I go sailing on Saturdays – Garage Sailing that is. I picked up some great stuff.

First, I bought a Fisher receiver for $5. It has $250 worth of tubes in it and recently has sold on eBay for over $500. It works well and I don’t know if I should keep it or not.

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I bought two screenplays from the 1940s. These scripts cost me $4 and that seems to be their value, but to me they are a wonderful find. They have the 20th Century Fox stationary mark on them and they are a good example of an historic piece of movie memorabilia. They are for movies that were actually made. One is The Eve of St. Mark, based on a play by Maxwell Anderson. Anderson lived nearby and wrote about the local scenery. His famous play Hi Tor is about the mountain that looms above the town of Haverstaraw, 5 miles up the river form here. During college I worked the 11PM to 6AM shift at a diner with one of his grandsons.


The Nyack area has been the home of artists and writers for years. I’ve been to parties where the Weavers (1950’s blacklisted folk group) played. My wife’s family was good friends with Burgess Meredith and Mitch Miller. My Grandfather knew them both. I went to school with Leo Tolstoy’s grandchildren. My Great Grandfather was good friends with William Porter (O Henry) and knew the Barrymore family of actors. My 13 greats grandfather was named Van Winkle and was know as Rip. Family tradition has it that he was the same one named in the famous short story.
When Erica was in college (Bates in Maine), one of the teachers remarked about Washington Irving’s vivid imagination to be able to make up Rip and The legend of Sleepy Hollow. Anyone from around here knows that they are old stories that Irving just cleaned up and published. There is a real Sleepy Hollow and the legend of the headless horseman goes back almost 200 years among my ancestors before Irving wrote them up.
When Erica corrected the teacher, the professor told her that she did not know what she was talking about.