GROWING UP IN AMITYVILLE: THE FRIENDLY VILLAGE ON THE GREAT SOUTH BAY

Before Amityville:

I was born in Brooklyn on the evening of October 19, 1934.  As Pop told it, Mom had a long day of labor and he had gone back to his Mother’s house to report and get a bite to eat.  Remember that in those days the husband sat in a waiting room far removed from the delivery process.  He thinks he was eating a Lamb sandwich about the time I was born.

Mom and Pop had been married on January 6^th, 1934, and lived in an apartment on 2015 Dorchester Road.  The apartment cost $50.00/month and had a doorman.  Pop had a several block walk from the subway, and he says that winter was the coldest he could recall.  He always arrived home frozen stiff.

All through the Great Depression Pop had a job working at the International Nickel Company [INCO], where he would remain for 42 years.  The offices were at 67 Wall Street in Manhattan.  Mom had taught parochial school, but had settled in as a stay-at-home young bride with a new baby.

Pop had graduated from Manual Training High School [later John Jay, but now closed] in 1924 and went to work for a bank.  As he told it, he wanted to go to the tennis matches at Forest Hills and asked for a day of – which was refused – so he quit.  One of his schoolmates, Bill Phillips worked at INCO and got Pop a job there as a carpenter, basically putting together display booths for industry shows.

None of what follows can be verified as I am putting together stories Pop and Mom told and things that were said to me by Aunt Dot and Uncle Bill.

Pop was the ‘runt’ of the litter.  He ran about 5’9” and 135 lbs on his best grownup day.  He was reputed to be about as tough as they come.  There are many stories about fistfights he got into.  “Being left handed,” he once told me, “was a great benefit.  Nobody was ready for a good left hand punch.”  He has a scar along the bottom of his chin and a tongue that sported a scar that was the result of his nearly biting the tip of it off in some sort of scrap.

It is probable that he worked for bootleggers during Prohibition.  Here are some vignettes – pieces of stories that I heard:

When Pop first met Mom – she was the girlfriend of one of his friends – they arranged to meet the following week at a party.  Pop was scheduled to work that day and would arrive late, but he gave her a warning.  He knew who was going to supply the liquor and he said that person was not trustworthy and Mom should not drink anything until Pop got there.  I assume he would have had ‘safe’ stuff.  Anyhow – she didn’t listen, drank some stuff and got really sick.  When Pop arrived she was head-down in the toilet.  I guess you could s ay – it was love at first warning.

He soon rose out of the carpenter job into working with the hotels and restaurants where meeting were held.  When I was a teenager Pop knew just about every manager in most NY hotels and a lot of restaurant people as well.  When we went to places we went in NYC Pop would always be greeted by the managers there – generally guys who were about pop’s age – so it easy to imagine that the whole bunch of them were young guys in their early twenties during Prohibition.

Pop used to talk about going to a speakeasy near the police station in Manhattan somewhere around center Street. One of the stories he told was about some young thug sitting in the restaurant who reached over and slapped his date. The owner of the restaurant/speakeasy, walked over to the guy and said something like, you’re out of here. I know your boss and if I hear anything happened to this young lady that will be the last thing you’ll ever do.

 The speakeasy was also popular with the hierarchy of the New York City Police Department in particular one guy named Valentine who was a very famous New York policeman eventually becoming chief. Mother used to tell a story of Mrs. Valentine eating off everybody’s meal.

 Moving To Amityville:

One of the boyhood friends was a guy named Dan Bradley. I knew him as uncle Dan and he had gone to Notre Dame and then medical school and move to Amityville to set up a medical practice. The result of Mom and Dad visiting Dan was that they too moved to 'the country,' so their young boy could grow up running through fields and enjoying country living.

Without a doubt growing up in Amityville was a remarkable experience. We moved there in May 1937. Then Long Island was a series of separate towns divided by a mile or two of nothing but open fields. Amityville had about 700 families living in one square mile everyone knew everyone else particularly if you went to the same church.

By the time we moved to Amityville mom had in ‘au pair’ to look after me. I don’t think it was very long before Mary wheeling me around in a baby carriage met Charlie’s ‘au pair,’ Veronica, pushing Charlie around. I do not remember any time not knowing Charlie.

We moved into a brick Tudor house on East Lake Dr., #22. It looked out on Avon Lake, and it must have been stressful for mom and dad to know that a little two-year-old had a lake just across the street. Neither of them could swim and neither of them weren't interested in learning. I think they used my city training to make sure that I would not cross a street or even walk on a street. One of the stories they would tell was Charlie and I walking together and Charlie stepping out into the street and me grabbing him and saying 'no street no street.'

The little house had three bedrooms, a bath and a half, a living room kitchen and dining room. Out back with a big yard, which Pop joyously planted with flowers and vegetables. I think he had always wanted to have a big garden and here his dream to reality. One of my memories of Pop and the garden was when tomatoes became ripe he would stick a salt shaker in his back pocket clean up tomato off with the hose and eat like an apple sprinkling salt here and there and then leaving the salt shaker on a post for the next tomato.

What we soon realized was that the house was built on reclaimed land, mostly sand. Clearly the lake had been shaped at some time prior to the building of the house sometime in 1927. During heavy rains, and hurricanes, which were plentiful in those early years, the basement would happily flood 2, 3, even 4 feet. Somehow the perils of a small ocean in the bottom of the house never particularly upset my parents, who would hire a guy to pump the water out. For years the basement had an inch or two a water in it almost on a permanent basis and pop brought in big timbers, by big I mean maybe 12 x 2 which served as sort of duck walks from the furnace to the shelves where things were stored.

Hurricanes

We experienced major hurricanes during our early years in Amityville. I don’t remember the hurricane of 1938, which was massive. It reshaped the shoreline on the Great South Bay and the barrier islands on the ocean and knocked down 18 trees on our property alone. The damage was so great and with no electric for weeks that we moved back into the city with Mom’s Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa Winckler. ot back I had a forest of down treets to play in and around.

The hurricane of 1938 struck us in the late morning of September 21^st. Pop had gone to work as if we were just experiencing a big rainstorm. In those days, you should know, there was no such thing as a weather report or even a weather service. This hurricane, which you can read about, struck the South Shore of Long Island as a total surprise. It plowed across the island smashed into eastern Connecticut and Rhode Island in full force. Amityville was on the left edge of the actual eye hurricane, and a weathervane at the local airport spun off after registering 125 mph.

The great story that Mom used to tell was that when the eye appeared over the house she thought the hurricane [or the storm she did and she wouldn’t have recognized it as a hurricane at that point], was over and I was sent out to play. Fortunately Mom realized her mistake soon enough to prevent me from being blown to New England.

Pop recalled looking out the office windows and seeing waves smashing up onto lower Manhattan. I do not know how Pop got home that night.

I do very clearly remember the hurricane of 1944, which struck at night. I remember sitting in the staircase with Mom and Pop listening to trees come down around us. Through all these hurricanes we never experienced any damage to the house. More trees down and more to play in and around.

We never experienced hurricanes of the magnitude of 1938 or 1944 again, but over the years hurricanes brushed by, mostly reduced in power. The hurricanes of 1938 and 1944 were huge because they never lost their power and roared across the island and into New England with wins exceeding 125 miles an hour and in some places topping 150 miles an hour. Sometime you want to Google the 1938 hurricane and see what a huge disaster it was.  No one in living memory had experienced storms of that magnitude. And since there was no weather service to issue warnings and since hurricanes were little understood the damage caused by these storms was immense.

The New England Hurricane of 1938 (or Great New England Hurricane or Long Island Express or simply The Great Hurricane of 1938) was the first major hurricane to strike New England since 1869. The storm formed near the coast of Africa in September of the 1938 Atlantic hurricane season, becoming a Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale before making landfall as a Category 3 hurricane ^[1] on Long Island on September 21. The hurricane was estimated to have killed between 682 and 800 people,^[2] damaged or destroyed over 57,000 homes, and caused property losses estimated at US$306 million ($ 4.72 billion in 2010).^[3] In 1951, damaged trees and buildings were still to be seen in the affected areas.^[4] To date it remains the most powerful, costliest and deadliest hurricane in New England history.

Great Hurricane of September, 1944--Is perhaps a forgotten storm in light of the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, and the Long Island Express of 1938. However, this was a memorable storm in its own right. Cape Henry in Virginia was hit with sustained winds of 134 mph, and gusts up to 150 mph. Meanwhile, in Norfolk, winds reached close to hurricane force while gusts went up to 90 mph. The powerful storm caused tremendous damage along the coast from North Carolina to New England with some 41,000 buildings damaged, and a death toll of 390 people. The storm cost some $100 million dollars in damage including $25 million in New Jersey alone, where some 300 homes were destroyed on Long Beach Island.

AMITYVILLE: VJ (Victory over Japan) DAY, AUGUST 14, 1945

World War II was a terrific time to be a little kid. Since we had no understanding of the terrors families experienced not knowing if their loved ones were alive or dead, or of fellow villagers dying in far off places, we were free to play war games and collect lead soldiers, sure in the knowledge that we would teach those dirty Germans and Japs a lesson. 

Every morning at breakfast Mom and I listened to the news programs on the radio. By now we are all familiar with the five or six hour time difference between the EAstern US and Western Europe, and that time difference meant that our morning news allowed us to hear what had happened in Europe that day. I can remember General Eisenhower's  broadcast announcing the D Day landings and the accounts of the surrender of the Germany (VE Day) in May, 1945. 

On the late afternoon, afternoon because these events were happening a day away in the Pacific, around 6 P.M. on Tuesday, August 14, 1945, the announcement of the Japanese surrender was broadcast. 

The daily life of a little kid is pretty much the same day-in-day-out.  The school year, weekend days, summer vacation all roll together and it is impossible to single out any one day.  I suspect this is the same for just about everyone.  The exception is, of course, on those days when something so terrible or so memorable happened that makes it impossible to forget.

From 5 to 6 P.M. I would have been listening to kid radio shows like Jack Armstrong, All American Boy, Uncle Don, and Captain Midnight, and others I have forgotten.  On that day they would have been interrupted by the news of the Japanese surrender.

Pop worked in New York City, along with the Dad’s of my friends –Charlie, and Eddie.  Like all Dads they commuted into the city on the Long Island Rail Road, leaving at 7 in the morning and returning about 7 in the evening.  Since the announcement was made at around 6 P.M. we believed that they would not have had the opportunity to hear the news before they boarded their trains to come home. Many commuters, Pop among them, drove back and forth to the station.  If the Moms drove, they waited at the station, kids in the back seat, to pick up their husbands and drive home for dinner.

Amityville was a village of just 700 families and our ‘downtown’ ran from the railroad tracks in the north south along Broadway to the Triangle Building near the schools  – about three blocks.  The stores I can remember are Christopher’s Stationary, two pharmacies – Phanamiller’s and Polaski’s -- a movie theater, Woolworth’s 5 and 10 cents store, Fisher’s Soda Fountain Shop, the Bank of Amityville, and Geneco’s Grocery.  Phanamiller’s phone number was Amityville 1! 

The exact center of town was where Union Avenue crossed Broadway, and magically became Greene Street.   Phanamiller’s and the Bank of Amityville were on the west corners and St. Martin’s was just down Union Street to the east.  Hanging over the center of the intersection was a traffic light – one of three in town – held in place by wires anchored to poles on each of the four corners.

Mom and I walked down to the railroad station to meet Pop as he drove home, in our light brown 1939 Dodge sedan, and give him the news.  To our amazement we found intersection of Broadway and Union Street jammed with cheering people. Not so surprising when yiou raelize that just about everypoonein our tyown was in some was connected personally to the war -- whether work at the airplane factories, loved ones in the service, or just doing their bit what with wartime rationing.

As the commuters drove up  from the railroad station parking lots to the light at the intersection everyone cheered.  If their family was waiting they jumped in the car and drove off, horn beeping for all it was worth.  Someone tossed a roll of toilet paper over the light – the paper-streaming out behind.  Soon, and many a toilet paper roll later, the light and the intersection was totally covered in the white paper.  Who started it, or where the rolls came from I do not know.  That is the most enduring memory I have of that day.

When Pop arrived, he picked us up and we ended the day having dinner down at the Unqua Corinthian Yacht Club.  Pop had saved some fireworks all through the war. They were in a glass coffee jar down in the basement.  He promised that when the war finally ended we would set them off.  I looked at that jar everyday during the four long years of the War. My long wait finally ended with a bang!

For me – just two months short of my Eleventh birthday it was a time for celebration.  We Won!

For the grownups the feeling was one of relief – its finally over [no exclamation point].