| Issue #33 - November 7, 2008 |
What's That Up On Top Of The Flagpole?
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Photo by Susan Galardi
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Dear Dan,
For a long time now, I've been suppressing the thought that something is rotten in the Town of East Hampton. There's an effigy, held up on a post, just off the corner where Newtown Lane meets Main Street. It unsettles me every time I pass it, because it calls to mind a lynching of some kind - but I'm assuming there's some more benign explanation. I finally asked around about it in the nearby shops this summer. I couldn't get an answer. So I decided to write to you. Do you know what it is?
Thanks,
Presca Abn
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Dear Presca Abn,
First of all, the reason nobody you ask in the stores knows what this is all about is because almost all the stores are now part of upscale chains and the managers of the stores don't even know if East Hampton is one word or two.
But to get to your question. About 20 years ago, a store on Newtown Lane with a flagpole next to it was rented by a charming man named Morgan Rank. Rank was a former New York City advertising man who had moved out here after turning his hobby into a career. His hobby was to drive a station wagon to the Midwest - to Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky and find wooden folk art, scarecrows, whirligigs and the like, which people out there make in their spare time and often set up on their front lawns. He'd make friends with these people, buy their wooden sculptures, and then drive them back to East Hampton, where he'd set them up in the store and sell them to collectors.
He'd sometimes find multiple pieces by one particular farmer, and he'd have a wine and cheese gallery opening in the store, with the man present, and it would be quite a little event.
In any case, Rank got an idea about that flagpole next to his store. If at one time it had an American flag flying from it, there hadn't been one for as long as he knew, so it was just bare up there. Why not get a ladder and put a wooden folk art sculpture up there? He found a piece, which was a full size affair of a wooden man with moveable arms and legs, and he got it up there and fastened it. Then he arranged the man so that his head was forward and looking down with one arm gesturing to the store below.
The Village took very unkindly to this. They demanded he take the sculpture down. They told him it was illegal advertising. Rank, a stubborn fellow, said it was art, and he'd go to court to keep it up. And he did. And he won.
Rank is no longer there. After about 10 years, he met a wonderful young woman, fell in love, married her, and went on to other things. But the art has stayed. Today the store is occupied by Prudential Real Estate.
A lynching? An effigy to a time we would like to forget? I think not. Everything is in the eye of the beholder, as you know. You should now behold it differently. As for the future, what I think we ought to do is go up there on a ladder, and raise this man's wooden head, and then outstretch both his arms upward, in prayer, or perhaps in unbridled joy, or perhaps to assuage the rain gods so we have a good summer, or perhaps in surrender to those who are approaching him with no good purpose, or perhaps just because he wants more soup.
What we should not do, I hope, is take him down, strap him to a stake and set him on fire as punishment for 20 years of illegal advertising because that damn judge really was wrong and we all know it.
It would not be a good way to treat folk art.
Sincerely,
Dan Rattiner
Dan's Papers, founder
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