As I sit at my desk, typing this column, I am enjoying the longest day of the year, June solstice. It will not get dark until almost 9 p.m., and the June light makes our world sparkle. Recently we have been living through some of the most beautiful days with temperature and humidity in the Goldilocks range: not too hot and not too cold. It is also the first day of summer, a word that always brings a smile to my face.

What do you think of immediately when you think of summer? I conjure up cherries, watermelon and corn on the cob; then there are ice cream, lemonade, lobster rolls and backyard barbecues for lots of socializing. Lest you think that all I fantasize about is food, there are those luxuriously lazy days reading at the beach or at the pool … and oh those sweet summer nights. Time seems to slow down a bit and we get to relax amid less structure in our lives.

There are other reasons to be happier when the days are longer. Because we are phototropic beings, the presence of sunlight is important to us, more so for some of us than others. Many people suffer to varying degrees from seasonal affective disorder during the winter, when the days are shorter. Natural sunlight is a freely available mood enhancer, causing us to produce vitamin D, which in addition to helping with the absorption of calcium, also affects our levels of serotonin and melatonin and hence our feelings of satisfaction. When there is little sunlight, some people can suffer from depression.

Light therapy, with specially designed lights and vitamin D plus melatonin supplements can combat SAD to a degree, although no one really knows why some are susceptible. More affected are women, those living farthest from the equator (e.g., the Eskimo) and those with a family history. Chemical makeup, age and genetics also seem to be factors. But there is no SAD during summer solstice. This is the time of the longest light, when the sun seems to stand still in the sky before reversing its direction for the rest of the year. Of course the earth rotates around the sun, rather than vice versa, and as the earth moves away on its axis, it seems the sun is moving lower and lower across the sky through the remaining six months.

June solstice has inspired countless festivals, celebrations and religious events. Stonehenge, that mysterious megalithic structure in England, was clearly built to mark the solstices for the stones are lined up accordingly to receive the sunlight (there were some 12,000 people in attendance this year).

Oops, I didn’t mean to get so carried away with technical stuff. Nonetheless, here’s another bit of trivia: This year the full moon — otherwise known as strawberry moon — coincides with the June solstice we are enjoying. Not since 1967 has that happened, apparently, and it will not happen again until 2062. See how special it is to be alive today!

On the eve of Father’s Day, here is an adventure story of a father along with a slice of little known history about the Civil War. His name was Newton Knight, he was a poor Southern farmer and he led a revolt against the Confederacy from deep in the heart of Dixie. Proving that not all residents in any one region think alike, Knight and as many as 1,000 other farmers in Jones County, Mississippi, waged an effective guerilla war against the Confederate troops and declared loyalty to the Union.

Whenever Confederate troops came after him and his band of like-minded white men, they would just melt away into the swamps of southeastern Mississippi and disappear to fight another day. Then, in the spring of 1864, “the Knight Company overthrew the Confederate authorities in Jones County and raised the United States flag over the county courthouse in Ellisville,” according to an article in the March issue of the Smithsonian magazine. “The county was known as the Free State of Jones, and some say it actually seceded from the Confederacy,” the article maintains. There will soon be a movie about this remarkable footnote of history, to be called “Free State of Jones,” starring Matthew McConaughey as Newt Knight.

By all accounts, Knight was a remarkable military leader. He certainly was a remarkable father, who had nine children with his first wife, Serena, who was white and from whom he eventually separated. He also had five children with his grandfather’s former slave, Rachel, entering into a scandalous common-law marriage, and according to the magazine, “proudly claiming their mixed-race children.”

Jones County was poor at the time of the Civil War, with only 12 percent of its population made up of slaves, which probably somewhat explains its lack of loyalty to the Confederacy. It also was marked with what the Smithsonian article calls “a surly, clannish independent spirit.” Today it is 70 percent white, still rural and its inhabitants earn low or modest incomes. And while there is a Confederate monument next to the columned courthouse in Ellisville, there is no mention of the anti-Confederate rebellion that Knight led. In fact, Jones County is described by some of its inhabitants as the most conservative place in Mississippi now, and some disown Knight.

Yet some of the younger people in the county think of Newt Knight “as a symbol of Jones County pride,” according to the article. “Knight was 6-foot-four with black curly hair and a full beard—‘big heavyset man, quick as a cat,’ as one of his friends described him. He was a nightmarish opponent in a backwoods wrestling match, and one of the great unsung guerilla fighters in American history. So many men tried so hard to kill him that perhaps his most remarkable achievement was to reach old age.

‘He was a Primitive Baptist who didn’t drink, didn’t cuss, doted on his children and could reload and fire a double-barreled, muzzle-loading shotgun faster than anyone else around,’ said a local historian. ‘….There’s good evidence that he was a man of strong principles who was against secession, against slavery and pro-Union.’”

Knight actually enlisted with a group of locals in the Confederate Army at the start of the war; a biographer speculated that he relished being a soldier. But many of them, including Knight, deserted from the Seventh Battalion of Mississippi Infantry after the passage of the “Twenty Negro Law,” which exempted one white male from conscription for every 20 slaves owned on a plantation, making it what locals called “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” When they returned home, they found the Confederate authorities where taking what they wanted from the wives in the name of the war effort—“horses, hogs, chickens, meat from the smokehouse and homespun cloth.” There was a mass meeting of the deserters, and they organized themselves into the Jones County Scouts. Knight was unanimously elected their captain. They vowed to resist capture, defy tax collectors, defend each other’s homes and farms, and do what they could to aid the Union.

Their ranks swelled, they waged guerilla warfare successfully against the Confederate war effort, and that is the way they, led by Newton Knight, entered the history books.

The column I intended for this week has been put aside. This is a historic moment, and as a journalist, with a front row on history, and as a woman in what many still think is a man’s job, I cannot let the moment pass without offering the recognition it surely deserves. Finally, in my lifetime, a woman has become the presidential candidate of one of the two major parties in the United States of America.

Although I have voted for candidates of both parties in different presidential elections, depending which one I thought was better, this has nothing to do with party affiliation. I would never pick party over country. The triumph of this moment does have to do with a struggle for equality in governing that is as recent as my mother’s hard-won right to vote in the 1920s. Can you imagine a time, not prehistoric but merely one family generation back, when women could not even vote? Or earn careers in medicine, law, business, literature or the arts?

This has nothing to do with whether I like Hillary Clinton or don’t like Hillary Clinton, any more than whether I am a Republican or a Democrat. This turn of events feels like we are emerging from the dark ages and into the sunshine of the 21st century. And to be honest, I am surprised at how powerfully this moment affects me.

Yes, I came of age during “women’s lib,” graduating from college at the time Betty Friedan’s book, “The Feminine Mystique,” was published. And yes, I was one of the early wives and mothers in our social circle to balance the needs of a family with those of a business, but frankly I never thought of myself as a member of “the second sex,” or as a revolutionary. I was merely doing what for me “came naturally.” But throughout my life working these dual jobs, I have felt the contradictions within society about a woman’s “role.” Indeed, my own mother was dead set against my starting a newspaper, accusing me of “abdicating my responsibilities at home.” But I thought all that was long past.

Why shouldn’t a woman lead her party in a run for the presidency? If the population feels she is qualified, why shouldn’t she lead her country as president? Now there is a lot more going on during this vindictive presidential campaign than women’s rights. In fact, I wasn’t so aware that the issue of women’s rights was playing a part. So much of the population is angry, frustrated, even frightened with how they are being governed by an obstructionist Congress and a rapidly changing economy.

Thus my surprise by my own reaction on the level of gender equality. I still remember when Geraldine Ferraro, who came to the New York Press Association as the keynote speaker when I was its president in the 1980s, declined my husband’s offer of a corsage. He had bought one for her and one for me, but she explained she “couldn’t look too feminine.”

I also recently remembered with a laugh, as I was recalling early history to my 21-year-old grandson, that I had been propositioned while eating alone in a dining room of a hotel before a convention was to begin there the next day. “Good girls don’t do that,” I was admonished, for dining solo. Lest I chalk up that encounter to a fluke, it happened again on the train trip home.

The past may be past, but it surely isn’t forgotten. And when I looked around the table last month at the board of directors meeting of the NY Press Association and realized that there were only two other women publishers in a room of 28 board members, I realized that the past isn’t even past. But clearly there is hope.

It has been more than a quarter of a century since I was married, but nonetheless I read, “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person,” a front-page piece in the Sunday Review section of The New York Times this week, with great interest. Before my husband died, I had been married just shy of 25 years, so I figured I had a dual perspective on the issue.

I was not surprised to learn that the article had one of the highest “hits” in the entire Sunday paper, from those who read online. Marriage is a fascinating subject, both for those who are, those who never were — and those who are no longer. There is some magic in the whole process of falling in love and of deciding that this is the person one wants to spend the rest of one’s life with. By the same token, that was not always the primary criterion for marriage: financial security, international alliances, duty — these are but some of the other motivators. My grandfather, for example, was widowed at a young age when my grandmother died in a wagon accident at the turn of the last century, leaving him with three young children. The family expected him to marry his wife’s younger unmarried sister, which he obediently did, to keep the clan intact and provide loving care for the children, who were after all her nieces and nephew. There are countless instances of royals who were married off to other royals in order to cement strategic alliances — between countries, between tribes, between sects.

Marrying for love is a fairly recent and novel idea that is even today not always practiced around the globe. Marriages can be and still are “arranged.”

But this article last Sunday dealt only with a marriage that is made by mutual choice of the couple involved. So what are the problems the couple will face? Alain de Botton, the author, attempted to list them. “We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well,” is definitely one of his better lines. He continued, “In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: ‘And how are you crazy?’” He doesn’t say this, but when one buys a house or a car, one asks,”What are the problems here?” Certainly the choice of spouse is far more critical, and all liabilities and drawbacks should honorably be revealed.

Even in today’s lenient “shacking up openly” culture, something new by the way with only the past couple of generations, couples may not know all that they should about one another. “One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with,” the author said.

“Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating,” de Botton asserted. He certainly hit the nail on the head for at least my generation. We all became engaged as casually as picking a partner with whom to go to the prom. We dated for two months, two years, whatever the case, but always on our best behavior and in settings like concerts and parks that surrounded us with beauty. Perhaps today’s greater intimacy lessens the surprises.

The author makes a key point: That what we seek in marriage is supposedly happiness but in fact is familiarity. We seek to recreate relationships we experienced or yearned for that were out of reach in our childhoods. Those are not the relationships most conducive to happiness.

Also people who feel terribly lonely, who find the thought of being alone throughout their lives terrifying, “risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate.”

And then there is custom. Everyone married when they finished their schooling, or shortly thereafter, it seemed to us of a certain age. Indeed, my mother told me on my wedding day that I had barely managed to avoid being “an old maid.” I had just turned 22.

Back to business as usual now, but last Thursday night, May 19, was magical. As some 300 community members, advertisers and readers know firsthand, we had a 40th anniversary party aboard the P.T. Barnum, one of the ferries of The Bridgeport & Port Jefferson Steamboat Company. There are three vessels in its fleet that sail between the two shores of the Long Island Sound, and the reason we reserved that particular one was its wide center aisle, which we converted into a dance floor after we ate.

Speaking of eating, the food was simply delicious, if I do say so myself. Catered by Elegant Eating of Smithtown, owned by Myra Naseem and Neil Schumer, the supper was a choice of Thai chicken, orange salmon, a vegetarian and a vegan meal. Each guest was handed a shopping bag with the entrée of choice inside as he and she came aboard. It was like being given a grab bag with surprise contents to be pulled out, one at a time, once the passengers were seated. Included were a small tray of appetizers, a fun salad, a larger box with the main course and sides, and a little bag of scrumptious mouthfuls of desserts. Bars at either end of the boat provided white or red wine — or water — to accompany the meal.

All of this played out against a backdrop of quiet dinner music from our talented DJ, who was able to stop and get a bite to eat himself when he was temporarily replaced by the High C’s, a delightful a cappella act. Drawn from Stony Brook University students, the group harmonized beautifully and was widely praised throughout the evening.

We also viewed a short video of different staff members at work and a slightly longer film clip previewing seven dramatic episodes we will be releasing in two months about the Setauket-based Culper Spy Ring. The video action came to life, as actors in Revolutionary War costumes seemed to leap from the film and began dueling across the ferry’s main cabin. Unlike the AMC popular cable drama, “Turn,” ours will be authentic and will be accessible through a QR code — that is, a matrix barcode — on our Three Village map. Wait for it until July.

As soon as the formal, albeit brief program was over, we turned the floor loose for dancing. The DJ encouraged guests to rise and “cut the rug,” with his lively music. Some guests drifted outside to the stern or up to the top deck to watch Nature’s spectacular show. While we gladly take credit for the many other logistics of the party that worked, we can only give thanks for the turn the weather did that afternoon. What dawned as a gray and uninspiring day, with a damp chill and the distinct possibility of rain, became sunny and warm. The skies cleared to allow a Hollywoodesque sunset.

As the ferry slowly turned around from its “cruise to nowhere” and re-entered the harbor, we were honored to have state Assemblyman Steve Englebright and Suffolk County Comptroller John Kennedy Jr. offer some deeply appreciated kind words about our newspapers. Comptroller Kennedy brought a proclamation marking the occasion and Assemblyman Englebright, who has been in public office about as long as we have been publishing and hence knows us well, talked about our track record over the years. It was a lovely finale to what was for us a memorable evening.

Other officials have sent proclamations as well, including Town Clerk Jo-Ann Raia on behalf of Huntington, and members of the government of Brookhaven Town, led by Supervisor Ed Romaine. We will be proud to publish them over the next couple of weeks as space allows. As always, news comes first.

I want to offer heartfelt thanks to others who generously contributed to making our party a reality, including our law firm Glynn Mercep and Purcell; John Tsunis, the spark plug behind both the Holiday Inn Express Stony Brook and Gold Coast Bank; and our accountants, Covati &d Jahnsen. Fred Hall, the general manager of the ferry company, is himself celebrating his 40th anniversary with the company and deserves our admiration for his steady hand over those years.

And, finally, to you — our readers and advertisers — who have supported us over four decades, and to our dedicated staff, past and present, who make the newspapers and websites trustworthy sources of news week after week, my profound gratitude.

Thank you! Hope to see you at our 50th party.

Does it annoy you too when the pitchman in the commercial urges negotiating with your credit card company, with the advertiser’s help of course, to pay less than you owe? It’s the same message when it comes to “settling” with the IRS. “You don’t have to pay all that you owe,” encourages the adman’s voice. “Call us and we’ll reduce your amount to a third without bankruptcy.”

What about us poor schnooks who paid every last penny of what we owed? Were we incredibly stupid when we could have gotten off with far less cost? Maybe it’s only the rich who pay everything they owe, but I know that’s not true. Men and women will work two and three jobs to be able to meet their expenses, especially those incurred for their children. They must not know that all they had to do was run up the bills — the higher, the better — then declare that they couldn’t afford them, and they would get a reduction of their debt.

What has happened to honor? Maybe it is just those of us of a certain age who still carry these old-fashioned ideas in our heads. “Pay as you go” was my parents’ adage. The idea of a credit card puzzled them. If you couldn’t afford to buy a car when you wanted one, then wait until you had the money and you could buy it. Delayed gratification was admired. They were even dubious about a mortgage, although that became the American way after World War II.

But the thought of not honoring one’s debts was anathema. In essence you gave your word when you accepted credit, and “your word was your bond.” People who walked away from their debts expected to go to prison, certainly not to call a “negotiator” who would beat down your creditor into accepting less — or nothing at all.

Donald Trump raised the possibility of our nation reducing its national debt by bargaining with our creditors, an unwelcome but nonetheless real technique in business. These creditors of American debt would include other nations, as well as widows and orphans who buy U.S. government bonds because they believe in our creditworthiness — our honor to repay. People who cannot repay, while they no longer are imprisoned in a jail, are imprisoned by their actions. They are never trusted to the same extent again, and if they have to borrow in the future they pay a significantly higher rate of interest on the borrowed money, if they can get a loan at all.

The same holds for nations. Those countries whose economies crashed have had to pay exorbitant interest on their bonds to entice new capital, and their people have been impoverished in the long run, leading to disastrous social unrest. History is rife with such examples.

So what is a person, whose intentions at the time of borrowing were honorable but whose circumstances have dramatically changed through no fault of his or her own, to do with that debt? Borrowers may lose their jobs; they or a family member may get sick and require ruinous financial support; insurance on property or health may be insufficient or nonexistent — and so forth. As the expression goes, “life happens.”

Most commonly, the terms of repayment can be changed. A longer time in which to repay the borrowed money can be arranged, allowing the borrower a chance to recover from whatever the disaster. This lowers the monthly rate of repayment although it does increase the total cost of the debt. But it does preserve creditworthiness — and reputation. That solution only works, however, if there are good prospects down the line and a willingness on the part of the debtors to assume responsibility for their actions. In circumstances where there is no hope for recovery, then bankruptcy is the only choice.

But the idea of those who know how to play the system bouncing from one loan to the next with little consequence is unacceptable and makes fools of us all. And those who make a business out of helping such individuals run off with other people’s money are worse yet.

One of the more curious footnotes to World War II occurred 75 years ago this week. On a May evening in 1941, Rudolph Hess, deputy führer of the Third Reich and No. 3 man in line of succession after Hitler and Hermann Göring, flew solo from Germany to Scotland and parachuted into the waiting arms of the British.

So who was Hess and why did he make this bizarre wartime flight? He was born into a prosperous German merchant family living in Egypt just before the turn of the 20th century. The oldest of three children, he was by inclination a warrior and immediately after World War I broke out, he joined the infantry. He was wounded several times during the war, always returning to the front when he recovered and earning medals that included the Iron Cross in 1915. Toward the end of hostilities, he trained as an aviator.

In 1919 he continued his education at the University of Munich and attended a class taught by Karl Haushofer, a proponent of the principle of lebensraum (“living space”), which urged the need for more land. Postwar life in Bavaria at that time was chaotic, with fights erupting between right-wing groups and Communists, and Hess was drawn to battles in the streets as a member of the Thule Society, an extreme anti-Semitic gang.

In 1920, after hearing Hitler speak at a Nazi rally in Munich, Hess became totally devoted to him and joined the Nazi Party. From then on Hess was almost inseparable from Hitler, being at his side in the abortive Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 when Hitler tried to stage a coup d’état, and was in prison with him subsequently where he talked to Hitler about the lebensraum idea that became a pillar of the Nazi platform and justification for conquering lands in Eastern Europe. And while in prison, Hess helped Hitler write his “Mein Kampf” (“My Struggle”). After they were released, he was even subsequently injured protecting Hitler from a bomb planted by a Marxist group.

When Hitler and the Nazis finally did seize power in 1933, Hess became a cabinet member and was frequently the one who would introduce Hitler at rallies and speaking engagements. If Hitler could not attend, Hess would be his surrogate, addressing the crowds. Part of his cabinet responsibilities was to cosign every law decreed by Hitler, including the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jews of their rights as German citizens and set the stage for the Holocaust.

Meanwhile Hess regularly took lessons, becoming ever more skilled as a pilot. When war broke out in 1939, he asked Hitler if he could join the Luftwaffe but Hitler forbade it, telling him he couldn’t fly again until the end of the war but eventually limiting the ban to one year. Hess had been Hitler’s private secretary for years but was replaced by Martin Bormann, who gradually surpassed Hess in his relationship to Hitler.

About the time his flying ban was lifted, Hess confided to his son that he wanted to arrange peace negotiations between Hitler and Churchill. He talked about flying to meet with the Duke of Hamilton in Scotland, who was known to Albrecht Haushofer, the son of Hess’ professor and with whom Hess had become a good friend. They believed, mistakenly, that Hamilton was a leader of the opposition against the war. Hess began outfitting a sophisticated airplane with the necessary equipment to reach Scotland, including auxiliary fuel tanks, and after abortive tries due to weather or mechanical limitations, finally took off on May 10, 1941. That was six weeks before Hitler planned Operation Barbarossa, the surprise invasion of the Soviet Union. Hess was distressed at the prospect of two fronts and was determined to get Britain to sit out the rest of the war.

Hess was able to get to the coast of Britain before the radar picked him up, and before fighter planes sent up to intercept him could shoot him down. He flew at extremely low altitude and when he was near his destination, he parachuted out of his plane and landed within a few miles of Hamilton’s home. Churchill was not interested in his plan and the British held him as a prisoner of war. Hitler was reportedly enraged by Hess’ action and, disavowing any such knowledge on his part, stripped Hess of all his offices and decorations, fearing the response of Mussolini and the Japanese to such a unilateral move. Ultimately Hess was tried in the first round of prisoners at the Nuremberg trials and sentenced to life. He died in Spandau Prison in 1987 at age 93 by suicide.

The question will always remain for historians to argue: Did Hitler send Hess on his doomed mission?

Would you like to know what Ava Gardner had to say about her first husband, Mickey Rooney? Stay tuned.

Despite having passed away two years ago, Mickey Rooney walks the stage at the Ward Melville Heritage Organization’s Education and Cultural Center in Stony Brook village. That bit of otherworldly magic is thanks to the artistry of St. George Productions, whose acting company members make the famous come alive again.

Rooney’s first wife was Ava Gardner, and I was interested to read Gardner’s autobiography after a brief stop at her museum in Smithfield, North Carolina recently. We were driving up Route 95, returning from a visit to Hilton Head, when one of our group suggested we see the museum. It was started near her hometown with seed money left by the actress. Now, I don’t know how many of you remember her or have seen her films, but she was right up there in stardom with the likes of Rita Hayworth, Grace Kelly, Judy Garland and Elizabeth Taylor. Some of her leading men were Clark Gable, Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Robert Taylor, Burt Lancaster — and Mickey.

She was a head taller than Mickey Rooney, and she met him on her first day on the MGM studio sets. He was dressed like the famous Brazilian dancer, Carmen Miranda, for his role in the movie, “Babes on Broadway,” with Judy Garland. He was two years older than Gardner and at that time, 1941, he was the most popular star in America. He had acted as Mickey McGuire, the character from the comic strip, Toonerville Trolley for seven years and then as Andy Hardy, the beloved teenager, for ten years after that. Rooney was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor in 1939, and was earning $5,000 a week, plus bonuses. He knew how to act and he also knew what he wanted. He phoned Gardner every night for the first two weeks she was in Hollywood, until he finally got her to go out with him to dinner—as long as she could bring along her older sister.

Initially stunned by his shortness, Gardner describes Rooney as “charming, romantic and great fun.” She offered, “I had to say one thing for him: He sure had energy.”

“He was the original laugh-a-minute boy, and even the second or third time around, his stories, jokes, and gags were funny. There wasn’t a minute when he wasn’t onstage. He loved an audience, and I tried to be as good a one as I knew how.” They were engaged before her 19th birthday. They were both kids without the slightest idea of what marriage should be. Mickey woke up after their wedding night and left Ava to go off with his gang of buddies and play golf.

Mickey did endear himself when they visited her ill mother, shortly after they were married. “He entertained Mama, he hugged her, he made her laugh, he brought tears to her eyes. He did his impersonations, he did his songs and dances—it was a wonderful, wonderful occasion for Mama, who we all knew was slowly dying. Although I had loved Mickey from the start, that show he put on moved me beyond words.”

His normal lifestyle, which he continued after their marriage, according to Ava, was “boozing, broads, bookmakers, golfing and hangers-on, not to mention the heavy involvement of studio work and publicity.” She was most appalled by the philandering. They divorced two years later.

They stayed friends for the rest of their lives, dating from time to time after their divorce, until they both went on to other spouses. For Mickey, that was a beauty queen that he met in Birmingham, Alabama. He was married a total of eight times.

According to Mearene Jordan, Gardner’s helper, who wrote a chapter at the end of the book, “Mickey Rooney was a funny little guy—she got a big kick out of him. She saw him last year and she said, “Reenie, he’s still the biggest liar in the world. Poor Mickey, he cannot tell the truth, he never could. But he’s cute.”