Charity Robey

He goes out every night, and is still home

 

Brad Kitkowski is the owner and manager of Isola, a restaurant in its third year as a warm and welcoming year-round Shelter Island refuge of rustic Italian fare.

But Brad’s working life has not always been hospitality and good times. In his 30s, a couple of years into a successful career at Willis Group, a multinational insurance brokerage, he accepted a new job as managing director with a high-powered, privately held firm.

“Seven days into the job I thought I made a mistake,” he said. “I had to figure out how to be me, and survive.”

He managed to last in the job for two and half years by focusing on understanding the business, and positioning himself with executive management. “You are a product of what you’ve gone through,” he said.” You’ve got to learn from everything. Did I have bad dreams for 60 days after I left? Yes. Took a little bit to shake it all off.”

Brad grew up in Ohio, the middle child in a family with three brothers and a sister. He moved to Florida with his mother just before his senior year of high school, went to junior college for a year and a half, and then to the University of Florida at Gainesville, a place he fell for immediately.

The Kitkowskis were long-time Notre Dame fans, so when Brad began “bleeding orange and blue” during the second half of his first University of Florida football game, his siblings figured he had seceded from the family. Patrons of Isola will find evidence of Brad’s continuing dedication to all things Gator in the décor, including the distinctive blue of the Isola logo, which could evoke the Mediterranean Sea, or could be Pantone PMS 287 C (also known as Gator blue).

Brad was in his senior year of college when he was offered an interview for a sales position at E-One, a manufacturer of fire and rescue equipment, whose slogan is “Kickin’ Ash Since 1974.”

Unfortunately, when he walked into the interview, he thought the position was in medical sales. “I had to admit it, I had no idea what the company did,” he said. “They liked the way I recovered, and I got a second interview.”

He started out as a product manager for tankers, and still in his 20s, became a product manager for a petrochemical and refinery business, and was then promoted to regional manager based in Amsterdam, with a territory that took in most of the Middle East and all of Africa. For five years in the mid 1990s, he called on accounts from Turkey to South Africa, still a junior person, with a junior salary to match.

“My expense account was four times my salary,” Brad said. “But I still know 15-20 words in a dozen languages, and I saw Mt. Kilimanjaro, and Victoria Falls.”

It was a life changing experience, but he felt something lacking. “I was not grounded in any way,” he said.

He resigned, and moved back to Central Florida where he got married and went to work for a company that did employee outsourcing for small and medium businesses.

Brad’s son Bailey was born in Sarasota, Fla., but by 2002, his marriage to Bailey’s mother was over. He moved to Manhattan, his ex-wife to Long Island, and Bailey lived with both. Brad calls Bailey “the most consistent person in my life.”

Brad’s move to New York marked his shift to a new line of work, since he had been recruited to work for Willis Group as a senior vice president managing a retail division of the commercial insurance brokerage where he made his career.

He made dinner, too. “When I moved to Manhattan I really got into food,” Brad said. “My son was with me every weekend, every vacation. I made goulash, chicken and noodles. I recreated my mom’s dishes.”

He discovered Shelter Island around the same time, and still remembers the anxiety of a newcomer on his first ride on the ferry. “Was I in the right lane?” he said.

But he soon felt at once that this place is heaven: “I always say, people either get it or they don’t.”

Brad had been a summer visitor for about 10 years before he thought about opening a restaurant here. His grandparents owned a restaurant when he was growing up, the site of his first beer and his first job, as a dishwasher. He’d also dipped his toe into restaurant management in Manhattan.

On Shelter Island, he got to know the Rando family, who owned Sweet Tomato’s, located in the 100-plus year-old Victorian in the Heights where Isola now operates. The building once housed a butcher and grocery, and for the last 30 years or so a series of restaurants, including The Cook, Chamberlains, and Sweet Tomato’s. To make it work, Brad needed to buy the building, and for that he needed a partner, his friend Anthony Killough.

The first years of Isola were not without bumps. “The first summer we were blessed with a great chef but we made every mistake in the book,” he remembered. Staffing, the bane of every restaurateur operating in a mostly-summer economy, was challenging. “We had some misfires,” Brad said.

Keeping the lights on for the entire winter was counter intuitive, and proved to be a stroke of genius. “I stayed open the first winter and then I knew people,” he said. “You make progress here through word of mouth. The reality is you’ve got to earn the respect of the people who are here.”

Operating year-round also helped him build a strong staff. “We are a place that has pretty darn good service and the service is because we have pretty darn good people,” he said.

Brad still keeps his hand in the insurance business, but his heart, and increasingly his home, is on Shelter Island, providing hospitality for friends and family. “I got a chance to do something that I love. I get to go out every night.”

Lightning round

What do you always have with you? My Shelter Island bracelet.

Favorite place on Shelter Island? The North Ferry, because it means I’m back.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island? Manhattan.

When was the last time you were elated? When I realized that Isola made it, we are going to be here for awhile.

What exasperates you? Narcissists who distort things for their own benefit.

When was the last time you were afraid? When I had a laydown-MRI. I had to figure that one out.

What is the best day of the year on Shelter Island? Memorial Day.

Favorite movie? ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel.’

Favorite food? Isola’s lasagna

Gone but not forgotten The mystery house of Dering Harbor

SHELTER ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY COURTESY PHOTO
Adolph Schwarzmann built a cottage in a section of Dering Harbor known as Germantown in the 1890s.

By Charity Robey, published in the Shelter Island Reporter on October 10, 2019

A Dering Harbor “cottage” built in the 1890s by a magazine publisher and attributed to Stanford White was razed by a grocery-store heiress in 1963.

In the early ‘60s, Rachel Carpenter, a wealthy and civic-minded Shelter Island resident, bought the 80-year-old house across the street from hers, tore it down and replaced it with a guest house that didn’t interfere with her view of the water.

The house razed by the A&P heiress has become part of Shelter Island lore, in part because some Islanders still remember its beauty, and in part because it was said to have been designed by Stanford White, the celebrated architect responsible for the triumphal arch at Washington Square and several mansions on the South Fork. 

No one could deny that the house was lovely, but its attribution to White was a myth that architect Carol Karasek and a retired archivist, Phyllis Wallace, have punctured. 

For people who care about balancing historical preservation with the rights of owners to do what they want with their property, the story of the Schwarzmann/Carpenter house is one where preservation lost.

The house was built by Adolph Schwarzmann, who cofounded the popular magazine, Puck, in 1876. Between 1890 and 1895, Schwarzmann and four other families built homes on Sylvester, Nicoll and Havens Roads, in a section of Dering Harbor once called Germantown because most of the residents had German-sounding names. It is unlikely that McKim, Mead and White, Stanford White’s firm, had anything to do with the Schwarzmann cottage, as it does not appear in published catalogs of their commissions; one strong bit of evidence refuting the theory that White designed Schwarzmann’s house.

A second and even more compelling piece of evidence is the plan for the house that archivist Phyllis Wallace unearthed in the Historical Society collection, which clearly lists “Wait and Cutter Arch’s, Boston” as the firm responsible for the drawing and floor plan of “Residence for A. Schwarzmann Esq.”

The real mystery is why anyone thought the house was designed by Stanford White in the first place. Stewart Herman wrote The Smallest Village, a lively history of Dering Harbor. He wrote, “Adolph Schwarzmann, publisher of Puck magazine, commissioned the noted architect, Stanford White, to design a house on the bluff between Pickhardt’s house and the channel,” and then referred to Belle Schwarzmann in 1943 as “the daughter-in-law of the man who commissioned Stanford White to design him a house.” Herman repeated the story, but it was almost certainly not the source of the mistaken attribution. By the time Herman’s book was published in 1976, Schwarzmann’s house was long gone and the myth of its creator already firmly established. 

Part of the explanation for the Stanford White myth may have been the house’s beauty. Built on a bluff overlooking Greenport Harbor and east to Orient, it had three verandahs. Carol Karasek said some features of the house could suggest Stanford White, such as the oversized columns, and the little oriel on the second floor. She has a plausible theory: “I wonder if someone saying ‘Wait’ might have been understood as ‘White’— especially with an accent?”

SHELTER ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY COURTESY PHOTO
The Schwarzmann cottage, March 14, 1960, shortly after the property was purchased by Rachel Carpenter.

Phyllis Wallace is one of the few to have seen the interior of the house in all its splendor. Her memories of the home center on an enormous upstairs bathroom with a giant sunburst on the wall, made of tiny inlaid tiles in a rainbow of colors. “As a woman who grew up with seven of us using one bathroom, I was very impressed. That was a highlight.”

The Schwarzmann cottage was razed by “Claude Fuller and crew,” according to Historical Society records.

In 1963 there was no tide of public opinion to stop Rachel Carpenter from tearing down her own house. She was considered a benefactress, and most Islanders were grateful to her for building a new medical center. “Nobody thought about it at the time,” said Phyllis. “We weren’t thinking about preserving things.

Long live the Queen

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO A royal view.

 

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter in August, 2019

I was 11 when my father parked a brand-new Pontiac in our driveway. He named her Yvonne because he liked the way Yvonne LeMans rolled off his tongue.

On our first ride I sat on the back seat with my two sisters, bound for outer space. The motor sounded like the roar of a lightly-sedated tiger; the upholstery was clean and smooth. We rode around the block with my dad at the wheel, and my mother in the passenger seat.

I’m looking forward to reliving the feeling of a brand-new ride when the North Ferry Company puts The Menhaden into service later this summer. Will it hum companionably? Will it be so capacious that it will carry 40 Mini-Coopers and a pool-water truck at the same time?

Will it have that new-ferry smell?

In 2003, Mike and Trish Bebon had the honor of accidentally being the first official passengers on The Mashomack — the first of the 25-car boats — when, planning to leave the Island on the first boat of the morning, they got to the ferry way too early. When someone approached their car and asked how long had they “camped out” to be sure they were first, they were puzzled.

“We weren’t even aware that it was the first trip of the new boat,” Mike said. “We just have a habit of arriving early for everything.”

Acquiring a new ferry, like buying a new car, can mean parting with the old one, and alas for riders of the North Ferry, the time is fast approaching to say goodbye to The Islander, a boat that is called “The Queen” by her crew. Near the end of her 50-year reign, The Islander is a rusty link to times past.

There were ferry lines so long you bonded with your line-neighbors and joined them in freezing out any miscreants who attempted to cut in. With just enough space for 10 lucky cars to come aboard on each trip, survivors of this Darwinian process lost their troubles somewhere in the middle of the bay when the sea air swept away the bad. Foot passengers climbed the rust-lined stairs to the passenger area to say hello to the captain and take in the views. Inefficient, possibly dangerous, it was the best 15-minute ride ever.

Bill Cummings, who runs the House on Chase Creek, grew up on the Island and remembers riding the Islander when he was so small he had to stand on the bench in the passenger cabin to see out the windows during the crossing.

Paul McDowell, president of North Ferry, remembers telling his parents that he and his brother were going for a walk in the woods when they wanted to slip away in the late 60s, a precursor of today’s “hiking the Appalachian Trail” excuse for doing something that’s no one’s business. In this case, Paul and his brother walked down to the ferry, boarded The Islander, sat upstairs watching the captain, and took in a Godzilla movie at the Greenport theater while their parents were unaware that their kids were on the lam.

Paul and his brother were not the only members of the McDowell family to use The Islander as a bridge to adventure. Their black lab Poker used to sneak onto the ferry, disembark in Greenport and head for the Drossos Motel, two miles down Route 25, to beg for food. This story sounded fantastical to me until I realized that Pat Lenox was cooking at the Drossos snack bar in those days, and no hound or human can forget her burgers.

Steve Lenox told me of the time he and Eddie Clark were captaining the Islander in the 70s, during a crossing that was so rough, it resulted in a design modification of the boat. High seas tossed a wave of green water into the boat over the gate, overwhelming the drains on the deck. Suddenly the front of the ferry was filled hip-deep, and the gates had to be opened to drain the water.

As a result of this harrowing trip, a large gap was cut at the bottom of the gate, a modification made to allow water that washed into the boat to drain faster, and the Queen continued to make the roughest crossings safely.

Joanne Sherman tells one of the best ferry stories, a cautionary tale that resonates today and is even better because it is true. A fully-loaded sewage disposal truck boarded the ferry on a hot summer day bound for Shelter Island with sedans packed tightly around it. In the middle of the crossing, a breach in the tank storing raw sewage occurred and the contents — which must have been under pressure — shot in a spurt into the open window of the car parked next to it.

The sewage, a foul-smelling blue slime, continued to spurt out onto the deck while passengers ran for their autos on a surface of slippery waste that gave no purchase.

They pulled off the ferry on Shelter Island, tires splattered with muck as the truck driver abandoned his vehicle in the ferry parking lot and fled. Ferry employees hosed down the vehicles that were on board, many of the passengers, and themselves.

“Not too many people remember the poop-deck incident anymore, but I do,” Joanne said. “Whenever I’m on a boat and parked near a truck whose contents are under pressure, I keep my windows up.”

Gianna Volpe, who hosts a radio program on WPPB every weekday morning, got her start in journalism on Shelter Island. Her memories of the North Ferry from her days working at the Reporter are dear to her.

“I began my cub reporting days watching the sun rise from the ferries heading into the Reporter from Mattituck,” Gianna said. “It’s a meditative trip — and an invitation to remember why I work as hard as I do to live out here.”

Before The Islander retires later this summer, I plan to take another ride or two and remember the good times, like climbing up the stairs to the warm passenger room to watch my sons peer through the windows into the gloom of a frozen winter night, and their excitement when they spotted the lights of the ferry slip on the Shelter Island side.

We’ll make new memories on The Menhaden but I’ll never forget the Queen.

The fall that just fell

MARTIN BURKE PHOTO Autumn dawn at Congdons Creek.

The fall equinox happened right before my eyes at the Heights post office on Saturday, Oct. 19, when Jim Eklund, still dressed in his three-season uniform of shorts, nearly collided with a person wearing a bulky, hip-length Fair Isle sweater as she barreled through the front door. They do-si-doed, and she eyed his knees.

“How low did it get overnight?” she asked him.

“Shorts weather is almost over, but I’ll go kicking and screaming.”

It’s so last-century to believe that fall starts on Sept. 23 and ends on Dec. 20.

Astronomically-speaking, those dates are the brackets, but this year, the events occurring inside them (so far) have included nor’easters, hot flashes, emotional upheaval and snowfall.

The sunrise over Congdon Creek was warm and windless on the first Monday in November, a day that made some of us fear we’d lived long enough to see the end of commercial scalloping. The unusually placid weather made the disaster coming into focus even more heartbreaking.

When things go badly wrong, it is awful to be reminded that your affairs may be tangled, your life upended, your livelihood threatened, your existence in doubt, but the sun still rises and the earth turns.

Jim Pugh took advantage of the fine weather on opening day at the town dock to get his boat out of the water for the season. He maneuvered a rusty trailer into position (since few were scalloping, there was plenty of room) and proceeded to bail water from a swamped Whaler that was lolling in the water like a half-inflated swimming pool raft.

He rowed it around the dock, nosed up on the landing ramp, and hopped into the water to pull the ancient skiff up onto the trailer. He pressed a passerby (who was hanging around hoping to see some scallops) into service, positioning the boat on the trailer, while the rest of the water drained onto the pavement, down the hill and into the creek.

I was just glad to see that somebody got something good out of the water that day.

Not long after the scallop catastrophe was revealed to me, Russell Glover of Consider Bardwell Farm came by to tell me I’d better throw away that wheel of cheese I bought at the final Havens farmers market — a cheese that was going to get me through the fall.

The cheese-maker’s safety inspector found listeria — a milk-borne bacteria — from milk they had purchased from another farm. The voluntary recall meant they had to shut down production, destroy their inventory and let their staff go, a nightmare scenario for a small cheese maker like Consider Bardwell. Their reaction prevented anyone from getting sick, but how and when they can start making cheese again is in doubt. A GoFundMe effort is under way now that may help them hang on.

Feeling pretty low as I contemplated a winter without affordable scallops and my favorite cheese, I voted. It made me feel much better, even though I had to convince a pollworker that my signature was actually a match with the one they had on file. My penmanship is slipping.

In November and December, steep declines in the striped bass and bluefish population in our waters got headlines and prompted stricter recreational fishing regulations.

Fewer bluefish were landed along the mid-Atlantic coast in 2018 than in any year on record, an existential threat to Bob’s bluefish and blue cheese special, and the snapper derby, not to mention the recreational fishing industry.

It’s not just the people who enjoy fishing, make cheese and round up their winter income on scalloping that are in pain, and have had setbacks this fall. Maybe a new hip kept you inside, or you had to skip a gathering of friends while battling a head cold. You lost an election, or your old dog is spending less time on the porch lying in the sun now that the shadows are sharper, and the sun sets early.

We’re a community that cares for neighbors who are hurting, and likes to support people who need a hand. We are really good at making change locally, but more and more the roots of our problems are global.

The other day, I decided to walk my favorite trail at Mashomack backwards. My goal: to see an entirely new set of water views, hills and hollows. (The trail was backwards — I did not walk backwards, that would be stupid.) A rustle of leaves and a ringed tail sticking out from under a low boardwalk across marsh confirmed that I was not the only one surprised by my path through the woods.

It was good to look at this very familiar place with new eyes. I thought about the first time I laid eyes on Miss Annie’s Creek, 30 years ago, how important this place is to me, and how I must do what I can to take care of it.

When we voted, we made a lot of changes at the state and local level, and we’ve already seen many East End leaders take up arms against the effects of climate change.

Increasingly, it’s the job of our elected officials to figure out what to do. There has never been a more important battle to win.

Glowing worms, spider webs-all in a day's work for this Shelter Island graduate.

COURTESY PHOTO

Emily Hyatt, in Boston’s Kendall Square near BGI Genomics where she worked this past summer.

Emily Hyatt, Shelter Island Class of 2016, is a biochemistry major at one of the best science and engineering colleges in the country, but her love of science started when teacher Dan Williams told her she could do a project on some proteins she had seen online that caught her eye.

The project gave her an idea of what real scientific research is all about when she was still in high school. “He was my enabler,” she said recently. “I just took it and ran.”

Now a senior at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Emily decided to major in biochemistry and has sharpened her focus on genomics. She’s also working part-time for BGI Americas, part of an international company that provides genome sequencing services, and plans to make a career in the fast-growing area after graduation.

She said she’s been fortunate to find great teachers at RPI, including Donna Crone, Ph.D. “She is my absolute favorite,” said Emily. “She reminds me of a finch, she wakes up really early every day. She’s absolutely the best prof in the bio department.”

Emily has already taken Ms. Crone’s courses in molecular biology and genetic engineering and is about to take the second part of molecular biology, a course known to be extremely tough.

Alongside coursework, Emily has participated in research, including a project last semester that had her working with a type of worm called C. elegans. No ordinary worm, the C. elegans she worked with were engineered with a characteristic that could be considered a benefit only on Halloween, a gene that made them glow green in the dark.

Emily designed and edited the DNA of an E. coli and when the glowing worms ate the E. coli they stopped glowing because her edit interfered with the gene that made them glow.

Her current research project involves figuring out how to engineer E. coli to make spider silk proteins; substances that have applications as medical sutures, coatings, and gels. This metabolic engineering research is the Ph.D project of a graduate student whom she calls “spider man.”

This past summer, Emily had an internship in Boston with BGI Genomics, the largest genetic research center in the world, headquartered in China. The company does genomic sequencing. Emily’s current job with BGI Americas involves contacting scientists at research facilities in North, Central and South America using a National Institute of Health grant list to find people who might need BGI’s services. Although Emily knew that biotechnology and pharmaceuticals were growth areas of industry, she had no idea of the size and competitiveness of the genomics sequencing business.

Emily’s boyfriend went to a large technology-oriented high school in New York City with plenty of college level classes available, and seemingly limitless resources. “By contrast, I went to Shelter Island with 19 kids in a grade.

And yet they did so much. At SIHS, they want kids to see all the things that they can do.”

She and her current roommate have lived together since freshman year, and this year they were joined by her roommate’s boyfriend in a house off campus with a front porch. “It’s cozy,” said Emily. “We’re renting an apartment just like normal people.”

She loves Troy, the small city in upstate New York where RPI is located. “It’s beautiful, and there’s a farmers’ market every weekend.”

She’s still trying to adjust to the sounds of sirens. “I still notice it, especially at night, when I was thinking — ‘Really? Another siren? Can we please stop setting our houses on fire?’”

Learning to love scientific research was just one of the important lessons Emily took away from her experience at the Shelter Island School. In a discipline where strong writers are scarce, and the need to explain complex ideas to a non-scientific public of the utmost importance, Emily is that rare thing in science, a strong writer. “Ms. Colligan taught me how to write, and I try to focus on writing in my humanities courses,” she said.

These days, Emily’s trips to Shelter Island are holiday visits. She has no plans to move back because her work is centered around Boston and the Bay area and Seattle. She’d like to live in a rural area near water, but it has to have a biotech industry so she can continue what she started years ago at a small school where her teachers cared about her, and wanted to give her the world.

She has a giraffe in her office and it's all good.

CHARITY ROBEY PHOTO Mary Kanarvogel

A stuffed giraffe named Melvin, completely swathed in toilet paper, stood by the window of Mary Kanarvogel’s office in the Shelter Island School on Halloween as a stream of students came to see him.

But the students, from every grade, shy and soft-voiced, bold and booming, dropped by ostensibly to see Melvin’s costume (the hypochondriacal giraffe went as a mummy) but really to check in with Nurse Mary.

She’s a multi-tasker. While dispensing a mint to a sixth-grader for a sour tummy — “Maybe you had some candy today?” — she tallied the carbohydrates in a high school student’s lunch so he could adjust his dose of insulin accordingly.

Mary Fikslin grew up in Kearny, N.J., a Scots/Irish town with a view across the Meadowlands of the New York City skyline. She and her identical twin Jane were the youngest of six children. Jane, born an hour after Mary, was a complete surprise to everyone except, perhaps, infant Mary.

Mary’s mother worked as a secretary and her father was chief of maintenance for a chemical company. At 4 feet, 10 inches, Mary was “the eighth tallest cheerleader” in the high school squad. “Kearny is still my favorite place,” she said. “I have strong ties.”

Mary’s older sisters and brothers all went to college, but with resources running low by the time Mary and Jane graduated from high school, Mary took a full scholarship at Upsala College, a place she might not otherwise have gone. After two years at Upsala, she changed course, starting over at Rutgers in a nursing program.

In 1981, after six years of college, she had her nursing degree and went to work at Columbia Presbyterian, where she excelled, handling a large and needy patient population, and starting an orthopedic nurse practitioner program. One day, she caught the eye of an HVAC-installer named Mark Kanarvogel, who was renovating rooms in her ward.

Soon he came to her with a splinter in his finger. One of Mary’s colleagues pointed out that he always wore the same shirt. “Just find out if he’s actually wearing the same shirt every day,” she was told. “If so, you can’t go out with him, but if he’s wearing the same style, different shirt every day, then it’s O.K.”

That test, Mark passed.

He told her he lived in Centerport and asked where Mary was from. “I said New Jersey, and he said, ‘On purpose?’” They married in 1985.

Their first child Ian was born in 1986 and Hope came along in 1991. Ian is recently married, and working as a teacher in Oysterponds, and Hope, who is also married, lives in Rutland, Vt.

When Mary met Mark, she had never heard of Shelter Island. “I thought Long Island was a place where rich people went on vacation,” she said. But Mark had spent time at Camp Quinipet as a child, and dreamed of coming back with his own family. “Mark said to me, ‘You get on the ferry and you lose all your bones, you just relax.’”

They found a non-winterized trailer in the Center, and began spending weekends and summers with their growing family. Mary worked as the Camp Nurse at Quinipet in the late 1980s through the early 1990s, and Ian and Hope were campers. In 1997, the family left Centerport for Shelter Island.

“I always thought it was a nice place, I just didn’t want to move here,” she said. “But it turned out to be fabulous.”

On Memorial Day weekend 1998, Pat and Steve Lenox opened a diner that today is known as The Islander. Mary, who had recently moved to the Island, and was working at Eastern Long Island Hospital, went to work there, and loved it, staying until 2001. The stress of nursing had been getting to her. “Waiting tables is serving people, but you can’t kill anyone,” she said.

She also started a business in 1999 called Friendship Quilting, providing machine quilting services to the quilting community, which was vast and growing. Her business was so successful that she found herself with a two-year waiting list, and nervous customers in line to have their quilt finished in time for a birth or wedding.

Working long hours in her basement alone, she realized that her passion for quilting was partly her love of the society of other quilters, and decided to start quilting with friends only.

In 2001, Ruth Mattson was the school nurse for Shelter Island, and when an episode of head lice broke out, Ruth called on Mary, who was working at Eastern Long Island Hospital, to lend a hand. When Ruth decided to leave the position, Mary stepped up, and has been known as Nurse Mary ever since.

Like any community, Shelter Island has problems, and those problems show up in the health and well-being of children. “Some kids here have no health insurance,” Mary said. “In the dead of winter, it gets rough. I do a lot of field work with the Lions Club to distribute IGA food cards, to help families with heat and coats, or help kids who don’t have money for a school trip.”

Mary is not a fan of short-term rentals, which she believes have reduced the number of year-round rentals, and put more pressure on Island families. “I’ve seen so many families have to leave the Island because of the rising cost of living here,” she said.

“There used to be a very small number of reasonable rentals. Now there are none. People can make more money renting weekends. The school enrollments tell the story. People have come to me desperate that their housing is going to short-term rental and they have no place to live. I know a family living on a boat. It affects young people, families that probably shouldn’t live together anymore, have to stay together.”

Though she loves her work, Nurse Mary said there may come a time when she will be ready to see the country. “My sister is already retired, and when I’m ready,” she said, “when it’s not fun anymore, I’m going to rent a drivable Airstream and we’ll go — Women on Wheels.”

Lightning round — Mary Kanarvogel

What do you always have with you? My twin sister and I have gold baseball charms from our dad. He played baseball in the Navy when he was in Okinawa.

Favorite place on Shelter Island? Daniel Lord Road.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island? Kearny, N.J.

What exasperates you? Inefficiency.

When was the last time you were afraid? Yesterday. I heard a BAM! at 6 a.m., and thought the wind blew a tree on the house. It was the pole in my walk-in closet — fell right off the wall.

What is the best day of the year on Shelter Island? The Snapper Derby.

Favorite movie or book? ‘Atlas Shrugged’ by Ayn Rand.

Favorite food? Coffee.

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family? Jack Monaghan. A kind and gentle soul.

Favorite elected official? Jimmy Carter.