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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Inside the Herb McCarthy estate, Tom Edmonds pulled two canvases out from a closet in the late 19th-century mansion and took a step back. He turned to his companion, Sheila Guidera, in disbelief.
“Oh my God, how interesting,” he murmured to himself, adding the folk-like paintings to the treasure trove of donations headed for the Southampton History Museum, where he is executive director.
But that is where his wonderment started and, temporarily, stopped.
Without much of a second thought, Mr. Edmonds took the 18-inch-by-24-inch paintings back to the Rogers Mansion and stuffed them into another closet, where they lived for the past 10 years — until their recent rediscovery this past fall, not to mention the piece of forgotten history they represent.
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Dressed in a medical gown, mask and face shield, Stratis Morfogen had poked his head into his 14-year-old daughter’s bedroom to check on her — when he saw tears streaming down her face.
By way of explanation, she simply handed him her phone.
“F you, Bea! I have to quarantine because of you,” one TikTok user wrote. “Bea this is your fault!” another said on Instagram.
And then came the comment section — brutal, relentless finger-pointing at the Southampton eighth-grader who had tested positive for COVID-19 less than two days earlier and complied with contact tracing.
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For nearly two decades, St. John’s Episcopal Church in Southampton had never once locked its doors, keeping them open for rest, prayer, solace and peace 24 hours a day, seven days a week — with no exceptions.
It was a tradition born from the devastation of September 11, 2001, a time when religious, spiritual and agnostic individuals alike needed guidance, or simply a place to go, following the terrorist attack on New York City that day, just 90 miles away.
Weighed down by uncertainty and fear, parishioners sought a similar degree of comfort when the COVID-19 outbreak reached the East End this past March. Some turned to their houses of worship as beacons of hope — and, in the case of St. John’s, knew the doors would always be open.
Until they weren’t.
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Penny Wright never imagined this day would come.
For nearly three decades, the director of adult programs at the Rogers Memorial Library devoted her life to the Southampton community, piecing together a prolific range of classes, lectures, concerts and more that scintillated the mind, body and spirit, even in the darkest of days.
But recent events have snapped her own life into focus, Ms. Wright explained last week from her apartment in the village, where she has worked remotely since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. What she realized she was missing was time — time to cook, bake, walk and organize, visit with her friends and family, and simply relax.
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With an end goal of submitting the build to the Guinness World Records, the two-day endeavor to get there was not only physically challenging, but also artistically, mathematically and logistically complicated, explained origami master Shrikant Iyer from his home in Southampton, where the completed dragon currently lives and looms over his head, despite standing 6-feet-2-inches tall himself.
“It’s a very, very difficult thing, what we did. It truly is,” he said. “It’s not ordinary to fold that big, and then also, the dragon is not a simple model. It’s not a crane, it’s not a jumping frog. It’s a western dragon with wings. It’s hard enough getting it looking nice with 10-inch paper, so with 24 feet, we really had our work cut out for us — and we only had two people. It was really tough.”
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Every time John Betts finds himself in Southampton, he can’t help but stop by the North Sea Road McDonald’s.
And he never tells anyone who he is.
With the exception of the dining room and drive-thru window, the restaurant — with its signature yellow double arch, retro interior and familiar scent of salty French fries — remains virtually unchanged, a step back in time to 1970, when Mr. Betts first got his start there toasting burger buns, not far from his family home in North Sea.
“I remember the first day, I burned 24 buns twice in a row. I thought that was it,” he said. “But I survived, they looked past it. I think I got 24 of them out of the way before they saw it.”
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Despite a legacy that includes contemporary giants such as Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, Lee Krasner and Robert Rauschenberg — who all famously lived and worked here — high-end New York galleries have largely shunned the East End as a serious year-round art destination, until an international pandemic buoyed it to the surface.
Gone are the days of summertime pop-up galleries, many of the converted newcomers agree. Now, they’re finally here to stay.
“I’d like to say this was one big strategic decision,” said Gordon VeneKlasen, managing partner of Michael Werner Gallery, three days after opening the new East Hampton space. “But in fact, it was sort of an instinctual thing. It seems so obvious now.”
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For the first eight years of his life, Jeremy Dennis knew his grandmother Loretta Silva — Princess Silva Arrow of the Shinnecock Nation — only as “Ma.”
And, even from a young age, he realized that she carried the lifeblood of the family.
Ma welcomed generation after generation into her home on the Shinnecock Territory, ensuring every child in her family grew up surrounded by love and warmth, discipline and support, including Mr. Dennis. Before he was born, she would throw mini-powwows on the front lawn, drawing crowds from all over — even from abroad — to visit the house and see native crafts and beadwork, eat traditional corn cooked in the earth layered under seaweed, and watch tribe members dance and sing, dressed in their finest regalia.
It was a place for family and tradition. And when Ma died in 1998, a part of that was lost, pushed aside, as was the upkeep of the house.
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The restaurant industry looks a whole lot different these days. But for owners with seasonal food trucks in storage, they have an interesting opportunity — and they wasted no time starting up their engines.
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