Featured Story

This week in Shelter Island history

50 YEARS AGO IN HISTORY

The United States men’s basketball team beat Yugoslavia 65-50 to win the gold medal at the Mexico City Olympics.

People in the United States were listening to the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.”

According to a report filed with the United States Air Force’s Project Blue Book, an employee at the Minot Air Force Base said a bright orange-red object had been sighted with follow up reports from a B-52 bomber crew of a similar sighting.

“The Case Against Congress” by Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson was a best seller

And on Shelter Island . . .

50 YEARS AGO

The battle was waging to make the five East End towns into a county when the U.S. Supreme Court acted to strike down a section of the New York State Constitution that held that the population of the five towns was too small to meet county requirements.

That brought a lot of advocates of a Peconic County to the forefront. They rallied behind a resolution in the towns to take the issue to the floor of the state legislature. The vote that November was heavily in favor of pushing the issue forward with predictions that a Peconic County had its best chance of being created.

POSTSCRIPT: Welcome to 2018, where despite many efforts, Peconic County still remains a dream.

30 YEARS AGO

Board fine-tunes budget

The Town Board was working on cuts to what was then a record $2.7 million budget that, if left untouched, would have raised town taxes 30 percent. A lot of work would lie ahead, but ultimately the Town Board signed off on a budget that would raise taxes by 25 percent.

POSTSCRIPT: Today’s Town Board started with a more than 16 percent increase in spending and has cut that in half and is still close to cutting more out of the budget this week. Ideally, the Town Board might want to arrive at a budget that raises spending by 4.5 percent, but no one is certain it will reach that number. Still, it could land somewhere between  5 or a bit more than 6 percent spending increase.

10 YEARS AGO

‘Best year ever’ for Island 5k

That was the Reporter’s headline 10 years ago when Islander Bryan Knipfing emerged as the winner with a time of 16:52. The weather was less than ideal, but that didn’t discourage participants gathered at Crescent Beach.

Temperatures were in the 40s that year, but  runners built up a sweat on the course raising money to help fight breast cancer.

One runner said, “The farther we ran, the warmer we felt.”

POSTSCRIPT: No doubt those runners and walkers on a cool and at times rainy Saturday morning felt the same way about their run. Three organizations shared in the proceeds generated by the 19th Annual Shelter Island 5k Run/Walk — The North Fork Breast Health Coalition, The Coalition for Women’s Cancers at Southampton Hospital and Lucia’s Angels.

[email protected]