Island profile: Landing and thriving on Shelter Island

Pat Binder, a mainstay at this newspaper in the 1980s and 1990s who raised five kids on Shelter Island, not to mention the kids’ goats, chickens, ducks, geese and rabbits, lives in an old farmhouse with a beautiful, sunny backyard that feels as if it’s out in the country, not smack in the Center with neighbors just a stone’s throw away behind the trees.

Her youngest, Darrin, put in the beautiful pool outside the kitchen door when he was starting his pool company about 20 years ago and Dan built the deck. Pat planted the magnificent, perfectly manicured border garden inside the fencing and did all the weeding for years, not only in the garden but in the fenced-in vegetable patch.

A peach and an apple tree brim with perfect fruit, a big Rose of Sharon bush that Pat planted is full of blooms, and down at the foot of the winding, gently sloping lawn there’s a pond full of bass the egrets and herons hunt. They are the progeny of fish Darrin caught elsewhere and brought home in a bucket to put in the dredged-out former swamp when he was a kid.

Now her family makes sure the big lawn is cut and most of the weeding taken care of. Dan, with his carting company, handles the trash. The kids and grandkids are her support group. “I couldn’t survive here if it weren’t for the kids. I’m so lucky,” she said.

The property was all part of the old Oliver farm, which she convinced her husband Joseph Buddy Binder to buy in the 1960s, after they’d rented vacation places on Shelter Island for a couple of seasons. They lived in Valley Stream, where Buddy owned a gas station. They had gone to the Island on a one-day visit to see a friend and it had been love at first sight for both of them.

“Buddy was more practical than me,” said Pat, who seems highly organized, detail-oriented and very practical herself, having made lists before her interview of important dates in her life and the names of bosses, colleagues, part-time jobs, Reporter customers and friends she wanted given credit in her story. But Pat knows the newspaper business; there often just isn’t the space for everything you want to get in.

She convinced Buddy that they could afford a second home if they both quit smoking. “I think I was also thinking maybe we could skip feeding the kids, too,” she said. But soon it became clear they weren’t going to quit smoking anytime soon. Valley Stream was getting built up and the gas station wasn’t doing well so they made the choice to throw caution to the wind and move to the Island.

All five kids had been born by then and four are still on the Island: David, who works in the office at Darrin’s pool company now, was the first in 1952; Alison, a longtime former employee of St. Gabe’s Retreat, followed in 1954; Aimee, a former newspaper art director now living in North Carolina, in 1956; Daniel in 1959; and Darrin in 1964, “a happy surprise,” Pat said.

“I was always very happy pregnant for some reason. I didn’t know better,” Pat said with her usual dead pan.

Born in 1931, she had grown up Pat Rausch in Astoria, Queens, her parents both employees of the Sunshine Biscuit Company: he was a carpenter and she was a cookie packer. After high school, she got a job in downtown Manhattan with Guaranty Trust Co. in a filing job. She gave it a year and a day and then couldn’t stand it anymore — but she thinks it taught her to be precise and disciplined in her work. By then, she’d met Buddy, also from Astoria, on a date with other people. They were married about a year later.

Once on Shelter Island, the kids who were old enough all went to the Shelter Island School — they adjusted well, Pat said — and Buddy went to work at the Grumman plant in Sag Harbor. Later he worked for Rachel Carpenter, the A&P heiress with a house in Dering Harbor, and went on start his own lawn mower repair business and Snapper dealership. He and Pat were divorced in the 1980s; he passed away a few years ago. He had remarried happily, Pat said. She did not. “I’d had enough of that,” she said.

In the beginning, she took whatever part-time jobs she could find. Until she went to work for the Reporter in 1978, they included gigs at Charlie Kraus’s snack bar at Louis Beach, Vivienne Gershon’s House of Glass, catering here and there including Cackle Hill Farm, cooking for the likes of Alice and Andrew Fiske at Sylvester Manor and in the kitchen at Gardiners Bay Country Club, where she described her boss Len Bliss as “so nice”: He taught her she couldn’t make sandwiches for the members like those she fed her kids at home, she explained. “They had to be thick, with lots of stuff in them.”

Every fall in those days, she and Buddy, like so many Islanders, made extra money scalloping; the kids did the shucking. “It was pretty lucrative,” she said.

She interviewed at the Reporter with grizzled editor-owner Bob Dunne after seeing an ad for a sales representative. He was skeptical but she got the two-day-a-week job; soon enough, after she not only brought in some North Fork ads but also modernized the ad tracking and billing process as well as some production routines — like placing ads first, then laying in the stories around them instead of Bob’s other way around — she was full-time.

It was fun, Pat said, especially after Pat Cowles bought the paper in the late 1980s. She fondly remembers trips to press conventions in Albany and especially the year he chartered a bus to take his staffs at the Reporter as well as the Sag Harbor Express and Three Village Herald, which he also owned, upstate. Over the years, she heard Governor Cuomo speak twice, shook the hand of vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro and learned to play liar’s poker “and did quite well.”

She doesn’t recognize the Reporter now. “I think we were eight pages when I started,” she said.

After she retired at age 64 in 1995, she went to work at Darrin’s pool company. “I got fired,” she said, a few years later when son David took over that position after going back to school to become a notary.

A former Goat Hill board member and golfer, Pat these days keeps close to home because of meniere’s disease, which can cause vertigo. Four of her kids and all but one of her seven grandkids are nearby (four great-grandkids live in Virginia). Pat does a lot of reading (“real books,” not ebooks; “The DiMaggios” most recently) and crossword puzzles in Newsday and wherever she finds them. She watches Mets games whenever they are on TV, “Jeopardy” as well as “Downton Abbey” and, on DVDs from the library, which she loves, “Homeland,” “Southland,” and “Game of Thrones.”

It’s pretty quiet out back. There are no more ducks, rabbits or goats. But if you stop by, be careful when you get back in your car on the way out. Her sweet terrier mix Maisy “tries to go for a ride with everybody,” Pat warned.