Island Profile: The building inspector recalls those noisy crickets

Bill Banks, 58, last month started his 17th year as building inspector for the Town of Shelter Island.

He came here to live when he was six and remembers the Island back then with great fondness. It was a long way and very different from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where he had been living with his parents and five siblings, four brothers and one sister. And it was very different from what it is now.

“I remember when I first came here,” he recalled. “I was just overwhelmed with the amount of open space, fields of potatoes, walking in the dirt with your bare feet and the rye grass that would grow taller than you were. You could walk through the fields and the grass would be over your head. It was just fun.”

Bill’s dad was a foreman in a New York City paving company and he came out weekends. When they moved into their house on Bateman Road, right next door to the American Legion Hall, “You couldn’t even see the Legion Hall” from their front porch. “It was all woods, all the way up to the stop sign and the library wasn’t there. That was all woods, too.”

The family had been vacationing here for several summers before the move. Bill remembers how much they all loved having the water so near and how much they all, especially his mom, hated to go back at the end of the summer. “I just didn’t want to leave and the next thing you know, I find out we’re staying and I couldn’t wait.” That was 1960.

In Greenpoint, all his older siblings went to Brooklyn schools; he was about to start first grade and his younger brother was ready for kindergarten. But there was an issue, as he remembers it, with different schools and different bus schedules — his mother wasn’t happy with it. It was time for a change. They didn’t have a car so, if they wanted to stay on the Island, they had to find a house close enough to the school for the kids to walk.

A friend told them about the place on Bateman Road and they bought it and moved in, spending their first fall on the Island with their first hurricane, Hurricane Donna. The only downside, as Bill remembers it, was the sounds of crickets.

“In Greenpoint where we lived, our building adjoined a fire station and it’s funny. When we first came here, when I was in bed, I couldn’t sleep because of the crickets. I was so used to hearing fire trucks, you know? If you heard the siren blow, you just rolled over and went to sleep. But the crickets were so annoying. It took some getting used to.” He also got used to ice skating on the pond, sleigh riding on Goat Hill and camping out in the backyard.

He and all his siblings went to the Shelter Island School, where Yvonne Clark, who died in April, was his first grade teacher, and they all graduated; some went on to college. Bill stayed on the Island and worked any number of jobs, as his mother did. Divorced after the family’s first few years here, she managed to raise six children, cleaning houses, shucking scallops, whatever came to hand. Bill was quick to point out how hard those times were. Many families helped them. “That  made difficult times a lot easier,” he remembered. “Without that, without them, without that kind of help, I don’t know what would have happened.” Even so, he said, his mother never regretted her decision.

Bill worked for Fred Ogar’s refuse company, as well as D and D Plumbing and Electric for a few years; Shelter Island Hardware for almost 17 years; and with Sonny Edwards, in his television repair business.

Sonny was also the building inspector. He thought Bill should take the state courses to become certified and apply for the job when Sonny retired. That’s exactly what happened. When Sonny retired in 1995, Bill applied and was hired. By then he had been a member of the Zoning Board of Appeals for more than four years, a relevant credential.

On May 22 of this year, he celebrated 16 years on the job. He loves it, he said. “It’s been a good job, very interesting. There’s something different every time, indoors, outdoors, not just stuck behind a desk all the time. You’re out and about and seeing different things, different materials, techniques and talking to the different people, who’ve been around for a long time.”

His sister, Mary Wilson, works with him; she’s the building permits coordinator and examiner.

When his mother died, she left the Bateman Road house to Bill. He, Mary and her husband Ron decided to pool their resources and renovate. It took them three years, with mortgage complications, to build the house they wanted. “It’s nice because we’ve all had health issues, where you needed someone to be around, so it’s worked out,” Bill said. After a degenerative spine disease, his physical ability makes certain activities difficult. Nerve damage to his right arm, nerve damage that never healed, means he can’t do a lot of things he used to.  A fusion with bolts and rods leaves limited mobility and makes repetitive motion hard.

But he’s upbeat, looking forward to the future and, most especially, his upcoming high school class reunion. Members of the Shelter Island School Class of 1972 will gather to celebrate their 40th reunion at Goat Hill this month. “We were the largest class the school had ever had, 33 of us,” he said. Bill doesn’t yet know how many classmates are coming but he’ll certainly be there.