1954: Uncle Saint reporting from Fire Island?

    My cousin Katharine and I have every reason to believe the young barefoot reporter seen in this 1954 NBC news footage is our Uncle Saint. The footage is for a story about New Yorker theatre critic Wolcott Gibbs and his weekly summer newspaper The Fire Islander. Gibbs was a friend of Saint's step-father John O'Hara back then ( thus the name "Gibbsville" in so many of O'Hara's stories) and must have known J Bryan III as well. Gibbs even recruited O'Hara and other friends to write for The Fire Islander.



  With literary lions providing much of the copy, it was up to the Gibbs's reporting team to handle the day to day news and Uncle Saint, the former managing editor of The Virginia Spectator at U.VA, appears to be up to challenges like covering trustees meetings.

   In the first issue of The Fire Islander Gibbs promised his readers:

    Our reporters will be instructed to get around. There are usually twenty little communities in any community. It will be their job every week to get in touch with a representative member of each of them and come back with the facts, upon which the editors will them superimpose grammar.

  Why would Gibbs devote so much time to a little read broadsheet?

"I'm in love with the goddamn beach!"

screenshot

On Saint's 4th Grade Poetry Recital May 1973

From a collection of letters to friends found in Box #3. This one from June of 1973 recalls the poetry recital we all had to do for Mrs Cunningham's class.

"The first boy did Maurice Sendak's "Chicken Soup With Rice" and all the other boys, waiting their turns squirmed in agony so that all the metal seats in the rooms sounded, I suppose, rather like the breaking up of those old ships in the Taiwan Harbor. But God it was funny.
They'd get up there with their jaw muscles working, faltering, flushing , racing through the first stanza since they were the only ones they were really sure of and then doom because the line would come which he wouldn't know. And you knew the boy was thinking two or three lines ahead of what he was saying and the adams apple would start bobbling, they eyes rolling, slight tears springing up and then that awful silence which would s t r e t c h o n endlessly until the teacher would prompt.
Saint's friend Nick Cudahy got up on stage and squared off as though the poem were his mortal enemy, delivered in a fighter's crouch, attacked each stanza by grabbing it at the throat..
And then Saint, doing Robert L. Stevenson's "Land of Nod" squirming like a snake, not daring to look at his classmates, eyes fixed on an owl poster at the back of the room, made it through without blowing a line, then sagged against the back of the wall, wiped his hand across the brow and sighed "I did it!" which met with great laughter and applause."