Charity Robey

Leon 1909, Valerie Mnuchin's 'love letter to Shelter Island' is also getting love from people who have to come by ferry.

https://shelterislandreporter.timesreview.com/2023/03/07/island-restaurant-features-local-food-and-staff-housing-leons-is-six-months-old-and-thriving/

Dave Daly and Ben Gonzalez, holding on to a sense of place

Ben Gonzalez,left, and Dave Daly with Paco at their Shelter Island home. (Credit: Charity Robey)

WHEN BEN GONZALEZ and Dave Daly decided to start an oyster farm, Dave knew exactly where he wanted to raise bivalves.

His great-grandfather, Thomas Daly, bought a large Southold property in 1919 to get his family away from the flu pandemic sweeping through New York. He put down roots, and over the decades the family extended and built houses all around him. Dave grew up sailing in Southold Bay, and riding the ferry across to Shelter Island for ice cream.

Dave and Ben picked out an underwater lease site in Southold Bay for their new farm in 2013, one of the 10 leases granted by Suffolk County for aquaculture that year.

“It seemed like such a reach to be starting an oyster farm, but the Bay feels like my back yard,” said Dave.

Now six years into the business, they have raised half a million oysters, and a few weeks ago moved to a new home on Shelter Island, up the hill from Chase Creek, and downhill from the golf course with the 7th hole out back, another great location.

Ben’s family is originally from Galicia in Northern Spain, but he grew up in the Dominican Republic and has lived in Buenos Aires and Texas for extended periods. After a 25-year career in marketing with Verizon, he retired. Not yet 50, Ben was ready to start a new business. “My family was extremely concerned when I told them we were going to be oyster farmers,” Ben said.

Dave had no experience raising shellfish either, but he did grow up around boats.

“Motor boats were a four-letter word in our house,” Dave said. “That classic postcard from the 1960’s you sometimes see of two men sailing in Southold Bay — it’s actually my dad and a friend.”

Even before they bought a house in Southold, Dave and Ben bought a 25-foot motorboat, a Maxum. “It’s very top-heavy, my dad calls it the floating Clorox bottle,” Dave said.

Ben told of the time they invited Dave’s dad to cruise with them. “He used to sail to Block Island every year, so we invited him to come with us on our motorboat. He showed up with all these charts and rulers, and when I said, ‘Mr. Daly, we have GPS,’ he said, ‘I don’t trust those things.’” 

Dave added, “If our GPS ever failed, I don’t know how we’d get back.”

Ben was working for Verizon in New York and Dave was in the business school at NYU when they met at the Star Lounge in the Chelsea Hotel, where Dave had gone with group of NYU friends. They married in April of 2011 in Vermont, and it must have been a great wedding because, when same-sex marriage became legal in New York a few months later, they started getting requests from friends and family to do it again.

They adopted Paco, a snaggle-tooth chihuahua mix a few years later. He was a rescue. “A couple of families rejected him because he does bite a little bit,” Dave said. “I had a very ugly dog growing up named Squiggy who looked a lot like Paco.”

Ben said, “I had been hearing stories about Squiggy for years, and I finally saw a picture. He’s the ugliest dog I’ve ever seen.”

They only agreed to foster Paco for a weekend, but when they brought him in the adoption papers were ready, and they wouldn’t give him up.

Dave introduced Ben to the life aquatic when they started coming out to Southold on weekends, and once they found out about oyster growing, Ben went all in. With an education in oyster-raising courtesy of the SPAT (Southold Project in Aquaculture Training) program at the Cornell extension in Southold, “we got 1,000 oysters the size of a pinkie nail to grow or to kill,” Ben said.

They grew.

In the third year of the SPAT program, they learned that Suffolk County had leases for commercial oyster farming. They got into the lottery, were picked to lease a spot in Southold Bay, and joined the nearby Shellfisher Preserve, owned by the Peconic Land Trust, where they operate the land-based part of the farm operation, including tumbling and sorting the oysters.

Once they invested in the lease, they needed equipment, including a boat with a crane to lift 1,000 pounds. They found a bayman selling a scalloping boat, and named the 19-foot Mako “El Pulpo,” or, “The Octopus.”

“The boat has been working these waters for much longer than we have,” Ben said.

In the first six years of production their company, which they named Southold Bay Oysters, had annual growth of between 20% and 40%. They’ve just launched a skincare product derived from nacre, the mother of pearl coating inside an oyster’s shell.

In spite of impressive growth in their first years of farming, sales during the pandemic have been down, as they have been for all oyster farms who depend on restaurants, special events, private parties and tours. Fortunately, the oysters, unperturbed by pandemic, are patiently growing in Southold Bay.

Dave and Ben, with their combined experience in finance and marketing, considered the craft brewing and winery businesses before latching onto oyster farming. Ben was dazzled by the eco-friendly nature of this form of aquaculture, and how it bodes well for the future of the business. “The more I learn about it, the more impressed I am with how powerful oysters are — how they clean the water and establish protective reefs,” he said.

For Dave, it’s more about a sense of place. “The draw for oysters for me was a love for the North Fork and a desire to be here,” he said. “My family used to be here through Thanksgiving and then close the house until Easter. Now there’s pumpkin season and Christmas tree season. The draw for oysters for me was a love for the place and a desire to be here.”

Ben and Dave — Lightning Round

What do you always have with you?  Ben: My wedding ring. Dave: My wedding ring, and Paco.

Favorite place on Shelter Island?  Ben & Dave: The Ram’s Head Inn.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island?  Dave: Southold Bay, the beach. Ben:Orient Point.

What exasperates you?  Ben & Dave: When people come out here to visit and bring a bottle of California wine.

When was the last time you were afraid?  Ben & Dave: Coming back from Fishers Island on our boat, we got caught in fog, and had to try to get out of the way of a massive tanker coming through The Race.

What is the best day of the year on Shelter Island?  Ben & Dave: Labor Day in West Neck Bay. We go to enjoy the beach and spend the night on the boat. 

Favorite movie or book?  Dave: “Jaws.” Ben: “The Others.” 

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family?   Ben & Dave: Kim Tetrault, director of the SPAT program.

Most respected elected official?  Ben & Dave: Steve Bellone, Suffolk County Executive. He represents government that really works.

Island Profile: Cristina Cosentino, a farmer looking to put down roots.

Outstanding in her field: Cristina Cosentino at Sylvester Manor Farm. (Credit: Charity Robey)

 

 

Cristina Cosentino is a farm manager who works with her hands as well as her independent heart, so when she found herself mired in Sylvester Manor’s Windmill Field without enough weight over the rear wheels of the truck to get out, she was determined not to call for help.

“Usually when something like this happens, I call Gunnar [Wissemann, Grounds Manager], and he does one thing and then it’s fixed,” she said. “This time, I decided I’m going to get myself out of this.”

Hirotsugu Aoki and his dog Finnegan were a few miles into their usual 7-mile walk when they came upon her and offered a hand. But Cristina wouldn’t let Aoki push, so he had to stand by as she struggled. Finally Tristan Wissemann and Stewart Mackie came and pushed her out of her misery.

“I always have plenty of help in my life, and I struggle with accepting it,” she said. “My mom always says, ‘Just say thank you. Let people help you.’”

To gracefully accept help was one of many lessons Cristina learned growing up on Long Island in a large Italian family. Her father’s grandparents were from Sicily, and her mother immigrated from Italy when she was 13. “They were farmers in Italy, raising hazelnuts, walnuts and grapes,” she said. “We always had a garden. My nonno [grandfather] still makes wine.”

Another lesson was the importance of good food. “My grandmother is an incredible cook. I know everyone says that about Italian women, but she is extraordinary,” Cristina said. From her grandmother she learned her signature dish, a potato gnocchi that always gets requests. “My nonna is from Avellino, so it’s not light fluffy gnocchi, it’s the dense kind and you roll it with your thumb. It holds the sauce.” 

Almost every member of Cristina’s family works with their hands, from her grandmother’s gnocchi-making, to her father, who is a carpenter, and her brother, a successful heavy metal drummer. Cristina started piano in 1st grade, by 4th grade she was playing the cello, and later dabbled with the accordion and percussion instruments. She graduated from Smithtown High School, and went to the University of Delaware to study cello.

In 2012 she completed a masters in Italian Studies from NYU in a program based in Florence, where she lived in the San Frediano neighborhood and studied the Slow Food movement that began in Italy. Her roommates and friends taught her about Italian food and wine, and it was a life-changing experience.

Back in the States, she worked for a year as a wine representative, selling a portfolio of Italian wines to restaurants, but quickly concluded she was not cut out for it. “I like connecting with people, she said. “It energizes me. But the basis of the wine job was, ‘I’m going to try to sell you some wine, and that’s why we’re talking.’”

While working at a farmer’s market, Cristina asked Teddy Bolkas, from Thera Farms in Ronkonkoma, for a job, but based on her size, he was skeptical. “I think the moment when I impressed him was when I found a hookworm in the soil,” she said. “I asked him what it was, and he said it’s bad, and I started pounding it.”

She was hired.

From there she worked with a beekeeper who managed 50 hives across the North Fork, and in 2015 went to farm at Sylvester Manor, laying eyes on Shelter Island for the first time on the day she moved into the Manor house. At the end of the season she was riding a bike down Cobbetts Lane as the maples were turning red and realized she didn’t want to leave. 

She was living on the North Fork when she had dinner with a friend at a restaurant in the city called Wildair. Her friend knew one of the line cooks, and after the meal introduced Cristina to Armond Joseph when he met them at a bar. 

“I thought he was kind of a jerk,” Cristina remembered. “He probably would not have talked to me if he hadn’t made the connection with my vegetables, but he heard me say something about Italy, and being a farmer.”

When they said goodbye, they hugged each other a little too long. “I thought — ‘That’s a nice hug,’” she said. 

Cristina invited Armond to visit her on the North Fork and the next weekend he came out.  They met again in the city, and a month later moved together to Providence, R.I. where Armond had a job. He’s now the chef at Achilles Hill in Brooklyn and commutes between New York and Shelter Island, since Cristina moved back in January of 2020 to become the director of farm operations at the Manor. 

They agreed to get married in the middle of a day in November that didn’t start out well. Cristina was still recovering from an emergency appendectomy at Eastern Long Island Hospital earlier that month. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and there was frenzied activity at the farmstand.

“I was actually having a mental breakdown,” she said. “I was thinking about everything that I had to do and how was I going to get it done. That’s when he asked me, in the middle of my worst behavior. And I said ‘Yes,’ because he must love me to ask in that moment when I was behaving completely unacceptably.”

Her plans for the future center on starting a family, and making the Sylvester Manor farm the best it can be. “I love it here,” she said. “I like the fact that you can only get on and off by boat and that you have to go to the supermarket by a certain time, and if you drive around after 8 p.m. you will be the only car on the road. I want this to be my forever home.”

Lightning round

What do you always have with you? Nothing! Well, now I guess it’s my engagement ring.

Favorite place on Shelter Island? The road to Ram Island, between Big Ram and Little Ram.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island?
Florence, Italy.

What exasperates you? When people don’t empty the sink drain. I like a clean sink.

When was the last time you were afraid? On the operating table before my appendectomy.

What is the best day of the year on Shelter Island? When the maple trees on
Cobbetts Lane turn red.

Favorite book? ‘The Neapolitan Novels,’
by Elena Ferrante.

Favorite food? Mozzarella di Bufala.

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family? Anthony Bourdain.

Most respected elected official? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Hirotsugu Aoki, an artist afoot

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last spring, a man commenced to walk the roads of Shelter Island every day. Accompanied by a beautiful brown dog, he carried a camera. Hirotsugu Aoki, (everyone, including his wife calls him Aoki) follows a daily ritual — walk seven miles, and take pictures. Soon he noticed that he had become an object of curiosity,

“There are not too many little Japanese guys around here,” he said.

Last week, Aoki agreed to sit for a few minutes outside STARs Café and tell me who he is and how he got here.

He was frequently interrupted to greet friends and allow Finnegan (the aforementioned beautiful, brown dog) to accept high-value treats. 

Aoki was born in Yokohama in 1943, the fourth of five children. His parents were doctors.  A traffic accident when he was 15 left him hospitalized with a brain injury.

“I heard the doctor saying to my mother that he did not think I was going to make it,” he said. “Somehow I survived, but I stopped growing.”

He graduated from high school, but admits he didn’t go much in the last year, in part due to the lingering effects of his brain injury. “I realized how fragile and unreal life is, and that I could be gone forever,” he said. “I think that’s why I stopped going to school.”

Trained as a painter after seeing a show in Tokyo of contemporary art including paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Josef Albers, he decided to move to New York in 1967 to pursue his interest in avant-garde art.

“At that time in New York, you didn’t have to do much to support yourself,” he said. Working as a carpenter, he painted and hung out with a lot of other poor artists, some of whom, such as the conceptual artist On Kawara and the video artist Nam June Paik, later became famous.

“I was a hippie,” Aoki said. 

In 1969, living in an unheated loft with winter coming on, Aoki met Teresa O’Connor, a professor at CUNY. “I needed a girlfriend with a nice warm apartment,” he said. “And I needed to learn English, and she was an English professor.”

They married in 1972.

A commercial photographer asked him to construct a prop for a photo shoot, and impressed with how much money he was paid, Aoki decided making models for commercial photographers was a good way to make a living.

In 1974, he was one of a group of artists who bought 132 Greene Street, a 19th-century cast iron loft building in SoHo. He took an entire floor of the empty warehouse — 3,000 square feet, as his studio and home.

“I had to make it livable and I needed a lot of money for lumber,” he remembered. “So, it was good that I got into model making.”

Aoki’s and Teresa’s son Owen was born in 1981. Eight years later, they adopted a boy they named Siever. Their third child is Leilei, who Teresa met and fell in love with in China. Leilei became their daughter three years after Siever arrived.

Today, Owen works for a financial company and lives in Singapore, and Siever and Leilei came to Shelter Island from New York with Aoki and Teresa in April.

Aoki’s side of the family still lives in Japan, including his mother, who is 107. “I think she’s tired of living, but she’s OK,” he said. “Every time I go to Japan, I say this is the last time.”

As his career developed, Aoki began to work in movies, where his designs and creations had to do things, like explode, or move across the sky. He began to design and direct his own special effects. In 1990, he worked on “Back to the Future … The Ride,” visualizing and designing the film effects for the wild ride in a flying DeLorean that thrilled visitors to the Universal Studios theme parks.

Aoki’s talents were in high demand, but 60 to 70 hours per week of work was ruining his health, and in the early 80s he was diagnosed with angina. He resolved to change his living habits by getting outdoors and out of the city on weekends.

He and Teresa had been regular visitors to her brother Jack O’Connor’s Shelter Island home but after his death in 1983, they decided to buy a house and land in the Catskills for weekends, which they later sold when the kids lost interest.

A second health scare in 2011 prompted Aoki to begin walking seven miles every day around his SoHo home. In April, with the virus raging in New York, they left SoHo with Siever and Leilei for Shelter Island, and in December they’ll move into a rented house owned by an old Shelter Island friend, Wendy Murdock. 

When Aoki began his long daily walks in April, he was one of very few pedestrians on the Island. “I took photographs of scenery at first and it was so boring,” he said. “As I got to know people, I could ask people to be in my picture.”  

Finnegan made many friends too, and Aoki took pictures of folks holding Finnegan’s leash. “Taking pictures is kind of a hobby but I really enjoy doing it. I just want to do it for myself, but I would like to be better,” he said. “I’m not a weird guy.”

The images of Shelter Island on Aoki’s Facebook page are luminous; a spacious, open-hearted take on the Island’s big skies, scenic corners and unusual architecture, starring the dogs and people who live here.

In Aoki’s eye, an abandoned boat in an untended lot is a still life. The hundreds of images he has posted are a portrait of an unpretentious place during a fraught time in its history.

He said, “Some people here have a lot of money, but there is less concern with social status than East Hampton. I like that very much.”

The O’Connor-Aoki family have been celebrating Thanksgiving in SoHo with at least 30 people for many years, a sort of friends and family pot luck. This year there will be just five around their Shelter Island table. Although they have been invited to join friends on the Island, they’re staying close.

Aoki said, “I’m enjoying my life, and I don’t want to make it any shorter.”

Lightning Round

What do you always have with you? A camera.

Favorite place on Shelter Island? I like the Heights because of the architecture.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island? London.

What exasperates you? Mr. Trump.

What is the best day of the year on Shelter Island? When Cristina Cosentino at the Sylvester Manor Farm told me I can just go in and walk around the farm. I didn’t know that.

Favorite movie or book? ‘The Deer Hunter.’

Favorite food? Sushi.

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family?  The painter, Vermeer.  

Most respected elected official, present or past? Mr. Obama.

Laurie Fanelli, seeing things through for her community

Laurie Fanelli at the Senior Center. (Credit: Charity Robey photo)

Laurie Fanelli makes a habit of ascribing anything she accomplishes to someone else.

Like her assertion that she got the leadership skills and compassion that made her the town’s director of Senior Services from her mother, Loretta Gillman. Laurie has a story to illustrate the point. “In my family, it was known that if you came to the New York area [the family lived in Rutherford, N.J.] you’d call Loretta and she’d take care of you.”

Laurie’s uncle was once on a trip to Costa Rica, made friends with a basketball coach named José, and gave him Loretta’s number. Loretta got a call from José and gladly offered to put him up when he visited New York over the holidays. But when the Gillman family went to Newark airport to meet their visitor (with a sign that said “José”) he had an entire basketball team with him. Their house was over capacity, but Loretta was able to find friends and neighbors to house the (very tall) team, and the Gillmans had the whole long-legged crew for Christmas dinner.

Laurie’s compassionate bent led her to nursing as a profession. At 20, she graduated in 1961 from the Christ Hospital School of Nursing and began working there. One day, she heard about a 2-year-old child who needed help. The child’s father was overseas, and her mother was a North Korean medical student doing her residency at Christ Hospital.

“Poor little Sissy — her name was actually Maryann — was alone in her apartment with an aide,” Laurie said. “Her mother didn’t know what to do with her.”

When Laurie went home and told her parents, they took Sissy in and raised her as their own. Sissy lived with the Gillmans for 15 years with weekend visits from her natural mother. Today, Laurie says, Sissy is a family court judge, living in Seattle, married and with two children of her own. Laurie regards her as a sister.

In the early 1960s, at the invitation of a friend who wanted to help her get over a break-up, Laurie went on an 18-day cruise from New York to Venezuela. She volunteered one day to take a little boy up to the bridge to meet the captain, while the boy’s parents went to have a drink in the bar. She and the little boy met the ship’s officers, including Joe Fanelli, a handsome recent graduate of the Merchant Marine Academy, where Laurie’s brother had also studied. Joe was a mate on the United States, docked in New York, and when the cruise returned to New York, they continued to see each other and married in 1966.

Their three children are Cristina, Marissa and Julie. Cristina lives in Mendham, N.J., is married to Tim Babits, and works as a teacher in elementary education. Marissa Fanelli lives on Shelter Island, works at The Islander, and has a 14-year-old son Charlie who attends the Shelter Island School. Julie, also an Islander, is married to Joe Denny; their daughter Vivian is 8 and attends the Hayground School where Julie teaches.

The story of how the Fanelli family found Shelter Island is a familiar one. In 1967, Laurie and Joe were invited out by friends, and immediately fell in love with the Island. Weekend stays at inns and with friends followed, and they bought a sailboat and lived on it for a while. In the early 1970s, they bought a tiny house, and a few years later built a bigger one in Shorewood. Cristina, Marissa and Julie worked every summer, washing dishes at the Inn Between, teaching swimming, and making sandwiches at the Island Boatyard, where they were known as “the Deli Fanellis.”

In 1980, Joe was diagnosed with a life-threatening bone marrow condition with an uncertain prognosis and no cure. Most people with that type of bone marrow condition died within four years of diagnosis.

Joe had started a successful business in ship brokerage that had supported the family for many years, but with the future uncertain, they decided Laurie needed more education, so she got a master’s degree in Nursing Education at NYU, and after certification began working as a nurse practitioner. Joe worked up until three days before he died in 1996 — 16 years after his diagnosis.

In those years, Laurie said, they squeezed in a lot of living. “We traveled and the girls got through school,” she said, “but he missed some great grandkids.”

Over the years, Laurie’s work took her to the front lines of health care. She admits she gravitated to the most challenging assignments “I became the expert on the hard cases,” she said.

In the early 90s, while working as a visiting nurse in Newark, she went on assignment in the company of armed guards, and was once guided through the halls and stairwells of a bullet-hole-riddled building by flashlight and met a couple of intimidating but helpful men who got onto the elevator with her and then suggested she’d better walk. She later learned they were undercover policemen. Parking was possible, but car theft was rampant. “I lost five cars,” she remembered. “After the fifth, Joe said, ‘I think it’s time to get out of Newark.’”

She was living a kind of split life; changing dressings, and cleaning wounds for elderly, impoverished and often bereaved homebound patients during the week, and heading to Shelter Island on the weekend.

From 1999 to 2006, she worked at Village Center for Care, an AIDS program, at Rivington House in the Village. “There was treatment, but people were dying so fast,” she said. “Too many funerals. It was horrible.”

In 2015, she retired, and a few months later ran into Chris Lewis, a friend and former Town Council member, who encouraged her to take on another tough assignment — to rejuvenate Shelter Island’s Senior Center.

“I thought, I know I can do this,” she said. “I’ve always tried to go toward something that spooked me or something that I didn’t know. I’m the idiot who loves to get lost.  My husband used to say, ‘You and your shortcuts.’ It’s even true in this job.”

Laurie has made a lot of changes at the Senior Center, with new staff and new initiatives. While keeping vital programs running smoothly, she added a program to administer flu shots, which is expanding to offer a variety of immunizations. This year, all 300 spots for flu shots filled quickly. In the first weeks of the COVID-19 emergency, the Senior Center harnessed a pool of over 80 volunteers to help quarantined and homebound citizens get mail, supplies and food.

She has shown leadership on the question of safe drinking water, the lack of well-testing, and the threats to the quality and quantity of water in Shelter Island’s sole aquifer.

In the early days of the pandemic, Laurie took advantage of the full-time presence of an array of talented health professionals to establish the Health and Wellness Alliance to advise and educate the community. The organization includes three social workers; Lucille Buergers, Nancy Green and Bonnie Berman; psychiatrist Ryan Sultan; and clinical psychologist Trisha Gallagher. Jessica Colas and Laurie, both psychiatric nurse practitioners, round out the team.

These days she’s focusing on issues related to loss and loneliness, such as hoarding and bereavement, problems that cause real pain and suffering. “There just are not the services available over here,” she said. “If I was in New York and concerned about a hoarding situation, a social worker would go out, and if we were still concerned, we’d call Adult Protective Services. They’d call on a team to make an assessment. We might get an aide in to get the place cleaned up and to build trust so we could then work on issues.”

But she refuses to let the current lack of services east of Riverhead for these kinds of problems discourage her. “We don’t have it,” she said. “We need it. I will get this. ”

Lightning round

What do you always have with you? I used to wear a figa, a golden hand charm from Brazil.

Favorite place on Shelter Island? The beach in Shorewood. It’s full of memories.

When was the last time you were elated? Two weeks ago, when our mental health group had a gathering at Crab Creek Beach.

What exasperates you? Stupid questions.

Favorite movie or book? ‘Toms River,’ by Dan Fagin. It’s about what happened when a town polluted their aquifer.

Favorite food? Vanessa’s Dumplings in New York.

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family? Florence Nightingale.

Most respected elected official? Rudolph Giuliani.

Shelter Island School Senior Abby Kotula is a quiet leader.

Abby Kotula is the vice president of the Shelter Island Class of 2020. (Credit: Charity Robey)

ABBY KOTULA IS vice president of the Shelter Island Class of 2020, a multi-sport athlete, and although she doesn’t consider herself a great cook, when it’s time for macaroni and cheese, her considerable project management skills guarantee a speedy and excellent result. 

“You have to put in your own cheese,” Abby said. “I start with Kraft, it’s the best, despite what people say about Annie’s. And I use a blend of cheeses.” 

From cross country running to volleyball, cheerleading, basketball, softball and baseball, Abby has been a spirited participant in high school sports, if not a star. “Some people are great at one sport and they play it every day,” she said. “I’m not great at one single sport and that’s why I’ve done so many.” 

In ninth grade she was the lone female player on the JV baseball team, a left-handed pitcher on a team of guys, most of whom she’d known for years. 

Born in 2001, Abby grew up in a house on Bowditch Road with her brother Michael, who is six years younger. Her dad, Ed Kotula, is a captain on the South Ferry, and her mom Vicky is a children’s librarian in Greenport.

There were 22 students in Abby’s kindergarten class at the Shelter Island School, and the 12 set to graduate this year have been together for almost 13 of their 17 years. “It’s been quite the journey,” she said. “It’s been a little difficult for people from the outside to come into such a closed environment.”

With graduation in sight, Abby’s been thinking a lot about the freedoms and the limitations of growing up on a remote island and attending a small school. “Everyone knows everything about everyone,” she said. “I don’t care, because I like me.” 

She said she’d attended homecoming at a couple of much larger high schools, and got a glimpse of what she missed. “I had tears in my eyes at one of them,” she remembered. “They have a football team, and there is a big game. With that said, I don’t have any regrets growing up here. I have made my best friends here and we won’t drift apart.”

For four summers, Abby’s worked at the Pridwin, busing tables, serving at weddings and the barbecue. She’s sorry she can’t go back this summer, but renovations will force the Pridwin to stay closed for the season, and force her to find another job. 

An eager participant in school trips, Abby said the high school journey that math teacher James Theinert led to the Glacier, Grand Teton, and Yellowstone National Parks was unforgettable. 

“I got to stand next to some of my closest friends and look out at amazing views,” she said, and gave a shout-out to the generosity of local businesses and the Shelter Island Educational Foundation for making these trips possible.

Another trip led by Mr. Theinert to the Strongpoint Theinert Ranch brought Abby and her classmates to the mountains of Magdalena, New Mexico, where they built a campsite as a service project, and hiked with veterans working through the difficult adjustment to civilian life that is so common in those who see combat. 

“They told their life stories,” she said. “I remember everything they said.”

Abby’s participation in the Rotarians Youth Leadership Association, (RYLA) beginning last spring, has been life-changing. She and her classmate, Emma Gallagher, were inspired by the example of Islander Luke Gilpin, who graduated in 2018, attends George Washington University, and is a senior leader with RYLA. 

In RYLA, Abby found an organization that seeks to develop leadership in young people who are not necessarily outgoing, public-speaking people, but would like to be “quiet leaders” in their peer groups.

A spring RYLA program in April of 2018, followed by a summer program in Massachusetts, were enough to convince Abby that the Rotary organization was for her. Organizing and coordinating the multiple fundraisers and service events that RYLA sponsors tapped into her strengths, and introduced her to students from all over the Northeast. 

“I was very quiet before RYLA, and since quiet leaders are often passed over, RYLA tries to get everyone involved,” she said, adding that she made her way through a competitive selection process to become a senior leader with RYLA. 

In the fall, Abby will study at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), and plans to work in hospitality and event planning after graduation. She’s particularly interested in environmental issues in hospitality management, an interest that was piqued when she was a prospective student attending a class at SNHU. She asked a question about hotels going green, and discovered this question is an important challenge in hotel management and other hospitality disciplines. 

She was inspired her to write her senior thesis about the problem of pollution in cruise lines. Her research showed her evidence of cruise ships the size of small towns, that dump plastics and food waste in the ocean, use dirty fuels, and generate more pollution than a town on land. One of her dreams is to figure out how to make a more sustainable model for this industry, and go on a cruise herself one day.

Contemplating the future of Shelter Island, she worries that the movement toward a tourist economy will continue, and the school will disappear altogether. “Every year the classes get smaller,” she noted. 

When Abby started kindergarten, the overall school population was around 250. Today it’s under 200.

She’s aware of a few senior classmates who intend to come back to Shelter Island after college, but she isn’t one of them. “I want to travel, to find out about other cultures, and you can’t find any of that here,” she said. “And it’s very expensive.” 

No matter where she lives, she said she’ll stay close with the steady and reliable friends she’s made here. “There are two types of friends when you are in a situation,” she said, describing her best friends. “The kind who will freak out with you, and be there for you in that way, and the kind who will stay calm and help you through.” 

---

Lightning Round — Abby Kotula

What do you always have with you? On a memory shelf in my room I have the ticket I used to go from Tarifa in Spain to Africa on a ferry.

Favorite place on Shelter Island? The school. I’ve had the most fun memories there.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island? The RYLA summer camp at Norwich Lake, in Massachusetts.

When was the last time you were elated? When I found out I made Senior Leader in RYLA, the happiest moment of my life. 

What exasperates you? When people try to be someone who they are not.

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

Favorite food? Mint chocolate chip ice cream

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

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.

Veteran Island

SHELTER ISLAND HISTORICAL SOCIETY PHOTO A May 1944 letter from Ignatius Avona, US Navy, to his brother Charles Avona, US Army.

There is an affinity between veterans and haircuts, and Louis Cicero understands both.

He’s been cutting hair at his barbershop in the Heights since 1959. “I had an old-timer in here who fought at Iwo Jima,” Louis said. “Saw a lot of action at a young age. They open up in the barber chair and tell me their secrets and problems. They know I won’t tell anyone.”

Bill Dickerson, 95,  served in WWII, and weighed 113 pounds when he entered the Army in his prime at 19. He operated the 155-millimeter gun, a weapon with 96-pound shells, and a range of about twelve miles. “You could get off about five rounds in a minute if you worked really hard at it,” he said. “We could wipe out Riverhead from Shelter Island.”

Bill operated the gun at the Battle of the Bulge. When it malfunctioned,  he was struck in the head. Six months of recovery left him with no hearing in one ear, dents on one side of his head, and memories of his service that he’s shared with family and friends ever since.

In the last census, 2,392 people called Shelter Island home, and 381 of them were veterans. Add to that number the Islanders who are not themselves vets, but have a father, mother, brother or sister who served this country and you see the powerful influence of military service on Shelter Island, an influence that becomes obvious when veterans and their families tell the stories of their lives.

Although Betsy Durkin Mathes never knew her grandfather, who died at the battle of the Somme in World War I, or her father, a paratrooper in World War II who died at the Battle of the Bulge when she was three, their lives inspired her. “They were both officers who died while defending their men,” she said.

After a career as an actor and lyricist, Betsy, still haunted by the life of a father she never knew, wrote a book, “Forever is Not for Everyone,” to try and find meaning in her father’s story.

Town Councilman-elect Mike Bebon’s Air Force service gave him life and work experience that helped him become Director of Operations at Brookhaven National Lab years later, but it also kept him from his father’s side in his dad’s final days.

In 1975, Mike had been assigned to inspect a base in Texas built in World War II  to modernize it for the era of terrorism. “My dad had a heart attack and he was doing OK, and then he had another one and passed,” said Mike. “At least he knew we were coming back [to Long Island].”

Military service runs strong in Sara Mundy’s family, and its influence on her is evident, even though she chose a different kind of service — she works at the Senior Center. Her father and her brother Michael served in the Marines, brother Nathan is still in the Marines, and her sister Melissa is on the board of the Theinert Foundation, a charity established to support veterans and their families in memory of Joseph Theinert, who grew up on Shelter Island, became an officer in the Army, and died in Afghanistan protecting his men.

“Joe Theinert was very close to my father and my sister, and my brother Michael left for boot camp a month after Joe was killed,” said Sara. “I don’t think any of us slept the whole time Michael was there.”

Town Supervisor Gary Gerth’s father was in the army medical corps during WWII, and Gary enlisted in the Navy in the late 60s, when he was about to be drafted into the Vietnam War.

The first time Gary saw Shelter Island, he was in an Army helicopter, flying over the East End in late 1970s on his way from the Naval War College, to a base on Long Island. He said he’ll never forget the view from above of the emerald-green Island between the North and South forks of Long Island.

Gary later became Director of Veterans Services Agency of Nassau County, and worked to resolve cases for veterans who had been denied benefits, sometimes because of missing records. His agency was able to reconstitute many of those records, and get benefits to veterans and their families.

Dave Clark, the son and father of veterans, served with the Marines in Beirut and narrowly missed getting blown up in 1983, when a truck bomb destroyed the Marine barracks and killed 220 men. It wasn’t until his own son was deployed to Afghanistan that he understood how the family of a soldier feels.

“You don’t even think about it when you are over there. But the parents think about it every day,” he said.

He remembered when the barracks blew up it took about five days for his family to find out he was still alive.  “It took a few years off their lives.”