Staten Island Summers

In the 1950s through the early 1960s I spent my summers at a bungalow on Neptune Drive in the New Dorp section of Staten Island, about a two hour drive from my home in Bergen County. It was a magical time for a while, until it wasn’t.

My grandmother, Emma Gottlieb, gave the bungalow to my mother. Emma also had a store on the main boulevard where she and my grandfather, Philip, sold dry goods. I would go there looking for something good but there was just buttons, fabrics and thread, nothing worth my time. My grandfather died before I was born.

It was always fun when we arrived and my brother, my sister and my parents would pile out of our old Chevvie, heading for a summer adventure.

It was small bungalow just two blocks from the beach and a long stone jetty which was next to Miller Field, a military airbase surrounded in barbed wire that was long since shut after World War II.

The bungalow had a grassy side yard that was always overgrown until we arrived for the summer and someone used the push mower to trim the grass.

A small, building in the rear of the yard was where my brother slept. It was big enough for a bed and a chest of drawers and a record player. My brother liked Bo Diddley, which today seems totally out of character for him.

The shower outside was built on wooden slats. The water was always cold and there were always spiders creeping about.

The bungalow was built on cinder blocks and we would crawl under to find the Spaldine rubber balls that would bounce there while we played off the front stoop. Crawling through cobwebs was gross especially if they got in your mouth.

The toilet was off the kitchen. You pulled a chain to flush. We ate in the kitchen which had a red Linoleum floor. My parents’ bedroom had no door, just a curtain hung in the doorway for privacy. I slept in a bed in the living room with my sister. There was a round, tin trash can in the corner of the room that held all the toys. Mostly I remember Chinese checkers.

The couch was in the living room and the front door opened onto a small yard bordered by a metal fence and hedges. The front door lock never worked so we always entered through a side door. Our neighbors were Mary and Charley Troll, very quiet and very nice people. Charley always had a cigar in his mouth.

Neptune Drive was a one-way street, wide enough for one car. Nobody could park on the street and everybody had a small parking spot on their property. There were bungalows up and down the street, close enough so you could see into your neighbor’s windows. A few homes were year-round, like the Calamanos. All the kids envied the Calamanos but looking back it must have been lonely after the summer ended.

The Mahaneys owned the bungalow across the street. Pat Mahaney and his girlfriend, Bunny, were often making out on the couch on the front porch. Pat was from a second generation Irish family. He lived on the lower east side and he was something right out of the Bowery Boys. He later became a New York City fireman and he and my brother were lifelong, best friends. He and Bunny have been married ever since, except for a few years when they separated and then got back together. They had a daughter, who was a dancer and a son, who is a high ranking member of the military.

The Mahaneys included Pat and his fraternal twin, Philip, who later became an electrician. Friends and other relatives also stayed at the bungalow from time to time. They had an icebox and the iceman used big tongs to carry ice from the truck. He would toss ice shavings to the kids. We had a refrigerator.

Catty corner to us was another bungalow whose only resident seemed to be an older woman with a very large goiter on her neck. One time I saw her in her nightgown and it was partly unbuttoned so I could see her breast. I have no idea what her name was but it was always gross to see her big, ugly goiter.

Someone known as Lee Boy, who was obviously mentally impaired, would walk up and down the street collecting any kind of cards, playing cards, baseball cards, whatever. Lee Boy would carry tall stacks of cards and smile until one of the boys snuck up and knocked the cards out of his hands, just for a laugh.

And the vegetable truck came regularly, selling fresh produce and the favorite staple of summer. The driver yelled out “Get your watermelones. Get your watermelones” and the residents would go and pick out fresh vegetables and watermelons.

The only other people I knew were the Calamanos and a Greek family, the Nichitiotis family, who lived in Queens and summered in their bungalow.

The Nichitiotis daughters were Tina and Annie. Tina was my sister’s age and Annie was my first crush. She had a screened-in porch and we’d play board games when it rained. Other times, she would come with another girl to my bungalow where me and a friend played Spin the Bottle or Seven Minutes in the Dark, a game that some people called Seven Minutes in Heaven.

The boy and girl would go into the closet and do whatever they wanted, which was usually nothing, although the boy always claimed that a lot went on in the darkened closet.

Spin the Bottle involved spinning a bottle. The bottle stopped and pointed to the girl, who you kissed (if you were a boy) or the boy (if your were a girl).

I never got very far with Annie. I remember her as pretty, dark skinned with black hair that she wore in one long braid down her back. She lived next to the Calimanos and the boy, Bobby Calimano, was my chief competitor for Annie’s affections. The proximity of the Calimano house provided Bobby with a huge advantage in my pre-adolescent battle for her love.

Then there was the centerpiece for the whole summer: The Beach. It was a place of religious beauty that overlooked the majestic Atlantic Ocean.

You would walk there down Neptune Drive in the morning. Adults wore sandals but the kids were barefooted. The hot pavement burned the souls of your feet but it was an incentive to get to the beach as fast as possible.

There was a small bench at the entrance to the beach. It was the scene of the great cigar debacle. I was sitting on the beach one afternoon smoking a cigar when my sister arrived. She yelled that she would tell mommy as she ran up Neptune Drive to inform my mother of my terrible deed.

On the beach, the blankets would be spread out, the transistor radios were turned on, most likely to 77 WABC, which was an all-music station and was later referred to as WABeatleC. It was an AM station as there were no FM stations yet. The popular hosts were Dan Ingram, Harry Harrison and Bruce Morrow, known as Cousin Brucie.

Of course, we spent a lot of time in the water which wasn’t very clean. At certain times and days of the week, large tar balls would come in with the tide, probably dumped by the huge oil tankers that you could see dotting the horizon. They attached to your body like glue. Other than ugly, they weren’t a big deal. At the end of the day, you washed off the tar with turpentine. It was before we knew much about carcinogens and that kind of thing.

Wooden skids also washed in from the tankers and they were a prize that we converted into floating docks that were coveted by all the kids.

At night, there were movies in the community building on the beach. The favorites were Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis comedies. The kids would hurry to get the best folding seats in the front of the room before the 16mm films would begin.

The building was also the starting place for the end of summer races that featured events like egg tosses and three-legged races. Little plastic trophies were handed out to the winners.

There was a vacant building down the street from the beach where we would smoke Marlboros, look at the Playboys we hid in the building and lie to each other about our non-existent sexual exploits. Cigarette money came from the soda bottles we’d find on the beach and return at Vinnie’s candy store. Small bottles meant two cents while the larger ones brought in a nickel.

If we were hard up for money and cigarettes, sometimes we would steal the empty bottles that Vinnie kept in a shopping cart outside to the rear of the store. Then we’d refund Vinnie’s own bottles for the cash.

Rainy days were usually a time for movies at the Lane
Theater on New Dorp Drive. I saw “The Peppermint Twist” there which was about Joey Dee and the Starlighters and how they invented the twist and not Chubby Checker.

I also remember being scared after seeing “The Tingler,” a 1959 movie about creatures that burrowed into your spine and gained strength through fear, before killing you. The chairs had “Percepto!”, a vibrating device that was activated by action on the screen.

After The Tingler and Vinnie’s and the tar balls and the shower spiders, it was time to return to Bergen County. We arrived home and the first thing I wanted to do was flush a toilet and shower without spiders.

I couldn’t know it but the next summer would be our last in Staten Island because that following August my father died and because the city took all the properties through eminent domain in advance of plans to build a long boardwalk. The boardwalk was never built and all that remains of New Dorp Beach are the empty, overgrown lots where bungalows once stood.