They Call Him ‘Ronnie Rocks’

It was an unexpectedly summery day last week—nearly 10 degrees warmer than the projected 61-degree forecast—Vicki Reith remarked to her husband as she slipped on her sunglasses and gazed out across Great Peconic Bay at Meschutt Beach.She glanced back at him, seeking any sign of acknowledgment, finding none.

A smile swept across her face.

Ron Reith was facing the complete opposite direction, his back to the water, carefully placing one foot in front of the other. The brim of his Shenandoah National Park cap shadowed his eyes, bent fixedly on the sand.

“Ron?” she asked. “Ron!”

“Hmm?” his head snapped up. “Yes, it’s very nice out,” he murmured, returning his attention to the sand, and then, with glee, “Look, another one! Look at that—the eyeballs are looking at me! What am I gonna do, not pick it up?”

The limber, 80-year-old jokester crouched down and plucked a smooth, gray rock from the line of unremarkable stones washed in by the tide. He surveyed it in his palm, running his fingers over the two small indents in the center, and a crescent-shaped erosion toward the bottom.

This is not an ordinary rock. To Mr. Reith, it has a face. And a personality.

“I just look at them and they turn into whole faces—eyes, noses, mouths. Sometimes, they’re even animals,” he said. “I don’t do anything to them. I just put two googly eyes on them—or one, if it’s someone from the side, or a sneaky rock.”

Mr. Reith—a longtime builder who is now better known by his nickname, “Ronnie Rocks”—has created thousands of rocks over the last five or six years, most signed with a scribbled “RR,” when he remembers. He gives them to his friends and family, leaves them in local businesses, and gifts them to children, free of charge.

By passage of hand, the rocks have traveled internationally, their googly eyes looking out on England, Costa Rica and New Zealand, to name a few destinations. They have even graced the top of a wedding cake as bride and groom.

“The way people react to these things, I’ll tell you. He’s had people walk away very quickly after explaining what he does, or they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s an art form—you’re so artistic,’” Ms. Reith said. “And he’s, like, ‘What’s artistic?’”

She laughed. “I said, ‘Well, you have an eye, and you’re seeing something that most people aren’t seeing.’”

As Mr. Reith likes to tell it, the inaugural rock hunt was an accident. He was actually combing the beach for hand grenades. “I had some lawyers,” he said ominously. “These lawyers were all crooked.”

And then began a winding, 15-minute tale of betrayal, scheming and murder—not by his hand—that ended with his wife cutting him off mid-story. “We’ll be here all day,” she teased, straight to the point. “I’m surprised he got as far as he did.”

She tucked a strand of her platinum blonde hair behind her ear as her husband burst into laughter. “You are correct, my dear,” he said. He adjusted his cap, making sure his disheveled, shoulder-length white hair was still pulled back with a black elastic, and returned to the hunt. “She thinks I’ve flipped out, that I can see these faces.”

His wife shook her head. “When he started, I think it was mainly an outlet for his stress. He really had some legal troubles,” Ms. Reith explained. “He’s one of those people who really dwells on the stress. Maybe your brain, in some way, is safeguarding you. There was no other way he could get rid of the stress. When he started with the googly eyes, he relaxed.

“He enjoys it so much. He loves that the kids love it. I just like seeing him like this and, to me, it’s worth windowsills full of rocks.”

The couple met almost 35 years ago in Mount Sinai—Mr. Reith grew up in West Hempstead, his wife less than 10 miles away in Roslyn—and married in 1992. His five children, from a previous marriage, and seven grandchildren recently visited for his 80th birthday last month at the couple’s home in Southampton, where they have lived for the last two decades. The Meschutt Beach Hut in Hampton Bays is their local haunt, and they visit at least three times a week during the summer, with an aluminum tray of rocks in tow.

“We’ve been serious collectors for years,” Beach Hut owner Rob Marsilio said, pointing to a shelf overflowing with rocks behind the bar. “Until they all fall down and kill one of my bartenders. Then, I’m suing him. That’s the plan.”

Mr. Reith smirked.

“I love them. They make me happy,” Mr. Marsilio continued. “That little sad face at the top is my all-time favorite. He always tells me they look like me. It’s usually the fat rocks.”

Mr. Reith distinguishes between a face and an animal as he picks up each rock, placing them into the pockets of his black windbreaker. That is all he will discuss while he’s in his zone—when he’s not cracking the occasional joke—and it is nearly impossible to shake him from it without being abrupt.

Each 20-minute walk typically yields between 10 and 40 stones, he explained, finally emptying his haul into the back of his white Chevrolet Avalanche parked in the Beach Hut lot. If the couple walks three times per week, that equates to almost 400 rocks per month during the summer, and approximately 4,000 rocks every year.

He ran his hands over the 33 rocks from that Thursday morning’s walk, humming quietly to himself. Satisfied, he closed the truck bed, revealing his license plate border.

“Happiness is being Ronnie Rocks,” it reads.