Islanders remember a friend, Mary Travers
Mary Travers died last week at the age of 72 in Danbury, Connecticut, after a five-year battle with leukemia, and when the news reached Shelter Island, the Reporter’s phone started ringing. Islanders wanted to touch base, to remember the blond girl who rode that horse and went on to become the legendary “Mary,” of Peter, Paul and Mary.
The lone female voice of the famous trio was, according to Peter Yarrow, writing on the Mary Travers website, “honest and completely authentic and that’s the way she sang, too; honestly and with complete authenticity.”
The Travers family lived in New York City and summered for a number of years in Shorewood, when it was still “the Garr Estate,” through the early 50s. Colette Roe remembered the whole gaggle of teenagers that used to hang out on summer evenings at Louis’ Beach, now known as Crescent Beach. “We used to build big bonfires and roast marshmallows. And then one day this blond girl sort of just appeared. She rode a horse bareback, no saddle, and she had a guitar that hung round her neck and shoulder and down her back.” Ms. Roe remembered being invited back to her house, walking all the way from the beach to Shorewood, talking, laughing and singing along the way. “It wasn’t anything special. Just kids singing, who all knew the same songs.”
According to the musician’s website, Ms. Travers became part of the Greenwich Village folk music scene while in her teens, and it became her musical home. She recorded two albums with Pete Seeger, who became one of her mentors. She linked up with Noel Paul Stookey, an electric guitarist, and the “Paul” of the trio and the two began playing as Stookey and Travers. Albert Grossman, a mover and shaker of the folk scene, introduced them to Yarrow, a native New Yorker. The trio made their debut at the Bitter End coffeehouse in 1961 and within a year aired the debut album that included their first Top 10 hit, “If I Had a Hammer.” That song was written 10 years earlier by Pete Seeger and Lee Hays of the Weavers, and captured the spirit of the growing civil rights and antiwar movements that soon followed. The trio moved folk music to a commercial pinnacle that had never been seen before, and earned numerous gold and platinum records as well as five Grammy Awards.
Tom Young called in from South Carolina to remember working in Shorewood during the early 50s, and the young blond girl who rode a horse, who would sit and watch the men work. He didn’t see her again for 40 years but always realized who she’d become. In 1992, he was with his wife and Jackie and Maurice Tuttle at the Westbury Music Fair where she was performing. He sent a note and a dozen roses backstage, and received a pass and an invitation for after the show. “She was the same person she’d always been,” he said. “Regular. Fame and fortune never changed her at all, she was a good person.” He, with other Islanders, went to a number of her concerts.
Cliff Clark was with the group at one of these and when Ms. Travers said how much she had loved the Island, he invited her to come spend a day and she did. They spent all day, walked the Shorewood property, around the old gardens, and went out to the manor house. His memories of her from those long-ago years are vague; “I remember her as this frightened young blond, she’d ride past the house, come across the fields. She’d bring the horse onto the ferry and ride into Sag Harbor for ice cream. I thought she was strikingly attractive, but I was only 12 and she was 16 or 17. Maybe any young blond would have seemed that way.”
Hoot Sherman remembered as well. “We lived on Thomas Street then and we always had horses and she was a horse-crazy kid. She’d hang out at our house and we’d go riding together. She was mid-teens, a year or two older than I was. She was actually better friends with my brother,” Herb. Hoot was also at the gathering at Cliff Clark’s house with his wife Joanne when Ms. Travers visited. “It was a great time, we just reminisced. She said how much she’d loved it as a kid growing up.”
Ms. Roe pointed out, “We knew she wasn’t one of us. It was clear she was different. I mean, there was the blond hair down her back and the horse without a saddle. But we had enough in common so that she was friends with us.” When she read of Ms. Travers’ illness, “I thought of getting in touch. But I didn’t. I mean what do you say, ‘I’m sorry you’re dying?’ But I thought about her a lot.”