A Life Lived For Service: Charles Styler Dies At 81

To this day, Virginia Styler can visit the exact spot on Hill Street where she met the love of her life, almost 65 years ago.

It was 1957 in Southampton, where the Bronx native was spending the summer babysitting for an elite “Blue Book” family. She was sitting with two other girls on a cement wall on Hill Street, passing the time, when Charles Styler and his friends drove by, screeching to a halt.

“He picked me up,” Ms. Styler said with a light laugh. “And I was never able to get rid of him. He stuck like fly paper, you know?”

He was 17, she was 15, and they were smitten. But at the time, she never imagined that their love story would span decades — moving them from New York to their longtime home in North Sea — and that her husband would become a fixture on the East End.

Here, the community simply knew him as “Charlie.” He was dependable, trustworthy and civic-minded, easily recognized by his red suspenders and a video camera in his arms, generous with both his time and talent as an audio-visual technician for SEA-TV.

He was a professional perfectionist while on the job, and a great conversationalist outside of it — patriotic, conservative and unapologetic in his opinions, yet always willing to listen.

On April 13, Mr. Styler died following a long battle with cancer, leaving behind his wife of 58 years and their children — Lisa Milby, Katherine Styler Feldman, and Michael and John Styler — as well as 11 grandchildren and 11 great-grandchildren.

He was 81.

“My father, for my entire life, has done all he can for the community,” Ms. Styler Feldman said. “Every time he did something, it was for the community. And he didn’t care if he was getting paid, not getting paid — he was always doing it for the community.”

Charles Albert Styler was born on February 1, 1940, in Queens, but spent most of his formative years on the East End. He dropped out of Southampton High School at age 17 to enlist in the U.S. Navy, where he attended Radioman Class “A” School.

“He was a very smart man, but he hated school. School was not the thing for him; it just isn’t for some people,” Ms. Styler said, noting that the young Mr. Styler had just finished boot camp when they met. “He was in radio school at the time — the Navy tests them to see where their talents are, and his was in radio, Morse code — and he wasn’t doing so well and he must have told me.

“And I said, ‘If you flunk the class, I’ll never see you again,’” she continued. “He brought those marks up like you wouldn’t believe.”

Mr. Styler received certifications in electronics and transistor theory from the Eastern Suffolk Board of Cooperative Educational Services, and earned a first-class radio telegraph license from the Federal Communications Commission. He served for four years as a radio operator and was aboard the first United States Navy ship, the USS Maury, to enter the Black Sea since the Yalta Conference.

And then, on June 9, 1962, he married Ms. Styler.

“The people I was working for that summer, they looked at me and said, ‘Oh, you’re in love.’ And I looked at them and said, ‘I’m 15, I don’t know anything about love, what are you talking about?’” she recalled. “But they were right. It was a chemistry type of thing between the two of us. We had that close bond. You can’t describe the connection, it’s just there and sometimes you don’t even know it’s there.”

By March, they’d had their first child and decided to move from their apartment in the Bronx to North Sea, loading up their station wagon to the hilt, “like gypsies,” with everything they owned, Ms. Styler said, unsure of what the future would hold.

“We never had any money,” she said. “He made it work because there were a lot of times when I was ready to give it up, and he kept it together. How he kept it together? I don’t know, but he kept it together. Because we lost a child and it’s very hard on a relationship. And I never wanted anyone who didn’t want me, same thing with him.”

She sighed to herself. “We had, at times, a contentious marriage because of some of the things that happened in our lives. But he was always there,” she said. “We loved each other very much.”

Their most challenging chapter came almost 50 years ago when their 5-year-old son, Richard, was struck and killed by a truck during his walk to catch the school bus — an accident that Ms. Styler witnessed from the window of a café that she ran at the time.

The Styler family was devastated for years, she said, but somehow, they found their way through the grief.

“It was tough, it’s still tough,” she said. “It never really goes away. It becomes part of your life. You just learn how to live with it. Because if you don’t learn how to live with it, you go under. And I’ve always said, if you haven’t had some of the bad stuff in life, how do you ever know you’re going through good times?”

One of Mr. Styler’s most rewarding experiences was serving on the Southampton Union Free School District Board of Education, starting in July 2019. He added “good fiscal oversight” to deliberations, according to President Jacqueline Robinson, who first met Mr. Styler through the North Sea Community Association, where he was a longtime member.

“He listened to what everybody had to say. And if he felt he needed to, he spoke up about things and gave his input,” Ms. Robinson said. “I, personally, had many lovely conversations with Charlie, I always enjoyed talking to him. I would call him to touch base about different things, and we would spend quite a bit of time on the phone together, just talking about anything and everything.

“I’ll miss him,” she added. “He’s one of those people that you just always expect will be around.”

Whether it was the Boy Scouts of America’s Eagle Scout Awards or Our Lady of the Hamptons children’s plays, the Southampton Village Fourth of July Parade or the Hampton Classic Horse Show, high school graduations or Veterans Day events, Mr. Styler was always there and documenting the action for SEA-TV — the education and government public access television channel for Southampton Town that he helped get off the ground in 2005, after filming events for years prior, free of charge.

Encouraged and assisted by former Southampton Village Mayor Joseph P. Romanosky Jr., Mr. Styler felt that the community should have first-hand access to governmental meetings and local events, and so he gathered, constructed and developed what was necessary to broadcast them.

When Bruce Nalepinski came on as executive director, he already knew that he could count on Mr. Styler.

“I got there, and there was Charlie,” he said. “He was always the go-to guy, as far as I was concerned. If I definitely wanted somebody who would not screw up the recording, I could always guarantee that he would come through with the proper video and sound.”

While Mr. Nalepinski introduced Mr. Styler to technology like the memory card, which would free him from lugging around clunky equipment and video tapes, the veteran was set in his certain ways — like always having back-up cameras in case something went wrong.

“He was like the changing of the guard, from the old school to the new video,” Mr. Nalepinski said. “Charlie was the reliable guy amongst us hot shots. When we would fall on our face, Charlie would say, ‘Oh, I’ve got that, I’ll bring my camera in,’ and we’d shoot with that old video camera, which was reliable and trustworthy.

“Charlie was very much that, too,” he continued, “and he took it much more seriously than I did. There was a learning curve, but Charlie gradually came around. He was quite a character, I gotta say.”

To say that Mr. Styler was committed to his craft is an understatement, said Mr. Nalepinski, who fondly recalled a stormy, Mecox Cut opening where the videographer ran up to the top of a pile of sand, in the pouring rain, to shoot the exact moment that the Atlantic Ocean waves crashed into Mecox Bay.

“It was extraordinary,” Mr. Nalepinski said, adding, “Charlie would have two or three cameras running, all by himself, and he’d run back and forth between all these cameras, getting all the angles, and then he’d edit it.”

With audio engineer Charles Certain, the pair worked together as a well-oiled machine for 15 years. And while their politics never aligned, they connected through their shared goal of making the station better, he said.

“I’ll tell you, we’ve had a lot of great, feisty conversation throughout the years. And I think I’ve learned a lot from him and I think he learned a lot from me,” said Mr. Certain, who is of Black and Shinnecock descent. “The color barrier made it different sometimes, but I would always give him my point of view, and he would listen, and I would get his point of view. A lot of the times, you don’t know what it’s like to be what I am unless you’re in my shoes, so I think I made him more aware of that part.”

About a month ago, Mr. Certain — who is 65 years old himself — asked the octogenarian when he would retire. And, with absolute seriousness and certainty, Mr. Styler responded, “I’m gonna retire when I die.”

“For whatever it’s worth, he got what he wanted, and he played it out,” Mr. Certain said. “I give him a lot of credit for that. You don’t always have to see eye-to-eye with someone to respect who they are.”

On Monday, Ms. Styler Feldman stepped into her father’s shoes to take over his role as videographer for Southampton Village after working alongside him, part-time, when she moved back to the East End after spending over three decades away. The change is an emotionally charged one, she said, and attributes to him much of her own desire to help the community.

As a child, she remembers her father working from home as a ham radio operator, where he would answer emergencies from distressed callers all over the world. And when contacted, the antenna on Great Hill Road in Southampton still repeats Mr. Styler’s information — his voice a testament to a life lived for service.

“I’m so glad that I was here for my father’s last days, to take care of him with my mom and my sister and my brothers, it’s just been a blessing,” Ms. Styler Feldman said. “My last five years have been jam-packed with joys and sorrow, and just appreciation that I ended up back here.”