Island Profile: For Reid Baker, Shelter Island was love at first sight

Reid Baker and his wife Judith Grodowitz are not impulsive types — in fact, quite the opposite. They decide slowly. Really slowly. Although they met in 1975, and became “sweethearts” in 1976, they didn’t marry until 1995, maintaining a relationship over short, medium and long distances during that time.

A few years after their marriage, they wanted a get-away place from New York City, and they searched for five long years.

“We kept looking around,” Mr. Baker remembers. “We didn’t have much money. We looked in Connecticut, upstate New York, Pennsylvania, the North Fork, the South Fork. And then we saw an ad [for a place on Shelter Island] in the East Hampton Star.”

One ferry ride over to the Island and Mr. Baker and Ms. Grodowitz were suddenly impulsive. It was love at first sight.

“It was sort of like marrying someone after one date,” Ms. Grodowitz said.

They bought immediately. Not only do they have no regrets, they’ve found even more to love. They closed on their house in August 2001 and their first weekend here was the one after 9/11. They spent that Sunday at the Quaker service in the woods and began meeting neighbors who would eventually become friends.

“We really scored with our neighbors,” Mr. Baker said of the Jay Card Sr. family, the Butts and BenSusans.  “You don’t get a whole lot of property, like you do upstate, but people are really respectful and when we first got here, Jay Card Sr. was “so wonderful.”

A serious music collector, Mr. Baker was immediately struck by the depth of the Suffolk County library system and he said he spends a lot of time at the library here.

“It’s just great and I can find more stuff from the Suffolk County collection than I can in the city,” he said. “There you have 8 million competitors who are equally savvy and want the same things that you do, so you have to wait months and months and months. And the New York system is seriously underfunded.

I don’t know how they do it here, but they must be magnificently funded. I feel so fortunate that we landed here.”

Their enthusiasm for the Island is not all the couple have in common.

“Judith and I are both from DC, government employees’ children,” Mr. Baker said. “My dad worked at the CIA and her dad worked at the Defense Department. I didn’t know he was CIA. He always had a State Department cover.”

The family was stationed in Saigon in 1951 when Reid was born.

“The French were still there and there was a lot of turmoil,” he said. Eventually the family moved to Bangkok and then to Casablanca. North Africa, comprising Morocco, Tunisia and Libya, became Mr. Baker’s back yard. The family returned to the U.S. in 1961 and they lived in a DC suburb until Reid’s dad retired in 1972.

After high school, Reid went on to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, but he said it wasn’t a good match.

“I kind of struck out,” he recalled. “People go away to college and sometimes they aren’t ready. Vanderbilt  didn’t suit me very well at all.”

Mr. Baker came back to the DC area, worked jobs at the post office, the National Institute of Health, a drugstore and even an envelope factory.

“Then a buddy of mine took me into his darkroom,” he said. “He had a darkroom made from a bathroom in his parents’ house and he was making a print.

When I first saw that print coming up, I thought, ‘Wow. Cool.’ I think I was hooked at that moment.”

His first job as a photographer was as a freelancer shooting for a company that catered largely to political lobbyists. He’d later go to art school at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, at the suggestion of a friend.

Mr. Baker graduated in 1982 and he returned once again to the DC area. Still in a relationship with Judith, he began work at the Library of Congress, working with their photographic collection.

“They have  incredible things there — a Gutenberg bible, William Blake books, Audubon prints, amazing things,” he said. “I would be the guy taking transparencies. If you wanted to make a calendar of Audubon prints, since they’re in the public domain, you would come to the library and we would take the pictures for you.”

He also photographed the regular goings on at the library for their publicity department.

“People came from all over the world; the Queen of England, she was a really big deal; the Dalai Lama; first ladies.”

In 1993, Reid decided to come to New York and moved in with Judith, marrying her two years later. A dancer and teacher of the Alexander Technique, she was teaching at several different schools while maintaining a private practice. The Alexander Technique stresses a re-education of the mind and body and is often used by dancers and other performers. She still continues her work in this area and wonders if, at some future time, she might begin here on the Island. She has taught the technique to seniors and would love to become involved with that again.

Mr. Baker found a job at the well-known Manhattan auction house, Christie’s, where he still works. There are 30 departments there and each one makes about 30 sales a year. That’s a lot to photograph and he does it all.

He also maintains his own web site, reidsbaker.com, for fine art photography and interior design.

Mr. Baker and Ms. Grodowitz say they enjoy every minute they’re here. Once again the Island has gained a family looking forward to putting down even deeper roots.