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By Louisa Thomas Hargrave

Although European wine grapes only became a commercial crop on Long Island in the 1970s, most farms on the East End had at least one grapevine (usually a native variety like concord or catawba) on a trellis off the kitchen doorway. For many years, I used to enjoy sitting under one such trellised vine in Cutchogue, when I occasionally visited my neighbor, Stanley Tuthill, for morning coffee. Stanley (known as Sparky to his contemporaries) welcomed a small group of friends and farming neighbors to his farmhouse every morning (excepting Sundays) at 9 and shared stories of bygone days.

In the winter, we sat in his kitchen, but whenever the weather permitted, Stanley would bring the coffee and cookies outside, setting up aluminum chairs under the grape trellis. As the growing season progressed, we would discuss the ripening of the fruit that hung over our heads.

Stanley was a teetotaler, and never drank alcohol, but he told us how his family used to harvest many baskets of grapes from that vine, making juice, jelly and pies. Although his family never made wine, most of their neighbors fermented both wine and cider, and his mother made a lightly fermented root beer that (although Stanley denied it) must have been slightly alcoholic.

Stanley often spoke about his life on the farm, where he was born in 1914. He had a terse, Yankee way of talking that distilled all the elements of his stories into a few pithy sentences. Unfortunately, those stories will now have to be carried on by the few who remember them. Stanley died recently, a few days after being hit by a car that was backing up in a Southold parking lot. Though his life was long, it ended prematurely, and it deserves a tribute, for the way he lived was a model to be honored. Stanley liked to quote a verse from the Bible, Micah 6:8: “What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

“I live by that,” he would say, and his behavior bore that out.

Stanley attended the Cutchogue Presbyterian Church virtually every Sunday of his life, and although he himself never preached, many of the stories he told had a moral component. One day when I came to visit him, Stanley asked me, “Did you see the rainbow last week?”

“No,” I answered.

“Too busy, I suppose,” he said. “Everyone is too busy to see all the beauty that surrounds them in the world.”

Then, he added, “I ran after the pot of gold, but someone else got there first.”

This wry comment aside, Stanley was generous, and didn’t covet what others had. His philosophy of acceptance and restraint were evinced by one of his favorite stories. As I recall his telling it, “One day I went out to the smoke house, and noticed that a couple of hams and some bacon were missing. There was snow on the ground, and I could see footprints in it, going up north toward Oregon Road. I went to tell my father, who was taking care of the horses, and asked him if I should follow the tracks. ‘No,’ he said; ‘I don’t wish to know who took it.’

“But that’s not the end of the story. A couple of days later, when I went to the smoke house, the hams and bacon were back there. My father said, ‘You see, sometimes things take care of themselves. We didn’t make an enemy, and we have our meat.’”

After telling this story, Stanley added, “Things were different then. We all knew each other by our first names. Now there are so many people, we can’t know them all.”

When I first met Stanley, he lived with his brother Leslie. Neither ever married; they spent their lives farming, raising potatoes and cauliflower, plus subsistence amounts of fruits and vegetables on the side. Leslie kept chickens; they had a milking cow, and many cats. Although at the end of his life there were no more animals on the farm, Stanley appreciated the role the farm animals had played in his life. “When I was a child,” he related, “my parents always said that on Christmas Eve, the cows went down on their knees in the stable. I had to see it for myself, so, one Christmas Eve, when I was about 8, I went out to the barn. But the cows weren’t on their knees; they were lying down as usual, chewing their cuds. I was disappointed. Then, I noticed that one of the cats was lying on a cow’s belly, purring. I guess she knew not to use her claws! And that made it worth the look.”

It would be easy for an outsider to see Stanley, who lived his entire life in the same house and rarely ventured off the East End, as a simple country hick, but in reality, he was an insightful, sensitive observer of a broader world. Sometimes, that broader world of sophistication and celebrity even came to him. As he retold one such incident, “I used to paint in the winters, when there was no work on the farm. One winter I was painting in Greenport, at some property owned by Mr. and Mrs. McCann, at the end of Main Street. The McCanns did publicity for theater people. There was a big house, many outbuildings, and guest houses. We were almost done, and I was painting the floors. I liked to paint nice floors. So Mrs. McCann comes and says, ‘Stanley, come here. There’s someone I want you to meet.’