Dan's Papers - May 30, 2008

The official explanation for the lack of sand on the beaches of the Hamptons this month is that it was caused by a strong nor'easter that came through on the night of May 17-18. Without bringing with it a drop of rain, it tore out the sand from all the beaches and took it out to sea. Ditch Plains in Montauk is just bedrock, there are problems at Sagg Main, in Hampton Bays and, as always, in Quogue. The visitors are, of course, disappointed.

What could we do, the officials ask? It was an act of nature.

Baloney. Dan's Papers knows for a fact that the sand in the Hamptons was repossessed this spring by the Addison Sand Company of Outer Banks, North Carolina. It is a tale of negligence and neglect, spite and retribution. And it is a tale that must be told.

This April, the officials of Hamptons Township worked vigorously, as they always do, to get everything ready for the big Memorial Day weekend. The huge trees on Main Street, all green and full with leaves, were trucked in from Ohio. The flowers and shrubs were brought in from the nurseries of Tennessee and Kentucky. The windmills, dismantled for the winter and stored in garages around the area, were brought out again and reassembled in their appropriate places. The gorgeous oil paintings, chosen from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as they are every year, were brought in and placed in the various art galleries in this community. And the sand, as usual, was ordered from the Addison Sand Company.

Addison has always given the Hamptons a special price for the sand, because it is vacuumed up from Palm Beach after the winter season in March and then barged up the inland waterway to be set down here for the summer season.

And that is exactly what Addison did this year, arriving with the sand in those big yellow Addison barges around March 15. Ton after ton of it was distributed out along all the beaches in and around the Hamptons during the two weeks after that.

When this arrangement was first implemented back in 1976, old man Addison was paid cash on the barrelhead. That soon devolved into payment by check, and then, around 2002, got arranged as a "pay in 30 days" agreement.

Everyone in the Hamptons knows that Freddie Addison, the son of old man Burt who ran the company before, has a nasty temper. And so it's always been that this money has been paid on April 15, "cash on the barrelhead" as Freddie calls it, just as his dad did, although it is now a certified check.

This year, however, something went terribly wrong. The check was cut at the Bridgehampton National Bank branch for $2,450,000 on April 14, and it was given to Alan Mendelhoff of East Hampton, the comptroller of Hamptons Township, to present to Freddie at Danny's Poxabogue Café on the morning of April 15 as, by tradition, it always is.

Mendelhoff, however, even with the check in his pocket as a reminder, overslept the appointment. He had stayed up until 2 a.m. watching a bad made-for-TV movie, he later said. In any case, Freddie showed up at Poxabogue at the expected time, waited a half hour, had an omelette, waited another half hour, and then stormed out and went on his way.

About an hour after that, we're talking 11:30 a.m. now, Mendelhoff woke up in his home in Sag Harbor, and ran off to meet with Addison. But Addison was gone.

And so Addison repossessed his sand. With his ten barges with the big vacuum cleaners bolted topside, he sucked up every single grain of it sometime during that night of May 14-15 when the purported "nor'easter" supposedly came through. The sand is now gone, and down in the Outer Banks where it has been spread out on the beaches there, much to the delight of the residents, who believe that with this extra cushion more tourists will come and just perhaps the Outer Banks will begin to get the cachet that both the Hamptons and Palm Beach have heretofore enjoyed.

As for Mendelhoff, he is working with a bank of telephone people in the basement of the Hamptons Township building in Mecox trying to find some other sand company willing to take this community's money in exchange for the six billion tons of sand it needs. If Mendelhoff doesn't get us the sand before the Fourth of July, the Mayor says he's fired.