Charity Robey

Island Profile. The lady on the top of the hill-Catherine Becker: Six decades of Shelter Island life

Catherine Becker has seen more than a half a century of Shelter Island history from her home on Little Ram Island.

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter, August 28, 2014

 Catherine Becker has lived at the top of the hill on Little Ram Island for the past 55 years.

 Born in 1917, Catherine is a living witness to much of 20^th century history. From her vantage point in a modest home on a high point of land on Shelter Island, she has spread her unforgettable brand of humor, warmth and serene confidence. The poet Maya Angelou said, “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Catherine has the rare gift of making the people around her feel good.

 Born Catherine Kupsh in the Bronx, she grew up in Queens, near the present-day Belmont Racetrack. “There was a cornfield in front and a beanfield in back.” When her mother died in the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, Catherine was an infant. Catherine, her brother Henry, and their father moved in with her maternal grandparents. Her mother’s sister--a woman she called “Auntie”—became a mother to her.

 Auntie was beautiful, fun, and loved adventure.  “She loved to take Catherine out on lively outings, saying, ‘Let’s go gallivanting.’” Catherine’s father proposed marriage to Auntie, but was refused.

 When Catherine applied for a job at the Eberhard-Faber Pencil Company, Auntie bought her a silk blouse for $2.98 at Lerner’s for the interview, and waited protectively outside the factory while Catherine was inside, ready to storm in and fetch her. Over an hour later, Catherine emerged from the factory in time to prevent an intervention, and announce that she had the job--export accountant at a salary of $15 a week.

 The Depression was “a worrisome time. “ Her father had a butcher shop, but his business dropped off, and in 1931, “We were told that he had retired. “ He found work as a butcher at the A and P where “he was paid in meat.” The family was able to get by, although times were very tough. . “We would add fabric to our dresses, called it a ‘false hem’ to make them longer so we could get more wear out of a dress before outgrowing it.”

 Catherine attended P.S, 34, Queens Village Elementary School.  After high school, she enrolled at Pace University, to study accounting and business administration, the only woman in her class. It was in an accounting class in 1938 that she met Milton Becker, who would be her husband for 67 years.

 Milton went to work at Pfizer Pharmaceutical Company as a cost accountant, where he worked until his retirement in 1979. Catherine is proud of Milton, and Pfizer’s role during the years of World War II, making the new penicillin drugs that saved the lives of countless men and women from fatal infections. And, she added gratefully, “Pfizer is still taking care of me.”

 After the War, their daughter, Carol and son, Donald were born.  All their friends were having babies, and all the babies seemed to come in pairs of the same sex. When a friend asked how they had managed to have one of each, Milton said, “You don’t think I work for a chemical company for nothing.”  Catherine said, “I was so sure Donald was going to be a girl, I sent Milton back to check.”

 Catherine has two grandchildren, Yasmin and Richard, and two great-grandchildren.

 When her phone rings nowadays, it sounds like a playlist on shuffle.  She’s got a ringtone song for every child and grandchild.  “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” announces a call from her son Donald,  “Ee-yi-ee-yi-oh” means Yasmin is calling from her farm full of horses and dogs and the strains of the “Star Spangled Banner” indicates lawyer and grandson Richard is on the line.

 Catherine and Milton first came to Shelter Island in the 1950’s when friends in their East Hills neighborhood invited them out for the day.  They bought land and built the house Catherine lives in to this day. As was typical of their relationship, they divided responsibilities amicably.  “Milton got to choose where to put the house, and I got to choose the boat.”

 After Milton’s retirement in 1979, they lived on Shelter Island full-time. They were regular lunch customers at Orient by the Sea, where they would arrive on their 23 foot Chris Craft, but not before phoning owner Bob Haase to warn him they were coming.  ”Milton was the worst yachtsman, and he couldn’t swim. Bob would have one of the dock boys come out to meet us.”

 Once, Catherine relates, she was trying to tie up the boat herself when Milton caused the boat to lurch, dumping her in the water, although “I kept my hat on.”

 Catherine’s brother Fr. Henry Kupsh also lived on Shelter Island, and was guest minister during the summer at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, where Catherine and Milton had been members since 1955.  In 1998 Catherine and Milton designed and donated a lovely stained-glass window for the church hall.  The window celebrates the joys of life on Shelter Island with a scene of sunset, sailboats, seabirds and a scallop. 

 St. Mary’s is where Catherine met Alice Fiske, who until her death at 88 in 2006 was the legendary lady of Sylvester Manor. “Allie was a character.” Catherine said in tribute.

 Once Catherine told Alice that she had admired a silver-topped cane while in her daughter Carol’s company.  “I said to Carol, ‘I’d like one of those when I get old.’ “ Carol responded, “You are old.”  When Alice heard this Catherine said, she tartly remarked, “ ‘Write her out of the will!’ That was so typical of Alice.”

 For many years, Catherine was a member of the ‘9-holers” a loosely-affiliated group of golf-loving women who played every Tuesday at Gardiner’s Bay Country Club; but waited until the more ambitious golfers had finished their 18 holes. The “9-holers” (surviving members include Jean Farnham, Hermine Gladstone, Doris Schultz and Marianna Tarpinian) waited until the course was clear to play, because, as Catherine said, “9 holes was enough.”

 And although she does not exercise the right to use it, Catherine did recently renew her license to operate an automobile; a development that sent a wave of disbelief through her children. “I can legally drive until I’m 100.”

 Catherine is prepared to stay put in her house on the hill. Recent hurricanes have not intimidated her,  “They tried to put me up in the firehouse, but I wouldn’t go.”

 She is in complete possession of her sense of fun, as well as her sense of irony,  warning James Eklund, owner of the Ram’s Head Inn, where she is a regular lunch customer, that she plans to celebrate at the Inn, “If I make it to my 100^th birthday. I may not know I’m there, but I’ll have a party.”

Voices from the distant past | Shelter Island Reporter

BEVERLEA WALZ PHOTO | Patricia Yourdan, left and Pat Shillingburg transcribing one of the last letters in a batch of more than 700 written from the 1740s to the 1820s.

A team of enthusiastic amateur historians, led by Patricia Shillingburg, spent much of the summer transcribing a treasure-trove of 762 letters written by and to Thomas Dering and his children between the 1740s and the 1820s. Here, Patricia Yourdan and Pat are transcribing one of the last letters. At a reception hosted by Pat and Ed Shillingburg on August 3, Pat presented Phyllis Wallace, archivist for the Shelter Island Historical Society, with a thumb drive containing the complete transcript of the letters, making them accessible to scholars and researchers.

via shelterislandreporter.timesreview.com

Shelter Island profile: Mary Hillemeier | Shelter Island Reporter

Farming is not what it used to be.

Thank goodness.

Mary Hillemeier, vegetable grower at Sylvester Manor Farm, is articulate, well-educated and elegant. The very model of a modern farmer, she is trained in, and devoted to small-scale, sustainable and community-based practices.

She leads the workers of Sylvester Manor Farm by example. Picking a row of prickly okra, her smile is bright and her manner friendly, but her hands are powerful, rough and calloused, and they speak volumes about her.

Hired to manage the planning, planting and people who raise Sylvester Manor’s exquisite, sustainably grown produce, Mary came to Shelter Island last February when we were in the tight grip of a nasty winter.

The Island’s climate had been described to her as relatively mild, but in her first months here the warmth she experienced came from the people she met. “Shelter Island is singular … very, very friendly. I don’t have to introduce myself more than once and most people remember me. They are curious about who I am, and where I came from, and how I got into what I’m doing, and that is really lovely.”

She came to farming through her love of food and cooking. While studying Italian and art history at the University of Michigan, Mary spent a year in northern Italy. Experiencing the way food was grown, prepared and eaten there was life changing. “I don’t think at that point I saw myself as a farmer, but I definitely got excited about food.”

After graduating from Michigan in 2006, Mary moved to New York City, determined to keep food at the center of her life. By day she worked in book publishing. But by night she cooked at a restaurant in Brooklyn and worked with Norwich Meadows Farm in partnership with Common Ground and Just Food, to establish a “sliding-scale CSA,” or community supported agriculture, that provided locally-farmed food to New Yorkers of all income levels.

In the fall of 2008, Mary grew from foodie to farmer; going to Argentina to learn farming through the Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF) program. She stayed through the spring of 2009, working on two subsistence farms and learning how to raise everything from goats to berries.

Mary went on to work at the Urban Roots Youth Development and the Green Gate Community Farms in Austin, Texas, and then to study at the Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California at Santa Cruz — the first and oldest such program in the U.S.

Mary remembers first hearing of Shelter Island when she was living in Brooklyn and read an article in the New York Times. “I read about the farm right around the time I was going to Argentina. Later, when I saw the name, it sounded familiar.”

In winter of 2014, she accepted the job of vegetable grower at Sylvester Manor.

Mary manages three full-season apprentices, two summer apprentices and anywhere from three to four WWOOFers at any given time. Recent Sylvester Manor Farm WWOOFers hail from Brooklyn, Vermont and Switzerland.

The crew lives in the Manor House or in tents on the property and Mary rents a cottage close to the farm.

The whole crew cooks and eats together. “Like a village,” she said. “It’s wonderful. A lot of sharing. We made gumbo on Monday. Our okra was just coming in. I used green peppers and onions and  made a nice roux.” Ask around at the farmstand, and you’ll learn that Mary’s gumbo is already the stuff of legend.

An important part of Mary’s job is to help apprentices and WWOOFers who may not have extensive farming experience adapt to a lifestyle that involves hard physical labor. “Your body definitely changes when you are bent over half the day carrying heavy bins … I certainly felt that shock and shift for myself.”

She helps the workers understand the changes in their bodies as nature’s way of making a farmer. “In spring you start out with leafy greens, things that are light and easier to carry, and then you get tomatoes and zucchini and then work up to melons and pumpkins … getting heavier and heavier as you go through the season. You kind of feel your summer body starting to happen … The more cartons of cucumbers you carry, you feel your arms getting stronger, building yourself up to the finale, the October harvest.”

A primary focus of Mary’s work prior to the growing season is to develop a “crop plan,” which she calls, “a blueprint for what I’m going to grow and where I’m going to grow it.” She incorporates crop rotation in her plan, “Part of an organic process is not to grow tomatoes where you grew them the year before.” She also considers vegetables that she has had experience eating, as well as growing, such as the Padron pepper, “the size of your thumb round or oblong. Fry them with oil and salt. The bigger the hotter. They were all the rage in Santa Cruz, but they taste even better grown here.”

Among the many factors Mary has to weigh in choosing what vegetables to include in her crop plan are the tastes and food traditions of the community (light on the collards here, heavy on the tomatoes), the resistance of crops to diseases that can’t be effectively controlled using organic practices (no corn) and the climate of Shelter Island (mild and well-sheltered). Among other sources, she consults local farmers. With her friend and colleague Layton Guenther, the farm manager at Quail Hill in Amagansett, Mary said, “We joke that Shelter Island is ‘Tropicalia’ compared to Amagansett.”

Mary arrived at the farm a few months before Eben Fiske Ostby, 10th generation descendant of the original European settlers to Shelter Island, officially donated his 1737 Manor House and grounds to the nonprofit Sylvester Manor Educational Farm. She experienced the “joy and gratitude toward the family and the sense that this project is getting such support. It is exciting to be part of this organization in that moment.”

Mary has felt the embrace of the community. “It’s really been a nice thing for me as a newcomer to Shelter Island to be in such a central location, to meet local folks … I feel welcomed. I’d love to continue living here.”

via shelterislandreporter.timesreview.com

Island profile: award-winning author Robert Lipsyte | Shelter Island Reporter

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO |
Robert Lipsyte and wife Lois B. Morris with Milo at their West Neck Road home.

In some ways, Robert Lipsyte is unremarkable. Born in the Bronx in 1938, he grew up in Rego Park, Queens and went to Forest Hills High School. And after many years living in New Jersey and the Upper West Side, raising two children, and working very hard, he now lives on West Neck Road with his wife, Lois B. Morris, and a handsome, elderly spaniel named Milo.

Unremarkable until you read his remarks.

Because for over 50 years, in novels for young adults and as a journalist, Robert has been writing about the American experience — mainly through the lens of sports — with humanity, wit and acumen. He’s the smart kid in the back of the classroom, armed with a peashooter.

Seated at the dining table in a bright room, Robert is speaking frankly. When Lois suggests a modicum of restraint, he responds, “The dog is here. I can’t lie.”

Prize-winning sports reporter and columnist at the New York Times, winner of the 2001 Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American Library Association for lifetime contribution to Young Adult Literature, and runner-up for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary, Robert is currently working for ESPN as ombudsman, where he has recused himself from Twitter in part because “I have a tendency to pop off.”

To hear Robert tell it, his start in journalism was typical of the time. “At the Times in 1957 if you were a white guy with a tie and no tics you could find a job and work your way up … I’ve been really lucky about accidentally falling into great jobs without the kind of career planning I would advise for young kids.”

Luck, or is it an uncanny ability to show up at events just as all hell breaks loose? Like the time he was sent to cover a fight between Sonny Liston and a kid named Cassius Clay, because the regular Times sports writer was too busy and Liston was obviously going to whip Clay. Or the time he was sent to cover his first NASCAR race and realized that Dale Earnhardt had been killed when, “Someone ran out and threw a blue tarp over his car and everyone in the press box started to cry.”

Or when Robert went to work for the New York Post in 1977, shortly after Rupert Murdoch took over … and lasted seven months.

About that he said, “Rupert finally read me.” Hired as the city columnist, Robert found he could write whatever he wanted as long as it did not conflict with the Murdoch political agenda; anything that did would be cut out.

One night, after learning his column had been altered in this way, Robert had enough. He left his resignation letter on Murdoch’s desk and went over to Channel 2 where his friend Dave Marash was an anchorman for the CBS 11 o’clock news. “I guess I whined to him,” Robert said. “Marash said, ‘If you ever want to quit, how would you like to quit on the 11 o’clock news?’ It was a slow news night. I found out that more people heard me announce my resignation that night than had ever read me in my life, books, magazines and newspapers. It was a revelation.”

Robert first came to Shelter Island with his family in the 70s. “We visited and guested and rented and in the early 90s bought a house.” He and Lois live in “her house” on West Neck Road, adding a room in the basement where Robert works and some woods in the back for Milo to defend. “So I’m guesting once again.”

Robert’s daughter, Susannah, is an attorney, married, living in Brooklyn and the mother of a two-year-old. His son Sam lives on the Upper West Side and is chairman of the graduate writing program at Columbia University. “My son is a famous writer. The dynamic in the family has shifted,” he said. “A few years back he would show me stuff before he sent it in, now I show him stuff. I love it. I think vicarious pleasures are the best pleasures.”

Vicarious pleasures are what Robert has given to countless parents, as they’ve seen their children — especially sons — pick up his books and start reading like doctoral candidates. Before there was Harry Potter, there was “The Contender” and “One Fat Summer”; compelling stories that acknowledge the dark and troubling moral challenges in sports and growing up in a way young readers can understand.

His latest work, “The Twin Powers,” is science fiction for middle-school- age kids, coming out in October. “I wanted to see if I could write a book without sex or drugs — something that my grandchildren could read. And I wanted to try different voices and have a woman character. It was written on Shelter Island in a wonderful bubble of quietude.”

In his fiction and non-fiction writing, Robert examines the American obsession with boys and sports, a phenomenon he calls “jock culture.” He said, “Kids really should play sports. But parents have to figure out how they can understand, that even though sports heroes seem to be live and in color, they are movie stars.”

Lance Armstrong is one of many such heroes that Robert met over his career. He described Armstrong with characteristic humanity, saying, “I thought from the beginning that Lance was doping and I didn’t care. To go up the Pyrenees without chemical help is crazy … He lied of course. But he was a hard case and I kind of respected him. He’s a tough guy, even looking at you across the table, there was nothing soft or sweet or ingratiating about him. But his foundation was spectacular. He helped an awful lot of people.

When they stripped him of his seven titles, it became impossible to replace him because everyone all the way down were dopers themselves.”

Robert sees two levels of sports; one is the Yankees or Mets, the Tour de France, the World Cup (“they are not such good guys”) and the other is “the Bucks on down. Positive values.”

He celebrates sports that involve real human accomplishment, not mixed up with entertainment and big money. “What could be better than the Shelter Island girls volleyball team? That’s kind of a human treasure. And that’s sports … a great coach … look how hard they worked. That didn’t just happen.” he said, “They’ve gotten something out of that experience that will serve them the rest of their lives.”

“When we hold athletic heroes up as models we should hold them up as models for work ethic, for dedication to goals, for collective play, and not some delusional fantasy we have of their character.”

Robert’s current job as ombudsman for ESPN puts him in the thick of the moral issues he’s been commenting on for his entire career, such as the controversy over brain damage among NFL players as a result of repeated concussions. Pro football generates more income for ESPN than any other sport, so how does ESPN go about covering a story that threatens the very identity of the sport?

“That’s an ombudsman issue, and that’s why an outside critic is a good thing,” he said. “And I have been critical.”

The view of the Island as merely a charming paradise does not make sense to Robert. He sees much more complexity here. “Shelter Island is special but it is also a microcosm of the world … There are a lot of different communities, wonderful and enriching and sometimes they interact,” he said. “It’s Peyton Place with plovers. It’s people whose kids go to school here, who work here, it’s a thriving artistic community, retirees and writers.”

He also includes the people who come for the summer and “leave their money here.”

“I love this place. I love it for the physical beauty. There are interesting people here. You get to talking to somebody semi-retired, some guy who comes along and it turns out he was an underwater demolition expert in WWII and he blew up the world!”

Robert loves the Shelter Island “gems,” like the Perlman Music Program, Project FIT, Sylvester Manor, the Mashomack Preserve, the Bucks, and the fireworks. “Anything that’s a community campfire, that brings people together in a glad moment is really a great positive,” he said. “My job is to eat the marshmallows.”

“I love it for the quietude. I love it for a sense of sanctuary here for me,” he added. “At my age and for how I live it’s almost perfect. I say almost perfect, because if I said that Shelter Island is perfect, a tree would fall down on the house tonight.”

via shelterislandreporter.timesreview.com