economy slowed. Visitors were not certain they could drive out to the Hamptons, find gas for their cars here and then drive home. Resorts and chambers of commerce here were advertising that this was not the case. If you didn’t drive much around here after you got here, you’d have enough to get back to the city. “The Hamptons on a tank of gas and back” was the slogan. And that was why Jim Davidson was sitting in my office. “I want to create a shuttle bus service to get people around the Hamptons after they get here,” he told me. “It would be like those jitneys they have in southeast Asia. We have this one main road. I will have eight-passenger vans driving up and down the Montauk Highway from Southampton to Montauk, back and forth and back and forth. You could hail it anywhere, get on and go from one town to the next.” “What would it cost?” “Fifty cents a trip, from wherever you got on to wherever you got off. We’d have a bike rack on a trailer out back of the vans. You’d put your bike there. Then you’d have your transportation for going north or south after you got off.” I thought this was a very unlikely idea. People DansPapers.com
were in love with their cars. But then I thought maybe it could work. There had been a lot of things that I thought would not work that did. And certainly it would bring a remarkable and unusual service to the community. So if he wanted to try this, I would gladly support it. I told him so. “We’ll need permits to do this. You just can’t start a bus service and charge money for it without permits,” Jim said. At this particular time, Dan’s Papers was the only independent publication in the Hamptons. All other publications were newspapers of record. They would be for or against the project, giving space to those opposed to the plan as well as in favor. This was why Jim approached me. Besides that he knew me, I had no such obligations. “I’ll write up a story about what you are going to do,” I told him. “And I’ll urge everyone to let the towns approve it. And I know a lot of officials who could help ease the way to get permits.” And so, this man Jim Davidson embarked on a business that he called the Hampton Jitney, doing something that had nothing to do with what the Jitney has become today, 40 years later—bringing people back and forth from the Hamptons, the North Fork, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Florida and
Boston in the lap of luxury. Over the following winter, Jim approached my art director, Thom Speckenbach, about designing a logo for the Hampton Jitney. Thom phoned me about it. We had a skeleton staff in the winter and were publishing once a month. I was vacationing in Hawaii. Got there in November, was returning in March. “Go ahead,” I told him. “Do your best.” Thom’s logo went on the sides of the two minivans that Jim bought. It’s the same logo that is there today. The service started off well. There were lots of people, especially those with environmental concerns, who thought this a good idea. You’d see the vans going up and down the Montauk Highway right outside my office window. But soon, the uniqueness of it ended and ridership dropped off. It continued on for the rest of the summer, and for the summer after that, but it was clearly not going to make it. The gas crisis was resolved. And people just weren’t going to give up their cars. What I didn’t know was that in the fall after the first year, people asked Jim if he’d take them in and out from the city aboard his vans. It was not exactly a business. Jim had a license to ferry June 20, 2014 | 7