“Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave and grow old wanting to get back to.”
-John Ed Pearce
I grew up on Long Island wanting to spend my adult life some place they wrote songs about. After bouncing around during my twenties, I settled in Ohio and have never left. Although Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young got a hit out of the Vietnam Era rocker “Ohio”, that wasn’t the kind of song I had in mind. Yet, I learned to find another kind of poetry in Ohio’s gently rolling hills, its acres upon acres of corn and beans, and the charm of its small towns and villages.
There comes a time, however, when circumstances take you home again with a fresh set of eyes. That happened recently when my cousin Carl invited a small group of native Long Islanders to his spectacular home overlooking Cold Spring Harbor – an arm of the Long Island Sound.
Because I’m older and hopefully wiser, my visit caused me to see how places tend to mature the same way people do.
A Middle-Class Wonderland
During the Fifties, Sixties and early Seventies, when I was growing up, suburban Long Island was a middle-class wonderland. Close to but not part of New York City, Nassau and Suffolk Counties still retained many colonial remnants of their agricultural and maritime past. Although few of its famous duck and potato farms remained, most of the seafood I ate as a kid was caught in Long Island’s local waters within hours of being served. Many of the neighboring towns, especially those with funny sounding Algonquian names[i], could easily have been located further north on the New England coast. Long Islanders enjoyed having 1,180 miles of sandy seashore, an elaborate park system credited to the visionary Robert Moses, a thriving aerospace industry that produced the Lunar Excursion Model which landed on the Moon, excellent public schools and some of the earliest shopping malls, such as Roosevelt Field.
By the time my family moved from the Bronx to Long Island, developers like William Levitt had perfected the concept of “suburban sprawl”. To meet the demand created by returning WWII veterans armed with the GI Bill, these builders blanketed the largest grassland east of Appalachia with low cost[ii], mass-produced homes. The housing they built was monotonous and in some ways tacky, but it offered first time home buyers an affordable, safe environment to raise a family.
During the fourteen years I lived on Long Island, I attended local public schools from grades K through 12. I worked a variety of entry-level jobs after school and during the summer, got around on a bicycle until I was old enough to drive, and experienced what some described as the greatest “Melting Pot” ever known. Almost all my friends and schoolmates were from first- or second-generation families, which meant they had parents or grandparents who still spoke foreign languages at home and followed Old World customs. But unlike the ethnic enclaves of Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, where most of us had lived before becoming Long Islanders, the Island offered an exciting mix of cultures and conveniences to anyone seeking the American Dream.
Little Socio-Economic Stratification
Perhaps I was naïve, but I rarely noticed the socio-economic stratification of the times. I’m sure it existed elsewhere in the United States of America, but it wasn’t a big factor where I lived. We all had the same black and white TVs, rode in the back of similar American-made station wagons, and had none of the technology today’s kids expect to have. To me, everyone on Long Island, minorities included, appeared “middle class”.
I remember once being invited to the home of a kid whose father was the CEO of a major motion picture company. Aside from the home having a screening room where we saw a film weeks before it was to be released in the theatres, the rest of the home seemed only slightly nicer than the one I lived in. I also recall delivering canned foods and a turkey to an underprivileged family as part of a Key Club service project in high school. Although the recipients certainly appreciated our club’s charity, their home didn’t reflect the kind of poverty I later witnessed in various parts of the US and abroad.
Today’s Long Island
Whereas Long Island’s middle class was ascendant during my formative years, today it’s a shadow of its former self. That became immediately clear during my recent visit. Landing at the newly refurbished LaGuardia Airport, I was struck by the dozens of needle-like residential high-rises piercing the City’s skyline. I suppose if you’re wealthy enough to live in Manhattan, you’d want to put as much distance as possible between yourself and the streets. In contrast, the crumbling infrastructure of New York’s working-class boroughs and the less affluent parts of the Island looked as though it hadn’t been maintained since I left. The gap between rich and poor had certainly grown, and now Third World Socialism is said to be knocking on the City’s door.
Remembering the Good Times
Against that backdrop, it was still good to remember the good times when the world seemed to be a much simpler place. Admittedly, my childhood was at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The Nation had become prosperous enough to fund Great Society programs like Medicare, food stamps and subsidized public housing. A whole host of civil right issues remained to be addressed, but for the most part Americans celebrated being the most advanced, democratic nation in the world.
As my cousins and I laughed at photos from our childhood and walked along the Island’s scenic waterfronts, our conversations re-kindled memories that caused us to smile no matter what was going on in the world today. Although the dreams of our younger years have been mostly achieved or forgotten, new ones about the lives of our children and grandchildren have taken their place.
Was Thomas Wolfe Right?
American author Thomas Wolfe wrote:
“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to your romantic love, back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and fame . . . back home to the old forms and old systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”[iii]
I don’t fully agree with this famous quote from Thomas Wolfe’s 1940 novel. There are three things about our past that should be considered timeless. Because they are immutable qualities of God, I see truth, goodness and beauty as transcendental values that never change. At whatever age we encounter them, they become etched into our being and remain fixed through every chapter of life.[iv]
The lessons I learned as a child, intentionally or not, have stayed with me all these years. I came to love literature and expository writing because of a high school English teacher. I learned truth from witnessing the goodness of people who took the time to teach me life’s lessons. I developed an appreciation for the beauty of music that became the never-ending soundtrack of my life. Yes, as an adult, I’ve learned other things too. I continue to learn today. However, the core of what I believe is true, what I consider good and what I see as beautiful was largely shaped by those early years on Long Island. I will gladly return to those precepts at any time.
[i] Manhasset, Shinnecock, Montauk, Amagansett and my hometown Massapequa, among others.
[ii] In the 1950s, when my parents purchased their 1,000 square foot “Cape Cod” style home, the average house only cost about 2-1/2 years of wages for a single-income family. Today, the income ratio in most cities is between 8 and 16 years of wages for a dual-income family.
[iii] You Can’t Go Home Again, Harper & Row (1940).
[iv] See Peter Kreeft, “C.S. Lewis’s Philosophy of Truth, Beauty and Goodness,” IVP Academic, print on demand edition, June 15, 2008.
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