More on Bay Avenue Elementary School

We lived on Grove Avenue. Our neighbors the Westbrooks were good gentle people. My best friend Paul Crabtree and I flipped baseball cards under the fire escape at the school during recess.

My father took me and my oldest sister Louise with him every Friday after he came home from work to buy Cod Fish cakes at the small deli on, I think, the corner of Bay Avenue and Main Street. My mother cooked them in stewed tomatoes, which I then thought was the only way to make them edible.

After every Thanksgiving Day, we walked into town to the Sears Roebuck Store, where as kids, we dreamed and imagined about gifts under the tree at Christmas time.

Our family went to the Robert Hall Clothing store in Coram, New York for our yearly Easter clothing.

We attended St Paul's church in Patchogue. And I still remember feeling like I entered a jail each time we visited the post office for stamps or to mail packages. The stone building looked huge to me, had bars on the windows, or I imagined that it did, and the ceilings were quite high. Of course, I was quite short.

I vividly recall when the four corner's fire made us think that the safety of our hometown wasn't quite what it had been the day before. But the community came together as so many Long Island communities did back then and encouraged business owners to rebuild. When they did, we all shopped there again.

When I married my wife Ruth, who grew up in NC, I took her upstairs at Sweezy's Department Store so she could experience the wavy floors, the different levels that seemed to have been built in as the building expanded over the years.

Growing up in Patchogue, although my family moved to the North Shore when I was 8, instilled a love of neighbors and friends I've never found elsewhere. Maybe that feeling had to do with my age at the time, the innocence of those postwar decades.

Or perhaps, it was more about the place and the people who lived there. This is what I chose to believe. I have lived in several different states in all corners of America, and never found what I experienced when I lived and grew in my first hometown.

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Mitchell Paul Feinberg

Mitchell Paul Feinberg

I took this picture during a trip Mitch and I took to New England to do a photo essay on covered bridges.

It is possible that on this same trip, we also drove up to Maine first to look at a house that needed a roof. Unfortunately, the concrete block walls wavered like the Great Wall of China, so adding a roof seemed a waste of time and money.

I knew a woman named Jill (she had a cat named Embly) in Burlington, Vermont and we stayed at her house one night. As it happened, the next morning, the headlines announced that Richard Nixon had resigned. Since all of us Leftist Pinko Commies (as the right wing framed our politics back then) worked to see Nixon run out of town, the news was a cause for celebration.

The paper was sold out everywhere we went locally! We needed to search out newsstands in the center of Burlington before we finally found the paper that Mitch holds in the photo while sitting on Jill‘s house’s front steps.

On our return home to New York, we passed a huge field of corn. Mitch suggested we stop and gather up some corn to take with us. I stopped alongside the wire fence and we both ran between rows of corn. Yes, I got lost, but I don’t know if Mitch did. We called to each other until we found the road and the car parked several hundred feet away. After that, we loaded the rear floor of the car with dozens of ears of corn and drove off as we heard a truck approaching from behind.

When we reached the Feinberg home in Port Jefferson, Mitch’s father took one look at the corn and announced, “You can’t eat that, its feed corn.”

It seems that we raided the wrong farm! But we got dozens of terrific covered bridge photos including the one posted here.




(The bridge photo posted is copyrighted and may not be reproduced in any manner digital or otherwise without the express written permission of L. Schliessmann).

Bay Avenue Elementary School, Patchogue, New York 1957

This great photo was shot as a class picture in 1957. I'm standing alongside my best friend at the time Paul Crabtree. However, I have not heard from him or any of the rest of the class since then and can only wonder where they are, what they've done and, embarrassingly, what their names might be.