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.

Rodney Rhodes - Korean War Veteran

A man to ride the river with.

Rodney Rhodes hailed from the Louisiana Bayou country where he was born and raised. He worked as an electrician in NYC after serving his nation during the Korean War. Rodney went through some of the toughest fighting of the Forgotten War and like so many other men and women who served with honor doing that conflict deserves recognition for his service.

However, I am including him here because he became a good friend while I worked at the Trenton, New Jersey Vet Center on Jersey Street. He was a quiet good natured guy who always had time to chat, and in fact visited the Vet Center many days for that purpose alone.

We shared coffee and donuts and discussed his war and mine (Vietnam) and what life became for us after returning home to learn that although we had changed beyond self-recognition, everyone else seemed like the same folks we left behind.

I always told people who asked my age that I was 22 --or whatever I was at the time-- going on 90. He not only found this funny, he knew exactly how I felt and what I meant.

When the Vet Center helped set up a tribute to Korean War veterans to honor them and the local Korean population at the Olympic baseball game between the USA and Korea in Trenton, Rodney was a great supporter and helped in every way possible.

At some point within the years he came to the Vet Center, he visited Washington DC and stopped at the Wall to honor Vietnam dead. He took a terrific photo, had it framed and presented it to me at a ceremony at the Vet Center.

I made him sign the back, which he did including the inscription I used to open this post. When I asked him what he meant, Rodney said, "Where I'm from, riding the river is a way of life. A man to ride the river with is a man you can trust your life to."

Then he told me about a friend of his who he rode the river with years ago. They passed under a low hanging live oak tree. As they did, a snake dropped from the tree into the boat. It wasn't the type of snake anyone might want to have that close since it was a water moccasin. His friend pulled out a pistol he always carried and blasted a couple shots at the snake. He missed the snake, but sank the boat. They remained friends because he knew the man shot at the snake to keep them both from getting poisoned many miles away from the nearest hospital.

Rodney had a way of smiling that told more than his words. After that story, I knew a lot more about him and his values than I had before and knew that he too was a man to ride the river with.

Katie Hess

Katie Hess

Katie was an Irish Setter with a human heart and the ability to understand almost empathically, human emotion.

I can’t recall when I first met her. She was part of the Hess family of Poquott, New York. Brad and Kevin Hess were good friends.

Kevin introduced me to the Who. I was sitting down on the beach under an inverted sailboat that belonged to Mimi Rattigan (Mimi died in a car crash several years later). It was a rainy afternoon, so the beach was empty. Kevin showed up, crawled under the boat with Katie, and said he had heard the most amazing new album titled Tommy by the Who.

I fell into a quagmire of Abbott and Costello and asked Tommy the Who? thinking I’d misunderstood him.

Kevin grinned and I should’ve understood, but due to what I’d been inhaling, I failed the test. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s right.”

We went back and forth a few times and I finally figured it out when he started laughing and pointing at me like I was a beached flounder.

Not long after, I went through a bad break-up that drove me into a stupor of self-doubt and misunderstanding.

The rock in the picture was once used by local Native American women to grind corn while watching their men in the harbor fishing.

That boulder, dragged into location by a glacier, became a place for me to retreat when I needed time to think and stare at the blasted movies, which insisted on grinding through my head explaining what-ifs and such.

Every day I sat on the rock, Katie would show up and in her casual way demand attention until she decided to drape herself on the rock alongside me and relax with a possessiveness only an animal like she could get away with. She helped me re-evaluate my opinions and get on with attempting to live a worthwhile life.

She was a good friend and deserves recognition.

Sandra Diane Strassenburg

His loneliness can be found in the tree reaching upward
Touching the sky in dark silence
A naked splendor
His deepest loves remain within the heart
Truth the makings of the soul
A timeless image
His passions are hidden from all but the wind
Who travels the nights
In search of nature’s purity
A simple beauty
His innocent birth reflects upon the aging earth
As the morning explodes in glory
And a proud shadow
Echoes the creation of man

Sandra Diane Strassenburg - Winter 1971

What love have you to touch my dawn
With dew moist lips upon my own
The world sleeps
So we may be alone with the parting night
At peace with ourselves . . .
I have given my love to you and the day
What heart have you to turn away?

Sandra Diane Strassenburg - Spring 1972

If ever I knew a person whose life was a fragile gift like a thistle’s seed on the wind that person would be Sandy. She lived with personal demons created for her by well meaning adults when she was twelve years old.

She was informed that she would not live to see her thirtieth birthday due to a birth defect received while in her mother’s womb. At the time, the early 1950s the new drug thalidomide (side effects either unknown or kept from patients for obvious reasons) to assist mothers dealing with the extreme discomfort of pregnancy, created severe physical defects in fetuses. Many of our generation were scarred by this, as were their parents emotionally.

She is the one person that fills me with deep regret caused by my inconsistent behavior while she and I were married. We met the year I returned from Vietnam.

I was filled with the nightmares of PTSD brought on by combat experiences impossible to forget without chemical assistance. The aid I chose was alcohol, which kept me in its fog throughout the years she and I lived together and beyond.

This is not an excuse, but a fact. None-the-less the remorse I still feel eleven years after her death is as real now as it was the last time I saw and spoke with her.

That night, Christmas Eve 1981, I had visited my Aunt Betty Titmus at Saint Charles Hospital in Port Jefferson, New York. The weather was cold and wet, but not cold enough for snow. As I drove my old 1962 Mercedes Benz along 25A where it runs past Port Jeff harbor, I saw a woman hitch hiking. She wore a short skirt and a light spring jacket. I slowed and stopped to pick her up.

As the car rolled by her, I saw her face and wondered if she would get in. She did and made some kind of comment about how weird it was that I was the person who stopped.

I felt the same way.

I had completed more than two years of sobriety by practicing the 12 step of AA by then. Sandy was drunk and had had a fight with her family, walked out of the house determined to get to The Four Corners Bar in Setauket. My AA sponsor would’ve told me to try to get her sober, which I did by delaying the drive, and parking behind the bar to talk for around three hours.

We discussed what happened with her and her family, and the harder I tried to persuade her stay out of the bar, to go home and spend Christmas night where I thought she should, the more determined she became to do the opposite.

She finally left the car when she had gotten disgusted with my attempts and like a moth drawn to light, entered the bar without a glance back to see if I watched.

Alan W. Walker - Al-V

Some people knew him as Fast Al from his stockcar days in New Hampshire. I met Al-V in High School auto shop class and quickly discovered that we had many things in common. We became best friends.

Over the next few years we founded a Hot Rod club named Vandal Speed Incorporated. VSI grew in membership to about 35 within two years while we built hot rods from Al-V's Burgandy 1957 Chevy to my '62 Ford red and white Sunliner convertible, to Danny Davis' White Whale 1958 Chevy convertible.

We spent many late nights and weekends in his parents garage in the house on the hill across from smoker's corner outside E.L Vendermeulen High School in Port Jefferson, NY. His parents were terrific, feeding us and allowing us to enjoy a few cold ones as we reconstructed his '57.

Al died about 12 years ago. I admit that we grew apart after my tour of duty in Vietnam, but I believe our feeling of brotherhood remained with us both until he died, with me still. My wife Ruth and I visited his grave site around 6 years ago and was pleased to see the wolve's cut into his marker.

His father Edgar (a quiet, patient and funny man), died within a few weeks of Al's dying and is buried alongside him.

Some people go through life touching others in positive ways that they never understand while doing so. Al was one of them as were his parents, Emily and Ed.

Hope you found peace, Al.

More later.

Photographed August 20, 2006 at Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet, SC
by Larry Schliessmann

Anna Hyatt Huntington's Don Quixote at Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet, SC. Photographed August 20, 2006 by Larry Schliessmann

Ward Clarke Campbell

Yesterday, I received a letter from an old friend Helen Belnick. She informed me that a good friend, Ward Clarke Campbell had died.

I had not spoken to him in a year or two, but only because I'm in South Carolina and he was in New York, and life has a way of pressing ahead, filling days and weeks quickly enough that time slips into a rhythm that blurs everything but the immediate.

Back in 1980, at the age of 31, I was struggling to rebuild a life that alcohol abuse had ruined. I had been sober through AA for less than 6 months, but was determined to make it. The first step I needed to make beyond not drinking, was finding a job.

After reading the want ads in The Village Times, for several weeks, I spotted an ad for Delano Studios. They needed someone to run kilns and assist with shipping. Nervously, I applied, was interviewed and waited.

A few days passed before I received a call from Laurene Sama. She told me that the job had been filled by an earlier applicant, but that they would file my application for future openings.

Yeah, right, I thought, and resumed my search.

However, two weeks later, Mrs Sama called and said that Mr. Campbell (everybody called him Mr Campbell (to his amusement it turned out)) wanted to interview me again.

The interview went better than expected, and I got the job.

Working at Delano Studios was like being adopted into a new family of people who all cared about each other, celebrated life and its events.

My supervisor was Linda Speiser from Stony Brook. Through her and Ward Campbell, I learned about the business, and about life.

Ward had a way of nurturing a person, treating them with respect and kindness. He never tried to dominate or control his employees, but did befriend most of us.

Years later, after I had left Delano Studios, lived in Oregon where I attempted to build Geodesic homes (did get one up and sold in a bad mid-80s real estate market), I returned to New York to live. I visited Delano Studios and learned that Ward was selling, retiring.

I suppose that when I worked with him earlier, that the idea of him retiring seemed unlikely. How naive are we when we are young?

I wanted to buy the company, but could not. Instead, he recommended to the new buyer, G Stuart Smith of Low Country Guild, Bluffton, South Carolina, that I go down and help them set-up Delano Studios in its new location. I went and stayed.

Once again, Ward Campbell set into motion events that changed my life in ways inconceivable at the time, creating an opportunity for me to make a lot of new friends, live in a place that really is God's country, and work doing one thing I loved.

I owe Ward Campbell a lot of thanks, and am pleased to have known him, to have called him a friend.

More later.

A Visit With Mickey Spillane

The first time I spoke with Mickey Spillane was the day after his 86th birthday party held here in Murrells Inlet, SC. We provided a movie poster to be displayed in the banquet hall.

Ruth and I had been invited to share in the celebration. During the evening, we invited Mickey to stop by our bookstore in town.

I admit I did not think he would. After all, we had opened the store nearly a year earlier, displayed some of his movie posters in the front windows, and knew he drove by a time or two every day.

However, Mickey walked through the front door around 11am and wandered around looking at displays of books and toy cars, something he collected, and finally stopped at the counter.

I had an original I, The Jury movie poster under the counter, which I took out and showed him. He broke into a grin, shook his head and said, "Biff." He clearly didn't think that Biff Elliott was a great Mike Hammer (he played the part in the original movie). After a moment of hesitation, I asked him to sign the poster. He looked at me and I read his reluctance, and watched him sign despite how he might've felt. I promised him then that I would not ask him to sign anything else, and never did.

As a long time fan of Mike Hammer, I had collected many items related to his career, including some books written by other authors who he had helped promote by sending their work to his agent.

We talked about a man named Garrety who wrote some hardboiled cop books. When I asked him what happened to this writer, he told me he had died young, and by his tone, I surmised that Garrety died due to behavior Mickey did not agree with.

After walking around the store with him, showing him collections writers that few people read anymore, both mysteries and science fiction, he turned to me and said, "So many of them are gone now. Death just doesn't make sense."

I'd never thought about death in that way, but had to agree and still do.

By the time he left, around an hour later, he had invited Ruth and me to visit him at home, which we did and started a brief but good friendship.

More on Mickey later.