If not by face, Patricia Lynch was known by name — and reputation.
She was a force, a fearless investigative journalist who exposed cults and their leaders for “NBC Nightly News.” As one of the first women in her field, the two-time Emmy Award-winning producer blazed a path for women in male-dominated television news, splitting her time between New York and Southampton, and drawing ire as a hotly contested local figure here.
She owned who she was, through and through.
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Every afternoon, like clockwork, Robert Hand Sr. could be found relaxing at his kitchen table in Sag Harbor, watching the birds through the window.
He knew them all. For the renowned decoy carver, they were his friends, his muses, his inspiration — and, in turn, he was their biggest fan.
But in recent weeks, the birds have gone without an audience. Mr. Hand died on January 11 after a cardiopulmonary arrest due to COVID-19 pneumonia at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, according to his eldest son, Robert Hand Jr. He was 77.
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With a simple blink, Chris Pendergast wrote one letter. Then the next, and the next — continuing on this way for hundreds of thousands of characters selected on a 15-inch computer screen.
And he used only his eyes.
The ensuing words unfold across the 314 pages of his recently published memoir, “Blink Spoken Here: Tales From A Journey To Within,” written with the help of his wife, Christine, almost 28 years after he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease, a devastating neuromuscular disease with no cure.
His prognosis was that he only had 36 months to live.
“I refused to simply wait to die,” he wrote in an email, using his eye-controlled computer from his home in Miller Place. “With Gehrig’s grit, I chose to live with ALS, not die from it. I wrote stories as our family made the journey. It evolved into the book.”
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“I hate to say it, but this cluster of people, it’s sort of the end of an era. These people that are between 85 and 95, there aren’t that many of them, when you think about it. There will be more to follow — more talented and creative people — but this was a group of really formidable artists. And extraordinarily influential. And Joe was one of them.”
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B. Smith lived by the motto, “Whatever you do, do it with style.”
Her loved ones would argue that she also did it with poise, charm, elegance and graciousness. She was a shrewd businesswoman, yet generous; accomplished, yet approachable.
She was joy.
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Robert Dash was a man with wonderful hands — for writing, for painting, for gardening, for talking, and for petting his beloved Norwich terrier, Barnsley.
He was a man with a proper air, a garrulous nature and an intimidating intelligence, often punctuating his winding sentences with a thoughtful “yes” when he wasn’t speaking Latin, Greek or quoting poetry.
He was a man of contradictions—genuinely caring about those he had barely met, hosting parties and guests at his home while keeping his distance, and equally content reading classic literature or experimenting with new plant material, knee-deep in soil.
Mr. Dash knew who he was. There was only one man like him. And there will never be another.
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Scott Chaskey and his daughter, Rowenna, stood at the entrance of a rather unremarkable shed in the Northwest Woods last week, with dozens of soaring metal sculptures with long, slender legs peeking out.
They were artist Bill King as Mozart, Bill King as John Faddis, Bill King as Mary Magdalene. They were Bill King singing, dancing and holding hands with children. They were Bill King in the furthest stretches of his imagination — a magical place, his family and friends attest, filled with generosity, wit and the driest sense of humor, if it could even be typified as that.
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With more than six decades under his belt as a comic book artist, Mr. Goldberg’s passion blossomed at a young age while growing up during the 1930s in Manhattan. After just turning 17, he went to work for a company that would become Marvel Comics, helping to design the original color schemes of all the classic 1960s characters, including Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and the Hulk.
“A lot of talent and a little luck I had at the beginning,” Mr. Goldberg said two years ago at the Box Art Auction preview, “and fell in at the right time. I had Stan Lee as my friend, my editor, everything else for the first 20 years of my professional life. We spent a lot of time together with the superheroes.”
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