Hamptons Subway Celebrates Season with Red AGA Hats

SCENE ON THE SUBWAY

Among those seen amidst the crowds boarding the subway on the Westhampton Beach platform heading east on the local early Wednesday morning at 7 a.m. was former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, wearing sunglasses so as not to be noticed. What was that about?

WATER MILL WINS!!

At an award ceremony held on the front steps of the offices of Hamptons Subway, Subway Commissioner Bill Aspinall awarded first prize for the best subway platform decorations of 2024 to Anita Hardaway of the Water Mill Decorating Committee. The arrangement, which included dry ice and mist, snowmen, an antique model fire truck display and dancing ballerinas in tutus, was just way over the top.

AGA!

Commissioner Aspinall’s younger brother Biff, a local businessman who has won numerous contracts to repair the subway system in recent years, is going into a new business beginning next Friday. Making use of one of the numerous abandoned factories in the Hamptons where he used to make repairs – this one in Flanders – he will launch AGA! Folks around the country will be asked to send in their bright red “Make America Great Again” baseball caps, so his workers can remove the word “Make” and add an exclamation point after “Great.” Thus modified, they will be shipped back to their owners by UPS a week later reading “America Great Again!” The cost per hat to do this will be $69.99 plus tax and shipping.

“My brother and Donald [Trump] are great friends,” he said. “And it’s great that my brother has been appointed to become the Secretary of Underground Illegal Immigrant Removals, a new job in his upcoming cabinet. As I’m sure you know, we’ve got a life-sized bronze statue of the two of them with their arms around each other’s shoulders made in 2015 when the Donald visited the subway system. It’s in storage now. Subway rules were changed the following year to make it illegal to do electioneering in the system, but perhaps the Donald can by executive order rescind that rule now and put them out on the Westhampton Beach platform again. Oh yeah, the caps. There’s millions and millions of these baseball caps out there. Maybe 70 million. MAGA is so yesterday. Go AGA! Be the first in your neighborhood. We’re great even before we’re great.”

COUNTING THE CARS

This Monday kicks off our fifth annual Count the Cars competition for children aged 5 to 10. Parents are asked to take their children up to the top of Fort Hill in Montauk in front of Montauk Manor and look down to the west at the Subway Yards on Fort Pond Bay where all our subway cars are kept when not in use, ask their children to count them, write the total down on a piece of paper and put the total, with their name and address, into the slot in the little green and red metal box we have placed up there atop the hill. The winning child wins a ride around the system with Santa Claus and the motorman in the motorman’s booth at the front subway car on Christmas morning.

STRIKE SCHEDULED

The members of the Union of Flagmen No. 38, the men who wave the red and green flags at the subway car motormen to tell them to go and stop at the entrance and exits to the station, have scheduled a strike to begin on Christmas Eve. We cannot operate the subway without the flagmen. We are asking all retired and former flagmen, who were fired or quit or whatever, to please call headquarters and volunteer to come in that night so the subway can operate normally from then until whenever the damn flagmen’s strike ends.

GRAFFITI ARTIST WALK

The well-known New York City graffiti artist FABO appeared on the platform of our Southampton station carrying a spray can and began inspecting the walls last Wednesday. We identified him by the pictures we have of these artists on our computers. According to the rules, we cannot apprehend such artists until they actually do something, so in this case we just waited, but after awhile he turned around and went back up the escalator and out to the street and that was that.

COMMISSIONER BILL ASPINALL’S MESSAGE

Observant readers of this newsletter may wonder why we had our children’s “count the cars” contest four years ago, three years ago and two years ago, but not last year. The reason is that just before the gathering of the entries and the selection of the winner, we discovered that a group of five third graders from a nearby school which will remain nameless had snuck into the subway yard in the middle of the night four days before the end of the competition and had actually counted the cars up close and personal in violation of all the rules of the competition, which say that they can only be judged from afar up on Fort Hill.

We learned about this the next day, not because they were caught, but because they could not keep their mouths shut and told everybody. They were arrested, charged, tried, convicted and served 30 days in a juvenile detention center in Colorado before being allowed to return home. We have been persuaded to hold the event again this year, but we hereby issue this warning that if this happens again this will be the last year we will hold this contest, which will be a loss for us all. So think about it, kids.