I left home at nineteen years of age when I had been drafted into military service. When asked where I was from, I would say Long Island. Invariably, I would be asked to please be more specific. To that, I would answer, the east end. By that time the inquisitive stranger usually moved on, their curiosity having been satisfied, or having concluded that I was simply being an ass. Truth be known, there was no easy answer to that simple question.
Before ten years of age, I lived on the north shore in the Riverhead township, bouncing around between Flanders, Calverton, and Riverhead proper. From ten to seventeen, I lived on the south shore in the Southampton Township, in the quaint little off-the-beaten-path hamlet of Speonk (pronounced spee-ahhhnk, much like the sound an old goose makes). Following my high school graduation, the family once again relocated. This time, it was to Westhampton. Westhampton had an air of wealth associated with it: nothing substantive, mind you, strictly “air” in our case. Nonetheless, it became my hometown of choice, and the place to which I would return again throughout the remainder of my life.
Speonk was where I built forts and treehouses, explored the woods for hours and days on end. Out of oak, and a fascination with the history of the island’s Shinnecock Indians, I chiseled and painted totem poles, which I sold to summer tourists out of a makeshift roadside stand with a sign that read: “TOTEMS - Me Makem. You Takem.”
Entertainment back then consisted of imagination and whatever I could find to do outdoors. Television was not the altar of the home it has become today. Our family owned a small, state-of-the-art, black and white TV having only a dozen channels changed by turning a dial by hand. There was no such thing as a remote control. Of the positions on the knob, we received only three broadcast channels. Signal reception was via a rooftop antenna mounted on the chimney. There was no cable TV. There was no Internet or WiFi. There were no personal computers or smart phones. The family had only one phone, a landline device attached to a wall in the kitchen. Coming Home is seasoned with selections reminiscent of my childhood.
I lived for the weekends and summers when I would get rescued from my Lord of the Flies Speonk world by relatives who took me to their potato truck farm on the north shore. I rode for long hours on planters, combines, tractors, and trucks. I spent days and hours picking string beans, lima beans, and peas by the bushel basket. Picked strawberries for ten cents a quart, and physically moved heavy irrigation pipes, one at a time, across the rich, wet, nearly knee-deep muddy farmland soil. At ten cents a pipe, that was good money back then: the price of a 12 oz. bottle of soda pop, or two full-sized candy bars. For a buck, a boy could buy enough candy to put himself into sugar shock.
Work was hard, and play was equally as hard. Both were nothing less than euphoric. My cousin Tom and I built and raced soapbox cars down Suicide Hill, quite appropriately named. The wrecks were dramatic and spectacular. Somehow, we survived our childhood. When entering our teens, we graduated to our racing around the farm fields in Tom’s stripped-down hotrod beater of a car. Back home on the south shore, I terrorized the flora and fauna in the back woods behind the wheel of my own stripped-down beater, the Fifth Avenue Taxi.
Cherished childhood memories…gosh, those were the days!