55 Minutes from Broadway

In a dirt-floored shack on Half Moon Mountain, in New York's rugged little Ramapos, Gilbert Pitt lived for 81 years. He spent a big chunk of that time warding off social contacts and modern conveniences.

That meant considerable vigilance, for the Ramapos lie a mere 30 miles northwest of Manhattan. On clear days, from the top of neighboring Jackie Jones Mountain, Gil Pitt could see the skyscrapers: Half Moon itself was only 55 minutes from Broadway.

But Gil Pitt was born & bred a mountain man. By the time he was knee-high to a fox pup, he knew nearly all there was to know about handling an ax and a rifle. He grew up long-legged and straight as a tulip tree, standing 6 feet 3 in his bare feet. He had a vast nose, a scraggly beard and a wild look in his eyes.

Gil was proud of his family. The Pitts had been mountain men in the Ramapos since Revolutionary War days, and they claimed to be direct descendants of famed William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. "This Lord Pitt," they liked to boast, "he was lord of all England." The Pitts and the Starrs and the Conklins were the aristocrats of the hills.

Land of Plenty. The hills themselves had nearly everything Gil wanted--pickerel and bass and trout, possums and red deer, yarbs for medicine. Gil only needed a few dollars now & then for tobacco, salt, flour. In the old days, it was easy to make a few dollars. All he had to do was cut a little hard maple, sell it as fuel for the brick kilns at Haverstraw. Even the locomotives on the Erie Railroad burned wood for a long time. But all that gave out.

The auto came along and the state put paved highways through the Ramapos. Soon the woods were full of artists, Boy Scouts, welfare workers, summer cottages. A mountain man couldn't sing a ballad to himself, like "If life was a thing that money could buy, The rich would live and the poor would die," without somebody pouncing on it as something wonderful that was 500 years old and came straight from England.

The other mountain men drifted down into the valleys, the hamlets and small towns. Some of them even went to work on eight-hour-a-day jobs. But not Gil Pitt. He just moved higher up on Half Moon Mountain, four miles from the nearest town, two miles from the nearest highway.

For company, he had Maggie Gannon. Maggie was a husky, black-haired woman who had borne a brood of children over at Stony Point before she went to live with Gil 20 years ago. Gil called her his housekeeper.

Gil and Maggie discouraged strangers from coming up the mountain. They came down only to vote the straight Republican ticket, to pick up supplies and to get their old-age pension checks. The checks were one modern convenience to which Gil had no objection. With them, he and Maggie got along fine until the winter of 1946. Then they fell sick, almost froze to death, and were taken by a rescue party to a hospital at Suffern. When they got well, they were sent to the Rockland County poor farm.

Back to Their Shack. But after a few months Gil and Maggie ran away from the farm and lit out for their shack on Half Moon. An alarm was sounded, but Abe Stern, police chief of Ramapo township, didn't do anything about it. "Gil and Maggie will make out all right," he said.

They did, until this spring. Then Gil began to feel poorly; his heart was giving out. He took to bed. Day after day he lay there, looking out the cabin's dusty window. "Dogwood's late this year," he kept saying to Maggie. "Don't know as I'll live to see it."

Gil was wrong about that. A spell of hot weather brought the dogwood out, and one day last week, Half Moon was misty with its whiteness. Gil propped himself up to take a good look. "Never seen it prettier, even if it is late," he told Maggie. Then he fell back and closed his eyes for the last time.

When the men came to carry his body down the mountain, Maggie Gannon stood in the doorway of the shack and sobbed. "I looked for the dogwood to pull him through," she said. "I didn't look for it to take him off."

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