East Meadow

She stepped outside the ABC studios in New York after the last show, looking for her boyfriend Rootie, the baseball player, the star of their TV show. They had arranged to meet after the finale, but as she looked north, south, east and west, there was no sign of him.

Their late-afternoon daily children’s show had been a phenomenon. The early days of television broadcasting had been a matter of much experimentation, though why some shows caught on, and others sunk into oblivion, there were no definitive answers. She was happy that the show had had its four-year run, and she and Rootie had planned to move to the Bronx, where Rootie was already hired by the Yankees to play ball.

As she stood shivering in the cold, it occurred to her that she had been stood up. Without Rootie to plan her life, she was adrift, abandoned, and very much alone. The other cast members had their own career paths; Big Todd Russell was headed out to Hollywood to see if he could make the Big Time.

She adjusted her outfit: white blouse with a pink, polka-dot skirt, shoes and socks and a bag that matched her skirt. With no coat, she realized that she had better find someplace to warm up. She started walking, soon finding herself at Pennsylvania Station. Not having any other plans, she bought a ticket for the next train that was leaving for Long Island.

Long Island was a land of opportunity, or so it seemed to be at that time. Families were moving into cozy little homes there, each family with its 2.3 children. She headed for Garden City, because she liked the name. She boarded the train, having no clue how her life was going to change.

But when she got there, she was just as confused and alone as she had been in New York. She stopped into a candy store at the station and ordered a Coke. A handsome young truck driver came and sat down beside her. He drove a parcel post truck. He was headed to East Meadow, where he was dropping off a few birthday presents for a little girl who was turning four years old that day.

The little girl was living in the Golden Zone of happiness in the early 1950s. A loving family, plenty of friends and neighbors, she only wanted one thing for her birthday. She had wanted that present since August of the previous year, when her family had bought its first television set, and she fell in love with a hand puppet on one of her favorite television shows.

She hadn’t lacked for toys; she already had several dolls. But this doll was special; her flirty eyes looking off to one side seemed to have an extra sparkle; her deep dimples punctuating her chubby cheeks; and her perpetually smiling mouth that gave her face a look that was at once both sweet and knowing.

The Parcel Post man drove up to the little house on Gerald Avenue. Polka Dotty got off the truck, and walked into the little girl’s heart.

She became the child’s most beloved companion. Manufactured by the Effanbee Doll Company, Polka Dotty’s head was molded vinyl, her body was stuffed and encased in a vinyl cloth. The little girl spent hours tracing the swirls and patterns in Polky’s molded hair, dressing and undressing the doll, until all her original clothes were lost. No matter; Polky was just as enthralled with her little fan.

The “Rootie Kazootie TV Show” went off the air in 1953. Nothing was heard of Big Todd Russell or any of the other actors on the show. Rootie eventually made his way to California, where he tried out as a Dodger in the late 1950’s. But like many other TV toys from the Golden Age, he ended up on Ebay.

Polka Dotty still lives with the little girl. She has a place of honor in a little wicker carriage with her best friend, Robin, a vinyl doll with a little rosebud mouth, and red hair that you could actually comb, who came to live with the little girl and her doll in 1956. Best friends for more than fifty years, they are both rather fragile now. But they are happy to be beloved friends of the little girl, who is not so little anymore.

The Last Out

It was the final game at Shea Stadium. I don't usually follow baseball -- and I missed the Yankee Stadium ceremony -- but for some reason I remembered that yesterday would probably be the Mets' last game at Shea. I've never gone to a baseball game, but New Yorkers have always had a strange (unnatural?) attachment to its teams and their stadia, so I decided to watch the final game. First I had to local it on my cable station, then had to find the HiDef cable station. So I only popped in at the 8th inning.

The game ended disappointingly, but soon afterwards the ceremonies began. The announcer mentioned the many players who could not be present that day. But then they began calling out the old Mets. And I do mean old. I was shocked to see how much our boys of summer had aged. When a very elderly man came out I thought, oh, no, that can't be Ed Kranepool, and it was, I wondered how he got to be so old! Willie Mays was escorted onto the field with an aide at his side.

But then -- the kid they called "The Franchise," because he was the Mets' biggest asset in his heyday -- Tom Seaver came out to thunderous applause. And, oh, my, Mike Piazza, looking amazing (how did he get out of New York? he belongs here!) came out to even louder applause. And part of the reason had to be, his METS' SHIRT WAS TAILORED!!! Not for nothing do I watch makeover shows. His shirt was tailored for his body.

Finally, heartbreakingly, Tom took to the pitcher's mound, and Mike took the catcher's place, and Seaver pitched one last ball to Piazza. They embraced, and slowly left the field together. They came to the fence, and each took one side, and then, closing the gates for the last time, Tom Seaver and Mike Piazza were....

the last out.

What I Really Know About Civic Duty

What I really know about civic duty I learned from my parents. As young adults, they were Democrats who had worshipped Franklin Roosevelt and in 1948, I’m told, cried when hearing an impassioned civil-rights speech on the radio by an up- and-coming statesman named Hubert Humphrey. I wasn’t around for that speech, but seven-year-old me stuffed mailboxes for Adlai Stevenson. 11-year-old me snuck into the voting booth to pull the lever for John F. Kennedy. (Oops, did I just invalidate his election?) And 21-year-old me registered to vote on that birthday.

There are other forms of civic duty that I practice with some regularity: volunteering; recycling, supporting non-profits (sometimes volunteering to recycle for non-profits). But I think that probably the least effective thing I do is to work in political campaigns. Living in New York State, probably the “Bluest State” there is, much of what I do doesn’t have any impact at all. Al Gore didn’t even campaign on Long Island in 2000 – though I’m sure if he had, somehow my phone calls and stuffed envelopes would have turned the tide on Election Day. I campaigned twice for Hillary for Senator, but just half-heartedly, and darned if she didn’t win both times! So I don’t know if I’m a jinx and a jonah. I just know, it’s my civic duty to pester the citizens of my town to vote, which they promise they will, if only I would hang up the phone.

Sometimes I give my insurance company the willies when I volunteer to drive voters to the polls. Out here in suburbia, if you don’t have a car, you can’t vote. It’s not like it’s a law; more that it’s a huge inconvenience. So I’ll stuff as many folks as I can into my car, and drive around from pillar to poll, hoping that my passengers will do their civic duty and vote for my candidate.

The worst part about participating in political campaigns? Working in cold, unheated, rented storefronts GOTV (getting out the vote) on dreary, rainy First-Tuesdays-after-the-First-Mondays in November. The best part about participating in political campaigns? The impromptu First-Monday-night-before-First-Tuesday-in-November pizza and pot luck parties in those cold, unheated, rented storefronts, bracing for the 24-hour marathon ahead.

I can’t wait till November 3. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Submitted to AARP Bulletin.

Letter to a Baby Boy

Letter to a Baby Boy (Another in as Series of Letters That Will Never Be Mailed). May 26, 2008

Dear Baby,

Congratulations on being born! I’m not so sure I see the wisdom of being born at this point in time, when you may never be able to drive a car that is powered by gasoline, but I hope that you learn from the example of your family and grow to love mass transit.

Your grandmother and I met each other in a strange, 21st Century mode on an Internet Message Board, in 2001. When we found out how much we had in common, we began to correspond directly through email. In a wonderful coincidence, we learned that not only had we grown up within a few miles of each other, I in Bethpage and she in Levittown, but that we had been standing on the very same street on the very same day in November 1960. We both waited in the rain for a glimpse of Senator John F. Kennedy making a last-weekend campaign swing through Long Island.

My family was standing on the corner of Hempstead Turnpike and Wantagh Avenue, and she was standing on Wantagh Avenue about a mile to the south. As adults, we both moved to the north shore of Long lsland. We have met in person several times, and we share a warm email relationship.

I take some small credit in the circumstances of your conception. If not for my efforts 20 years ago, your life might have begun quite differently.
In the early 1900’s a man named George McKesson Brown, heir to a giant pharmaceutical company, bought several acres of land in Huntington bordering on Huntington Harbor and the Long Island Sound, and built himself a great estate. It was known as West Neck Farm. He had a grand home built, based on a Norman chateau, with a garage and stables and a boathouse on the beach. When he lost everything, as heirs invariably do, he sold off parts of the farm, and then finally the chateau, which he sold to the Brothers of the Sacred Heart to become a Catholic boys’ boarding school, named Coindre Hall, after the founder of that order.

When the school closed down, a combination of bad management and pilfered plumbing led the building to a state of near-ruin. While Suffolk County debated what to do with the property, all sorts of developers came up with plans to develop the land, raising the possibility of destroying one of the last remaining Gold Coast Estates. I fell in with a band of protestors called, “The Alliance for the Preservation of Coindre Hall,” or something noble like that, and together we painted posters and picketed Parliament (aka the Suffolk County Legislature) while we tried to stave off any possible development. At one particular meeting, held in the evening in one of the large drawing rooms, a group of suits from a medical-rehab institute tried to persuade us that having such a facility in that neighborhood, given that there is limited access, no trains or buses, and no nearby support businesses, would be a swell idea, started off strong, but by the end of the evening the 5 men making the presentation had backed themselves, literally, into a corner of the room. Seeing them cower from the assault of the mildest-mannered best-behaved group of concerned citizens was the highlight of my career as a protestor.

Eventually, the County took over the grounds, and Coindre Hall is preserved today as parkland, and the building, now on the National Register of Historic Places, is used as a wedding venue.

Getting the picture? Good, because just a few more details and then you can go burp. The garage and stables became the home of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington. The boathouse is the headquarters for the Sagamore Rowing Club. The grounds of the estate has picnic tables and even a dog run, which won’t do you much good if you do have a dog someday because there will be no gas to power the car for you to drive there.

And Coindre Hall itself? By yet another coincidence, your Mommy and Daddy chose the beautiful chateau as the site of their wedding two years ago.

Dear baby, do you want to know a secret? I did it all for you.

**********************************************************************

Roslyn May 19, 2008

When I was six years old my family lived in a small town named Roslyn Heights for 6 months, from the summer of 1955 to the winter of 1956, while we waited for our house in Bethpage to be ready. Often a town named “Heights” signifies an elegant address, but in this case we literally lived on the other side of the tracks from the well-to-do, just-plain Roslyn. (Not to be confused with Roslyn Kaufman, one of my first friends in Bethpage, who was thereafter forevermore known to me simply as Rozzie).

We lived at #33 Edwards Street in a garden apartment complex, on the second floor. The flat was cramped; it had a walk-in, but not an eat-in kitchen; two bedrooms (my brother and I shared one) and a little dining area and living room. All of our furniture from our house in East Meadow was somehow shoved into that tiny apartment.

We moved in during a brutally hot summer. One day my mother attempted to take my brother, some friends, and me to a nearby beach in our 1952 Chevy. We ran over a metal rod in the street which punctured a tire, and we all had to wait on the side of the road for help. Not having Triple A or a cell phone, I can’t imagine who or what we were waiting for, but a passing truck driver stopped and changed the tire for us. From then on, I always thought of truck drivers as friendly, chivalrous, and gallant.

I had gone to kindergarten in the Meadowlawn School in East Meadow, but I started first grade in the Roslyn Heights Elementary School, where my brother was in fourth grade. The school was an ancient, imposing brick building, probably built 50 years before, which could not accommodate the overwhelming number of students enrolled there. As a result, my first grade class was held in a left-over World War II-issued Quonset hut next door to the big school. (In an ironic burst of symmetry, some of my classes in my freshman year of college were held in old World War II Army barracks on the campus of Adelphi University, and the school theatre was in a Quonset hut.)

Kindergarten in East Meadow had been only a half-day, but first grade was a full day, and so it was the first time I had to eat lunch in school. I think we went next door to the old building for lunch. The looming, cavernous building terrified me, and I was unable to eat there. I would bring my lunch back to the apartment and eat it after school. Eventually I learned to swallow my fear, though others came in to replace it. My 9-year-old brother and I had to cross a fairly large street to get to school and back. There was one particular autumn day when my brother and I had to lug our book bags, lunch boxes (mine was a tartan plaid) and a pumpkin each across the Avenue and up the hill to our apartment. My doll Robin joined me at school occasionally; of course she was another burden, but not a weighty one.

My deepest shame, in all of my 17 years of education, happened in that Quonset hut. We had a substitute teacher one day, who asked us to write our numbers, as high as we could count. I got stuck on 12. I remember remembering that it was either 1-2 or 2-1; but couldn’t figure out which one was correct. Maybe if I had skipped past it, I still tell myself, I would have gotten back on track with 13. But no, I had to stop just when I had barely made it into the double digits.

My brother and I quickly made friends on Edwards Street. I know my friend’s name was Susan, but I don’t remember anything else about her. My brother’s friend was named Gilbert, and he was the perfect buddy to go on boyish adventures. In those days, children were safe to wander far from mother’s eye (although not really; it was only a year later that the case of the kidnapped Weinberg baby in Plainview became headline news) and the boys were able to get into mischief that only little boys can. I remember seeing them walking along a high brick ledge and jumping off onto the pavement. (My mother only learned about this from me 40 years later, saving her from a possible heart attack in 1955.)

I think the apartment complex was filled with other families on their way to permanent housing elsewhere; I know Gilbert also moved away, and he and my brother lost contact. For all I know, Susan, the barely-remembered best friend, is still living there. Interestingly, I went back to Edwards Street several years after we moved out; our apartment number, #33, which was on the left side of the street when we lived there, was inexplicably on the right side of the street when I went there as an adult.)

Despite the heat and the cramped little apartment, we had memorable times in Roslyn Heights. There was a dinky little town on our side of the railroad tracks, but Roslyn High School, and the little town of just plain Roslyn, was on the other, north, side of the tracks. When we drove into Roslyn proper, we had to drive up a hill and wait for the traffic light to change. I developed yet another fear, this one of the car rolling backwards down the hill. Although cars today are more reliable, I’m still not comfortable with that maneuver.

Sometimes on Sundays we would get into the old gray Chevy and drive through Roslyn Estates and Manhasset, looking at the fine homes there and dreaming. We would never have been able to buy one of those houses, but it was thrilling just to dream about. It’s still an if-only….dream of mine.
There was, and still is, a lovely duck pond in Roslyn; we went there to feed the ducks, which is probably frowned on today. We went to the movies in the theatre next to the Roslyn Clock Tower to see “Lady and the Tramp,” still one of my favorite movies, with the beautiful spaniel Lady still one of my favorite movie heroines.

My brother and I also were enchanted by an innovative children’s television show, that had also sprung from the mind, or the studio, of Walt Disney, “The Mickey Mouse Club.” Later I realized that the show was actually a marketing gimmick for Disney to lead families to his new amusement park in California, but we didn’t care. We watched that show and made friends with the Mousekeeters. There was even a Mouseketeer named Cheryl, although she pronounced the name incorrectly; the proper pronunciation is the plosive, fricative CHeryl.

We stayed in Roslyn until January 1956. From the heat of summer, to the bitter cold winter, we experienced four seasons in six months.

We finally moved into our permanent, forever house in Bethpage on January 19, 1956; it was to be our family’s home for the next 33 years. Roslyn Heights had been my home for only a half year of my nearly 60 years; still, it was a memorable slice of time, and the place where I learned to read, write, and feed ducks; to eat lunch away from home; to make and lose friends.

I conquered some fears, and acquired new ones.

I learned I could depend on the kindness of strangers.

I saw my brother as a daredevil for the first time. I shared a room with him for the last time.

I watched a romantic movie about two dogs in heat in the heat of a Long Island summer.

I cried from the pain of my red, chapped hands in the frigid cold of a Long Island winter.

It was only six months, but seemed so much more.

A Sentimental Journey -- October 8, 2007

Summer's Over (July 7, 2006)

An Open Letter to the children of Long Island:


I’m sorry to have to tell you this, kids, but the summer’s over. Actually, it was officially over on June 28th, when I ducked into Marshall’s to escape the sweltering heat and was greeted by racks of the latest in fall fashions. I should have seen it coming when the Bed, Bath, & Beyond’s Back-to-College displays were already getting dusty the day after high school graduations, while the Christmas decorations were, no doubt, on their way out to the selling floor.


It used to be that summer had three “first days of.” There was Memorial Day, in May, that, when the sun cooperated, drove Long Islanders in droves to Mr. Jones’ Beach on the “unofficial first day of summer.” Then there was the day of the summer solstice, June 21 usually, which was the real “first day of summer.” But everyone knew that summer didn’t truly begin until the July 4th weekend. Then, there were eight weeks of summer camp or summer school, and a week for back-to-school shopping. Summer ended on the Labor Day weekend, always in September, when you had the last barbeque of the year and put away the bathing suits. Never mind that autumn doesn’t begin until September 21 (the 23rd this year); on the Wednesday after Labor Day we would don our woolen sweaters and slacks to greet old friends and face new teachers, while wiping off the sweat with our long sleeves.


There was a rhythm to the seasons: it was hot in the summer, cold in the winter, and delightful (though in polar opposite ways) in spring and fall. But I’m not talking about Global Warming (sorry, Al); I’m talking about the merchants who rush the sales seasons and tease, taunt, and tempt customers with their rush-rush marketing schemes. I wouldn’t want to be a toddler (or a parent of one) and be faced with tantalizing Halloween candy in every supermarket, drug store or department store, only to be told, “Hang in there, you’ve got nearly four months, 100+ days! before you can put on your costumes and fill your tummy with bags with of yummy candy.” And, of course, by the time you are at last celebrating Halloween, the Christmas rush is all but over.


Everyone knows that the calendar we use today was man- (probably-not-woman-) made; there’s no earthly reason why New Year’s isn’t celebrated in August, except for the fact that it coincides with earlier, pagan celebrations; the Hebrew calendar marks late summer/early fall as the beginning of a new year, and the Chinese calendar pegs the depths of the winter in the northern hemisphere as the time of its new year. But our calendar didn’t just fall neatly into place: the days and months had to be massaged, maneuvered, and finally shoved into being by everyone from Popes to Emperors to 18th century officials (who imposed the “eleven day” change in 1752), to whom we have to thank for 7-day weeks, 12-month years, and 365 (but sometimes 366) days a year.


Daylight Savings Time is another of those constructs that seems had always been, but was, in fact, only introduced in 1918, and has been fiddled with many times over the past century. And soon Daylight Savings Time will extend longer, and Eastern Standard Time will be shorter; starting in March 2007, daylight time in the United States will begin on the second Sunday in March (instead of the first Sunday in April) and end on the first Sunday in November, instead of the last Sunday in October). The rationalization for the imposition of Daylight Savings Time that I had been taught as a child, that farmers wouldn’t have to milk their cows in the dark, sounds less and less plausible. I would think that those cows would be mighty confused by now, as am I.


The good news is that Halloween, always October 31, will give sugar-crazed children another hour of afternoon sunlight in which they can extort candy from and play pranks upon their hapless neighbors. But the political campaign season, for those who follow these things, will still begin in the heat of the summer, and will still culminate on a cold, dark November night (not the first Tuesday of November, though, but the first Tuesday after the first Monday).


It would be nice to go back to a time when you could buy a bathing suit in July and snow shovels in November. The most I can hope for, though, is that we will rush the seasons so far ahead that, at least for a few years, our calendars and the marketing seasons will be in synchronicity with each other.


So pack up your newly-purchased backpacks with your newly-purchased school supplies and set your newly-purchased alarm clocks for tomorrow morning, children, because school started, like, yesterday.

A Soap Opera Actor Died this Week

A soap opera actor died this week. But he didn’t just die; he shot himself in the head in his home here in Huntington, New York. His name was Benjamin Hendrickson and he played Lt. Hal Munson on the television soap opera As the World Turns for over 20 years.

Hal Munson was an upright, loyal, dependable cop with a wrinkled shar-pei face and a good heart. He was the kind of man who maybe would forget to buy flowers on your birthday, but would step in to do the dinner dishes when he saw you were tired; who didn’t miss a child’s soccer game or school play; who would take a leave of absence from his job to nurse his mother as she was dying of cancer.

Benjamin Hendrickson took a leave of absence a few years ago, to handle what were announced as “personal problems.” He was replaced by a journeyman actor, but fans were overjoyed to see him return. He hadn’t looked well for several years; but no one knew what was happening inside. Surprisingly, I never ran into him in Huntington (which is really a very small town) although I once answered a telephone call from him when a film he was in was playing at our local art-house cinema.

I wonder if he knew how many fans he had. I don’t know if he had a fan club; he never played the sexy romantic character, and I think that fans of the show just liked to see him around Oakdale (the fictional town that mirrors Huntington), as familiar and re-assuring as the cop on the beat. I wonder if I had had a chance to meet him face-to-face at the Cinema or at the Public Library or at Heckscher Park, if I could have said anything that would have touched his heart and pierced through the depression to make his life worth living.

“Mr. Hendrickson,” I probably would have babbled like an idiot, “You are so cool! Millions of people enjoy seeing you on ‘As The World Turns.’ Watching you has made my life a little lighter. Keep up the good work!”

So what can I take from his sudden death? What is the universal truth that I can learn from his life? I once knew a bright, lovely, kind young man who worked for a newspaper. One day he was in an auto collision and poof! He was gone. He was so full of energy and light that it was hard to accept that he was erased from the Earth. Here’s what he taught me: numbers under ten should be written as numerals, and numbers over ten should be written out in letters. Or maybe it was the other way around. I don’t know. But I remember our conversation that day, and that’s what I carry around with me.

What can I learn from Benjamin Hendrickson, what lesson can I carry around for the rest of my life? Maybe nothing as practical or profound as the finer points of proofreading a newspaper article.

I suppose what I have learned from my friend, my cop on the beat, my Hal Munson, is that you can never know the pain a person is hiding deep inside; a pain mere words can never reach. ‘Benjamin,’ I want to say, ‘Your mother is supposed to die before you. It’s terrible, but it’s the way of the world. Benjamin,’ I want to say, ‘Your life has meaning to millions of people.’ ‘Benjamin,’ I want to say, ‘Give me a call and we’ll talk it out. You can save me and I can save you.’

Would it have made a difference?

July 10, 2006