Love Lane gave Congressman Tim Bishop a warm welcome on Saturday afternoon. With more than 65 supporters in attendance and more stopping to listen off the street, BookHampton’s first town hall on the porch in Mattituck was a grand success. Later in the afternoon, he met another large group of constituents at BookHampton in Sag Harbor.
Congressman Bishop answered the moderator’s questions about environmental issues, education spending, gun control legislation and immigration laws, as well as taking numerous intelligent and thought-provoking questions from the crowd.
When asked what he’s reading, Congressman Bishop said he’s on a Kennedy kick: he just finished Chris Matthews' Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero (Simon & Schuster) and is currently reading After Camelot: A Personal Portrait of the Kennedy Family 1968 to the Present by J. Randy Taraborrelli (Grand Central Publishing). As a young man, one of the books most influential to him was Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives (Penguin Classics), a portrait of urban squalor in New York City tenements at the turn of the Twentieth Century.
After the meeting in Mattituck, two representatives from the Southold Democratic Convention made a few remarks, and then the crowd filtered into the store for an hour or so of shopping and mingling. One of Bishop's campaign managers, who professed how excited he was to see a bookstore on the North Fork, even bought a book for himself.
