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IT WAS 5o YEARS AGO TODAY
Today, Sunday Feb 15, 2009, marks 50 years to the day since I turned in the fire alarm for the Knapp Mansion in Mastic Beach that afternoon. Through the years that this website has been online, the date has been recognized in various ways. It would of been nice to have a photo or two of the interior of the place before it was left empty and got wrecked, for this landmark date, because this entire website was started just by my looking for any photos of the Knapp mansion ...
But for today what we have is a page of direct links to my past pages about the fire and the Knapp Mansions (there were many of them) and a small part of my imagination. It's a "rough work tape" as we call it here in Nashville, with about as many clams in it as there are left in Narrow Bay. It's a small piece of music that seems appropiate for this. Right now it is in about as rough shape as the Knapp Mansion was on that Sunday afternoon when the arsonists lit it up. But like Benjamin Button, I'm confident it will be undergo a reverse aging process and be in good shape when it gets recorded for the forth coming Elm & McKinley Suite I am hoping to have that project finished this spring / summer to go with the publication of my book "The Knapp's Lived Here"
In writing The Empty Ballroom, I thought of my impressions of that huge empty room when I first walked into it during the summer of 1955 and of the many visits after in the last four years it stood. And I thought of the couples that lived there; like Frank & Louise Lawrence, Willis Penney & Claire Knapp, and of course Dodi & Gertrude Knapp and Dodi & Marion Knapp, the George Sutter family and all the servants that worked at the Knapp place, The Clunes, The Schluders etc and the piano recitals Father Skelly of St. Jude's presented in the ballroom for the Mastic Beach town folk in 1950 - 51... the last days there was any life left in a place called the Knapp Mansion.....