then two years working as a mechanic for Hap Bowditch.

“Then I sold my soul,” he laughed, after seeing a help wanted ad placed by the Heights Property Owners Corporation for a maintenance worker. He’s been at it 30 years come June.

Now John Michalak is working for Hans on the two-man Heights maintenance crew, plowing, picking up leaves, taking care of roads and sewers. Hans used to run the sewage treatment plant, too, but after it was upgraded the Heights hired a separate manager for that.

John is a bike fan like Hans; the two rode to Florida together a while ago. Bev Pelletier is another biker buddy; she and Hans have been all over, from North Carolina to New Hampshire.

Hans got into biking about 15 years ago “during my midlife crisis.” He’s got four in his garage but he hasn’t been aboard for two years now because of a hip problem.

His son Jeremy has been in the Air Force for five years, based in Afghanistan right now. Tanya lives in Beacon, New York, where she is a house painter. Sister Heidi lives in Arizona and South Carolina and Rosie and brother-in-law Charlie are close by.

These days for fun Hans plays pool and bowls at the Legion Hall. He writes the men’s bowling column for the Reporter, where editors and proofers are always on the lookout for the earthy double entendres he has been known to plant in his copy.

PETER BOODY PHOTO | Helen Rosenblum at home on West Neck Creek.

Helen Rosenblum’s father, a lawyer who worked in the U.S. attorney’s office for many years before starting his own firm, didn’t want her to follow in his footsteps.

“He didn’t believe in woman lawyers,” she explained the other day, “not because he didn’t believe in their abilities” but because they were always relegated to research and office chores.

It was 1971. The future Shelter Island town attorney, fire district attorney and town justice was working as a secretary for a movie distributor in Manhattan and helping her mother take care of her aged father. She decided to wait no longer, applied to Fordham Law School and was accepted.

When she told him about it, her father was in the hospital. It turned out to be the day he died. As she remembers it, “He made some gesture with his arm that my mother understood. ‘You’re proud of her, aren’t you?’ she asked him. And he said yes.”

Helen inherited a passion for the law, justice and public service from her father, whom she adored. A lawn sign reads “J. J. (for Jacob Joseph) Rosenblum” at the edge of her driveway. It’s not there because the modest ranch house on West Neck Creek was once his; Helen and the late Harry Buxbaum bought it in 1981 as a weekend retreat from New York. The sign is a memento from her family’s home in Wilton, Connecticut, where the Rosenblums spent the part of their summers when they weren’t traveling in Europe.

She was close to both parents but found her mother Evelyn “difficult,” she said. When she visited Helen on Shelter Island, she’d stay at the Dering Harbor Inn and would say she’d had a good time watching the “rats” outside her window climbing the trees.

Her mother was referring to squirrels. She was not “an animal person,” Helen said, as she describes herself. Her cats run the show in her house. One of them, Iggy, is disabled with spine damage he’s had since kitten-hood but Helen just could not allow him to be put down.

Helen and her sibling, older brother Michael, who is now a retired attorney living in Chicago, grew up on the East Side. She went to a private day school in Manhattan from kindergarten through 12th grade. Then she was off to Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs.

She enjoyed it there but left after the school put her on probation in her junior year because “I’d met a young man and didn’t come back one night” to her dorm. It was a platonic relationship, she said, but “they didn’t care.” Fed up, she transferred to George Washington University and got her B.A. degree in American studies.

Her father knew the president of Warner Brothers-Seven Arts, which had offices in New York, and helped her find a job. During her years in the film business, she met Harry, an older man — just as her father was considerably older than her mother — who was a branch manager for the firm. They would remain together until his death in their Westmoreland house on May 21, 1994.

Harry was well known on Shelter Island, which he’d discovered before World War II because he was a sailor. “He landed on Mashomack and fell in love with it,” Helen said. As a younger man, Harry stayed at the Yacht Club and showed Hollywood films at the American Legion Hall and later the Beach Club — still fond memories for older Islanders today. He also shot 16mm movies of the Island during the hurricane of 1938, which Helen donated to the Historical Society.

They were living together at 1 Lincoln Plaza in the late 1970s when they decided to try Shelter Island as a weekend place. They rented a tiny house on the creek off Winthrop Road for a couple of years. Broker Fred Dinkel soon found them the Westmoreland house, which they rented for a year before buying.

Helen had her law degree by then, having earned it by attending classes at night and working by day, but she hadn’t worked as an attorney. When she realized she loved Shelter Island too much to leave for the city every Sunday, she told Harry she was going to live at the house and study for the bar exam. He was all for it and soon joined her full-time here after his retirement.

Her first job as an attorney was working for John J. Munzel in Riverhead, focusing on probate, real estate and matrimonial cases. But because she became known for her “animal work,” she said — for reasons she now can’t recall — the

ASPCA turned to her when it was working to close down a notorious animal collector’s shelter near Sag Harbor. She obtained the orders that allowed the ASPCA to conduct a raid and Judge Lester Gerard later named her its receiver when the ASPCA and the county Department of Health moved to shut the shelter down.

The demand of that work “raised havoc with my practice,” Helen said, “so I went out on my own.”

Helen’s municipal work and public service are well known on Shelter Island. Supervisor Jeff Simes asked her to take the job as town attorney in 1986 at a fixed salary for the so-called part-time work. She remained on the job for 16 years, handling a major rewrite of the master plan and the zoning code, until both she and

Supervisor Art Williams agreed the job had become “just too much” for an attorney with her own thriving practice.

By then, Helen was the attorney for the Shelter Island Fire District and also deeply involved as a Red Cross volunteer. She became a certified “critical care” EMT and often responded in the middle of the night to ambulance calls.

Supervisor Williams and the Town Board turned to her when Town Justice Edward “Pete” Hannabury died at the end of 2003. They appointed her to the job and she’s been elected to three four-year terms, most recently in 2012 when she ran unopposed.

On October 10, 2010, Helen suffered a severe stroke at her Riverhead law office, the result of clots caused by atrial fibrillation, a common arrhythmia that has since then been corrected in Helen’s case by a fairly simple procedure called ablation. “I recovered. I was very, very fortunate,” she said. “Now my limp is on the other side and it’s because of arthritis in my hip.”

She remembers how “so many people came to see me in Stony Brook, probably to say good-bye.” Her significant other, Southold attorney and former Greenport Village Justice Ed Boyd, was with her at the hospital every day and helped her in her recovery.

“It’s unbelievable how fast I was back” at work, she said, but “I was very, very concerned about my practice.”

She did scale back her work for the ambulance squad but is now hand–ling  a bigger caseload than she’s ever had in her practice.

PETER BOODY PHOTO | Sandra Waldner in her framing studio on Worthy Way with a Peter Waldner original high on the wall behind her.

Sandra Waldner’s was a familiar face on Shelter Island even before she landed her job as full-time  cashier at the new Schmidt’s Market this year.

She’s been here since age five, grew up working at the Ram’s Head Inn, Gardiners Bay Country Club and the Dory, among other gigs, and graduated from Shelter Island High School.

For 20 years, she worked at the Heights post office. Then in 2006, she and her new husband Peter Waldner — the Island artist and  Reporter cartoonist — opened Wish Rock Studio, where they sold Peter’s works and those of other Islanders and where Sandra started a custom framing service.

They were so busy Sandra decided to quit the post office job — something she felt compelled to do also because her mother was ailing and so was her sister Kris, who had cancer. Her mom died just a few days before Sandra’s last scheduled day at the post office. Kris, who worked on South Ferry, died in 2010. Most of that time she lived in her own apartment at Sandra’s Greenport house.

“I was able to spend the last three years of my sister’s life with her, going to Riverhead to see doctors. We shopped, we laughed. She was just incredible,” Sandra said.

Meanwhile, all had gone well at the gallery until the crash of 2008. After that, sales took a nosedive, forcing Sandra and Peter to finally close at the end of 2010. Peter returned to house painting and Sandra found jobs as a pet watcher, aide and driver, even as demand for her framing services remained strong. But she needed something solid.

When she read in the paper that Schmidt’s would be hiring local people, she went in to apply and ran into landlord Danny Calabro, a classmate from her Shelter Island School days.

“I asked him to put in a good word for me with Dennis,” Sandra said, referring to the proprietor of Schmidt’s, “and he said ‘Oh sure.’ And I got the job.”

“I love seeing so many people” at the market — “people I haven’t seen because I’ve been down here all the time,” she said during a long talk at her framing studio on Worthy Way. “I saw more people there in my first three days on the job than I’d seen in the past three years.”

“I was so sure the gallery was the right thing for us to do,” Sandra said. “I felt it was going to work out. I had complete faith. I was so tired of being afraid.”

A conversation with Sandra reveals a warm, thoughtful and generous person, a member of the poetry group at the library (at least before work complicated her schedule) and the kind who never talks about the little things she does for people. Someone else told us that she was the one who made sure a 90-something-year-old customer got a cake on his birthday because she knew no one else would think of it.

Sandra was born in Washington, D.C. in 1954, the youngest of Kathryn Waddington’s three kids. Her brother Glenn is a former town councilman and supervisor candidate and a veteran captain at South Ferry.

Kathryn Hawkins had gone to live in Washington with three girlfriends after graduation from Shelter Island High School and met serviceman Robert Waddington there at a USO dance. He later took the family to Ohio when he got a job with the postal service near Dayton.

He and Kathryn divorced when Sandra was five. She brought the kids back to the Island to live with her mother, Mary Conrad Hawkins, and eventually went to work for the postal service herself as a clerk at the Center post office.

When she was 14, Sandra started her first of many jobs, working as a waitress and chambermaid at the Ram’s Head. She continued to work summers through school and her two-and-a-half years at SUNY Oneonta. A Regents scholar, she nevertheless needed student loans. She left because she felt as if the economy were in free-fall at the time.

“I was really affected by that,” she said. “What am I doing here, I asked myself, accruing debt with no real plan?”

Thinking maybe she’d picked up some great stories for a writing career, she went to work tending bar outside Oneonta at a place called the Evening Inn, where she learned how to play pool and eventually realized — much to the amusement of the working-class bar crowd — that she wasn’t supposed to stay open until the last patron stumbled out the door after 3 a.m.

As for good stories, “You realize when people are drunk you wind up hearing the same stories over and over,” she said.

After a trip west with a boyfriend, she wound up living with her sister Kris and Kris’s boyfriend in a no-water cabin outside Fayetteville, Arkansas working at a fast-food restaurant.

“I found out on that trip I wasn’t a pioneer woman,” Sandra said.

Back on Shelter Island, Len Bliss gave her work at his department store. Playing pool at the Pub, where La Maison Blanche is today, she met Thomas Corcoran, the son of a Heights summer family who’d been going to college in Ithaca but was finishing his degree at Southampton College.

They were married in 1979 at Union Chapel. After some false starts in businesses in Manchester, New Hampshire and Jersey City that his father had steered him into, they settled in Greenport “for the diversity,” Sandra explained.

Thomas worked as a house painter with Jim Brewer for years. Sandra had various jobs until her mother alerted her that a position was opening at the Heights post office. Sandra took the Civil Service test and got the job in 1985, the same year she had her firstborn, Christopher.

Eight years later, after their daughter Alexandra had been born and a few years after Thomas launched his own investment advisory firm, he died at age 39 following a horrible ordeal brought on by severe alcoholism.

On New Year’s Eve at the end of 1998, Sandra was throwing a “kid-friendly” buffet at her home in Greenport and asked Peter Waldner, an old friend of Tom’s, to come over because she knew he’d be alone that night. Peter’s daughter Lindsay was a close friend of Alexandra. His ex-wife Kathy had been Sandra’s best friend.

“It was a sparkling night,” Sandra said, remembering their stroll down to the First Night celebration going on in town.

When they were married in 2006, “It was a banner year,” Sandra said: they opened the gallery, bought their Worthy Way house, and their youngest kids both graduated from college. Alexandra, who went to Boston College, now lives in San Francisco, where she is a barista. Son Chris, who went to Green Mountain College in Vermont, is a captain on North Ferry.

It’s hard to work seven days a week — five at Schmidt’s and two at her studio, Sandra said. “My choices led me to where I am financially,” she added. “I can’t blame this on anybody … I would never regret the time I spent with my sister; I wouldn’t regret what I learned by opening the gallery and also what we learned about what we believe, Peter and I,” about the value of art, no matter what the market may say.

PETER BOODY PHOTO | Brothers and business partners Derrick and Ben Smith and Chesapeake retrievers Mahi and Captain Jack.

Talk to Ben and Derrick Smith and their dad Bill about their two businesses — Mildew Busters and East End Waterproofing — and at times three cheerful, enthusiastic people are answering your questions all at once as two big Chesapeake retrievers wag at their feet.

Their two businesses recently won annual “Best of” awards from the readers of Dan’s Papers. Ben, 27, will eagerly tell you the companies have won nine “Best of” awards over the years, the first in 2006.

They got together to chat outside a big shingled house in North Haven where Ben, who handles the jobs for Mildew Busters, had been slung from a rope cleaning and sealing the cedar shakes on an ample, steeply pitched roof.

Derrick, who handles East End Waterproofing, is 24. Over the winter of 2007-2008 he left college when his dad called to say that he and Ben had landed a winter job taking a yacht to the Caribbean.

“I was at school and I wasn’t feeling it,” Derrick said of his time as a freshman at SUNY Delhi, “and ah …”

“I think you went to school thinking it was going to be some type of school and it turned out to be kind of a technical school, really, right?” Bill interrupted. “Is that right, Rick? Air conditioning and electronics?”

“And then you called one day,” Derrick went on, “and said you got that job on the boat … and it was coming to the end of the semester …”

“And the next thing we know,” Bill said, “you were coming around the corner in the BMW.”

“And you made it to Florida in 18 hours,” Ben said.

East End Waterproofing grew out of Mildew Busters, a business Bill started back in the early 1980s. Bill serves as the customer point man, scheduler and support person for both services but he will tell you repeatedly, “It’s all these guys. They do all the work.”

Like Derrick, Ben was in his freshman year at college — Keene State — when he began to wonder why he was going to college at all.

“We talked and we talked,” Ben said, “and I decided to take the semester off. I went to Costa Rica to fish for two months and tried to find a job.”

“I pulled all kind of strings to try to get him a job down there,” said Bill, who has captained yachts all over the Americas.

When Ben ran out of money after some fishing, dirt bike riding and exploring, he came home and went to work with Bill.

“These guys haven’t had a day off in four years,” Bill said, repeating his refrain that they have made both businesses the successes they are.

Derrick and Ben live with their mom, Becky, in the house on Brander Parkway where they grew up. Their storage and staging shed is the former site of her floral shop, which she moved about 13 years ago to Grand Avenue in the Heights. Bill now lives “a stone’s throw away,” as Ben put it, at his own place in Silver Beach.

“You could start my truck with your remote,” Bill commented.

Bill, 62, is well known to Shelter Islanders. An independent candidate for town supervisor in 2009, he is the founder of Fish Unlimited, an environmental group active in the 1980s and 1990s lobbying against Brookhaven Lab’s research nuclear reactor —  which has since been decommissioned — because its waste water was polluting the headwaters of the Peconic River. A professional boat captain and fishing guide, he has written magazine articles and books on fishing, including “Tuna: An Angler’s Guide to a Great Gamefish.” He started Mildew Busters in 1981 “in part to help support Fish Unlimited,” Bill said.

When Ben joined his father running a boat to the Caribbean over the winter of 2006-2007, “We kept talking” about doing more with the business, Bill said. “We realized this thing is totally underutilized. We were not really maxing it out. We all agreed that in March when the boat thing ran out we’d start to push it.”

Come that spring, “It wasn’t like a hobby any more,” Ben said. “We really turned it into a business.”

A growing awareness of the health dangers of mold — a trend that intensified in late 2012 after Sandy flooded so many coastal homes — has helped boost business, the Smiths agreed. So has a new aesthetic that considers weathered, brown cedar shingles an eyesore, Bill agreed. Many of today’s homeowners want their shingles to look perpetually new.

Mildew Busters features “totally green” sealants and cleaners made by a company in New Hampshire, the Smiths said; no tarps are required to protect landscaping because the chemicals are non-toxic and biodegradable. “I don’t need to wear a respirator with this stuff,” Ben said. Derrick uses “green” products from another company for his interior waterproofing jobs.

They learned the ropes “by trial and error, research and classes,” Ben said. In addition to cedar shakes on walls and roofs, he cleans vinyl siding and decks as well as patio and lawn furniture. “I really love working with the exotic hardwoods, teak and mahogany,” Ben said.

“You don’t need ropes and you can really see the difference. It’s very satisfying.”

Derrick’s East End Waterproofing was “a natural extension” of Mildew Busters, they explained, a way to extend the working season by offering interior services such as ridding basements of mold and mildew and refinishing and sealing them so there won’t be a problem again.

The brothers head to Bill’s house early every morning to plan their days: where they will be working and what they’ll need at each site. Ben and Derrick grab what they’ll need from their shed and head to work, rarely seeing each other during the day. Bill works the phone, oversees logistics and often shows up with supplies. Each business hires three helpers in summers and keeps two of them, Trent and Carlos, on all year.

Just recently, they incorporated their businesses and registered their logos as trademarks. They were designed by Shelter Islander Adam Hashagen.

Like Bill, Ben and Derrick are hunters and fishermen. They look forward to grabbing some time this fall to head out with their Chesapeake retrievers — Captain Jack, age 9, and Mahi, age 3 — for some duck and goose hunting.

Do they ever consider themselves lucky?

“That’s a really good question,” Ben said. “I don’t know if I ever felt lucky. It definitely makes sense.”

“It makes sense,” Derrick agreed. “We worked hard for it.”

PETER BOODY PHOTO | Dr. Bill Zitek at home on North Ferry Road.

Talk for a while with Dr. Bill Zitek and you can sense the decades he spent as the go-to vet in Southold Town and for many Shelter Islanders as the owner of the North Fork Animal Hospital. Soft-spoken, calm, careful and precise, he’s got the air of a man who has been trusted by thousands of people to help their animals.

“If I had to do it all over again,” he said of his veterinary practice, which he ran with only his wife Mariel’s help after he bought it in 1967, “I’d do exactly the same thing. I loved it.” He sold the practice 32 years later with a staff of about 15 employees.

At the end, Mariel was still helping with the inevitable late-night calls, when staff people weren’t available. Large, deep-chested dogs with “bloat,” for example, caused by twists in the stomach, were a common yet potentially fatal problem that often came up after-hours because owners tended to wait before calling.

“You could see the immediate relief” for the dog that often came after inserting a needle into the abdomen to relieve gas pressure, he said. If that didn’t work, the only alternative was surgery.

“We did a ton of them,” Dr. Zitek said, “in most cases with successful outcomes.”

Mariel was there with him when he started his career, “Helping to hold up cows’ tails,” he said. They were married when he was in veterinary school in Ithaca.

Thinking of an important detail about his practice, he said, “I had eight kids who came to me as 14-year-olds” to work at the animal hospital, kids “who went on to become veterinarians and a ninth who I have to share the credit for with Rob” Pisciotta. He’s the vet Dr. Zitek brought on board as he planned his retirement and to whom he sold the practice in 1999. A past president of the New York State Veterinary Society and an official of the American Veterinary Association, Dr. Zitek worked part-time for him for a while.

Regular visitors to Shelter Island, the Ziteks bought a house in 1984 on North Ferry Road and rented it out. One of their tenants was their son Craig, a former Shelter Island fireman who is now the chief fire marshal in Riverhead. Their two daughters, Leslie and Gail, who have two children each, live in North Carolina.

After selling the practice and expanding the house, the Ziteks moved here full time in 1999. Bill did not cut his deep ties with Southold.

He is still active with the First Presbyterian Church and the Rotary Club, for which he helped distribute food baskets just last week. He is also a local member of the Plum Island Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, which oversees the treatment and welfare of the animals at the national Animal Disease Center on Plum Island.

But on Shelter Island, he’s written himself a new resumé, serving for nearly a decade on the town’s Deer & Tick Committee, from which he is now retired, and serving as a trustee and energetic volunteer at the Mashomack Preserve, a place he considers a national treasure.
“I think it is really one of the finest pristine places on Long Island,” he said. “We’re used as a baseline for that reason. It’s an extremely important place both for its natural beauty and its scientific aspects.”

He launched and runs Mashomack’s bluebird nest program, which he started in 2001. Very much a man of science, he carefully observes the nests and collects data to track the program. This fall he presented a paper at the North American Bluebird Society annual meeting in Aiken, South Carolina.

How did a kid from New Rochelle, born in 1935, develop a love of animals and the outdoors? His dad, a journeyman electrician, had a deer camp in West Copake, New York that he expanded into a vacation home where Bill and his younger sisters spent every summer growing up.

He credits his love of the outdoors to picking berries with his sisters, exploring the countryside, swimming in Snyder Pond, and getting to know his father’s cousin-in-law, Clarence Padget, an agent for the Cornell Cooperative Extension. “Padge” took Bill along on trips to give technical advice to dairy farmers in northern New York. Padge is now 96, living in Florida, and the Ziteks visit him when they go down every winter.

Bill got it into his head he wanted to be a dairy farmer. With that in mind, he went to the College of Agriculture at Cornell, where his roommate was a pre-vet student. That got him thinking. So did the summer he worked at a dairy farm up in Gouverneur, New York, near the St. Lawrence River.

“A vet named Dr. Haenel came to treat a cow that had milk fever,” a dangerous condition caused by a loss of calcium after birthing calves, Dr. Zitek explained. “He put an IV in the cow and in 20 minutes she was up and standing. I said, ‘Boy. I think I want to do that.’”

He loved his seven years at Cornell, from which he graduated with his D.V.M. in 1959. “They were some of the happiest years of my life,” he said — in part, no doubt, because he met Mariel at a party there in 1957. She was a student at SUNY Cortland from Garden City. They married in 1958 while Bill was still in school.

His first job was at a practice in Glens Falls. In 1960, he had to choose between taking a job near Buffalo or in Rockville Centre on Long Island.

“There was so much traffic there, so many people,” he said of Long Island. “I said to Mariel, who was pregnant with Leslie at the time, ‘I think we’ll go to Buffalo,’ and she sat down and cried.”

So Long Island it was. On a day off, the Ziteks took a drive out through the North Fork to Orient, enchanted by the area. “I stopped off at Dr. Waitz’s to meet him,” he said of the vet who owned the North Fork Animal Hospital then. Not too much later, when Dr. Waitz put the practice up for sale at age 55 because of his asthma, Dr. Zitek bought it and came east with Mariel and their three young children to plant their roots.

PETER BOODY PHOTO | Doug Matz at his home on Tarkettle Road.

As the owner of Flanders Heating & Air Conditioning, Islander Doug Matz can’t help but dive into his work, heading every day to his office in Flanders and job sites across the East End.

It used to be that flying, or making offshore fishing expeditions on his 30-foot boat, hunting giant tuna or going after cod off Gloucester, were the only ways he could keep himself away from the job. Then 9/11 happened. He lost one of his best friends from his hometown of Hampton Bays, a man who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald in the twin towers.

“That changes your thoughts,” explained the Shelter Island EMS board member and chairman of the town’s Zoning Board of Appeals.

After some deep thinking, he married the young woman from Gloucester he’d been dating; bought his own business after working for the company that had acquired his grandfather’s and father’s heating firm in 1998; and eventually bought a big, silver converted-bus camper that can be seen in the summer months on its own parking ramp outside his high-gabled house on Tarkettle Road.

“The big reason the camper exists,” he said last week, “is to do things with the kids,” his two step-sons, Clarkson University freshman Wyatt Brigham and Shelter Island High School senior Carter Brigham. There’s also 19-month-old Michael Joseph Matz.

“A big part of the reason I bought this business,” he said, “was to give the kids the opportunity to get into it if they want. Whether they want the opportunity or not, time will tell.”

After 9/11, he also sold his airplane, a Cessna Skylane that had made it easy to get to his future wife Melanie and his fishing boat when it was up in Gloucester. But with his own business, he wasn’t flying enough to keep sharp.

“Flying was great … the life lessons you learn from it are phenomenal,” said the instrument-rated pilot. “You have to be ahead of yourself all the time. I don’t think it’s something you can pick up and put down. You get a bunch of people in the plane with you and now their lives depend on your decisions. It just didn’t make sense anymore.”

As for fishing, he phased out of those big offshore trips, too; he now keeps a 19-foot Carolina skiff at his dock. “I went offshore year-round for 20 years, going after cod, giant tuna, canyon fishing. I did that, been there. There’s a lot of prep work. It just got to the point where I didn’t want to do it anymore.”

For years now, whenever the boys have free time, Melanie and Doug are off and running in the camper, making weekend trips to New England and Canada in the spring and fall and longer trips during vacations and every summer to Florida and the West Coast with Yellowstone, Salt Lake City and the Grand Canyon in between.

“It’s a great chance to be together as a family and for the kids to visit so many different places. And with a 19-month-old, we’ll have the chance to do it all over again,” he said.

Doug Matz was born in 1963, grew up with two sisters and graduated from Hampton Bays High School in 1981. He went on to study mechanical engineering at SUNY Farmingdale to prepare for a career with the family business, Matz Heating and Air Conditioning.

His grandfather had worked in Astoria, Queens for a surgical instrument company before finding a job at Brookhaven National Lab and moving his family east to Hampton Bays. He started the family company in 1948 after building up a side business making sheet metal products and installing heating ductwork for local plumbers.

“I’m a third generation heating and air conditioning guy,” Doug said. “I’ve always enjoyed it.”

He never considered doing anything else but his father allowed him to make that choice, he said.

“He never had that option. He was forced,” Doug said of his father, who was happy to sell the business in 1998 and now lives with Doug’s mother in northern New Hampshire. Doug’s two sisters both live in the Hampton Bays area.

Doug was made district manager for the large firm that bought the Matz company (and other firms around the country) and had a combined revenue of more than $1 billion.

“I was traveling all over,” from New Hampshire to Virginia, with frequent trips to headquarters in Dallas. “It was a college education going from a company with 40 employees to having multiple locations and dealing with much larger issues,” he said.

A good friend, Charlie Wyatt — a partner at Otis Ford in Quogue, from which Doug had bought a lot of company vehicles — has a place on Tarkettle Road. “So I’d come over here and stay in the harbor and borrow his car and drive around the Island,” Doug said.

With the idea of having a weekend retreat here, Doug bought a cottage just down the road from Charlie. But “once I fixed it up I never went back. I stayed here forever.”

That cottage was located about where the living room is now in the Matzes’ high-gabled, shingled home, which they built after heading off to St. Lucia and getting married without telling anyone. It was a second marriage for both.

During construction, the town issued a stop-work order requiring an application to the ZBA.

“I didn’t know anything at the time and didn’t realize what we had done,” he said. With the help of a consultant, “I went through the process and learned a lot about the code.”

He’d had experience as a businessman dealing with the ZBA in Southampton Town.

“The difficulties in dealing with them, the lack of cooperation and lack of direction … There was this huge fear and it shouldn’t be that way. The zoning board shouldn’t give people what they want just because they ask for it, but there should be a fair and clear way to an end result.”

Community concerns and neighborhood impacts far into the future must be considered, too, he said.

The Shelter Island board “was great to work with,” he said. “Even the Building Department is great here compared to other towns. You can walk in and get answers. You can speak to people.”

The experience inspired him to seek a ZBA seat. Instead the Town Board appointed him to the Licensing Review Board, which had to handle some difficult cases during his time. When another opening came up on the ZBA, he applied again and was appointed. That was about five years ago. The Town Board tapped him to be its chairman in 2011.

Flanders Heating & Air Conditioning has 38 employees and a management team that allows Doug to head off on those camper trips.
But when he’s here, he works.

“Most of my time is supporting the installation and sales staff, holding project meetings, visiting homes that have problems, trying to resolve those types of issues. Yes, it’s still fun. It’s fun coaching people and watching them grow, taking a young person who doesn’t have much skill and developing him into top technician or top sales person, and having a career.”

Will any of the boys want that for themselves? With one of them not yet two years old, retirement could be far down the road for the current boss.