[Tamaroa]

Jeff,

There was no keeper there in 70-71. Basically the duties were shared between Fire Island Lifeboat Station (electrically) and us,
construction and maintenance. We had the generators and had to man them in the event of a storm outage. I was a DC and had to stand the duty one day out of three and one weekend out of three to be there in the event of a power outage. If you wanted to see something scary, you should have seen the transfer switch,(I use that term loosely). It was a huge knife blade and when we ran on generator, we would grasp the knife switch while wearing rubber gloves and rubber boots and swing it up in an arc to make contact with the emergency side. What a crash, bang and surge of power there was. Yikes!!! It 's so much easier with today's truly autimated switches.

It was great duty though. I figure it was payback for the 3rd District Maintenance and Repair team I was on which was actually worse duty than the Tam if you can imagine that. The beach was great, although the winters were pretty bad. We got nervous when a nor'easter tore through the dunes just a couple hundred yards from the light. I gave a bunch of slides to the Fire Island Lighthouse Preservation society and yes I am a member. They have a photo of Edwin that I gave them. Edwin was the last mascot the station had before it was decommed. He was a terrific German Shepard. By the way the photo in my first post, I took when I was there. Can you believe that photo was shot with one of those old instamatics?

The funny thing was that the lighthouse was not our primary duty. Our official name was FIRE ISLAND RADIO ANNEX. We had a 300 foot radio tower and several smaller ones that we maintained as well as the light, so there were a lot of ET's there as well.

All in all, I remember that light house quite fondly. The keepers cottage was renovated by me and used by senior personnel who had families. It was divided up into two apartments.

I just get so aggravated because commercially speaking at least Fire Island Light is at the bottom of the list. I once purchased a light house sweat shirt that had 33 light houses on it. Guess which one was missing? I almost returned it, I was so mad.


Regards,

Bill