The Christopher Morley Knothole Association will present "A Day of Literature in the Park...Poetry and Prose and a Picnic" to be held Sunday, Aug. 19 at 2 p.m. The park in question is, of course, the Christopher Morley Park, located on Searingtown Road in Roslyn Estates.

The Knothole Association will present live readings and adaptations of classic works of literature. The Day of Literature will be held outdoors under the shade trees of the Knothole Museum, which itself is the study Christopher Morley used to write his novels, newspaper columns, and other non-fiction works when he was a resident of The Springs section of Roslyn Estates. General admission is free as is the summer picnic provided by the Knothole Association. Local residents should bring their own blanket or a folding lawn chair. The Nassau County Museum is assisting the Knothole Association in presenting the event.

The Day of Literature will be the summer highlight for the Knothole Association. Speaking of the event, Harrison Hunt, a Nassau County employee who works at Cedarmere said the Knothole Association "used to do things like this years ago" at the Knothole Museum. After meeting with Knothole Association personnel, including its president, Peter Cohn, Mr. Hunt and his colleagues decided to revive the Day of Literature. "It's a natural event for the site," he said. "The Morley house listens well. It's something we'd like to do more of."

Mr. Cohn added that the day will be about more than just readings and a picnic. Association members hope to conduct interactive events with the audience. For instance, the association plans to include some literary games, with people reading excerpts from well-known books and seeing if audience members can guess the title and author.

The Knothole Museum is now open on Sundays from 1 to 5 p.m. At the site to tell visitors about Morley's life and career is Joseph Whalen. Mr. Whalen is recording secretary of the association. He can also be heard on Old Long Island Talk Radio Series on WHPC (90.3 FM) on Tuesdays at 6 p.m. and Thursdays at 7 p.m. Old Long Island Television airs on Cablevision's Neighborhood Journal Program (Channel 70) on Tuesday and Thursday, also at 7 p.m.

For the winter months, the Knothole Association looks forward to its Annual Reading Scholarship, held at the Bryant Library. Winners for last January's program were North Shore High School students, Lauren Berger, who read from 1984 by George Orwell, and Samantha Kyrkostas, who read from A Scandal in Bohemia by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Jennifer Berger, also of North Shore, coordinated the event. Students have six minutes to first introduce and then read from a work of literature from "The Golden Florins," a list of classic literature that Christopher Morley himself drew up. The winners receive scholarship prizes with money awarded from The Knothole Association.

The Knothole Museum itself reopened in the summer of 1999 after being closed for several years, due to some renovation and repair work. Although it has moved from its first location, the museum still retains much of its original furniture, including Mr. Morley's desk, a built-in cot and bookshelves, which themselves contain many of the author's own works.

Literature at the Knothole Museum claims that "no other writer has sung the praises of Long Island as strongly as Christopher Morley." Mr. Morley wrote for both the New York Evening Post (the newspaper once edited by another famous Roslyn resident, William Cullen Bryant) and the Saturday Evening Post. As with William Cullen Bryant, Mr. Morley commuted into Manhattan from Roslyn, although he used a train, rather than a ferry. There are still a few Roslyn residents who remember Mr. Morley waiting at the LIRR station in Roslyn Heights for the morning ride into the city. In his columns, he often wrote about commuters and in general, the daily struggles of New York life.