The St. James General Store - Community Treasure Then and Now

Smithtown by the Sound

By Nancy Vallarella

The St. James General Store -Community Treasure Then and Now

The Saint James General Store has been a local gem since Ebenezer Smith built it in 1857.  Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, it is the oldest general store still open for business in the United States.  

There is much documented fact and folklore on the store’s history. Information on ownership, paranormal occurrences, famous past visitors, visits with Santa, and most recently, resolved funding concerns are found on-line and in print.

This article is an attempt to explore some of the less known tidbits of information that help make the St. James General Store one of the most endearing assets in the community today.

Presently, cell phone service is sporadic north of the St. James General Store.  I have a running joke about that…” Nissequogue is Indian for land of no cell phone towers.” Amazingly, I get responses ranging from chuckles to “Really?” 

It’s all good.  Nissequogue is too beautiful to be compromised with ugly technology but, phone service was a big deal at the St. James General Store in the late 19^th century.  It was the home to the hamlet’s first telephone.  Can you imagine being a clerk hearing one side of all of the conversations had in town?

World-renowned architect, Stanford White frequently used that phone.  One has to wonder if it was all for business or did it help facilitate trysts with then supermodel, Evelyn Nesbit.  Folklore has it that after hanging up the phone and leaving the store, Stanford was standing on the porch when the phone shattered having been struck by lightning. Foreboding? Indeed.

Known for his promiscuity, Stanford White moved on as did Miss Nesbit.  Nesbit eventually married Harry Thaw, a multi-millionaire with questionable acquaintances and mental faculty. 

On a lavish trip to Paris, Evelyn confessed her affair with Stanford White to Thaw.  Historians report that Thaw and White were long-standing rivals. Fate brought these two adversaries together at the theater of Madison Square Garden. Thaw shot Stanford White, killing him in the name of his wife’s virtue or maybe the lack of.  

Thaw was found not guilty on the grounds of insanity. He was however incarcerated in an institution for the criminally insane.  Thaw’s legal team maneuvered him free seven years later. The couple divorced in 1915.

On a much lighter note:

Did you ever wonder about the history of the St. James General Store’s giant stuffed bear? 

It’s a mystery.  The bear’s big presence has an unknown past.  St. James General Store Merchandise Manager, Karen Sheedy has been there for twenty years and states that the bear has been there before she came on board.

It is difficult to trace the origin of many of the displayed museum pieces due to the changes in ownership. However, there are several verified original items. Ledgers, old photographs, original counters and cases, the post office, coffee grinder, tea canisters, and pot belly stove are among the original items remaining. 

Why was the Indian statue moved inside the store?

The statue went missing twice while residing on the store’s porch. Luckily, it was found in the Smith Haven Mall parking lot and again in the nearby woods.  It now welcomes visitors as they enter the inside of the store, inconveniently unavailable to pranksters.

Can you guess what the number one selling item in the store is today?

The Molasses Pop!    

Special thank you to Brad Harris, Smithtown Historian, and Karen Sheedy, Merchandise Manager, St. James General Store. Your time, knowledge, and patience are appreciated.

Op-Ed We Must Re Examine Social Security Death Benefits

By Veronica Colwin

Most people under the age of 60 years old, do not really plan on becoming widows or widowers. It is not something we necessarily expect, but sadly it is the reality for many. I mean clearly death does not discriminate based on income or age, so why does the government, regarding Social Security Death Benefits. 

Here is the scoop in case you are unfamiliar with how Social Security Death Benefits work for the surviving spouse and children. Every child dependent of the deceased is qualified until either the age of 18, or upon their high school graduation. Yes, you read that right! Not through college, but on their very last day of high school. The widow/widower is eligible for benefits only if they have a child under the age of 16, AND are only allowed to make under $15,000 annually. Yes, you read that right as well! 

Here lies the struggle, if you seek to supplement the loss of benefits from a child who just graduated high school to help with college expenses, you must do so while earning the kind of wages you would if you were an employed teenager. Why? Because you risk losing the benefits you continue to receive for having any other children, under the age of 16 years old. 

I am working with a client, we’ll call her Sue, who is widowed and raising five children on her own since the death of her husband eight years ago. Sue’s two older children are in college, she has a senior in high school, a daughter in 11^th grade and a 10-year-old son. Sue has been a stay at home since becoming a widow, to be there for her children. Her 11^th grader and 10-year-old are both categorized as “children with special needs.” 

Sue has much on her plate without adding the financial struggles she is about to face. Come June 2019, her senior in high school will lose his Social Security Death Benefits, while preparing for college. Sue will then have three children in college, and two at home with special needs. She must find a way to either continue to support the six of them on monies allotted for three people, or go back to work, being mindful of that $15,000 cap. There is another option, to gain full-time employment and give up her benefits. Let’s play out that scenario for Sue. After being a stay at home mom for over eight years, she tries returning to the workforce and earning an income that was more than the income she just lost. Hm…sounds easy enough right? Wrong! She’s been out of work for eight years, some would call her unemployable, and if she did gain full time employment, how is she going to cover child care expenses for her two “special needs” children?

The point here is that although many like Sue are grateful for the benefits, the guidelines make it impossible for widows/widowers to supplement their income when they so clearly need to. Any parent knows, regardless of the circumstances, there continues to be a financial responsibility to children attending college. So, why do benefits that are supposed to replace the income of a deceased parent end at high school graduation? 

Veronica Colwin is a graduate student working on her MSW at SUNY Stony Brook. As part of the social work curriculum she has spent the last two years receiving field and classroom instruction on how to provide care to clients in integrated health settings. Ms. Colwin is a single parent of a child with special needs, she has also spent time volunteering in a domestic violence shelter. Veronica Colwin will be graduating in 2019.

Theater Review - 'Nine'

Theater Review – ‘Nine’

Produced by: Theatre Three – Port Jefferson

Reviewed by: Jeb Ladouceur    

  Sometimes theatrical projects that we undertake with blind conviction as teenagers, actually turn out to be the roaring successes we’d dreamed of. Such accomplishments are rare, of course … after all, few if any in the heady profession known as show business can legitimately wear the mantel of a Mozart, Merman, or Mark Twain. But in 1963, aspiring young composer/lyricist, Maury Yeston, became obsessed with Federico Fellini’s semi-autobiographical film ‘8½,’ and twenty years after initially viewing it, he (with the help of master director Tommy Tune) turned the motion picture into a boffo Broadway musical.

  Yeston named his production simply ‘Nine’ … a number prophetically three short of the dozen Tony nominations (five of which resulted in wins) that the show ran off with in 1982. Add ten Drama Desk Award nominations (seven wins) and we’re talking about a smash musical by anybody’s reckoning.

  As we now know, 729 performances at Broadway’s 46th Street Theatre followed, after which the play was taken on tour in this country … opened internationally in London, Sweden, and Australia … and was revived to wide acclaim by New York’s Roundabout Theatre Company in 2003. The wonder of it all is that until the show’s stage debut in the eighties, composer and Yale alum Yeston had never anticipated that his ambitious project would effectively provide anything but his own satisfaction.

  ‘Nine’ centers on noted film director Guido Contini (played wonderfully by Brian Gill) and his search for a plot suitable to his upcoming movie. Not surprisingly, the film is to be a musical treatment of Giacomo Casanova’s life and his legendary womanizing in the eighteenth century … though it must be noted that our Guido is as much the romantically pursued during the amorous proceedings, as he is the reluctant pursuer. Frequently, this situation lands Contini in something of a pickle (there’s a tawdry joke in there somewhere) … indeed, we see that all the demands made by a virtual squadron of insistent honeys would undoubtedly have proven too much for a less gifted Lothario than Guido to accommodate.

  Ah, me. What’s a poor matinee idol to do?

  Well, if anyone would know, it would be Brian Gill. While co-starring with Tracylynn Conner in Theatre Three’s 2017 production of ‘The Bridges of Madison County’ the 160-year-old stage fairly sizzled as, under Jeffrey Sanzel’s direction, Conner and Gill found the chemistry required for that heartbreaking love story. Now, the Maestro has paired the two once again, and the match, though significantly less tension-filled this time, proves that ‘Bridges’ intensity was no fluke.

  By the same token, ‘Nine’ is no ‘Bridges of Madison County,’ … for few plays can match the brief Francesca Johnson-Robert Kinkaid saga for pure simpatico.

  Though it might be said that both stories have to do with the phenomenon which Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jacques originally termed, ‘Midlife Crisis,’ (and suggested that all of us experience it between the ages of 45 and 64) in ‘Nine’ Guido Contini gets a dose of the malady that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. In younger years, healthy males might think it heaven-sent to be chased by an endless bevy of breathtaking beauties, but ‘Nine’ puts the lie to that notion in no uncertain terms. Accordingly, what might have been viewed as a naughty little titillating show, is transformed by Sanzel et al into a compelling comment on human behavior. 

  All of the performances in this rather deep musical are quite good, and the cast is treated to a perfect, pastel set (Randall Parsons), appropriate costumes and lighting (Ronald Green III and Robert W. Henderson, Jr.), and some of the sweetest musical accompaniment (veteran Jeffrey Hoffman directs) to which we are likely to be treated this theater season. In the final analysis, it is the incomparable Brian Gill for whom it might be said this difficult piece of unforgettable theater could have been written … and the magnetic Linda May (Guido’s mother) whose consummate playacting commands our attention from first to last, deserves all the stars we’ve got.

____________________________________________________________

Award-winning writer, Jeb Ladouceur is the author of a dozen novels, and his theater and book reviews appear in several major L.I. publications. His recent hit, THE GHOSTWRITERS, explores the bizarre relationship between the late Harper Lee and Truman Capote. Ladouceur’s topical thriller, THE SOUTHWICK INCIDENT, was introduced at the Smithtown Library on May 21st. The book involves a radicalized Yale student and his CIA pursuers. Mr. Ladouceur’s revealing website is www.JebsBooks.com

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - Healthcare Is Preserving And Saving Life

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

Back when I started as a reporter on Long Island in 1962, my newspaper, the Babylon Town Leader, covered a story about a woman refused admittance to Lakeside Hospital in Copiague because she didn’t have medical insurance. She returned to her car—and died in it. 

That little private hospital is no more. Lakeside Hospital, which began as Nassau/Suffolk General Hospital in 1939, closed in 1975.  

Since then, there has been the rise of great, new medical centers here.

Stony Brook University Medical Center was the first and also became a multi-school site for health education. I reported on the creation of this at the daily Long Island Press in the 1960s and 70s. Stony Brook was directed by the state to establish a hospital as well as a School of Medicine, School of Nursing and School of Dental Medicine.

How to do this was beyond the knowledge of the university’s two top administrators, both nuclear physicists. Thus Dr. Edmund Pellegrino was hired as a university vice president and School of Medicine dean. He was a medical visionary. He told me he saw medicine as having become a business, a commodity. His dream for the proposed hospital was for it to be patient-centered, personal and nurturing. He said that medicine should be a moral enterprise with a doctor having a “covenant” with his or her patients. And he wanted health education not narrowly focused but embracing the humanities and social sciences.  

Before Dr. Pellegrino left Stony Brook to eventually become president of the Catholic University of America, he created the culture for health care and education at Stony Brook.

As the years have gone by, I’ve been treated by doctors at Stony Brook, and not for minor things. Last year, after falling on my head causing huge twin hematomas to form in my skull, I was operated on by a superb neurosurgeon, Dr. Charles Mikell. He drilled holes—as scary as that sounds—in my head to successfully drain the deposits of blood and fluid. 

Seven years ago I had two successful operations at Stony Brook for bladder cancer performed by world-class urologist Dr. Howard Adler. They were followed by treatments based on immunotherapy using—and this is a standard treatment—tuberculosis bacteria to stimulate the immune system and prevent a recurrence. There’s been no recurrence, most happily.

Now there’s been the rise of another medical center covering this region, Northwell Health. It came about with the merger of Long Island Jewish Medical Center and North Shore Health System in 1997. The private Northwell Health and the public Stony Brook compete—with Stony Brook in recent times merging with Southampton Hospital and affiliating with Eastern Long Island Hospital in Greenport. Northwell has a network today of 23 affiliated hospitals and other health facilities stretching throughout the New York Metro Area. It is linked to Hofstra University. Major hospitals part of the Northwell network in Suffolk include Mather in Port Jefferson; Southside Hospital in Bay Shore; Huntington Hospital; and Peconic Bay Medical Center in Riverhead.

I was recently treated at Peconic Bay for cataract removal. Optometrists advised that I needed the surgery. Eyeglasses, even with new prescriptions, weren’t doing it.

I received a strong recommendation about East End Eye and its lead ophthalmologist, Dr. Scott Sheren. He has been president of the Suffolk County Ophthalmological Society and medical staff president at Peconic Bay. He’s director of the Robert Merriam Rogers Center for Eye Surgery at Peconic Bay. 

He’s an extraordinary physician, highly competent and warm. A concern I had involved taking the medicine Flomax. Google—that font of oft-alarming medical information—warns about complications in cataract surgery for people who take Flomax. Dr. Sheren assured me that he would take special care. And he did, removing the cataract from one eye in January, the cataract from the other two weeks ago. It was amazing how after the first cataract was removed and a new lens inserted, when the bandage over the eye was removed the next morning I could see through the “fixed” eye with perfect focus and white was bright white. Looking through the other eye, still with a cataract, everything was yellowish. Now, with both eyes cataract-free, the world is clear.

     There have not only been great advances in medical care—the emergence of two big medical centers here—but huge advances in medical science here and elsewhere. Two close friends—one fitted with a pacemaker, the other with two stents after a heart attack, both done at Stony Brook—say they would be dead without the treatments developed several decades ago.

    The burning issue about health care is how as a society we can best pay for it. (My preference is “Medicare for all.”) Health care is about the most important use of money that exists—preserving and saving life.

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books. 

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP - "Balloons Blow...Don't Let Them Go"

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

 The East Hampton Town Board had taken a blow against balloons. A town law barring the intentional release of balloons has been unanimously passed. It follows action by the Suffolk County—back in 2005—prohibiting the mass release of 25 or more balloons filled with helium or other “lighter-than-air” gasses. 

The East Hampton law is tougher—it bars the release of any number of balloons. It zeroes in on balloons “made from materials such as rubber, latex, polychloroprene or nylon fabric that can be inflated or filled with a gas such as helium, hydrogen and nitrous oxide…”

“Balloons waste natural resources, litter our communities, pollute our waterways and kill wildlife,” says the measure passed 5-to-0 on February 7.

Exceptions are made for “balloons released indoors,” “hot air balloons that are recovered after launching,” and “balloons used for the purpose of carrying scientific instrumentation.”

The balloon business as represented by the New Jersey-based The Balloon Council, with a vested interest in its product, is not happy with what East Hampton has done.

A leading proponent of the East Hampton law was Susan McGraw Keber, a dedicated environmentalist and member of the East Hampton Trustees which has jurisdiction over the town’s waterfront. At the town board meeting, she presented the board with a proclamation from children of the Give It Back Club at the Montauk School. 

East Hampton Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc, the measure’s sponsor, said the town wants “to make people aware all across the country that when you release a balloon it has serious consequences.” How serious was outlined by those testifying before the board.

Kimberly Durham, necropsy program coordinator of the Hampton Bays-based Atlantic Marine Conservation Society, said: “I have observed the horrific consequences of discarded balloons on marine wildlife.” Marine life can’t distinguish between balloons in the water and jellyfish, a food source.

Some released balloons drift back to shore. Colleen Henn with the Surfrider Foundation told that board about the beach clean-ups it has conducted and balloon litter along the coast.

Lorna O’Hara, public information director of The Balloon Council, told WABC-TV/7 of the East Hampton law: “We prefer education over legislation.”

The county law—in which children also played a part—took form when then Suffolk Legislator Lynne Nowick of St. James received a letter from some elementary school students about helium-filled balloons falling into waterways and being mistaken for jellyfish by sea animals which ingested the balloons and died. They noted that Connecticut, because of this problem, had banned mass balloon releases and suggested the same sort of thing be done here.

Ms. Nowick got to work, did research, found that balloons represented the most common form of floating garbage within 200 miles from shore and, indeed, regularly kill marine life, especially turtles. She introduced the bill to prohibit mass balloon releases in Suffolk. The measure speaks of how “research has indicated that marine life and animals ingest these as they appear near the surface because they believe they are spotting jellyfish or other edible resources.” They then “either choke on the balloon or the balloon will form an intestinal obstruction either of which will sentence these animals and marine life to a painful death.” 

These balloons, further, are a “source of pollution.”

Enter The Balloon Council. As it says on its website, www.theballoonccouncil.org: “An industry has grown from a handful of small manufacturing companies…to one that now produces products that are an integral part of festivities in this county and abroad. At the time that TBC was established, several state legislators were considering well-intentioned but ill-conceived laws which would have severely limited consumer’s rights to obtain full enjoyment from balloons.” It trumpets: “The Balloon Council—Affirming America’s Ongoing Love Affair with Balloons.”  

The Balloon Council sought to stop the Suffolk measure but legislators resisted and enacted it. Ms. Nowick, after completing the maximum 12-year term allowed for Suffolk legislators, was elected and since re-elected to the Smithtown Town Board.

The organization, Balloons Blow, based in Florida, advocates alternatives to releasing balloons. “There are many safe, fun, and eye-catching alternatives to balloons for parties, memorials, fundraisers, and more!” it says on its website, www.ballooonsblow.org. It presents many. “As we become more aware of our personal impacts on the environment people are ditching single-use, wasteful products for earth-friendly, reusable and exciting alternatives.”

“Balloons Blow…Don’t Let Them Go,” it declares.

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY/College at Old Westbury and the author of six books.