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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