TF, this is really great. Thanks for the link as well.
Hope you're having a super 4th! Hot as hell I imagine, good ol' Houston in the summertime... sticky here too.
TMH,
Glad you liked it. The weather here is not hot at all, lots of thunder showers are keeping us cooler, wetter, and looks to be that way all week.
Going to my kids house for dinner, see the grandkids and fireworks in the front yard, weather permitting.
Hope you holiday is all it should be too. TF
TF-- Great post--a bit scary, tho in that I was raised in Massapequa, as was my wife--virtually all of our family members still live there!
Only problem-- Massapequa was virtually unsettled back then and, unfortunately, the South Shore of Long Island was a bastion of Tory sympathizers-- indeed most of the families for which the towns were named-- Hewlett, Lawrence etc had to flee to Nova Scotia after the war.
Still, imaginative and fun--thanks!
Tony,
I picked Massapequa because I grew up on Long Island and had a great sense of history, the history that was literally all around me. We had a Revolutionary War cemetery at the end of our street where Parker Avenue and Seaman’s Neck Road intersected. My brother and I would look at the dates on the head stones, many going back into the 1700’s, as we walked carefully and respectfully through the small lot to get to the “great forest” which lay behind it. That great forest was probably the sized of a standard lot; but to a couple of kids with imagination we were transported through time, back to when Tackapausha granted a small piece of land to the settlers. We would cut trails through the briars and we even had a small tree house back there.
The oldest family in the area was the Sparks. I attended J. Fred Sparks elementary school, named after the fellow who had owned most of the land which became Levittown. My brother and I had been told that their home and surrounding area was haunted, that she was a wicked old witch and never to get caught; if you have seen the movie, Big Fish, that should explain a lot. My brother and I spied on the place long enough to figure out that the story wasn’t true. We went over and knocked on her back door one day, introduced ourselves and were invited to help with the boiling of some clams. Our family became friendly with his elderly wife and son; J Fred having gone the way of the world prior to my time here. The Spark’s house is still there, along with a huge workshop that we would go inside. I think the son’s name was Pat; not sure after all these years. It was indeed like traveling through time when we visited that house; everything was a piece of history there.
I remember going on bike rides, totally without my parent’s permission or knowledge when I was about 7 – 8 years old to an arboretum; I believe it was called the Tackapausha Preserve, that was several miles away from our home. We also rode our bikes to Jones Beach, also quite a ways from our home. How we survived our childhood is one of God’s mysteries; however, I came away with a deep and abiding respect for those who established our country and began this “Great Experiment” we call America.
I was in the back yard of one of my friends digging in the dirt along the back fence line when I found a piece of silverware. It had become one with the dirt around it, having been there for a long time and so I was quite certain that I’d found part of a buried treasure, something left by the pirates, the colonials; anything but a butter knife that had been borrowed from his mother’s flatware set and gotten lost on a prior opportunity to dig in the dirt. We dug up most of his yard that year looking for the rest, the gold coins, the daggers, the gemstones and maybe even an old flintlock pistol. We never found anything else.
A couple of years ago I took Lucy and we went on an extended weekend trip to NY. That weekend, just before
...just before Christmas, it snowed on the Sunday we had designated to visit my old house in Levittown. We drove out the Southern State Parkway and got off on Wantagh, going by memories of forty years earlier. The Revolutionary War cemetery had been fenced in with a tall and ugly chain link eyesore, padlocked to keep out the vandals. It spoiled the setting, those who lay beneath the snow covered patch of ground, their head stones covered by the blanket of snow made it look much like a utility easement instead of a place in history. Maybe if we’d seen it without the snow it would have been a little better, oh well.
That about sums up why I picked Massapequa; could have been Merrick or any of the old village names.
TF
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