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This week in Shelter Island history

Old, open book with a damaged cover.
50 YEARS AGO IN HISTORY

The Boston Celtics beat the Los Angeles Lakers, four games to three, to take the NBA Championship title.Silent film actor and matinee idol Eugene O’Brien died in Los Angeles at the age of 85.

Pope Paul VI and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko met at the Vatican — the first meeting of a Pope and a high ranking Soviet official.

Alirez Pahlavi, youngest son of the Shah of Iran and second in line to the throne prior to the Iranian revolution, was born and lived until January 2011 when he committed suicide.

American golfer John Daly, who was PGA champion in 1991 was born in Carmichael, California.

And on Shleter Island …

50 YEARS AGO
Senior class visits Washington

It was the Easter recess of 1966 when members of the senior class were photographed in front of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. They toured the city, visiting a wide range of monuments and museums.

POSTSCRIPT: The Board of Education has just approved the senior class trip for 2017 to Washington, D.C.  scheduled to take place in January so  students can attend the inauguration of the next president on January 20.

The trip will start on January 18 with the students returning to Shelter Island on January 21, having had time for visits to  historical sites in addition to attending the inauguration.

30 YEARS AGO
Mosquitoes linked to Lyme disease

This was a front page headline at the end of April 1986. The discovery was made by an entomologist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment in New Haven and reported in the Hartford Courant. But no known experiment had linked the mosquitoes to the disease on Long Island.

Willy Burgdorfer, an entomologist at the federal Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Montana concluded that mosquitoes might be another occasional means of transmission in highly endemic areas.

POSTSCRIPT: Today, it’s widely accepted that ticks are the culprits, although some debate if deer ceased to be hosts for ticks on the Island and whether mice, birds or small animals might become infected.

20 YEARS AGO
Hail to civility

It was an editorial in late April of 1996 that praised the Town Board and people of Shelter Island for working out controversial mooring legislation in a civilized manner.

“We’ve become so accustomed to partisan incivility in county, state and federal government that the contrast is inescapable,” the editorial said. On the local level, “We’re thankfully approaching our mutual responsibilities to govern ourselves with fairness, compassion for opposing views and arguably with even-handed legislation.”

POSTSCRIPT: Twenty years later, as we compare much of the vitriolic rhetoric by too many of those who want to be the next president, it’s refreshing to say that the current Town Board and residents more often than not conduct themselves with civility while working out solutions to the problems of the day.

10 YEARS AGO
Critics say housing fee concept needs work

It was back to the drawing board for former Supervisor Alfred Kilb’s 2006 proposal that developers either devote 10 percent of their land to affordable housing or pay an equivalent fee.

While Mr. Kilb agreed to pull back the proposed legislation, he worried that “the train is leaving the station and we’re running after it, trying to provide affordable housing.”

He noted that someone had offered to pay more than a 10 percent fee and said the town needed legislation to take the money.

POSTSCRIPT: Affordable housing remains a controversial subject with only the half dozen houses on Bowditch Road developed in the mid 1990s. Revitalized efforts by the town’s Community Housing Board and the independent Shelter Island Housing Options are working to provide rental housing, but encountering obstacles.

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