When is a house, more than a house?

Mar 16, 2012
 
Dan’s Papers 

Dan’ s Papers has moved into its new home. But I have to confess, I will miss the rickety converted old house that served as the office and hub of the Hamptons, aka, Dan’s Papers, for so many years.

I will miss the way the huge poster of Dan’s face next to the commode, watched your every move. I’ll miss how the toilet paper supply was on open shelves across the bathroom - just close enough that every once in a while you’d check to see if you had developed the ability to move TP with your mind. The walls were paper thin and it amazed me how many people thought the nook by the bathroom was a secure place to chat.

I’ll miss looking into the rooms where the Ad people were chained to their desks by the ankles, not unlike the galley scenes in Ben Hur. It was safe to walk up to the edge of the room and throw food and canned goods in, but it was best to stay out of their reach, lest they grab your car keys and make a break for freedom.

I’ll miss the late night Tuesdays (when the paper was being assembled for printing) when the layout staff would put electrified razor wire up around their desks to discourage any last minute changes. Even so, late changes would get through and you’d hear the wails of the exhausted and frustrated staff. One of them would always come out to make coffee for the group. Whenever I was there, if I had the extra, I’d slip some Xanex into the coffee to help calm the group down.

Then there was the Senior Editor, the one on whose shoulders, all things fall. When I began writing for Dan’s, it was with Bill Scurry at the helm. Many have passed through that job since then, yes, they come and they go, but the aggravation reminds the same. Whenever I was in the office on Tuesdays, the Editors were alert, cogent, and highly intelligent. I never saw them the next day, but I’d bet a paycheck that on Wednesdays, they’d have to pull out their Driver’s License to remember their names.

I will really miss what I called Telegraph Hill. The old place, in addition to thin walls, had this steep, narrow, rickety, very squeaky staircase that led to Dan’s perch upstairs. Anything heavier than a cat would make these stairs creak. If wasn’t long before you could identify who was coming or going by the heaviness and speed of their footfalls. The really senior staff could tell you if it was Dan in a good or bad mood, if he was carrying anything, or how much he had for lunch. It was fun to be able to tell who forgot something based on the partial descent, then cursing, then ascent, then a complete fast descent with more cursing. This staircase was so fragile, it actually would shake the whole house depending on the forcefulness of the footfalls. Of course, I never went on it. I knew the steps would never handle the pressure, plus there wasn’t enough DW-40 in the building for me to adequately coat my hips. If I needed to see Dan, I could just take a position at the bottom of the steps and wait. I always admired the fact that even though he could have easily slung a fire ladder out the window and escaped to the parking lot unnoticed, he never did.

Yes, I’ll miss the old house and all the hiding places it had. But the new place will be even better for brilliant people to fester, I mean, foster their talents in this new millenia of Dan’s Papers. I have been a DanFan since he had a two page flyer when I was a teen growing up on the Island. It was Dan’s writing, and later that of Mary Lowry of the Pacific Sun in California, that gave me inspiration to write - but don’t let it get out, Dan doesn’t need any ego boosting.

The Answer My Friend, is Blowing Out Your End...

Last week, in Dan’s Papers (Bridgehampton, NY) Dan wrote an article called, The Maple Leaf Mini-Cooper People Have All Been Fired. In the article, he wrote, “The East Hampton Town Board met ... to consider what to do about the leaves that fall from the trees in October. .....The leaf pickup program, ... consists of town trucks and highway department employees going around picking up bags of leaves that citizens place by the side of the road. They take them to the dump. The cost of this ... effort in effect would be $700,000. The town could save that money if they canceled the program..... Of course, citizens themselves could take bagged leaves to the dump. ...During the discussion, the new Supervisor pointed out that the elaborate leaf counting program, put into place by his predecessor, had been canceled. For several years, as everybody knows, hundreds of uniformed "leaf counters" with red maple leaf insignias sewn on their shirts, have been going out in special town-owned Mini Coopers with hand held calculators to get the total of all the leaves on all the trees in town.”

Every week Dan puts in one article that is untrue and completely nuts and I’m always stupid enough to get roped in, but not this time buster! There’s just no way that Green-thinking East Hamptonites would resist schlepping their own leaves to the dumps. We have plenty of millionaires on Shelter Island who schlepp their own trash and leaves to the dumps and the East Hampton millionaires aren’t any better than ours, and if they think they are, then send them over here and we will beat them into submission. And East Hampton hired leaf counters, complete with little maple leaf insignia’s and little roller skate cars, driving around to count leaves? This is when I knew this article was bogus. Either that or East Hampton gets the prize for creating the most useless job in America. The runners up would be a job counting clouds shaped like triangles that pass over E.H. Main Street between noon and one on Tuesdays, or how many licks does it take to get to the center of a sugar free, fat free, flavor free, Tootsie Roll Pop.

However, I will agree that having a general idea of a volume of leaves can be helpful at times. On Shelter Island, we estimate leaf volume by eye. I am submitting this information to East Hampton to help them in the future, should they become serious about leaf counting. Remember, there’s no point in counting leaves while they are still on the trees because leaves travel. You get your neighbor’s leaves blown into your yard, and the person on the other side of you gets yours, and we all get some in the end.

One Bag = one tall brown paper biodegradable bag. Fits into the trunk of any car.
One SUV or Van load = six bags and four complaining children.
One small truckload = six lawn bags of leaves, one case of beer to replenish the workers.
One large truckload = ten lawn bags; or six bags, plus two helpers, and a cooler
One G-d damn big load = twenty bags in a yard. Ten will gradually be taken to the dumps, but by then, the other ten will have been rained on and will be slowly pushed back into the mulch corner. Every yard on SI has a mulch corner. You will know it by it’s big piles of wet brown leaves interspersed with fragments of torn brown biodegradable paper and a broken rake laying close by.
S--t Load of Leaves = more than twenty bags. Will take six men, three trucks, two cases of beers, 30 hot dogs and buns with condiments, 20 bags of chips, one burn barrel. It may take a dedicated crew like this all day and half the night to burn all these leaves, but they can do it. So what are the trucks for? Regardless of the amount of planning, someone will forget something and have to make a run to IGA or Fedi’s, the soberest one at the time makes the run. Throughout the evening, several more trucks with bags of leaves will appear. There’s just something about fire, beer, and the freedom to pee outdoors that draws men to a burn barrel like a moth to a flame.

If the East Hampton Leaf Counters feel displaced as workers, I’m sure the town can create a program for them to count grains of sand on the E. H. beaches. It will be important to segregate sand that does have a permit to be there from the grains of sand that do not have permits. Unauthorized sand may have migrated from one of the neighboring Hampton beaches. You don’t know where the Southampton sand has been and the first thing it’ll want to do is form a wet bar and bring it’s decadent Southampton live style with it. Tip: It’s easy to detect Southampton sand, it smells like lime and tequila. So, Sand Counters, put on your little red vests with crab insignias on, and go for it.