Dan's Papers - July 3, 2009

About 30 years ago, there lived on Leland Avenue in Southampton a man with a wife and a seven-year-old son.

The son was in third grade that year. But what happened that summer he recalled to me as one of the great traumas of his life.

"The neighbors came by," he said. "They wanted to talk to my Dad. And my mother told them that he came home from work about 5:30 every day. They should see him at six.

"I, of course, was home from school when they came. My mom was cooking. There were about 10 neighbors and they were angry. They were fed up with the fact that Dad was not mowing his lawn. The grass was waist high. It was a disgrace. They had talked to him politely about this over and over. He had not complied, not mowed. Two years was how long we lived there. Now they were going to ask him as a group. Mow Your Lawn.

"I was so embarrassed. The kids at school had been teasing me about this for the whole two years. Dad just would not do it. Dad stood up and he walked out the kitchen door into the garage and walked over to his lawn mower. The crowd followed him. I thought, oh my God he's finally going to do it. Thank God, thank you Lord. And he took the lawnmower out to the front lawn - it was an old fashioned push lawnmower - and as this whole crowd of people watched from the front steps, he slowly mowed his name in the lawn."

"What was his name?" I asked.

"Anthony," he said. "Then he stared angrily at everybody, nodded, then walked toward them and through the crowd and back into the house. I have never been so embarrassed in all my life."

This story came to mind the other day when I learned that finally, after 30 visits from the town, after five years of warnings and two court appearances, a man named Rian White, who lives on Fanning Avenue in East Hampton, finally lost his fight with the neighbors and the Town to keep various mementoes from his life out on his front lawn. It was soon cleared away by a carting company hired by the Town for that purpose.

White is a local through and through. He fishes. He clams. He keeps everything. Until the end of this battle, he had a 1965 Oldsmobile on blocks on his front lawn. He had a 1969 Ford Galaxy on his front lawn. He had a 1979 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia on his front lawn, and he had all sorts of other junk, including duck decoys, dog beds, clam shells from the clams he entered into the Annual Biggest Clam Contest and won, even a 100-year-old iron stove he got from when they subdivided the Bell Estate in Amagansett. He also had a seven-foot-high hot dog man, a big plastic thing, an advertising display consisting of a giant hot dog with a smiley face on it.

Every one of these things was full of memories and was important to him, he told officials each time they came. He also told them, and he believed that this was true, that a man's home was his castle. And for seven years, nothing got moved.

I think it was a fact during this time that many of the powers-that-be in Town agreed with White. Yes, his yard was, by the standards of others, a mess. But who were these people who complained, anyway? Neighbors? Locals? Passersby? Summer people, that's who they were. People who were happy to be living in a vacation home that looked out on farmland, but, heaven forbid, the farmers actually go out there and spray the crops. Oh no. There's this smell again. Time to call the police to tell them to stop that.

I recall on one occasion some woman talking about the stuff on White's front lawn and defending his right to have it there. She remembered riding around in that old Karmann Ghia with him. She fully understood that these things had memories to him. Rian was a great kisser, she said.

How many tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars of lawyers' time was spent on this case during all those appearances and the depositions of the neighbors and the researching of the law and the court case all the way up to the Supreme Court and back about whether you could go onto somebody's lawn and take something away without getting arrested for burglary and criminal trespassing? The Town didn't want that. What a precedent this would be. First it would be White, then somebody else.

And yet, the Town, at the urging of the neighbors, persisted. They told him to remove everything. He said no. They told him again. He said no again. They told him if he didn't remove it they'd send a carting company over to take it all away and he said just try. They actually SENT a carting company over one morning and White stood out there with his stuff and the men from the carting company said they felt uncomfortable about doing that and so they left.

Eventually, the Town attorney said they could charge him with having an illegal seven-foot hot dog man on his front lawn. They served him a summons, saying he was violating residential zoning laws that prevent having advertisements on the front lawn. The matter made its way through the courts. White said it was a hot dog man. The Town said it was advertising. And the judge ruled for the defendant. Some say the hot dog man's smile was even bigger after that.

And so, last Wednesday, when another carting company came, they had a speech to read to whoever might be on the property of White when they arrived. The speech was written by a lawyer. White was there. They read it to him.

Your property, they told him, has on its premises items that are dangerous to the public health, safety and welfare of the community. We are hereby authorized to remove any and all such property we might find here.

And then they went in, and with a crusher and a wood chipper, proceeded to clear everything on the property out - White videoed it all - and into the various machines that could flatten it, chip it or otherwise do away with it.

"They did this to me," White said when it was over. "They can do it to everybody."

But maybe not. White has his video and he thinks he will be going back to court. They've invaded his castle. They took his things. Somebody has got to pay.