As a student, Lillian longed for a youthful sounding name

It took many years to grow into her first name

By LILLIAN SMITH HANDLEMAN

Class of 1962

When I was in school I didn't like my name. I longed to be a Kathy or Debbie or something youthful sounding. Every Lillian I ever heard of was someone's grandma.

I realize now that I had to grow into my name and now I like it--Lillian Ruth, my Irish grandmother's name, a name of significance. Now I have grandkids with their own unusual names that I also like. I appreciate that those names have personal meaning for the parents who chose them as unique to their child.

I have no problem with unusual names. It's the fact that some new age names eventually become trendy and in the process, get hijacked, shortened, and misspelled into the mainstream. My daughter had an original, nearly unheard of name when I chose it 44 years ago--Micaela, the feminine form of Michael, her father's name. It was an alternative to the more common "Michelle", and it was unique then.

Today there are countless copied versions of "Micaela" chosen by parents who have butchered the spelling of that beautiful name into phonetically structured variants: Mikayla, Makala, and Cayla, to name a few. 

Although a "Rose" by any other name would smell as sweet (thanks, Shakespeare), I think we all struggle to distinguish ourselves in some way as we integrate into society. Our name becomes a big part of our identity as we get older and parents should choose thoughtfully before they dilute a lovely name with crazy spellings and assign it to their child exposing them to the ridicule of those who may poke fun.

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This story is in response to the previous post, "New fangled names for babies drive me wild."

Levittown absorbs you and keeps you in its grasp

A LONG-GONE EARLY LEVITTOWNER MISSES EVERYTHING ABOUT HER OLD HOME TOWN

1951 photo: Lillian Smith in front of her 17 Brook Lane home.

Levittown absorbs you and keeps you in its grasp forever.

By LILLIAN SMITH 

Class of 1962

It's been 48 years since I've lived on Long Island and yet it remains the most pervasive memory of my past. There is something so special about the Island for me--particularly Levittown, a town that absorbs you and keeps you in its grasp forever.

When you return for even a short while, it's like no time has elapsed at all--as if the life you lived back then was an alternate life. Perhaps everyone has that same nostalgia for the place where they grew up, and maybe that eerie suspension of time is just a universal longing to return to an era where everything seemed safe and possibilities were endless.

I remember Levittown now, more in the abstract than in the opaque reality of movie theaters, beaches and childhood friends. Although all of those things comprise the water-colored memories of the way we were (to borrow the corny lyrics of a Barbra Streisand song), I see Levittown more as a painting where the colors merge into the image of my past as a whole. And I miss everything about it.

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Lillian Smith Handleman is a 1962 graduate of Division Avenue High School and a long-time resident of Connecticut. She has been a frequent contributor to our blog.

A LONG-GONE EARLY LEVITTOWNER MISSES EVERYTHING ABOUT HER OLD HOME TOWN

A 1951 photo of Lillian Smith in front of her 17 Brook Lane home.
Click on picture to enlarge

By LILLIAN SMITH

It's been 46 years since I've lived on Long Island and yet it remains the most pervasive memory of my past. There is something so special about the Island for me--particularly Levittown, a town that absorbs you and keeps you in its grasp forever.

When you return for even a short while, it's like no time has elapsed at all--as if the life you lived back then was an alternate life. Perhaps everyone has that same nostalgia for the place where they grew up, and maybe that eerie suspension of time is just a universal longing to return to an era where everything seemed safe and possibilities were endless.

I remember Levittown now, more in the abstract than in the opaque reality of movie theaters, beaches and childhood friends. Although all of those things comprise the water-colored memories of the way we were (to borrow the corny lyrics of a Barbra Streisand song), I see Levittown more as a painting where the colors merge into the image of my past as a whole. And I miss everything about it.
_____

Lillian Smith is a 1962 graduate of Division Avenue High School and a long-time resident of Connecticut. She is a regular contributor to our blog.

Little boxes made of ticky-tacky and they all looked just the same

A recent photo of 117 Brook Lane....Lillian Smith's old home.

By Lillian Smith Handleman '62

In 1962, the year I graduated from Division Avenue High School, the cozy enclave of Levittown homes on eastern Long Island was rhapsodized by Malvina Reynolds, who described this post-war community of mass-produced houses in the lyrics of her song, Little Boxes:

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

That song may well describe the outward façade of Levitt homes constructed in the late 1940s with the box-like simplicity of a child’s drawing. There was a tiny Bendix washing machine off in the corner of the little kitchen studded with metal cabinets. Everything was miniature, like living in a snow globe. There was one small bathroom and two bedrooms off the living room with a window that overlooked a treeless view of a thousand other houses--just like the song described.

We didn’t know it then but that remarkable touchstone of modern suburbia was just the embryo of an era that would explode like a canon in so many different ways. And the nostalgic influence of those days would be felt years later, like a heartache.

But our community of little houses was so much more than just the superficial underpinnings of mortar and sheetrock. It was a symbol of our parents' security following the great depression of the 1930s and 1940s, and signified a certain upward mobility for them in an age of new prosperity. Despite the cold war that often had us hunkering under our school desks in preparation for an air raid, mostly we were the benefactors of an age of optimism where the hope and promise of a burgeoning economy took form in ways we couldn’t predict. It’s no wonder we look back in awe at the paradoxical simplicity of an era where the race for nuclear arms and outer space collided comet-like, smack onto the birth of Rock and Roll.

And at the heart of it all were those ticky-tacky houses we came home to every day after school, or at night after catching fireflies in the moonlight. They provided the warm comfort of radiant heat under tile floors on a cold winter’s day, and the feeling of safety despite the ever-present specter of political tension. Somehow, those houses blanketed us in the comfort of home and gave us our sense of belonging to something bigger than ourselves.

My parents died a few years apart leaving me orphaned at 18, and my house on 17 Brook Lane was sold a few years later. But the events of those years are embedded like a memory chip, so vivid are they to this day. They say that we tend to romanticize the past, yet there was something patently romantic about that whole era. I yearn to return to it, if only briefly, to taste again the sweetness of a time that remains, somehow, timeless.

Photo by Marilyn Monsrud Frese '63

Little Boxes by Malvina Reynolds, YouTube Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_2lGkEU4X

Little boxes made of ticky-tacky and they all looked just the same

By Lillian Smith Handleman

In 1962, the year I graduated from Division Avenue High School, the cozy enclave of Levittown homes on eastern Long Island was rhapsodized by Malvina Reynolds, who described this post-war community of mass-produced houses in the lyrics of her song, Little Boxes:

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

That song may well describe the outward façade of Levitt homes constructed in the late 1940s with the box-like simplicity of a child’s drawing. There was a tiny Bendix washing machine off in the corner of the little kitchen studded with metal cabinets. Everything was miniature, like living in a snow globe. There was one small bathroom and two bedrooms off the living room with a window that overlooked a treeless view of a thousand other houses--just like the song described.

We didn’t know it then but that remarkable touchstone of modern suburbia was just the embryo of an era that would explode like a canon in so many different ways. And the nostalgic influence of those days would be felt years later, like a heartache.

But our community of little houses was so much more than just the superficial underpinnings of mortar and sheetrock. It was a symbol of our parents' security following the great depression of the 1930s and 1940s, and signified a certain upward mobility for them in an age of new prosperity. Despite the cold war that often had us hunkering under our school desks in preparation for an air raid, mostly we were the benefactors of an age of optimism where the hope and promise of a burgeoning economy took form in ways we couldn’t predict. It’s no wonder we look back in awe at the paradoxical simplicity of an era where the race for nuclear arms and outer space collided comet-like, smack onto the birth of Rock and Roll.

And at the heart of it all were those ticky-tacky houses we came home to every day after school, or at night after catching fireflies in the moonlight. They provided the warm comfort of radiant heat under tile floors on a cold winter’s day, and the feeling of safety despite the ever-present specter of political tension. Somehow, those houses blanketed us in the comfort of home and gave us our sense of belonging to something bigger than ourselves.

My parents died a few years apart leaving me orphaned at 18, and my house on 17 Brook Lane was sold a few years later. But the events of those years are embedded like a memory chip, so vivid are they to this day. They say that we tend to romanticize the past, yet there was something patently romantic about that whole era. I yearn to return to it, if only briefly, to taste again the sweetness of a time that remains, somehow, timeless.

Photo of 17 Brook Lane in 2009 by Marilyn Monsrud Frese '63

Little Boxes by Malvina Reynolds, YouTube Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_2lGkEU4X