60 Summers Throwback: South O' the Highway 20 Years Ago

​Our celebration of the past six decades would not be complete without a tip of the famous hat to the boldface names who have made South O’ the Highway a staple of Dan’s Papers and one of our most widely read and enjoyed columns to this day.

You may even notice a few names from 20 years ago that still find their way into this space today—follow the links to see what these folks are up to now. Of course, we also tip that hat to classic businesses who have been partners with Dan’s Papers throughout our history, and who remain a vibrant, valued part of the Hamptons landscape.

Salman Rushdie, the world’s only literary fugitive and a man who sometimes decamps in the Hamptons, has a new book out entitled The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Reviewers are fascinated with it. Rushdie’s visage graces the front of the Sunday Times Book Review.

Rushdie made the scene at one of those off-season Hamptons literary parties in Manhattan, this one given by Tina Brown and husband Harry Evans at their East Side apartment. Attending, alone with many others, were Nora Ephron, Jerry Seinfeld, Jann Wenner, Bob Hughes and Martin Scorsese, all of these parts.

Author Tom Wolfe of Southampton, after spending ten years getting his new novel together about A Man in Full in Atlanta, is up in Stanford University making a study of that campus for his next project. But he’ll still be here for the Hampton Classic Horse Show.

Planting for the Elaine Benson Memorial Grove, in honor of Mrs. Benson who died last fall, will begin at noon on Tuesday April 27 at Short Beach, north of Long Beach, Sag Harbor. Bridgehampton High School students will do the planting.

Between May 8 and September 5, the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center will feature a dazzling total of 42 regular performances and 13 children’s theatre performances. Among those appearing will be Harry Belafonte, Jose Feliciano, Victor Borge, Itzhak Perlman, Chuck Mangione, Arlo Guthrie, the Count Basie Orchestra, Richie Havens, Melanie and Country Joe McDonald, Rita Coolidge and the New Rascals.

Actor Alec Baldwin will star in the four-hour TNT mini-series Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial. He plays Robert Jackson, the American who prosecuted Hitler’s high command after the war.

Bridgehampton’s Len Riggio, the head of America’s bookstore, Barnes & Noble, was profiled last Sunday in The New York Times. The article revealed that Mr. Riggio (whom some say is intending to put one of his stores in Bridgehampton), who bought Barnes & Noble in 1971, used to escape the boredom of business lectures at NYU in the ’60s by reading Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War and that another of his favorite works is The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

Get your copy of the limited edition coffee table book 60 Summers: Celebrating Six Iconic Decades on the East End. On sale now for $60 at FriendsOfDans.com.