"A spirit to be still for", Long Island Poem for Sunday

Watch Hill, July
George William Fischer

sunrise dunes, mist & saltspray
rose, birdsong daybreak, a doe
steps silent, earcock, scentsniff,
sun ignites her tan & white, day
brightens, she grazes & climbs

there on a safe height she hears
as I whistle, bounds across her
ridge & down, whitetail flashing,
graceful dancer, she levels with me

nonchalant, she nibbles & steps
forward, a spirit to be still for.
thirty feet apart our moments pass,
I circle, she patiently moves
where I stood

she looks back, crosses my path,
close as any gentle creature
should come, with first warm kiss of sun
she disappears


'Watch Hill, July' by George William Fischer from 'A Long Island Year / Paumanok Revisited' published by Myshkin Press, Long Island. With author's permission.

You will remember George William Fischer from his Long Island bottle collections and Nassau County Photo Archive Center. He wrote about his poetry: "Early on, I was hugely influenced by the singers Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell.  Read e.e. cummings very early, also Emily Dickinson & Walt Whitman.  Later, Wendell Berry, T.S. Eliot, W.C. Williams, Charles Bukowski, Allen Ginsberg, &c&c."

"Fell in with a few new friends and in a burst of spirit & energy, we founded the Long Island Poetry Collective in 1974. The Collective sponsored many open readings, and hosted major poets – mainly at the Fine Arts Center in Roslyn. For a growing membership, we published a monthly Newsletter and offered numerous workshops. The first issue of Xanadu magazine appeared in 1976, also the year we began publishing books and chapbooks written by Long Island poets, under the Pleasure Dome Press imprint."

"I try to write tight narrative poems, and my earliest lessons from Cummings & Dickinson hopefully continue as powerful influences. The conversational tone of Charles Bukowski, Wendell Berry, Anne Sexton & many others is a challenging perfection."

"My chapbooks include First and Third and A Long Island Year, and the book dark birds have flown was published in 2008 by Myshkin Press."

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Previous Long Island Poem for Sunday - "So slender is the island", Long Island Poem for Sunday

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Historical Long Island bottles in the collections of George William Fisher

Photo by Ewa Rumprecht

George William Fisher - bird watcher, poet, historian, civil servant, volunteer, photographer, collector, music lover. The list is hardly complete, George is quite a Renaissance man. We have already written about George's involvement in the Nassau County Photo Archives. In this article we will concentrate on his activities revolving around collecting and cataloging historical Long Island bottles.

Throughout the years George built two distinct collections: one of Long Island medicine bottles dated c. 1830-1920 and another of Long Island beverage bottles dated 1840-1970.

George first started collecting Long Island bottles of any kind, but was always drawn to Art Deco soda bottles. Then his interests expanded to earlier years. Through trades, purchases (eBay opened new horizons for bottle collectors), or donations George managed to enlarge his collection and to focus it on the two areas listed above.

George's medicine bottle collection is a completely unique undertaking. It is worth mentioning here that George collects embossed medicine bottles as opposed to generic medicine bottles where only a (paper) label distinguished a product of one pharmacy from another. Of the 175 known Long Island medicine bottles roughly 80% are in George's possession, including nearly all known pontil bottles. George published a book 'Long Island Medicine Bottles: Patent Medicines, Bitters, Sarsaparillas, Hair Products & Citrates' on the subject.

Photo by George Fisher

George's beverage bottle collection is remarkable for its breadth. Most collectors were originally not interested in bottles past 1900. Since George started with Art Deco bottles he covered later years and then expanded the collection to include bottles from 1840 - 1970. The beverage collection contains about 1,000 objects which he successively donates to the Nassau County Museum Division. About half of his collection is now under the county's care.

George is not only a collector, he is also involved in the cataloging and dissemination of knowledge in the area. Together with Donald H. Weinhardt he is an author of the authoritative compendium 'A Historical Guide to Long Island: Soda, Beer & Mineral Water Bottles & Bottling Companies 1840-1970'. The 4th Edition of the guide was just released in an electronic version. With its 800 pages and 500 photographs it is a true font of information.

Tracing of bottles and their history frequently feels like a detective work, one has to ferret information in various historical sources. George cross references advertisements, newspaper articles, business directories and documents to narrow down the operating dates of the 806 geographic Long Island (including current Brooklyn and Queens) bottling companies which marketed nearly 3,000 various beverage bottles, and over the years employed thousand of Long Islanders. His goal is to collect bottles from all 130 or so Long Island communities as almost each one had at least one bottling facility. In addition, many large hotels bottled soda, beer, and mineral water for their guests to take on the road or to pack into a picnic basket.

The beverage collection reflects changes in tastes and technological advancements from first crude, low production hand blown pontiled bottles and bottles made in snap molds to standardized bottles mass produced using the Automatic Bottle Machine. The transformation of bottling was marked by changes to the shape of bottles, method of glass production, color and chemical contents of glass, type of enclosure, and marketing approach.

Let us present some of the bottles from George's collection. Please see the excerpts from 'A Historical Guide to Long Island: Soda, Beer & Mineral Water Bottles & Bottling Companies 1840-1970' with the catalog descriptions of the first two bottles listed below.

	A beautiful Deer Park L.I. pontil bottle. There are 17 recorded remaining bottles. Did not appear in auctions in over 10 years. Photo by George Fisher
	L.S. Sammis, Hempstead L.I.. Scarce as teal color was not that frequently used at the times. Photo by George Fisher
	Hutchinson style bottle from L.O. Wilson, Oyster Bay. Seal was kept wet by storing bottles upside down. Bottle was opened by pushing the top inside. Outlawed as unhygienic by 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. Photo by George Fisher

George is available for lectures and appraisals. Please contact him directly at 516.375.9410 to make arrangements or to purchase any of his publications.

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Nassau County's Photo Archive Center at Old Bethpage Village Restoration

Photo by Ewa Rumprecht

If you have attended the same church every Sunday for the last 20 years, you may have wondered, how did your church look 100 years ago; who would be your neighbor on the bench, whose more or less ample bottoms polished the pew on which you are sitting now, whose kids carved their initials in the soft wood, how were the members of the congregation dressed, what hats were they wearing, did they look prosperous? Answers to these and to many other questions are waiting quietly at the photo archives administered by the Nassau County's Photo Archive Center at the Old Bethpage Village Restoration.

There are researchers, family members delving into their family tree, book authors, historians, organizations celebrating anniversaries of their activies, whose inquiries constitute the bulk of requests for the many images in the archive.

Of the 250,000 images in the archive, 14,000 are catalogued in an electronic format for an easy retrieval. George William Fisher oversees the project from his office/lab at the Restoration. He is a walking font of information on the Long Island photographers, photo techniques, history and industry of Long Island (he is an avid collector of Long Island soda, beer, mineral water, and medicine bottles). He is perfectly suited for his job or rather passion also for another reason, he has years of experience digitizing and archiving data, from human resource files to county records.

One of the current projects at the center is cataloguing the collection of about 4,000 images by Mattie Edwards Hewitt, a landscape and architectural photographer, from Richard Averill Smith's bequest to Nassau County. Hewitt was a very talented photographer who captured numerous architectural treasures of Long Island. Since she published extensively during her lifetime, her photos of Long Island mansions and grounds brought many landscaping ideas to middle class and thus shaped many a neighborhood on the island.

Archives include works by other major Long Island photographers noted for their historical or artistic merit: Henry Otto Korten, John Drennan,William Pickering, Rachel and Lydia Hicks, George Dradford Brainard, and the already mentioned Richard Averill Smith.

Photo Archive Center is located at the Old Bethpage Village Restoration, 1303 Round Swamp Road, Old Bethpage, NY 11804. Tours and visits, by appointment only, can be arranged by calling 516.572.8410.

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