Installment # 11

I only vaguely remember when the radio was the primary source of entertainment, besides phonograph records.  I sort of remember listening to Tom Mix, The Lone Ranger, Amos and Andy, The Shadow.  The comedians who either did or did not make the transition to television probably came on after my bedtime, so I never really heard about them until television.  It may come as no surprise that we tended to watch Dad’s favorite TV shows: Lawrence Welk, Life of Riley, Perry Como…I forget what else.

When we moved to North Massapequa in 1950 our block, North Kings Avenue, consisted of a row of ten little houses, surrounded by woods, with a great sandpit at the end of our block.  At least it seemed huge to my young eyes.  Houses were soon built in that area, and the further-most house seemed way far away.  But in 2013 I glanced down that way from Aunt Dot’s house, and the furthest house seemed like a stone’s throw away. The population more than doubled in the ten years that I lived on Long Island, from less than 1 million to approximately 2 million, from 1950 to 1960.  It had grown to 3 million by 2012, but that was over a period of more than 50 years.

The ten houses of North Kings Avenue were all two-bedroom/one bath houses, with basements.  Over the years, some owners finished the basements, which provided more living space.  Uncle Harold used their basement mainly for cages of pet canaries, but he added a second story of living quarters with bedroom, bath and dormers for light and air.  Our address was 132 North Kings Avenue, and Aunt Dot and Uncle Harold lived right next door at 130 North Kings Avenue.  It seemed odd to me for a time that a brother and sister would live right next door to each other (and on the same block in South Ozone Park), but upon reflection, that was rather common back then, particularly for first-generation immigrants, but is not so uncommon on Long Island to this day. 

It may have to do with cold climates in general, where people are smart to stay close to family to help and protect each other.  In earlier times not that many people had cars or drove, but even when that was more common, an area can become snowed-in, and having family nearby could be not just convenient, but vital. Here in California we take so much for granted.  We are spread out over hundreds of miles, but think nothing of jumping on the freeway and going visiting.

At any rate, there was our little family of four, in our little house, supported (at least for a time) by one blue-collar income.  During Herbert Hoover’s 1928 election campaign he had coined the phrase “a chicken in every pot, and a car in every garage” as his vision for a future of prosperity and the eradication of poverty.  I think the house cost $10,000 and was not particularly “below average” for the times, and I remember that we had a 1941 Packard automobile.  We were on track! (except we had no garage.)  Surely Mom and Dad were proud to be homeowners, happy to be the parents of two healthy little boys, and filled with hope for the future.  The memory brings a mixture of melancholy, nostalgia, perhaps sadness.  That point in time can never be recaptured or recreated. 

Certainly young couples are still starting families and striving for home ownership, but the standard of living and the style of living that I see in my mind’s eye and that we see in old photographs from the 1950s are gone forever, along with that little nuclear family of four.  And it is sad for me to dwell on what ultimately happened to the hopes and dreams and optimism of that young couple who became our parents.  My brother, Donald, is the only person alive today with whom I share that memory and that beginning, but it is not something that can be described and spoken of.  Aunt Dot and Cousin Harold, of course, have a lot of memories of living next to us during those years, but it is not the same as belonging to that family of four.

Who remembers me in my Little League uniform?  Who remembers the summer that I had a cast on my leg and couldn’t keep up with the kids running?  Who remembers Patty Hyland’s cousin, who I had a crush on when we were eleven?  How about when Cousin Harold’s dog, Browser, was hit and killed by a delivery truck?  We kids were outraged and yelled and ran after that driver for blocks before giving up.  Knowing kids, we had probably moved on emotionally by the time we had walked back to Harold’s house. 

Come to think of it, I was in my Little League uniform ready to leave for a game when Dad snuck up behind me and squeezed my left knee and I yelped with pain.  I had been trying to hide/deny/ignore the knee, hoping it would go away.  It turned out that I had something called Osgood-Schlatter disease, a fairly common occurrence in children who have a sudden growth spurt.  Who but me remembers that Mom and Dad tried to convince me that I had hurt my knee sliding into home plate during a ball game, so that they could try to get the Little League organization to pay the medical bills? (I don’t think that worked, by the way).

Harry Truman would have been president during my early childhood (1945-1952), but I hardly knew his name.  I remember the presidential election campaigns of 1952.  As we walked to the school bus we made fun of the names we were hearing on the radio: Eisen-however, Senator Kefaufa-the-grass, Adlaid (Marmalade) Stevenson, etc.  (It was Adlai, but we thought they were saying Adlaid).  I remember a headline after Eisenhower was elected indicating that the press was glad he didn’t mind them referring to him as “Ike”.  It saved a lot of space in the papers.  Eisenhower’s campaign included large lapel buttons that said “I like Ike”, so it figured that he didn’t mind being called that.

Sometimes I will hear music that I know Dad would have loved, but I can’t share it with him.  I can’t even turn to someone and ask, “Wouldn’t Dad have liked this?”  Nobody knows but me.  Living a long time includes losing some “points of reference” that cannot be recreated, but of course it also means creating new points of reference that may linger after you are gone…part of our immortality?  For the record, Dad died in his early 70s, from a combination of emphysema and cancer.  As I recall, he said that the doctor told him that, aside from making a couple of the doctor’s boat payments for him, there was no point in trying to save Dad from the cancer, because the emphysema was going to get him, anyway.

Patty Hyland, a girl my age, lived next door to Aunt Dot on the other side.  Theirs was the corner house, then Aunt Dot’s, then our house.  I remember when I had agreed to meet the guys who were heading off to somewhere, but I saw Patty and her friends in their little above-ground wading pool.  So I got my bathing suit and joined them.  Well, Dennis and the boys spotted me as they walked by and they let me know what they thought of my “betrayal,” calling me a traitor, etc.  In fact, I learned a new word, “scroffer.”  Dennis called me a scroffer for choosing the girls over the boys like that.  We were only 11 or 12 years old, but I figured they were just jealous.

Aunt Dot was telling me in 2014 that the Hylands were friends of hers and Uncle Harold’s during their teen years, and so was the couple on the other side of our house (the English’s).  So the first 4 houses on the block were owned by 4 sets of friends or relatives, who all moved together out to “the boonies” of Long Island.  She said there were no street lights the first few months after we moved in, and that it was pitch dark at night that winter.  (We moved in October 1950). She also reminded me about the old “party line” telephone system, which I now remember Mom complaining about.  The four couples needed to cooperate, share, be considerate, and above all be trusted not to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations.  It seems like I can remember Mom once or twice running out of patience, picking up the phone, and yelling, “Get off the phone!” because she was waiting to use it.  For incoming calls, Aunt Dot explained that each of the 4 phones had a different sounding ring so you knew which house it was for and didn’t answer someone else’s call.

Aunt Dot was telling me that the houses in South Ozone Park were attached in pairs, with small driveways separating each pair from the next pair.  She said they bought them for $3,200 and had monthly payments of $28.  They sold those homes for around $5,000, which enabled them to move to North Massapequa, where they paid $8,000 and had $45 monthly payments.  She said the jump from $28 to $45 was scary, and she really had to cut back and economize to make it happen, at least until Uncle Harold got a raise at the Long Island Lighting Company.

Patty and I did become girl friend/boy friend for a time when we were about 14-15, and I was really sorry when I messed that up.  It seems I had a conflict on a given weekend, and chose to be with another girl, instead.  That didn’t work out, but by then Patty felt like she had been dumped, and did not want to get back together.  I saw her for the first time in many, many years at the sad occasion of Uncle Harold’s funeral in 2009, I think it was.  It was a thrill to see her, even though we were both in our mid-sixties and looked it.  She told me that I was the first and only guy that ever dumped her.  I had to tell her that I was no prize, as it turned out, and she said neither was she.  We were both trying to be humble, I think, and to shrug off things that “might have been.”

Before the houses across the street were more than a dream in some developer’s mind, there were birch trees that we kids used to climb up and swing on.  Long before I had ever heard of the poet Robert Frost or his poem, “Birches,” we had discovered the wonderful property of birch trees that would allow us to find sturdy perches high up and to begin to sway back and forth until the branches brought us fairly close to the ground in one direction, then would lift us back up and bring us close to the ground in the other direction while we hung on.  Our mothers would have their hearts in their throats as they yelled and pleaded with us to stop before we hurt ourselves badly.  I remember we developed a taunting little song verse, singing, “Oh, we all gotta go sometime; we all gotta go sometime.” (As if we agreed that we might get killed doing what we were doing).  I can still hear the melody, if you could call it that, and see the anxiety on our mothers’ faces, and the relief when we tired of that and went on to some other childish, but less dangerous activity.

For the record, Robert Frost so captured my attention and allegiance with the opening lines of that poem: “When I see birches bend to left and right across the line of straighter darker trees, I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.  But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.”  He goes on to blame that on ice storms, but ends with wonderful reminiscing about how a boy bends a birch tree.  His last line is: “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”