Shelter Island profile: Peter Reich, a life afloat

When Peter Reich was 23 years old in 1980, he had an experience that usually lands a person on the morning talk shows.

Sailing his family’s 33-foot yacht Polar Bear, Peter and his friend Andy Reeve ran into a vicious storm. En route to Bermuda, the boat sank 750 miles off Montauk and left the two men floating in a tiny inflated raft for five days with eight slices of cheese, some ginger ale and a few signal flares.

The Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon, or EPIRB, that should have broadcast their location, malfunctioned. They tried and failed to hail a passing freighter, only to learn later that it was likely the Poet, a vessel that went missing in the same late October storm and is believed to have gone down with all hands.

Finally they were picked up in “extremely exhausted condition” by the Polish freighter Ziemia Gdanska when the 2nd Officer saw their flare around 2 a.m. on October 31.

They had survived a storm that sank much larger vessels and took many lives. The waiting, said Peter, was the hardest part. “We didn’t know what was going to happen,” he remembered. “I wanted to know where I stood. I’m a bit of a control freak.”

Today Peter is a successful partner in Reich/Eklund Builders, a father, husband, three-term member of the Town Board, member of the Waterways Management Advisory Council and still a bit of a control freak.

In the early 1960s the Reich family began coming out to Shelter Island, the setting for Peter’s earliest and happiest experiences. Born in Brooklyn in 1957, he lived in a house in Bay Ridge where, almost 50 years later, his parents still live. But as far as he’s concerned, he grew up on Shelter Island.

The Reich family bought a house in Silver Beach in 1964 and sailing became the center of Peter’s life on the Island, with lessons at the Yacht Club among his most cherished childhood memories.

Peter’s parents, Daniel and Olive Reich, now in their 80s, are still in the thick of Island life and many of their friends were important to Peter in his childhood and beyond. One such friend was Hal McGee, former town councilman and his wife Jeanne, who were lifelong friends of the Reich family.

Peter told of the time his parents first met the McGees at a Yacht Club party in 1967, where the couples determined in two minutes of increasingly incredulous questions and answers, that the Reich and McGee clans lived in the same house in Brooklyn, number 36 on 79th street, about 15 years apart. Hal McGee had lived at number 36 in the 1940s, before the Reich family  bought it in 1958.

“The same house in Bay Ridge produced two Shelter Island council members,” Peter said.

Another friend of the family and influence on Peter as he grew up was Walter Brigham, a sailor, craftsman and builder who mentored the young man. Peter remembers Walter as someone who could figure out how to do almost anything with his hands, preferring to work alone, rarely speaking in sentences of more than three words.

Peter said Walter’s legendary dislike of chatter led to a barroom bet on the odds of getting the silent man to utter a string of words. The bet resulted in a man named George stationing himself next to Walter at a remote fishing spot, where the following interaction allegedly took place.

George: “This is a gorgeous spot! Don’t you think? What a great view. What do you think of this spot? A beautiful place. This is a great spot, don’t you think?”

Walter Brigham: “Used to be.”

Peter attended Poly Prep in Brooklyn for middle and high school and SUNY Maritime in the Bronx for college.

He has lived full time on Shelter Island ever since. “The second I graduated, I was out the door,” he said. “This was already my legal address.”

Peter and his long-time friend and partner James Eklund run Reich/Eklund Construction, founded 30 years ago.

Peter married Susan Hawthorne and their 29-year-old daughter Melissa, who grew up on Shelter Island, attended Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon and now lives in Astoria, Oregon. She is stewardship director of the North Coast Land Conservancy. Peter and Susan divorced and she lives on Shelter Island.

Today Peter and his second wife, Loren, live in a 750-square-foot home above a garage-like room that is his office, hangout and display space. Holding an electronic object up for inspection, he said, “Here is the EPIRG that didn’t work. I still have it. Hard to believe.”

Asked if he minds living in such a small space, he said, “It’s like living on a very large boat.”

A shared interest in countertops first brought Loren and Peter together. She had hired Reich/Eklund to renovate her kitchen and called Peter for advice on materials. Coincidentally, Peter was himself choosing materials for a kitchen. “Our first date was looking at countertops in Southampton, then we had lunch,” Peter said.

On the day of his afternoon wedding to Loren, Peter decided to go parasailing in the morning. His soon-to-be bride demonstrated tolerance when asked what she thought of the wedding-day parasailing. According to Peter, she said, “If he breaks his leg, he’ll be there on crutches.”

Initially motivated by frustration with the permitting process for wetlands applications taking “ludicrous amounts of time,” Peter got involved in town government. He began by serving on the Waterways Management Advisory Council, helping to streamline the application process. In 2004, he was elected to the Town Board. He’s reaching the end of his third term, having been reelected in 2008 and 2012.

In the fall of 2013, Peter was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma after weeks of misdiagnosis and steadily worsening health. Doctors at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City eventually made the diagnosis and started him on a chemotherapy regime that lasted into early 2014 and halted his illness.

In April of that year, Peter endured a bone marrow transplant, including 100 days of isolation, no minor thing for a gregarious man. A year and a half out from his ordeal, he’s feeling good, and advising friends that Shelter Island is a great place to live, but “If you get bad sick, head for the city.”

A few years back, Peter built a 16.5-foot rowboat, a front-rowing vessel that stays in the water all year round. “Six years in a row Loren and I went for a Christmas morning ‘Santa Row,’” he said. “We’d put on our Santa hats and drop off presents at our neighbors on the creek.”

Currently, Peter is entranced with a wooden boat called a Caledonia yawl. He and Andy Reeve will spend part of August in a coastal sailing course, to test the handling of the boat before committing the time and effort to building one.

If being lost at sea for five days in 1980 diminished Peter’s enthusiasm for boating, it doesn’t show. “The water has a lot to do with why I love Shelter Island,” he said. “I’m not here for golf.”