Zach Peyton in front of Division Avenue High School. His dad is a 1961 graduate and his grandfather a distinguished long-time teacher.
By JEFF PEYTON
Class of 1961
Recently, I received a rare text from my son who is now living in Manhattan with his fiancé which included a photo of a sign shot from a rear car window: “Welcome to Levittown”.
I texted back: “Looks like Hempstead Tpke.?”
“YES”
“What are you doing?”
“Taking Marci to a friend’s Baby Shower”
“Where?”
“Somewhere on Gardiner’s Avenue… it’s in a pizzeria.”
“You know, you passed the site of Fiesta, at the corner of Hempstead Tpke. & Division Ave. The school is only a quarter mile north on Division. On the way back, you should take a picture of yourself in front. [Fat chance, I’m thinking]
Later Zach sends me a real time photo of 35 Snowbird Lane, the house I grew up in.. It’s painful to look at. Like it got stung by a giant bee all puffed up on some steroid bee toxin.
“This isn’t how it looked, right.”
“No. Hold on”
There is a folder on my desk of random old pictures. I pull 2 black & whites (‘52?) and photograph them and send them. They are pictures of kids: the true reference points in any pictures of early Levittown that reveal things. In the first one the kids (Joey Gallagher and Guy Johnson) are sitting where the driveway would be one day. In the second, there is Joey holding his baseball glove up with ball-in-pocket and standing between the bare-bone new but settled homes viewable in the background. This tech acrobatics is probably not needed as I think the house next door is still pretty much the same. Some Levitt homes, for better or worse, never get a major makeover.
“My battery is almost out” he texts. I figure that’s it.
But a short while later I get a picture of Zach standing in front of the school. I take it in. I don’t know why it matters. There’s the new generation. A young guy showing up to stand on turf his grandfather and father once walked on. The present has randomly asserted itself in the form of a gift, one of Forest’s feather landing on a field of our collective reverie.
I didn’t think to ask Zach to see if there was a jockstrap still hanging at a point way up the flag pole.
As I recall, Cornflower Road passed by the Levittown Community Church to the east, thanks to a fairly long banana curve going north and intersecting with Periwinkle. At the south end, near Division Avenue, Cornflower skirted the power lines that ran west clear to Newbridge Road.
The Cornflower Road time-space banana curve remains etched in my memory. I was driving to school with my dad, something I rarely did. I did not want to ride with him or be seen riding. I was nobody’s child. I walked. It was not cool having your dad (David Peyton) teach at the school you went to.
In the winter, walking to school was not always pleasant but it was a choice. What was a backpack? You carried your books to school. But this morning I was late and it had snowed. And so there I was “riding to school” with dad.The roads were slick with ice but clear of snow. As we approached Cornflower Road, the walkers glided by. Ahead, a car had turned onto Cornflower Road. (Actually, it would never really stop turning.) The car was familiar. It was Mrs. Gaskins’, Richard Gaskins’ mom. Unpredictable movement associated with her car was not unusual.
Immediately, dad’s driving teacher instincts kicked in. He slowed, being careful of course not to go into a skid. Mrs. Gaskins, however, was still turning. Time, yup, seemed to be standing still. She had entered “the mother of all skids”—a skid as long and as curved as Cornflower Road itself, a skid as simple as a forward pass line drawn on a play diagram. We could see it coming. Even though Mrs. Gaskins was clearly on the other side of the road, her vector was locking on.
My father, pathetically trying to mount a snow bank in a 1960 Comet, could not evade Mrs. Gaskins, now zeroing in, her face quizzically framed in her windshield. The sound of the impact crunched the air. Thus it happened that two cars kissed, steam rising, on Cornflower Road on a frosty morning.
The walkers stopped, gathered, and looked. A scene out of a Little Lulu comic book. Wow. An accident. Mr. Peyton, the driver ed. teacher, in an accident. And me smiling wistfully at passers by, the crackle of snow under the feet, feeling more sorry for my dad than for myself.
Tim and Mitch Lavey are shown "guarding" early Levittown.
Ed Lavey was a wordsmith, storyteller, poet, artist, photographer and teacher.
Levittown CapeCods in 1951. The trees and bushes had yet to flourish and no dormers or garages are in sight, just three youngsters enjoying a sunny day.
Click on photos to enlarge.
By JEFF PEYTON
Class of 1961
My childhood friend from up the street, Bob Vitrone, and I took Kevin Byrne to Yankee Stadium. It was a doubleheader in 1961 and we watched Roger Maris en route to 61 home runs poke one into the right field stands. Not long ago, Kevin’s reflection on that day was published in Newsday’s “Thanks for the Memories” column.
“My favorite memory of Yankee Stadium was my first trip there as a 12 year old in 1961. Jimmy Piersall was in center field for the Indians. Two men jumped onto the field and ran toward Piersall.He fended them off and kicked one in the rear as he ran away. The crowd went crazy. Mickey Mantle was standing on second base with an umpire laughing,” according to Kevin.
From Armand Tarantelli, who was like a brother to my dad, I learned to drive. Both were long-time Division Avenue teachers. That I have come this far accident-free and still alive and my family safe, I have Mr. T largely to thank. (Tarry lives around the corner from Kevin Byrne in Levittown.) It has been one of the greatest pleasures to know Tarry and his wife, Ines, better than I ever did so many years ago.
I couldn’t hit or throw a baseball accurately in high school, but I played Pony League and as a catcher could stop most pitches and took many a throw from the outfield standing my ground at the plate. Pete Cybriwsky asked me to catch him for several weeks in preparation for tryouts with Yankee Rookies. Perhaps he asked others. Pete saw something in me that I was struggling to see in myself.
I took his friendship with me to NYU where I made the freshman team. I hit .400 that year, batted fourth in the line up, and played third base. Few would ever know or care, but at one of the reunions Frank Barning brought the subject up. He had stumbled over a record of my private achievement while looking through some old score books when he was the sports information director at Hofstra.
Pete wrote these words to me in my father’s 1960 yearbook. “Jeff, You are one guy in next year’s class that this school will be proud to graduate. You’ve got the intestinal fortitude of a warrior and a heart that is kind and aware of others. Thanks for letting me be your friend.”Pete, who died way too young, was early Levittown's star pitcher.
Ed Lavey was my friend and a friend to many—a soul teacher. I loved seeing him walk through the door of my house, with a broad, warm smile and a pipe that radiated friendship. I walked by the Laveys’ Orchid Road house on the way to school every day. Sometimes I’d poke my head in and end up wishing I could spend the morning and skip school. Ed was a wordsmith, a storyteller, poet, artist, photographer and teacher, He painted with passion and imagination in his carport studio. He was always involved in discourse or dialectic — deep in Thomas Merton, Alan Watts, Haiku, Zen. ‘Roofsmith’ in bold black stood out on his bright yellow truck. Ed worked hard, mostly by himself, although my classmate Wally Linder worked with him for a while. There’s an honorary picture of Ed in the 1961 yearbook because he took and developed many of its pictures.
He and beautiful Arlene and their boys, Tim, Mitch and Robin were often at the house. We sat around the kitchen table in regular reunions well into the 1960s. Ed had a deep and enduring effect on our small circle of friends, which included Pat Calderwood, Daria Marusevich, Jerry Reichert, John Fitzsimmons, Allie Greengold and Wally Linder. He made us question our way of looking at the world. Ed was close friends with the Fitzsimmons and Sandy Limouze then the Dean of Kings Point, and several school principals and a school superintendent, and Tom and Ann Thibadeau, (Bart, Paul, and Susan’s mom and dad). Tom taught English in Levittown.
In the early 1970s, after I was discharged from the Army and life swept me off Long Island, Ed and Tom were interviewed on FM radio. You can listen to that interview here. http://www.puppetools.com/mp3/
When you get into a conversation about great teachers, you necessarily move into terrain related to the reality of school itself. We all tend to romanticize the experience, kind of like we do when reflecting back on time in the military, but in my first hours in the Army my mind exploded with memories of elementary school. In terms of what one is free to do and what one is not free to do, in terms of the herding yelling, control, authority, and
the threat of punishment, both experiences collided. I may have gotten more out of playing in the catacombs and the underground tunnels of NorthsideSchool under construction than I did having to sit all day in school.
I have always questioned the value and legitimacy of formal education. And some excellent teachers I have known feel that way, too. In high school, I can recall my gaze affixed for weeks through the window on a man, maybe it was two, atop the Levittown water tower, painting red and white squares, and wondering where he got the guts and skill to do that all day long.
The thing about early Levittown is that as we grew up with it, it grew into us – got under our skin. Levittown was as much an invention as it was a place. We took part in its creation, even as it created us. Unlike towns with established histories, ours developed from scratch over time, allowed us to feel the freedom of young pioneers, to run and ride along labyrinthine pathways we all but owned.
I recall the day in October of 1949 when I stepped out the front door of 35 Snowbird Lane. It was flat and soundless — the sky an expanse of openness and the sun low in the sky — strange to eyes and ears used to the apartment buildings and the rattle of trolley cars of Brooklyn, no streets, road, trees, sounds, lampposts, sidewalks,just dark earth, and houses, many waiting vacant. I looked to my right and there, in front of the house next door, was a boy, smaller than five-year-old me. He was looking down, his head a shock of red hair against the mud brown landscape. He was a kid I would know for years to come. I recall that moment as a time stamp — the moment I landed as a settler. It was a lifetime ago, but it was a blink within a series of longer blinks of time and travel.
We never heard the explosion, but for sure we are all outward, far-flung stars in the wake of our own big bang.
Early Levittown, New York photos courtesy of Tim Lavey, DAHS class of 1963
Jeff Peyton, class of 1961, who moved to his new home town in 1949
By JEFF PEYTON
When my family moved from Brooklyn in October of 1949 I think my brain became
partitioned like the old hard drives, one side Brooklyn, the other Levittown.
Both are filled with teeming, sharply distinct memories.
While two teachers have a warm place in my heart, Bob Henebry and Bert
Chapman, they were like all teachers -- defined by a culture that few ever
rise above. Sadly, Henebry and Chapman left Long Island for parts unknown without
a way to keep connected. There were other teachers who lived in the
village outside of my classrooms. These people did things with me, shared
what they knew with me. Took me by the hand, won over my heart, opened
my mind, changed my thinking and sense of myself.
Like Major Harry Harmon, a Kansas Air Force vet. The Harmons, I think,
had two daughters. As a military family, they were “not in Kansas any
more,” but surely hoped to get back home soon. They lived near the corner
of Snowbird and Tanager. Their house inside was plain and unadorned. I
recall walking with Major Harry (I was eight) down to Old Motor Parkway. In
the dry-baked air of a Long Island summer seasoned with milkweed and wild flower
and the endless flit and click of toad, butterfly, moth, dragon fly and locust,
we became naturalists. One afternoon, I watched the Major coax a bee off
a puff of clover into his open hand. The knowledge that you could let a bee
walk across your hand and not be stung, as long as your hand remained
open, amounted to super power I had not seen in any comic book.
There was Gene, the Clover Dairy milk man, who let me climb aboard at
7:15 every Saturday morning. I can still summon the damp smell of ice and
milk in the truck and feel the morning air against my face, my arms stretched
across the open door. There was the weight of the bottles and the rare OJ
in the metal carrier, and the clean snap of the milk box lid falling shut, and
the sense of other worlds and people were just waking up inside the houses.
Around 9 a.m., my sneakers green and dew-soaked, Gene dropped me off at
home with a flip of a quarter at me through the truck door.
There was Bill Levitt who lived on Pelican just east of Northside school.
Bill had a small box-like Chevy van which he used for his moving business.
I was his regular assistant and navigator. We went everywhere — Nassau,
Suffolk, even into Brooklyn. I learned to use the old wire-bound Hagstrom
street atlas and kept Bill on the straight and narrow. There was the day we
moved a fridge up three flights of stairs in Jamaica. My pay was $2.50 an hour.
There was big Ray and his old Volvo station wagon. Ray delivered papers -- the Long Island Press, Newsday, The New York Times, The Herald Tribune, The
Journal-American. Ray picked me up at 3:30 on Sunday morning, and drove
over to the Meadowbrook Theater where we packed inserts for an hour or
more behind the great brick edifice that protected us from the wind in the
dead of winter. In Ray’s hands and fingers, cracked, hard and blackened
from newsprint, I could read the meaning of work and its corrosive effect
on the body and learned not to take a warm bed and a chance to sleep in for
granted.
I worked for Herbert Richheimer and Sons on the trash pick up crew. We showed up
at home improvement sites and filled up the dump trunk. A college friend
and I painted the NorthsideSchool boiler room. A guy named Carmine was
the head janitor. Long gone by 1966 were the old-timers, the two Northside
School custodians, Smitty and Mr. Sparks, with his blue eyes and white curly
hair. I can still smell the sawdust-cedar mix they pushed with their brooms
down the hallway. Smitty lived on Swallow Lane, his house at the entrance
to the back field of Northside. Smitty would drop a couple of Kraft caramels
into your hand as you passed him in the hallway.
Across the street lived the big kid of Snowbird Lane, Joe Byrne, a New York
City cop. Joe wasn’t supposed to live outside the city limits, but, an ex sea
bee, Joe was not afraid to break a rule. Joe played stick ball, curb ball, touch
football. You could call his name and out of his house he’d come. From Joe
I learned how important adults could be when they actually did things with
you, took an interest in you, and joined you in play. Joe lived across from
us for a mere six years, but it seemed like a lifetime.
When Joe’s son, Kevin, contacted my sister after my dad passed in January 2011, Kevin and I re-connected and then he put me in touch with Joe. Joe, 85, is happily married
and still roller skates just like he did at the Levittown rink, despite the fact
that he’s got a pin in his hip from a spill a few years ago. On the phone I
could have been talking to a man in his 30s. From Joe and experiences with
others like him sprang the seeds of play and a belief about education I am
Tim Lavey calls the above photo of he and his brother Mitch, "Building Levittown." click on the picture to enlarge it
By Tim Lavey, class of 1963 My brother Mitch and I lived at 173 Orchid Road, between Skimmer Lane and Violet Lane (about halfway between Jerusalem Avenue and Newbridge Road). The picture was taken behind our house before the sump was built.
You can see an old culvert behind my brother Mitch's head. He graduated from Division Avenue in 1965.My guess is that it was late 1950 or early 1951. The houses in the background are probably those on the southern leg of Blacksmith Road." According to Jeff Peyton, class of 1961 and my childhood friend, "The sump was even with, or just south of the Old Motor Parkway, a place to my young eyes that was filled with wildflowers and Queen Anne's Lace, oversized brown locusts, and toads. I loved that place."
I remember one time a whole bunch of us were hiding out around the culverts in the underbrush playing war games in the early evening just as it got dark. My dad sneaked up on us and shouted to wake the dead. I’ve never been so scared in my life. As he took my brother Mitch and me back to our house, I can remember him lecturing us on properly setting up a perimeter to avoid being surprised by the enemy. September 4 is my dad’s birthday. He would have been 90 this month. He passed away in 1995 after a considerable struggle with the effects of Alzheimer’s. I miss him greatly, of course, and so do all those who knew him.
I also have wonderful memories of days exploring the forbidden tunnels inside the sump. We weren’t supposed to be in the sump much less going into those tunnels, but it seems that almost everyone did it. I forget just how far I crawled under the streets of Levittown exploring the sewer system, but I believe I got pretty far north. I remember being somewhat frightened about not being able to back track to the sump after making too many twists and turns into and through adjacent underground tunnels. It would have been exceedingly embarrassing to have become hopelessly lost and then ignominiously extricated by town authorities.
One more thing comes to mind. I recollect that before the sump was built in the very early ‘50s that we had major flooding all along Orchid Road during a heavy rain. I think my dad was out back with other dads doing what they could to stop the water from cascading into our yards and houses. I always thought (incorrectly I’m sure) that the sump was built shortly thereafter because that flooding had occurred. It’s much more likely it was already on the drawing board.
Jeff Peyton, son of our esteemed driving teacher Mr. David Peyton
By Jeff Peyton, class of 1961 As you may recall, Cornflower Road passed by the Levittown Community Church to the east, thanks to a fairly long banana curving north and intersecting with Periwinkle. At the south end, near Division Avenue, Cornflower skirted the power lines that ran clear to Newbridge Road.
The Cornflower Road time-space banana curve remains etched in my memory. I was driving to school with my dad. I rarely did. I did not want to ride with him or be seen riding. I was nobody’s child. I walked. It was not cool having your dad teach at the school you went to.
In the winter, walking to school was not always pleasant but it was a choice. What was a backpack? You carried your books to school. But this morning I was late and it had snowed. And so there I was “riding to school” with dad. The roads were slick with ice but clear of snow. As we approached Cornflower Road, the walkers glided by. Ahead, a car had turned onto Cornflower Road. (Actually, it would never really stop turning.) The car was familiar. It was Mrs. Gaskins’, Richard Gaskins’ mom. Unpredictable movement associated with her car was not unusual.
Immediately, dad’s Driving Teacher Instincts kicked in. He slowed, being careful of course not to go into a skid. Mrs. Gaskins, however, was still turning. Time, yup, seemed to be standing still. She had entered “the mother of all skids”—a skid as long and as curved as Cornflower Road itself, a skid as simple as a forward pass ‘line’ drawn on a play diagram. We could see it coming. Even though Mrs. Gaskins was clearly on the other side of the road, her vector was locking on.
My father, pathetically trying to mount a snow bank in a 1960 Comet, could not evade Mrs. Gaskins, now zeroing in, her face quizzically framed in her windshield. The sound of the impact crunched the air. Thus it happened that two cars kissed, steam rising, on Cornflower Road on a frosty morning. The walkers stopped, gathered, and looked. A scene out of a Little Lulu comic book. Wow. An accident. Mr. Peyton, the driver ed. teacher, in an accident And me smiling wistfully at passers by, the crackle of snow under the feet, feeling more sorry for my dad than for myself.
