Reporter Letters to the Editor
Better information
To the Editor:
I am alarmed at the sudden turn of events at the most recent Irrigation Committee meeting reported in the Reporter. I wonder about the real motivation of committee members to question their own authority to answer their responsibilities. This seems like self-defeating behavior as equally off course as the accusations towards Chairman Milton.
Yes, the committee got off to a rough start, I know because I was a part of it and resigned in frustration at its pedantic process.
However, I have come to admire and appreciate Mr. Milton’s need to prove every detail of its charges. This is a time-consuming process but a necessary and admirable one.
The committee was charged to “offer information on the impacts of irrigation on water quantity and quality” and it is doing so by requesting new chloride levels in our wells, critical information that has not been updated for more than 20 years. To enact a law based on antiquated figures is illogical.
That this is all taking longer than anticipated speaks to the committee’s seriousness of purpose.
Our consultant hydrogeologist, John Benvegna, has said that a delay in the execution of the ban would not impact the aquifer negatively. The town always retains the right to prohibit irrigation if a drought situation arises. Mercifully, the extreme winter snows will be trickling down into our thirsty aquifer this spring while we await and evaluate Mr. Bevegna’s new findings.
In the past 10 years, the Island has changed, the aquifer has changed and irrigation has changed. Don’t we want more current information to make better recommendations?
LION R. ZUST
Shelter Island
Kraus family kindness
To the Editor:
I very much enjoyed Bob DeStefano’s recounting of the Kraus family story (“Eye on the Ball,” January 30) as I have enjoyed many other Bob DeStefano pieces and hope to see more. But this piece put me in mind of an experience from a quarter-century ago that might add to the mosaic that Bob built up about the Kraus family.
My husband and I bought our house on Great Circle Drive in the summer of 1988. It was the first house purchase for us city-dwellers. One way we celebrated was by inviting, that November, a large passel of friends and relatives to come, stay overnight and have Thanksgiving dinner with us. It was only after 30-plus people said they would come, that we realized that we could not house them overnight in our house and that everything else on the Island was closed tight for winter.
Knowing that Ceil Kraus lived on the Island, though never having met her, I called and told her of our problem. She made our problem her problem. She agreed that some of the rooms at her Shelter Island Resort could be opened and heated for use by our overflow; this despite the fact that she and her family were going off-Island to visit their own family for Thanksgiving.
Although the Inn was closed and she did not know me from Eve, she immediately handed me the keys. She went further: she showed me how to turn on the heat and lights; she got people to make sure the rooms were clean and ready. We put our entire overflow in the otherwise silent hotel. It made a sweetly remembered Thanksgiving possible. Everything worked despite an unexpected snowfall.
Ceil Kraus’s act was one that showed her kindness and willingness to trust us, which I have always remembered with gratitude. It was a fine and wonderful introduction to life on Shelter Island. Only on Shelter Island!
Many years later, well into this century, Chuck Kraus was tiling our basement floor when I managed to fall off a motorbike in front of our house. I pretended I suffered no harm, when the fact was I had a deep gash on the top of one foot. It was Chuck Kraus’s human concern and common sense that finally got me to go to E.L.I.H. and have the cut attended to. I take this opportunity to thank him, too, for his concern and care on that occasion.
PHYLLIS GANGEL-JACOB
Shelter Island
A leap forward
To the Editor:
Congratulations to Sylvester Manor, the Shelter Island Public Library, the Browne family and all who participated in the Friday evening and Saturday morning programs of remembrance of those who were victims of the American slave trade. I doubt if anyone who watched the film “Traces of the Trade” (available through the library) could have been unaffected by the Browne family’s personal journey through their antecedents’ major role as slave traders. Saturday morning’s ceremony at the “burying ground of the Colored People of the Manor since 1651” was, in my opinion, a giant leap forward in Shelter Island’s confrontation with that part of our history we don’t often discuss, but should never forget.
MEL MENDELSSOHN
Shelter Island
