This week in Shelter Island history
50 YEARS AGO IN HISTORY
Ted Williams signed a five-year contract to manage the Washington Senators baseball team.
Mariner 6 was launched from Cape Canaveral for a Mars flyby to study that planet’s atmosphere.
Joanne Woodward won a Best Actress in a Drama Golden Globe Award for her performance in “Rachel, Rachel.”
LeeRoy Yarbrough, driving for Junior Johnson, eked out a victory in the final lap of the Daytona 500.
Barbara Jo Rubin became the first female rider to win a race against men at a nationally recognized competition astride Cohesian in Charles Town, West Virginia and she is to be celebrated this month for that victory 50 years later.
And on Shelter Island . . .
30 YEARS AGO
Master plan in works for Islanders
Local officials and residents began a discussion about formulating a comprehensive plan for Shelter Island. Supervisor Jeffrey Simes brought in Suffolk County Planning Department official Thomas Junor who had worked on an analysis of the Island in 1986 and was willing to assist in developing a master plan.
Helen Rosenblum, now a Shelter Island Justice Court judge, was town attorney at the time, and encouraged the effort, saying it would continue the Island’s low key atmosphere life style.
POSTSCRIPT: It took years and hard work to launch a plan that was undercut by those who didn’t want to see zoning changes. The plan remains on the shelf, but many agree it needs to be updated to fit current needs. Among those are stipulations about affordable housing that the Community Housing Board would like to have revisited.
20 YEARS AGO
Thiele fights high East End gasoline prices
Assemblyman Fred Thiele Jr. (I-Sag Harbor) introduced legislation aimed at promoting fair gasoline prices that he said were higher in the five East End towns than on the rest of Long Island.
Prices at the time were 10- to 15-cents higher east of Riverhead than the rest of the county, Mr. Thiele said. He called on State Attorney General Elliott Spitzer to investigate the pricing.
POSTSCRIPT: Twenty years later, Mr. Thiele is still monitoring gasoline prices on the East End and still finding them higher here, particularly on the South Fork. Shelter Island gasoline prices tend to be higher than they are on the North Fork.
10 YEARS AGO
Few changes in hunting statistics
There were no changes in hunting patterns during the two years after the 4-poster unit study had started, according to Mike Scheibel, Mashomack Preserve Wildlife manager. He reported that there were the same number of hunters in Mashomack and they were generally the same hunters.
Hunting there was done on weekdays in January, and there were between 20 and 40 hunters on the land each day, he said. He also said statistics for the first couple of weeks of the “nuisance hunt” were about the same.
Statistics for deer taken on town-managed properties weren’t yet available.
POSTSCRIPT: This year, statistics during the recreational hunting season that goes from October 1 to January 31 were down from last year. But the Deer & Tick Committee cautioned there was still too little data to draw conclusions about why fewer deer were taken. Animal Control Officer Beau Payne advised committee members that they shouldn’t expect this year’s nuisance hunt to make up for the lower numbers. There were 54 fewer deer taken during the first three months of the recreational season in 2018 than in the same months in 2017, Mr. Payne said in January.
