| Issue #48, March 9, 2007 |
They Talk
Big Duck, House, BBQ Grill Speak to Us From Here in the Hamptons
By Dan Rattiner
Many years ago, if you drove from Riverhead to Hampton Bays on Route 24, you came upon a little sign that said, “Hear the Talking Duck. Tune to 1340 on AM radio.”
So you’d turn your car radio to that station, and there would be Christie Brinkley — she’d identify herself — giving a one-minute speech about the Big Duck.
“The Big Duck was built in 1931 by a duck farmer in Flanders named Martin Maurer. The Big Duck is twelve feet high and twenty feet long. Its eyes are the tailights of a Model T Ford. It’s made of wood and plaster, painted white, and it is one of the few examples here on Long Island of a time when restaurants were built in the shape of what was inside, a fad that lasted from about 1935-1945. Inside, for many years, you could buy fresh eggs and freshly killed ducks and chickens. Also roasted chickens. Now, it is a museum owned by Suffolk County. Stop in and say hello.”
Then she would give you the days and hours the Big Duck was open. Then the story of the Big Duck would begin again. And at that point, you’d see the Big Duck and you’d either stop in or pass it by.
How they did this back then was by taking advantage of a little known law that gives all private citizens the right to lease a limited power AM station from the government. For a few thousand dollars, you can buy a transmitter that will send a signal out at the allowed wattage. You’re in the broadcasting business.
What happened to the Christie Brinkley broadcast was that the tape wore out. This was before CDs and digital. They recorded her reading the Big Duck’s speech on tape and then put it on what they called an endless loop. It just played over and over. The clerk, opening the Big Duck in the morning, would turn it on when she came in. She’d turn it off when day was done.
I never did find out why Christie Brinkley didn’t just record another one when she learned it had just worn out. Maybe they didn’t ask her. Maybe they had a copy made and had lost that and were just too embarrassed to ask her. Maybe there was no line item in the County Budget for it. Maybe it had been saying this over and over for three years and everybody got the message and there was no wave of enthusiasm to continue it.
In any case, there is today a woman named Loretta Besser, who is reviving this art for a new business. She finds somebody who has a house for sale and she makes arrangements for the house to tell you all about itself. Her business is called TALKING HOUSE.
Ms. Besser’s first customer is a former real estate agent named Don Orenstein. He has a waterfront house for sale in Quogue and he says this is one beautiful way to get the word out.
The signs went up on the front lawn facing Bayside Avenue and facing onto the Shinnecock Bay on the back lawn, and the signs tell motorists and yachtsmen to turn their radios to 1690 AM to hear what the house has to say. The house transmitter, hooked up to a CD, introduces itself, gives its address and says it has, among other things, a movie theatre and an ice cream parlor inside. You’d never know that from looking at it on the outside.
Orenstein is raving about all the attention his house is getting — and I suppose the house likes it, too — and it goes on and on.
One drawback of the system is that the limited power frequency is multi-directional, so not only will the people driving down the street or motoring by in yachts hear it, everybody who tunes into 1690 gets to hear it anywhere within a thousand yard radius.
Of course, you can get to not hear it by not tuning to 1690, but there might be an occasion when somebody is roaming the dial and comes upon the house, talking about all the wonderful rooms that are inside and the ice cream parlor and the theatre, and wonders what the devil is this all about?
Well, you could track it down. Travel one way the signal gets softer and filled with static, and the other way, it gets stronger. It might take some time — I could see people who have no life doing this — if you kept walking around, eventually you would find where all this is coming from.
Success could kill the TALKING HOUSE business, of course. If Ms. Besser sells thousands of these systems, eventually it will get nasty. You will get a house telling you not to listen to what that white house across the street has to say, but listen to what I have to say, or it could say that we make a lot of noise here, and that any new people who live in that yellow house with the black shutters, whoever they are, will just have to put up with what the sellers did, which is why they are leaving, and so forth and so on.
Frankly, beginning this summer, my own problem driving to work every day is not going to be with sounds, but with smells. I live in East Hampton and work in Bridgehampton. Some time at the beginning of this summer, Mark Smith is going to open his very latest restaurant, right on the Montauk Highway across from the Poxabogue Golf Course, where Alison’s By the Beach Restaurant used to be.
It is going to be a barbecue restaurant, and I love barbecue, and I have no doubt that when I get to within 1000 feet of that place, I will begin to smell what is going on there and slow down and it will take all my willpower to just keep going and not stop off for a pulled pork and make myself late for work.
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