Freeport: 1941-1948 -The War Years
I was seven years old when we moved to Freeport. Although these were the war years, and the names Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin were later to become familiar to me, World War II was only a background to growing up. (Nancy, being older, may have had a better understanding of the momentousness of the events and been more affected.) My information on the war came mostly from black and white Fox-Movietone newsreels at Saturday afternoon movies: helmeted Nazis goose-stepping before the Führer; Mussolini, pork-faced and jowly, a seeming caricature of a villain, rallying his troops in a huge plaza; terrifying (or perhaps terrified) Japanese soldiers screaming and crashing through jungles. I was not then aware of the Holocaust, the death trains, and the concentration camps, but somehow I “knew” about the Japanese, that they were expert torturers, infamous for devising excruciatingly cruel ways to force prisoners to talk. One rumored method that struck particular terror to my heart was the jamming of bamboo sticks under a prisoner’s fingernails and then setting the sticks afire. Whether the Japanese actually did this or not, I do not know, although I know now that it would have been far from the worst form of torture they practiced. But to me, it was the most horrifying, the one we whispered about, and I could feel the pain under my seven-year-old fingernails. Even today the memory tenses my shoulders and sends shivers down my spine.
Because we lived in a coastal village on the south shore of Long Island, nighttime blackouts were a continuing feature of the war. We were warned that enemy submarines, believed to be lurking offshore, could use our house lights to determine strategic locations of wartime installations. In our case, this was the nearby Mitchell Air Force Base. A single light, we were admonished, could unleash devastation, and whoever failed to adhere to the rules might be branded a traitor. I worried that if the enemy were close enough to see our lights, mightn’t he just come ashore and capture us? We were also warned not to give out information about where anyone in the armed forces was stationed. A ubiquitous poster of the day was a face with a cautionary finger across the lips and the caption: “A Slip of the Lip Could Sink a Ship.” The weight of civilian responsibility was heavy.
All houses were fitted out with heavy blackout shades, which we were careful to keep closed after dusk. Our dining room had a large bay window with three shades, at one time painted on by our mother, but also by guests who frequented the Freeport house in those years and were invited to paint on them. I have wondered what happened to those shades with works by Bradley’s photo-journalist friends, some of whom, like Andreas Feininger, later became well known. Bradley was an air-raid warden, and wore a white metal helmet as he went about the neighborhood, making sure that everyone had their shades tightly drawn.
Mother served in a corps of civilian plane spotters and also as a volunteer at Mitchell Air Force Base. On Saturday nights she drove a canteen truck, carrying food, drink, and women volunteers to the base to entertain the soldiers. To our disappointment, we were not allowed to go with her in the evenings, no matter how strongly we pleaded. It wasn't the soldiers we were interested in, but rather the chance to ride in the truck, with its impressively efficient Pullman-like fittings of stove, refrigerator, sink, and cabinets.
Food rationing was integral to the war years. Civilian families were issued monthly ration books containing a limited number of coupons for basic commodities such as sugar and butter, as well as for scarce non-food items: shoes, gasoline, and tires. In a family of five growing children, the rationing meant that shoes, as well as clothes, were handed down from one child to another. As for “butter,” what we were actually able to buy was margarine or “oleo.” Oleo came in a one-pound block and was pure white. In the box with it was a small yellow tablet of food coloring, which we kneaded into the oleo to give it the proper butter-yellow color. There was no noticeable lack of sugar, but of course I wasn’t the cook and perhaps not aware of the substitutions Mother may have made. Maybe we didn’t use much—I don’t recall desserts as a feature of the meals I remember from those years, not the way I remember oatmeal, red beans and rice, and ham and chicken gumbos. Perhaps, with Josie and Daddy’s [Bradley’s parents] coupons as part of the household ration, we simply had enough sugar. Daddy Smith was, or became, an expert fudge-maker, and sugar was clearly needed for that, but that may have been after the war. I had heard, but only vaguely understood, talk of “the black market.” I don't know if we ever acquired any extra rations that way, although bartering was permissible. If you didn’t want your sugar ration but pined for more coffee, an exchange with friends or neighbors could be arranged.
Air raid drills were a regular exercise in school. Although we soon became quite blasé about them, we responded rapidly to the sound of the air raid siren. The teachers moved urgently about, lining us up in orderly single file and shepherding us into the halls where we would sit on the floor, backs against the wall, knees up, heads bent over our knees, hands clasped behind our heads. We retained that posture--or risked a not-so-gentle warning rap on the shoulder--until the all-clear sounded. The school also helped to organize our contributions to the war effort. Students were encouraged to buy war bonds on the installment plan by buying ten-cent savings stamps once a week and pasting them in a war bond booklet. There were weeks when I didn’t have ten cents and suffered humiliation at not being able to march up to the teacher’s desk with the others, present my dime, and receive a stamp in my booklet. When we had saved approximately $18, we had enough to purchase a $25 bond. Girls and boys alike were also encouraged to knit squares that were later sewn together by some higher authority, perhaps the Red Cross, to make blankets. These were destined for those in England made homeless by the war. We heard much about “Bundles for Britain” and in my mind’s eye I pictured stacks of multicolored squares, knit by American school children, tied up in bales to be transported by troop ship to our counterparts in England, whom we had seen in the newsreels, huddled in air raid shelters, wide-eyed and clinging to their parents.
And that was my experience of World War II, except for occasional broadcasts when I happened into the living room as Mother or Bradley or Josie or Daddy were listening to Edward R. Murrow from London. Murrow’s voice was memorable even if the events he recounted seemed unrelated to our relatively carefree childhood. We knew, personally, no one who was in the war, except my father’s younger brother, LeMoyne, who lived in the mid-West and was rarely seen. The news reports, the battles lost or won, the casualties---all happened in a time and place very distant from our own lives. It was years later before I became fully aware of the severity of the Blitz in England, of Normandy and D-Day, of Dresden, and so many other significant events and battles of the war.
More about Freeport: 1941-1948
When we arrived in Freeport, we moved into a large frame dwelling at 229 Whaley Street, on the south side of town. Even today I can remember almost every square inch of that spacious, comfortable house, with its high ceilings, large rooms, wrap-around front porch, and ample yard. In the mid-80s, a friend who had business in Freeport went, at my bidding, to Whaley Street and sent me a photograph of the house. Surprisingly, it looked just as large as I remembered—and in rather better condition—unlike the New Orleans house, visited after my marriage in 1953, which defied my memory, so reduced in size was it compared to my recollections.
The Whaley Street house was entered through a vestibule, where Nancy and I would pause before going to school to remove the knee-length, pink cotton drawers that Mother had convinced herself would keep us from being laid low by the viruses of winter. The vestibule led into a large entry hall with a stairway that made a 90-degree turn about two-thirds of the way up. This area was notable for two reasons: Terry and Michael, in their never-ending role of bratty little brothers, used to wait for my boyfriends to come in the front door and then spit down on them. The second reason stemmed from Mother's decision to have the hall wall-papered and her hiring of a paperhanger. The wall was a map of the world print, and she was very pleased with the result. Unfortunately, the following day, the paper had begun to peel off and hung in sorry-looking limp strips. Mother resolved the matter by heading off to the Nassau County Court in Mineola to sue the paperhanger in small claims court. She was awarded $50, but I don't recall what happened afterward.
Downstairs there were two living rooms, divided by sliding doors that served as curtains for our theatrical productions, the “stage” being in the rear room. Off the back living room there were a dining room, and a kitchen with two pantries, and a back stoop where the milkman left milk in glass bottles in an insulated tin box. Despite the insulation, the milk would freeze in the winter, thrusting the yellow cream, and its crimped silver cap, up over the top. The kitchen had door that led to the basement, which housed the furnace and a large coal storage bin, and Bradley’s darkroom. Coal delivery was a neighborhood event. The driver would pull the truck into our driveway, open a basement window, and position a chute from the truck through the window into the coal bin. All the nearby children would gather to watch and listen as the shiny, black coal rattled down the tin chute. We sighed as it gradually slowed down, signaling the end of that mesmerizing procedure, and turned our attention back to whatever game was at hand.
Upstairs were five bedrooms, plus two more in a large attic. Although I can only recall one bathroom—here my memory fails—I feel sure there must have been at least another half-bath somewhere. There were nine of us, including Josie and Daddy, and in the summers sometimes eleven, when Steve and Bobby were there. The number and cast of characters varied, but many friends of my parents were often with us on weekends, and full occupancy of the seven bedrooms was the norm. A memorable incident, which remains a family joke, occurred when photographer Ewing Krainin, on one of his early visits, was spending the weekend with a current girlfriend (they were invariably models he had met during the course of business, and consistently beautiful). Josie and Daddy had a bedroom in the attic, and there was a second guest bedroom that had been assigned to Ewing. Thus it happened that one night Ewing, after a hot shower in the second-floor bathroom, wrapped himself in a towel, scrambled up the stairs to the attic, threw open the door to the bedroom he thought was his, and announced, “Here I am—all sweet and clean and ready for love!” Unfortunately it was the wrong door, and his declaration was made to an astonished Josie. Even now, years later, “Here I am—all sweet and clean….” remains the punch line that brings a smile to those of us who knew Ewing.
Ewing’s other contribution to family “tag lines” came from a business card that he had printed with Japanese characters and text on one side and on the other, in English, “Hooray, hooray, the first of May! Outdoor fucking starts today.” In our family, one only has to say “Hooray, hooray….” and the meaning is clear. Of all the many guests who became part of our extended family in those days, Ewing was decidedly the most colorful and memorable. He traveled on assignment to faraway places and always arrived on Christmas Eve with a suitcase laden with exotic gifts that he would wrap crudely in newspaper and mark for each of us. There were Indian saris, golden boxes in the shape of swans from Bangkok, lengths of colorful material from Burma and Africa, jewelry and perfume. But one gift from Ewing in early Freeport days that I'll never forget was an enormous, commercial-size jar---maybe 2 gallons---of black olives. Never had I seen so many olives! Somehow he had discovered my bliss. It was thrilling, and I felt very special that Christmas.
Ewing rarely stayed long and he frequently amazed us by letting us examine his airline tickets, which were folded, not stapled together the way they are today. He would hold the ticket high and let it unfold like an accordion until it reached the floor. We would peer at all the foreign destinations—Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Athens, Jakarta, Rangoon, Hong Kong, Cairo, Zanzibar—and could barely imagine such thrilling adventures as his tickets offered. A final word about Ewing: it was from him that I first heard the word “sexy.” I didn’t know what it meant but I was able to glean a sense of its sensuousness. He and one of his girlfriends, Skye Patrick, sat at the breakfast table one weekend morning, wearing identical red flannel shirts, eating and obviously enjoying some cantaloupe that my mother had served. The cantaloupes were fragrant and sweet as nectar, with tender, juicy flesh. Ewing, bright-eyed, smiled and pronounced the melons “sexy.” Like a scene from Tom Jones, he and Skye looked at each other, slurping and smiling with a pleasure that clearly came from more than the food. Ewing continued to be central to our Christmases even when we later moved to Brookfield Center.
Bradley’s sister Evelyn and her husband Dave, and Dave’s son-by-a-former-marriage, Bruce, were also frequent visitors. From Bruce I first heard the word “piss,” which I thought shocking but pleasing in its daring. I tucked it away for future reference. Bruce initiated my younger brothers, Terry and Michael, into the joys of the pissing contest. There was a large section of fallen tree trunk in the back yard, where Bruce would line up a row of half a dozen tin can targets. The goal was to aim their streams at the cans and knock them off the log. Having two girls as audience heightened Bruce’s bravado, and, as he was the oldest boy, he always won. Much later I learned that American men might revisit this childhood game. A Dutch firm was awarded a contract to manage the JFK Arrivals building in New York, and proposed having a black fly etched into each of the building’s porcelain urinals, a design element that in the Amsterdam Airport has encouraged users to hit the target, thereby reduced spillage by a not inconsequential 80 percent. Even boys will be boys, apparently, even big boys.
When we arrived in Freeport in the early summer of 1941, I was soon to enter the third grade at Archer Street School. The school was a short walk from our Whaley Street house, about three blocks, close enough to come home for lunch everyday; no lunch offered at school. My teacher’s name was Mrs. Dings. It did not occur to us then, although it did later, to make fun of the name; rather we treated her with the unquestioned respect that was the norm for those times and for our ages. Mrs. Dings was a kindly, placid sort, with short, wavy gray hair and a pink, well-powdered, complexion. She was probably in her early fifties. She was a bit dull, but we liked her, followed her instructions, learned our arithmetic tables, and improved our reading skills. For me, it was a year of adapting to the new neighborhood, the new school, the playground etiquette, and of making friends. The relative freedom of Archer Street School vis à vis the Catholic school I’d previously attended was distinctly liberating. As I mentioned earlier, WWII was something in the background.
I had many friends and few enemies. My two best friends were Laura Jean Vought, who lived behind us on the next street, and Mary Cleary, a twin from a family of 12 children (a 13th died shortly after birth, my first attenuated encounter with death), who lived two blocks away. Laura Jean’s angelic looks were belied by her lively, impish personality. Her yellow hair was thick and curly, and she had a deep dimple in her right cheek. In our home theatrical productions, she was inevitably the female lead, most notably in The Purple-Haired Princess, an early artwork inspired by recycling the purple grass from our Easter Baskets. It featured Laura Jean in a borrowed gown, her crowning glory tucked into a hair net and hidden by purple shredded cellophane. The uncritical, enthusiastic audience consisted of parents and other neighborhood children; standard admission was a few cents. Laura Jean had a false front tooth, the result of an accident just after her permanent teeth came in, and she was able to slid the fake tooth in and out at will with her tongue, displaying a dark empty space in the midst of her otherwise dazzling smile. This moveable tooth was unknown to most, and it was only after I became her best friend that I was permitted to see it. At school sometimes she would catch my eye and slip her tooth out, grinning wickedly. This was guaranteed to crack me up, and nearly uncontrollable giggles would have to be swallowed lest the teacher look my way. Laura Jean was my right-brain companion: we made up stories, invented practical jokes and dare-devilish games, and acted out of our imaginations.
By comparison my friend Mary Cleary was plain, but her strong sculptural face was handsome, cheekbones sprinkled with very fine freckles, a straight nose, slightly upturned at the tip. Her hair was straight, shoulder-length, and the color of pale ginger; her eyes velvety brown, her mouth wide, her teeth even, and her smile friendly. There was a knowledgeable and self-sufficient air about her. Mary was among the oldest in her large family, solid and unspoiled. (Her twin, Johnny, was smaller, with unexceptional brown hair, and in appearance shared only the straight nose and freckles.) Mary was a practical companion. We played outdoor games, gathered rocks, studied together, completed simple tasks for her mother, Rose, and helped to care for her younger brothers and sisters. Chores at a friend’s house held a certain exoticism and never seemed like work, much to my own mother’s exasperation, she later confided, when I would come home and bubble, “Oh, we had a wonderful time at Mary’s house! We washed the dishes! (or hung out the laundry, or folded the diapers, etc.).”
Laura Jean and Mary were the closest of a neighborhood of friends and companions. When I think now of my own children and realize that one was entering third grade when we moved to Red Hook, as I was when we moved to Freeport, and consider how different the rural environment was from the one into which I moved at the same age, I often wonder at the difference it has made in their lives---whether for better or worse. My older sister, brothers, and I briefly experienced a rural environment in Hot Springs, but in Freeport we were surrounded by neighbors and playmates. Next door were the four Philbin children. Janet Philbin was distinguished in our young circle by having contracted ringworm on her scalp and having to have her head shaved. This, we all agreed, was a disaster. But when her pale brown, formerly straight, hair grew back in, it was curly! As I had often bemoaned my own straight hair, I was very tempted to apply scissors and razor to my head to see if it would regrow into curls. In the end, vanity prevented me from accepting the need to go to school with a cap on my head for the weeks it would take to see if the experiment worked, so I abandoned the idea and in my adolescence pursued curls through Toni home permanents, which never lasted more than a few weeks on my wiry, resistant hair.
In addition to the Philbins, there was Bobby Doxsee, who lived behind us and whose family garage was sufficiently close to an apple tree in our back yard that we could climb the tree, hop over to the garage roof, and jump the nine or ten feet to the ground. We all did it, the older ones sooner than the younger ones, and took great pride in surviving the shock that echoed up our shins as our feet hit the hard earth. It continues to astonish me that with six children over the years, no one ever broke an arm or a leg, although Mother’s leg was later broken when she was kicked by a horse. Terry, too, as a teenager, was in a serious accident involving a horse in which he broke no bones but lost a spleen.
Catty-cornered from us was a large house owned by the Weinstein family. Sandy, my contemporary, was an only son whose father was the proprietor of the neighborhood candy store on Bayview Avenue. It was known simply as “the candy store,” and was where we all converged to carefully spend our allowances, or any money that might otherwise have come into our possession. It was a time when a few pennies would buy an astonishing assortment of sweets: small packages of Necco wafers, dots (round dots of colored sugar on long, white paper strips, perhaps fifty or more dots for a penny), chocolate cigarettes covered in white paper with gold tips, tiny tootsie rolls, stick candy in all flavors, ropes of twisted licorice (red or black), cinnamon-red hots, nonpareils. Ice cream cones could also be purchased if one were flush, and, during a period when Sandy was my “boyfriend,” he would take my cone behind the counter and dip it—without charge—into a glass jar of chocolate sprinkles. Peach ice cream with chocolate sprinkles was my unswerving choice and delight.
Adult neighbors were also part of our lives in various ways. Directly across the street lived Marita and Derf Higman, a childless couple who were good, if not close, friends of our family. Theirs was a neat, rather formal, house, a place we could go without hesitation in an emergency. I was impressed by Derf’s position as a clarinet player in the Guy Lombardo Orchestra. Here was a real person whom I actually knew and whom I could listen to on the radio. Every New Year’s Eve, we listened faithfully at midnight to hear them play Auld Lang Syne. My admiration was amplified by the fact that Derf had possessed the imagination and daring to spell his real name, Fred, backward. Further away by a few blocks were close friends of Mother and Bradley, Al and Marian Gould. Al was dark-haired, slightly balding and stocky, while Marian was petite, with soft, shell pink flesh, wavy blond hair, pale blue eyes and an aura of sweet innocence. Marian was more worldly than her appearance suggested and she and my mother were frequently together, laughing, exercising to keep their figures, gossiping. Al and Bradley shared the profession of photography, although Al was a commercial photographer, not a photojournalist. My first modeling experience was posing for him for a Heinz pickle ad, for which I was paid the heady sum of $25. Once, later, I posed for my stepfather and had my picture in the New York Herald Tribune Sunday magazine for a feature called “Stoppers.” This was during the Korean War, and the photo brought a flood of letters from servicemen, sad, intriguing, and funny. The next, and last, modeling experience was not until 1955 in New York City, when Nancy, who worked for a magazine called The American Hairdresser, asked me to model a pony-tail to illustrate a how-not-to-wear-your-hair article. Later when I occasionally felt the need for extra funds and saw ads in small newspapers seeking models of “all ages,” I thought about those occasions and remember that it was never fun and always somewhat dehumanizing.
The fourth, fifth and sixth grades at Archer Street School were, on the whole, happy ones, each distinguished by the teacher’s personality and curricular bent. In fourth grade our teacher, Miss Eby, emphasized poetry and its memorization. Most of the lines of poetry I can still recite come from that time, (“Under the spreading chestnut tree, the village smithy stands. The smith a mighty man is he, with large and sinewy hands…..”) By fourth grade we were sufficiently courageous to compose a little ditty about Miss Eby giving us the heebie jeebies, which wasn’t, in fact, true. Presumably it was all the poetry that prompted it, for she was generally well liked. In fifth grade, the emphasis was on math, and it is to the credit of our teacher, Miss Ventress, a middle-age but lively redhead, that I remember that year as a satisfying one. It was certainly my last encounter with math that didn’t induce trauma. Mrs. Yarrow, my sixth grade teacher, was a large woman with iron gray hair cut like a man’s, probably close to retirement age, who did not appear to enjoy either her work or her students. The feeling was mutual. Behind her back she was known as “the Battleax.” She frequently yelled at us and would use a ruler to rap the knuckles of any student sitting within range who spokes out of turn or gave the wrong answer. She also had a nasty habit of throwing chalk, very hard and very fast, at the heads of those out of ruler range who were misbehaving. Sixth grade was the worst of the elementary school years, but we were all in it together and my classmates and I took comfort from each other.
When we were not in school, we did the usual things that children do. In winter we built snowmen and used our sleds. Sometimes we went to Randall Park, where there was a skating rink, and we wobbled around, weak-ankles curving inward, until our feet became too numb to continue. Very occasionally there would be a family outing to Bethpage, where there was another park, much larger and more exciting than anything near home, with trails groomed for organized sledding. Often we would go down two on a sled, one sitting in front, the other behind with arms around the first one, or sometimes we would lie down, one on top of another, and hurtle down steering into the biting wind. In warmer weather, sidewalks were covered with our chalk hopscotch games, and we rode bicycles, two-wheelers, showing our progress by the eventual disappearance of scabby knees. And, endlessly, we jumped rope, individually with our own ropes, sometimes very fast—hot pepper, we called it—and sometimes with a long rope, two people holding the ends, while we each skipped through, then went around the other side to do it again. Or we played high-water, low-water, the rope-holders raising the rope higher off the ground each time until there was only one person left who hadn’t touched the rope while jumping over. We spent long, dusky summer evenings playing hide-and-seek, and kick-the can. As we got older, these games sometimes took on a new dimension when hiding with a boyfriend provided the tingle of intimacy, as we crammed ourselves tightly together in a place where we were unlikely to be observed and could lean into each other’s warm breath and body heat.
Our circle of playmates was always in flux. There was a girl who lived at the end of our block, Patsy, I think her name was, whom no one liked. She desperately wanted to be part of our group, and occasionally we would let her play. Sometimes, in hide-and-seek when Patsy was “it,” everyone would, by consensus, simply go off and leave her watching warily for one of us to sneak back to base and give the cry “Olly olly oxen, all in free,” when, in effect, the game was over. We didn’t realize how cruel we were, but I cringe remembering it. Around another corner lived Gregory Fury, a brown-eyed, golden-haired boy with the coloring of a Raphael cherub. The extent to which he appeared angelic was in inverse ratio to his behavior, which was exceedingly demonic. One had to be very cautious of Gregory, whose beguiling ways were generally preliminary to unpleasant tricks. His parents were either dead or divorced and he lived with an aunt. We considered him an orphan, and excused him sufficiently to let him be part of our games if we needed another person.