DAN'S PAPERS, May 14, 2010 Page 17 www.danshamptons.com
Eavesdropping It Was Like I Died & Got to Hear All the Comments at My Funeral By Dan Rattiner Last Monday at four in the afternoon, The Southampton Press posted a story on its web site that led a lot of its readers to believe that Dan’s Papers was going out of business. Why they did this I don’t know. Dan’s Papers is 50 years old, continues on and is profitable. What’s really happening is that the parent company of Dan’s Papers, a nationwide outfit in Cincinnati that owns nearly 100 newspapers, is going through a financial restructuring. It’s like the bankruptcy that General Motors or Chrysler or Newsday went through. It doesn’t affect Buzz Chew Chevrolet or Storms Motors in Southampton. Other media wrote stories about this and got a few details wrong. Nobody got it so wrong as did The Southampton Press. (Note: We publish The
Southampton Press website item in its entirety at the end of this article. See for yourself.) Interestingly, The Southampton Press story did result in a lot of their bloggers expressing their feelings about Dan’s Papers and either lamenting its passing or saying, good riddance, it is gone. I was really, really interested in this. Since I have spent 50 years of my life at this, it was like I’d died and gone to my own funeral. I could eavesdrop on what people were saying about me. “What goes up must come down,” was the first sentence of the first post, put there by PBR of Southampton. “Good riddance to that rag of a paper,” wrote BIGJimbo12 of East Quogue. “It was never a newsworthy thing to be called a newspaper. Catered to ‘east of the canal’ snots.”
“Amazing how someone with so little writing ability and ridiculously high advertising rates could last as long as he did. Why those idiots in Cincinnati would waste their money on such an inferior product is hard to figure out,” wrote Realdeal of Southampton. “Brown Publishing way overpaid for the paper in the first place. I believe the number was close to 7 mill. Tuff to make that back in this economic climate,” wrote tito of East Hampton. (It was more than double that.) “I grew up with Dan’s…was great…then he bought into the scene and thought it could become about him. Forgot about the fundamentals…” wrote Kelly of Hampton Bays. “Good riddance!” wrote johnj of Westhampton. “For those of you above claiming to be ad-buy(continued on next page)
MEANDERING THROUGH THE HAMPTONS OUTBACK By Dan Rattiner It’s all how you look at it. I dare say that most people who come out to the Hamptons consider the vast stretches of woods and dunes out here either as scenery to be treasured and prized or as an opportunity—for development—to divide it up and sell it off and make a profit, and move the economy just a little bit further forward. And then there are others. Many years ago, two brothers from Leningrad got off a plane in John F. Kennedy Airport and called me up. I had met them during a long-ago trip to the Soviet Union. Now they were making me a visit. Surprise! I drove into JFK and picked them up and brought them out. And as we were driving up Steven Hands Path toward my home, one of
them looked out the window to all the summer homes nestled deep in those woods and asked me, simply “Those berries in there, good enough
to eat?” Thus do perspectives vary. And yet, there is still another view of the woodlands and dunes of this community. Last Saturday morning, a sunny May morning, my wife and I dressed in hiking clothes and headed off to a place in Napeague that I know quite well—as a dirt road that heads out through some woods and dunes to the beach. But that was not the plan for that day. Chris held up a half page she had torn out of Dan’s Papers. It consisted of a map and some dotted lines and was accompanied by some copy from Ken Kindler, who writes a column about trails in the Hamptons. “This one starts about two miles east of where (continued on page 20)