THEN AND NOW: The Landry residence at 9 Loring Road in Levittown

9 Loring Road in 1973. Roberta Landry's non-Levitt & Sons house. Her family moved there in 1950.

The house in 2012. Roberta's parents sold it in 1976 and moved to Florida.

Levittown's Loring Road in 2012. Notice that there are still no sidewalks.

Click on photos to enlarge

By ROBERTA LANDRY

DAHS Class of 1961

It's been many years since I've been to the house at 9 Loring Road. The house I grew up in actually stayed pretty much unchanged for quite awhile after my parents sold it in 1976 and moved to Daytona Beach, Florida. I don't think it changed until around 2009.

The only photos of the changes I had seen were on the Nassau County Land Records site and they certainly didn't show me as much as Marilyn Monsrud Frese's photos shown here.

Among the other Division Avenue High School students who lived on our part of Loring between Sherwood Road and Hempstead Turnpike were Dotty Scagliola and Kathy Ryan (class of 1962), and Terry Ripino (1960). We were only a few blocks from the North Village Green.

Ours was not a Levitt house. My parents bought a lot on Loring Road and had a house built which we moved into in 1950. I assume Levitt didn't buy the Loring Road area as there were only a few empty lots. It was an already established road with a number of houses that were built pre-World War 2.

My father and brother Joe (Levittown Memorial class of 1957) did some work finishing the house - shingles, cement walks and driveway. I was told my job was to pick up the nails they dropped, but I really don't remember it. Water was from a well and there were no sewers on Loring Road. Levitt houses back then had cesspools, as we did as well. Later, my father and brother sank a new well in our basement. My brother thinks it was about 15- feet deep (from the basement floor). My drilled well here in Guilford, Vermont is down 445 feet.

Telephone was initially a two-party line. There were no sidewalks or street lights. I see from Marilyn's photos that there are still no sidewalks but I do see a few street lights. There was a Bohack super market around the corner on Hempstead Turnpike. There was also a candy/soda store where I remember going with Dotty Scagliola and buying things for our doll houses or toys or comics. Our lot was a half acre and we had a huge garden in the back yard.

The black and white photo shown above was probably taken around 1973. My brother also pointed out that back then we didn't even have curbs along the street.

Color photos taken by Marilyn Monsrud Frese in late March 2012.

Photos of Division Avenue High School graduates from long, long ago. One lived, briefly, on a nearby farm.

• Roberta Landry Bremmer, class of 1961 with her dog Lucky in 1950 at the Hanisch Dairy Farm in Plainview. She was six years of age.

• Jim Anton, class of 1961, and kid brother Jerry in 1955. Notice the Levitt houses in the background.

• Ira Shapiro, class of 1961, age 3

• Artie Kornfeld, class of 1960

• Don Davidson, class of 1960, age three in 1946. Nice pants, Droopy Drawers.

Click on pix to enlarge

Why did Roberta Landry live on a Plainview dairy farm in 1948? According to the 1961 graduate, "It was just the house my parents rented while they were building our Loring Road house in Levittown.

"As I remember, it was a little house, pretty close to the barn and cows. The owners of the farm lived down the hill and across the road. I had to walk down the hill to get the school bus and would get scared that the bull might be out. I attended St Ignatius in Hicksville for first grade then when we moved to Levittown, I went to Division Avenue for second grade."

The Loring Road house was not built by Levitt and Sons, one of the few non-Levitt houses that Division Avenue High students called home.

1961 DIVISION AVENUE HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION PROGRAM

Click on images to enlarge

Roberta Landry Bremmer sent us these pages from her class's graduation program. It's keepsakes such as these that can be lost forever, but when included here they continue to be part of the history of our school and now can be found on the internet via a Google search. The class of 1961 was the second to graduate from Division Avenue High School.

According to Roberta, "The program was tucked away inside my yearbook so is in better shape than the yearbook. It travelled from New York to Vermont where I now live. When I lived in England it stayed behind with my parents in New York."

Imagine how few copies of the 1961 graduation program have been saved from 50 years ago. It's amazing what comes your blogger's way.

The photo of Roberta was taken three years after she participated in her high school class commencement. In 1964, she graduated from the Mt Sinai Hospital School of Nursing.

Part 2: "What do you remember about your religious education growing up in Levittown?"

Vermont resident Roberta Landry still has her first communion veil

By Frank Barning
It has been enlightening to receive replies to our "religious education" question. Mostly, it has been memories of interesting times rather than serious theological discourse, with a lively mix of good spirit and humor.

I remember a Levittown boy asking me why the Catholic church that many of our friends attended was named after a breed of dog. I explained patiently that "The church and the dog were named after a saint named Bernard." A Google search of St. Bernard yielded far more items about the dog breed than St. Bernard of Clairvaux.

Jim Anton, class of 1961, and Jay Citrin '60 were neighbors and best friends. Jim, a Catholic, helped Jay prepare for his bar mitzvah. Over lunch a few months ago, Jim told me about his working with his buddy. Here we were about 55 years later and Jim proudly rattled off in Hebrew the Bible passages (haftorah) that he coached.

According to Jim, "I got to tell Jay after many years that the greatest gift he gave me, besides our friendship, was the sharing of our faiths. I will always remember the last day of Chanukah and his family around the table including me for a special celebration. On Christmas day there was always a present under our tree for Jay.

"For many years my wife and I both taught religious instruction and I was teaching Catholic faith from a Jewish perspective. I always professed if your going to be an educated Catholic then you need to also be educated in the Jewish faith and tradition. As a now departed Jewish friend use to remind me, 'Jesus was one ours before he was one of yours'."

Here is what some early Division Avenue High School students remember:

Robert Cotter, class of 1966
I dropped out of the Sunday School program at Levittown Community Church. In my class was Paul Adrian, who was also in my class at Division. It was, I think, grade seven. He passed this bit of info on to me at school: the Sunday School teacher, after telling the class that I would no longer be with them added that my leaving was a shame because "Robert needs it more than all of us". I rather liked that.

My friends represented a cross section of the religious spectrum so I went to midnight mass at Christmas, celebrated Chanukah, Easter and Passover, and my parents made sure that I had an understanding of what these holidays all meant.

Dewain Lanfear, class of 1960
I remember that we were dismissed from our last class of the day for religious instructions. Eventually, periods 1, 2 3,7, 8 were rotated to that "last" slot so that we didn't miss the same class all the time. Sometimes we didn't get to the church at all after we left school. The mix of religions in Levittown schools has been a source of tolerance throughout my life. It was something our parents who came from a more "ghetto-ized" city didn't experience.

Linc Binninger, class of 1963
I remember that my mother, my sisters (Carol - DAHS '64 and Kim - DAHS '73) and I were members of the Levittown Community Church by the Azalea Pool. My father, called "Big Bob" and dubbed "The Mayor of Quiet Lane", did not attend.

I will not go into the reasons for his failure to accompany us but I will say that by the time I was in about the seventh or eighth grade, I had begun to share his disdain for church services. So I began to plead with my mother to allow me to attend a different service from her, which request, bless her, she began to grant. I would walk in the front door of the church and out the side door, whereupon I would proceed to the North Green to enjoy a Snickers or a milkshake.

Roberta Landry Bremmer, class of 1961
I really don't remember very much about it except for getting out of school early. I do still have the veil I wore when I made my first communion as well as two pins.

Art Dorrmann, class of 1960
Even prior to moving to Levittown I had been brought up in the Episcopal Church. Other names for it are 'The Church of England' and the 'Anglican Church'. The Anglican Church was formed in 1534 by Henry VIII of England for what might be called 'social reasons'. The differences between the Catholic and Anglican churches were mostly minor - only one was Roman Catholic.

Since both of my mother's parents had been born in England it was the church she knew and to which she introduced me. We attended Holy Trinity Church in Hicksville. Mass was at 9 AM and religious instruction took place at 10:30. By the time I was 11 or 12 I was serving as an altar boy and continued throughout high school.

I attended church infrequently while in college and occasionally in the service. Since my early 20s I have been to church only for my son's Christening and for a Christmas eve mass about five years ago. I must admit part of my Paleolithic background rejects both women and homosexual priests - though I personally have no antagonism toward either group and have been known to socialize with them.

Arnie Galeota, class of 1961
I was brought up Roman Catholic but my parents weren't practicing Catholics. They however made me go to catechism, I had all the sacraments, baptism, first communion, confirmation and I was expected to attend mass every Sunday morning, but by myself. I would meet up with Jim McGrath and sometimes Jim Heyward and Ralph DelPiano who were in the same boat as I was. We would stand at the back of St. Bernard's church 10 minutes after mass began and we would leave right after the second collection plate passed, making it a total of 20 minutes listening to the priest say mass in Latin. Being in the vestibule gave us an easy escape. We would go from there to Whalen's drug store or the Diplomat Cafeteria or home.

My two closest friends were the Albaum twins, Donnie and Ronnie, who are Jewish. I spent endless hours in their home where I managed to learn bits and pieces about their faith and traditions but not in a classroom-type learning session. I felt a strong connection to that family since our heritage, mine being Italian, and family traditions and values were so similar aside from the religious aspect.

I also learned to love corned beef and pastrami and Hebrew National hot dogs, knishes and so on. Naturally they also were starved to learn about my religion so we discussed it at Caruso's regularly, where they learned about Italian food there. By the way, the money I was given for the collection plate went into the collection plate. I didn't want to go to hell before graduating high school.