Benita J. Hughes

Benita J. Hughes, the founder, along with her husband, William, of the Sandy Hollow Day Camp in Southampton, died at her home in Southampton on July 28 of lung cancer. She was 72.

This summer was the first in Sandy Hollow’s 39 years that she was not a daily presence at the popular summer camp.

Mrs. Hughes, who met her husband while both were educators—she as a speech and language pathologist, and he as a physical education teacher—graduated from Fordham University and then earned a master’s degree from New York University.

Her husband, who admits that his professional aspirations were limited when they first met, credits his wife, known to friends and family as “Bunny,” with encouraging him to pursue advanced degrees. He heeded his wife’s advice and eventually became headmaster at the Garden School, a preparatory school in Queens.

The couple married 45 years ago and soon realized that they would have to find a way to augment their small income from teaching. Realizing that they shared skills working with children and both had the summers off, they hit on the idea of starting a summer camp. The couple first put a deposit on land in Miller Place, but Mr. Hughes said this week that they were denied the necessary permits by Brookhaven Town after every single person in the hearing room stood up to object, voicing fears that children from New York City would become a disruptive element in the community.

After that initial failure, it was Mrs. Hughes who suggested the couple look for a small piece of land out east—where she had summered as a young woman. Mr. Hughes expressed doubts on the ride to the East End, saying, “If we can’t get a camp approved here, what makes you think we can get it out there?”

Her instincts proved correct. The couple purchased three acres on Sandy Hollow Road in Southampton in 1968 for $7,500 from Joe Landau, one of the biggest landowners on the South Fork. His holdings included Montauk Manor, which Mr. Hughes said he had hoped to make a gambling mecca.

Mr. Landau helped the couple obtain the variance needed to operate the camp, Mr. Hughes said, because he wanted to open the residential area for commercial use. It was Mr. Landau who started what is now known as Sandy Hollow Tennis Club, next door to the camp.

The variance, the very last case item on the agenda, was approved on April 14, 1968, the same night that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Mr. Hughes recalled.

It took more than a year to transform the land into a camp suitable for recreational activities, and then in the summer of 1970, Sandy Hollow Day Camp opened for business with 21 campers. The camp now boasts 110 campers, many of them the children of former campers.

The couple’s two daughters, Beth Barrie and Eileen Hughes-Orloff, who now run the camp with their father, were campers there and made many lifelong friends. They recalled this week that their mother once said that “the only thing better than teaching is to be a mother and grandmother.”

Mrs. Hughes was well-known for her love of children, and even after a long career in New York City public schools and Rockville Centre schools, she went back to being a part-time speech therapist at Tuckahoe School in the late 1990s, after her husband retired from education.

Ms. Hughes-Orloff said one of her fondest memories of the camp was “playing in the sun, having the best time with my friends, and out of the corner of my eye, seeing my parents.” Both daughters remember running excitedly into the camp office to visit with their mom as she went about her duties running the business end of the camp. Everyone in the family agreed that the camp reflected Mrs. Hughes’s personality, characterized as “cute, caring and unpretentious.”

In addition to her husband and two daughters, Mrs. Hughes is survived by a brother Franklyn P. Mento of Garden City and two grandchildren, Will and Fiona Barrie.

A funeral mass was held on Saturday, August 2, at Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary Church in Southampton, with Father Stanley Kondeja of Our Lady of Poland Church officiating. Interment followed in Southampton Cemetery.