Hamptons Subway Newsletter: A Funeral for a Friend, Gladys Gooding

SCENE ON THE SUBWAY

Alec Baldwin on the up escalator on Tuesday at the East Hampton station. Kelly Ripa arm in arm with her husband and co-host Mark Consuelos coming down the escalator at Sag Harbor carrying gym bags on Wednesday morning. New England Patriot owner Robert Kraft waiting for the up elevator on the Shinnecock platform yesterday.

DELAYS

For the next two weeks, there will be delays at the Southampton stop while motormen slow down to 3 mph as they enter and leave the station to show their respects to the late Gladys Gooding and an unidentified woman whose ashes were scattered on the tracks last Saturday after their untimely death there on June 11.

APOLOGY

Commissioner Bill Aspinall has asked us to publish this apology to our readership for the longtime chaos and the five-hour delay during the funeral service of the late Gladys Gooding and the unidentified woman held at the East Hampton station last Friday when the station was shut between noon and 5 p.m. The shutdown was only supposed to be for a half hour.

FIRST FUNERAL ON THE HAMPTONS SUBWAY SYSTEM SINCE ITS COMPLETION IN 1929

A funeral service for Gladys Gooding, 58, the popular retired opera singer and Voice of the Hamptons Subway was held on the platform of the East Hampton station last Friday beginning at noon. This was the first funeral held on the Hamptons Subway since its completion in 1929.

The funeral began at the Newtown Lane entrance to the subway stop where the Bay Shore Bagpipe Ensemble, in full uniform including kilts, high socks, daggers and shawls, played a Scottish dirge and slowly marched down the stairs to the platform, followed by more than 200 mourners. Bringing up the rear was The Rev. Bobby Friend, carrying the two urns, one with the ashes of the beloved Ms. Gooding and the other with the ashes of the other woman, still unknown, who was also killed when the pair fell onto the tracks at the Southampton station last week.

The platform itself was festooned with black crepe and black balloons, and, in the absence of a railing between the platform and the tracks, had a lineup of nearly 150 uniformed police officers from town, county, state and federal agencies standing shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the platform to keep those attending the ceremony from being pushed down onto the tracks, which is sort of what happened with Ms. Gooding and the unidentified woman.

Friend then said a little prayer for the two women. The bagpipers played “Amazing Grace.” And then, one after another, more than 40 people spoke about Ms. Gooding and about her short fuse and bad temper, which was really just an act, and about her simple beginnings in Chillicothe, Ohio. Three weeks ago, she became the Voice of the Hamptons Subway, where she made recordings saying, “Watch out for the closing doors” and “Next stop Westhampton Beach” and other phrases that made her famous.

In the absence of Commissioner Aspinall, whose plane returning from Paris, where he spent a holiday, was delayed, Assistant Commissioner Blankenall spoke about the work that Ms. Gooding did and how she will be so difficult to replace.

“Ms. Gooding died in the line of duty,” the assistant commissioner said. “She was down at the station, showing a visitor from the city where she worked and where you could hear the sound of her recorded voice, when this heavyset unidentified woman with a red pocketbook who was standing down the way heard her and shouted, “You must be the Voice of the Hamptons Subway,” and then ran over to embrace her, unfortunately resulting in both of them falling onto the tracks in front of the arriving D train.”

Mr. Gooding, who hurriedly returned from North Carolina, spoke about how much he will miss his wife Gladys and what a good cook she was, with her specialty mac and cheese and fried chicken on a bun and how they would soldier on.

So many people spoke about Ms. Gooding and about her stamp collection and her volunteer work at the dog pound, and her frequent trips to Atlantic City and her love of Frank Sinatra, that the half hour set aside for the funeral soon passed and the observance threatened to go on for hours and hours.

Mercedes Ruehl of East Hampton came to pay her respects. So did Jerry Seinfeld of Amagansett and Billy Joel of Sag Harbor.

And still the people came. Indeed, there were so many people on the platform by 4 p.m. that the police line finally gave way and numerous mourners had to be brought back up from the tracks by the SWAT team, which was called in, and then when the line gave way again, the rest of the ceremony had to be canceled.

After that, as the subway police were escorting all the mourners out in an orderly fashion, all three escalators broke down. The escalators were never designed to handle these kinds of loads, and then, because it had been forgotten in all the confusion, The minister carrying the urns crawled his way down the platform against the crowd to the edge and between the legs of a police officer threw the two urns onto the tracks where, because they were pottery, they shattered but nevertheless, in fulfillment of Ms. Gooding’s wishes, were sprinkled onto the tracks along with those of the unidentified woman.

And so, finally, with only a few minor injuries, the weeping mourners went home and the station was reopened in time for the evening rush hour, although the cleanup and hosing down of the shattered pottery, flowers, holy water, wafers and other debris had to be rushed by the subway maintenance crew.

A bronze plaque indicating that the ashes of Ms. Gooding, the Voice of the Hamptons Subway, had been disbursed there at the subway station, has been mounted on the wall. As for the other woman, there will be a second plaque mounted, reading, “In Memory of the Unknown Passenger” to mark that woman’s passing and, in fact, the passing of all other unknown passengers, to be seen there forever and ever.