Al and Sue Daniels Leaving Sag Harbor To Begin a New Chapter

Al and Sue Daniels sat at the kitchen table in their home in Sag Harbor Monday morning, carefully sorting through the pieces of glass they collect on daily walks along the beach. They use the soft green, blue, white and brown pieces they find for a hobby that keeps them busy attending craft fairs across the East End year-round.

With Christmas right around the corner, and the last shows coming up on the schedule, it’s a busy time for the couple, as they turn out jewelry, window decorations, glass Christmas trees, key holders, and all sorts of other knickknacks.

But this year, it’s a little more hectic than most, as the Danielses are also pulling up their longtime Sag Harbor stakes to move to Greenport.

If you have lived in Sag Harbor for any length of time, it’s hard not to know the couple.

Sue is an Elliston, who grew up on Norris Lane in Bridgehampton. Al, who grew up on Springs-Fireplace Road, is a 13th-generation Bonacker whose ancestors arrived in East Hampton in the 1640s. With a mother who was a Miller and a grandmother who was a Lester, Daniels figures he is related to just about everyone whose families were among the town’s founders. “I have a lot of cousins,” he said.

Sue, 75, had a long teaching career, first at the Tuller School in North Haven and later at the Rainbow School, a prekindergarten program she started in the Sag Harbor United Methodist Church before moving it to the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the South Fork in Bridgehampton.

Growing up in East Hampton, Al, who is 77, said he had “a wild childhood” — wild in the sense that just about every day he’d go fishing or hunting or just generally exploring the East End’s environment. He helped his father set pound traps, set gill nets, and worked on lobster traps.

“I was brought up on the water since I was 3 or 4 years old,” he said. “Today, that makes me want to go fishing just about every day.”

It also has left him with a wealth of knowledge about tides, moon phases, winds and other conditions on the water that make him something of a walking encyclopedia of the great outdoors. That made him a natural choice to write The Express’s “Outdoors” column, which he has been doing since 1988 and will give up with next week’s installment.

“I’m the last survivor of that crowd,” he said, referring to the columnists who worked for the paper when it was still owned by Vicky Gardner.

Like just about everything in the couple’s life, the column is a shared endeavor. Al writes it, but Sue types it, edits it, and submits it to the paper on time, usually with a photo to accompany it. The column is typically short and to the point, usually no more than 300 to 400 words, with a succinct roundup of fishing prospects, weather conditions, and the occasional comment about the birds he has seen that week.

But the column was just a sideline. Al, who graduated from East Hampton High School in 1965, was part of the first Board of Cooperative Educational Services program, traveling to Center Moriches every day to study mechanics. He joined the U.S. Air Force shortly after graduation. Trained as a mechanic for both jets and helicopters, he was sent to Vietnam in 1969.

Once out of the military in 1970, he moved to Sag Harbor, where jet engine repair was not in high demand. Instead, he found work as a carpenter, framing houses.

The experience proved valuable because in 1990, he was asked to become the part-time building inspector in North Haven. He later added part-time building inspector positions on Shelter Island and in Sag Harbor, retiring, as did Sue, in 2014.

You could say the couple met accidentally. “I had just gotten my learner’s permit,” she recalled, “and I talked my big brother into taking me out in the car. At the end of Norris Lane, a car goes by, and it has a really cute guy in it.”

The car, a 1956 Chevrolet, wasn’t half bad, either, he interjected.

Sue followed Al to Water Mill, where she attempted to pass him, but cut back in too soon, forcing him to drive into a potato field.

“I said, ‘Lady, give me your keys. You are not safe to drive,’” he recalled.

But they hit it off and began dating, and were married on June 28, 1969.

The couple have two children, Mark, who runs Mark Daniels Tree Service, and Kaitlin, a high school English teacher in Greenport. They have four grandchildren, including Kaitlin’s 3-year-old son, who goes by Ben, but whose full name is Bennett Miller in a nod to his Bonac heritage.

“One of the reasons we are moving to Greenport is so we can watch him grow up,” said Sue.

They have purchased a condominium that has a finished basement, so they can continue their shared passion of crafting. “People think it’s a get-rich gimmick,” Al said of their hobby. “But it keeps us outside in the fresh air and not at home watching TV,” Sue said.

For his last column, Al said he planned to rerun a poem he had written, “The Last Silverside,” which is something of a lament of the passing seasons.

For a man who grew up surrounded by the bounty of the East End, the poem could serve as a meditation of the decline of that environment.

“I don’t think I will see scallops come back in my lifetime,” he said, “and striped bass aren’t in good shape, either. And there’s rumors of them closing the codfish season. Humans screwed it up, but I don’t know if they can fix it.”