New York's not my home...

...but it used to be.

A few weekends ago Nickelodeon ran a virtual festival of Brady Bunch episodes. Like a car wreck, I didn’t want to watch but couldn’t turn away either. It had been a long, long time since I sat and watched that many episodes of that show. When I was much younger I really enjoyed watching the Bradys when they came on. It would piss me off whenever Richard Nixon would preempt the show just so he could go on t.v. and proclaim that he was not a crook. I clearly recall telling my mom that I hoped George McGovern would win the 1972 presidential election because I hated Tricky Dick for taking the Bradys off the air on a number of evenings. I also recall my mom telling me it wasn’t nice to root for McGovern. Time would prove me correct. Even as a child I had better political instincts than my parents.

Most of the episodes I watched were from the early 1970s, and three things occurred to me as I watched. First, how many churchgoers these days grew up on that show, not knowing that the actor leading this iconic family was really gay? Hey folks! Your ideal dad putted from the rough! Second, how nice it must’ve been to deal with serious family problems in half an hour. Lastly, where was I in life when these episodes were first aired? At the time I was a youngster living on Long Island, enjoying life in the suburbs of New York.

Ever since that fateful Tuesday morning of the eleventh of September, 2001, I’ve felt what amounts to a certain homesickness for Long Island and New York. It’s a process that really started a few years before that with a sociology class I had and an assignment of researching and writing certain aspects of your family genealogy. At the time I was about to become a parent so gathering a family history was (and is) important to me. But none of this wouldn’t have been necessary had my family not moved from New York to Georgia better than thirty years ago. Why we moved is beyond me; ostensibly it was because my dad had found a job in Georgia, so we packed up the truck and headed south. Once I was asked what brought me to Georgia during voir dire while serving on jury duty. My response was: “I was nine years old and too young to argue with my parents.” That got a laugh from the gathered jury-fodder. But life once we got to Georgia was strikingly different from what it once was in New York.

At the time I was watching the Brady Bunch as first run episodes my family was living in Uniondale, home of the New York Islanders. One of our neighbors was a plumber who worked on the Nassau County Coliseum while it was being constructed; I remember him coming home on quite a few occasions wearing an eye patch because he had suffered some sort of injury. The neighborhood was typical suburbia: modestly sized houses with modestly sized yards, sidewalks that ran the entire length of the block (not common in Georgia), trees lining both sides of Hawthorne Avenue.

The house that we used to live in looked like it was originally built as a single family dwelling, but was divided into a two-family house when we were there. It was by no means a new house. In later years I had assumed it was built during the post-war boom of new housing construction on Long Island in the late 1940s. A check of the online property records for Nassau County showed that the house was actually built in 1924. We lived on the first floor, and I remember the layout very well. My brother and I shared a bedroom at the front of the house. There was a firehouse at the end of our block and I recall being awoken in the dead of night by the engines heading off to a call, our curtains a reddish glow from the lights on the trucks. The living room, which is probably much smaller than I remember, lead into the kitchen, where one would find the staircase which led to the basement. The basement made a great play area; my dad had set up a large sheet of plywood upon which he set up an HO scale train set, and my siblings and I would do art projects down there as well. The stairs leading down made a great launching pad for my GI Joe jeep, at least for the first two attempts after which it snapped in two thus depriving me of an opportunity to sell it on eBay for $200. The basement is also where the huge oil-fired furnace was located. The thing would heat the house very well during those cold Long Island winters, but at a price. It would suck every drop of moisture out of the air and then begin draining fluids from your body. As the saying goes, you’d have to be primed like a pump before you could work up a spit.

Our neighbors were great too. Right across the street from our house lived an elderly lady, Mrs. Rugheimer, or Ruggie as everyone called her. I really wish I had a time machine for many reasons. Her house was literally like walking into an antiques shop, a collection of items accumulated during her long life and her husband’s days working on the construction of the Panama Canal. As a kid I didn’t appreciate her house, and I think the scary bear skin rug you encountered when you entered her house had a lot to do with it. She taught me many things, including how to tie my shoes. You were also aware to be on your best behavior when Ruggie was around as she had no problems telling you when you were misbehaving and then letting your parents know. Ruggie was truly a one of a kind lady and a very special early influence in my life. She died in 1984 a few months shy of her 92nd birthday.

Next to us lived the Hanson family. Mr. Hanson was the plumber I mentioned earlier who worked on the Nassau County Coliseum. Mrs. Hanson was Irish (or maybe Scottish, I can’t remember exactly), and my parents would put one of the stereo speakers in the kitchen window and blare one of their albums of bagpipe music as a cue that it was time to come over for drinks. Across the street and next to Ruggie lived the Friedel family. Their kids were a little older than my siblings and me, but they were often guests in our yard and attendees at birthday parties.

There a quite a number of other kids in the neighborhood, you could ride your bike or big wheel all the way up the block without worrying about street traffic. You could also ride around the corner to Frank’s candy store for a sugar fix (if you had saved your pennies or the Tooth Fairy was generous) or to the Sunoco gas station, where I would go to complete my collection of NFL player stickers they were giving out in 1972 (or where my dad would take my brother’s bike and mine to put air in the tires only to know things had gone wrong by the sound of a small explosion as he over inflated them). The neighborhood where my mother-in-law lives in Michigan reminds me a lot of where I lived in Uniondale; so much so that the first time my wife and I visited her mom after our daughter was born I spent a fair amount of time just walking around the neighborhood and enthusiastically offering to shovel the driveway when it snowed (oddly enough nobody objected to my volunteering). I don’t know what the neighborhood on Hawthorne Avenue is like now, but thirty-five years ago it was a great place to be a kid.

I went to school at Cedar Street School for kindergarten, followed by California Avenue School for first through third grades. Miss Van Note was my kindergarten teacher at Cedar Street, and our afternoon class was her first teaching assignment after graduating from college back in 1970. I remember our classroom was a fairly large space with a bathroom at one side of the room, an area set up like a house at the other, and a collection of tables/desks in between. We did the usual kindergarten stuff—played with modeling clay, colored, got free play time, got to be kids. On one day in particular a nurse came to class to administer TB tine tests. The tests back then were quite different from how they do it today. The device used to inject the medicine into the skin to bring about a reaction looked like a small rubber stamp, except with four ominous looking needles sticking out of the bottom. To a five or six year old child it’s a very intimidating experience. But to make everyone feel better the nurse would take her pen and use the four needle marks on your forearm to make a bunny face out of it. To this date whenever I’m stuck with a needle I feel a compelling urge to turn the needle mark into a bunny face. Cedar Street School was razed in 1972 and turned into a park (it stood roughly where third base and the shortstop positions are on the ballfield).


California Avenue School was already about fifty years old when I went to school there, and it’s still around today though with a few additions to accommodate the increase in students. And I'll bet they still strictly enforce no street shoes on the gym floor. Red Chuck Taylors were my gym shoes of choice. Mrs. Braddick was my first grade teacher. I remember my sixth birthday fell on a school day, and I sat in her class first waiting for my mom to stop by with birthday cupcakes for the class, and then waiting to get home and play with the new hook and ladder firetruck I got for my birthday that year. Ms. McEachern was my second grade teacher. I don’t remember much from my second grade year, except for finding out my kindergarten teacher, Miss Van Note, transferred to California Avenue when Cedar Street School was closed, and my friend Rodney. Rodney was quite a rambunctious kid. Our classroom was on the second floor of the school that year, and quite often Rodney would climb up on the window sill and threaten to jump. Each time Ms. McEachern would get Rodney to climb down, yet another crisis averted. One day we had a substitute teacher, and Rodney decided it was time to test her and climb up on the window sill. “Come near me and I’ll jump,” he threatened (as he always did). The substitute went to get him off the sill and suddenly Rodney disappeared. Seconds later there’s a scream as Rodney landed in the holly shrubs below the window. For Christmas that school year I had the pleasure of drawing Rodney’s name for our inter-student present exchange. For whatever reason I told my mom that I wanted to give Rodney a cap gun. Bad call. Rodney began firing the thing in the classroom, which was promptly taken away from him. Luckily for Rodney he did that in 1972, not in 2006, where he’d probably be tasered, pepper sprayed, and possibly shot by one of those cop-wannabe “school resource officers.” I’m not sure if he ever got the thing back; maybe it’s still sitting in a drawer somewhere at California Avenue like the teacher’s desk drawer of confiscated booty from A Christmas Story.

Sports and entertainment were never short on supply in Uniondale. In the winters they would fill the tennis courts with water and create outdoor ice skating rinks. It was at the Uniondale public park that I learned to ice skate. It was there that I also found out how hard ice is when you fall on it. After we left New York it would be twenty-seven years before I would don ice skates again. It was during our last trip to Michigan in 2001 when I would go ice skating again. For the first few minutes it was a very dicey affair as I tried to figure out how to keep my balance. But after about ten minutes all the training I had undergone in Uniondale came back to me and I was skating fairly well for someone who hadn’t tried to balance themselves on two blades for almost three decades. During the warmer months there were backyard missions that GI Joe had to conduct, and untold numbers of dangerous jumps that our Evel Knievel stunt cycles performed. Of course there was little league baseball to play, and the team I played on would practice on the open field across the street from Uniondale High School. That year our team was sponsored by Associated Supermarket; our blue uniform shirts had a fairly large ‘Super A’ on the backs. I can’t remember how well our team did in 1974, but I do recall that I didn’t play very well my first year in little league and that our team went to Shea Stadium that spring to see a preseason game between the Mets and Yankees.

In the summer there were always parties going on either at our house or at a relative’s. I can recall many a summertime gathering at our house, in particular one evening when a few alcohol-emboldened family members, my dad included, went skinny dipping in our above ground pool which I had the unfortunate circumstance to witness. About the time they dove in Ruggie turned on her front porch light across the street, causing well-founded concern amongst the "adults" in the pool. I don’t remember it, but it was at a party at my uncle’s house when I was two years old that I learned to tap a keg and pull a beer (I didn’t drink, just played bartender). There's a picture in a photo album my mom prepared for me as a high school graduation present as proof of my all-important life lesson. It’s a skill that’s come in handy as I’ve gotten older.

Summertime entertainment would not be complete without mentioning watching Fourth of July fireworks at Eisenhower Park or waiting in line for milk at the Dairy Barn, a drive thru milk store, or trips to Jones Beach to go swimming. Of course, who could forget going to fire tournaments during the summer? To the uninitiated, these tournaments were in essence fire companies from all over Long Island who’d get together and compete in a series of skill drills: connecting hoses to hydrants; planting, raising, and scaling ladders. It sounds pretty simple but the tournaments are very competitive and damned impressive to watch. Check out someone’s album of fire tourney pix on Webshots. And these too.

There’s so much about New York and Long Island that I could write about, but I think I’ve rambled on enough. When I posted my comments for the fifth anniversary of 9/11 I emailed the link to one of my former neighbors from Uniondale. After almost thirty-two years she was a little surprised as to how much I still identify myself with New York. And I think what I wrote to her is a fitting end to this entry. I may have spent most of my life in Georgia but I’m still a New Yorker at heart. I’m a fan of the Giants and the Islanders. I’ve been to Safetytown, Nunley’s, and the Jolly Roger. I know you go to Eisenhower Park to play and Roosevelt Field to shop.

New York’s not my home. But it used to be.