Feting the Fourth

Two anglers display their catch in a photo taken by Martin Anderson in Bay Shore around 1927. (Courtesy of Chester Nantz)

Everybody lined up for a photo when the Nantz family of Bushwick, Brooklyn, and other relatives enjoyed a Fourth of July country picnic near the Nassau-Queens border in 1903 or 1904. Retired plumber Chester Nantz, 70, of Malverne, who provided this photo, said his grandfather, Theodore Nantz, stands at the far left. Chester Nantz' father, also named Chester Nantz, is the boy in front. The man in the back row with the unusual hat is relative William Keeler. Any explanation for the hat, said Nantz, is lost to time.

Teased By A Turtleneck

SEVERAL readers called Newsday to ask if the photo above of the sidewheeler Nantasket seen on this page June 18 was retouched. They said the barefoot person in a turtleneck sweater and shorts doesn't seem to fit in a scene of Glenwood Landing from around 1910.

"When I looked at the picture, that was the only thing that looked out of place," said reader Carol Nucci of Huntington Station, a librarian at North Shore High School in Glen Head. She said the person in the turtleneck looks like a woman with teased-up hair, perhaps from the 1960s. "It stuck out like a sore thumb."

Jeff Schamberry, Newsday's deputy director of photography, said the image was copied by Newsday directly from a glass plate negative provided by reader Ted Smith of Huntington. With a computer, Schamberry enlarged the photo far beyond the detail seen at right and found no imperfections that would reveal tampering. "There's no way that's a phony," he said.

However, the readers' interest did inspire questions. Some at Newsday speculated that the barefoot person -- along with another person in shorts and with a pointed hat at right -- might have been members of a theatrical troupe greeting the boat, or that they simply had been swimming nearby.