Concluding a Journey Into the Past

'Our Story' completes a 273-day run as a daily feature spanning LI's rich heritage

We're history.

"Long Island: Our Story" concludes as a daily feature.

From the beginning, we have tried to give you a sense of the sweep and richness of Long Island's heritage. We all go back a long way. Although 80 percent of us live in housing built after World War II, our history as a human community goes back 10,000 years to the Indians who hunted in our virgin forests and scooped life from our bays and harbors.

In many ways, the story of Long Island is the story of America. A story whose chapters include the impact of European civilization on those same Indians, the introduction of slavery, the triumph of the American Revolution, the rise of the Gilded Age of the great mansions, the ascendancy of the Jazz Age, the winning of World War II and the birth of the suburbs.

Like all histories, the story of Long Island goes from the ordinary to the remarkable, from everyday life to transcendent moments. We've tried to show both through the experiences of people who lived them. A colonial mother named Mary Cooper, who lived to see all six of her children die and confided the "harde labor and sorrow" of her daily life in Oyster Bay to her diary. Elinor Smith of Freeport, part of a generation of young men and women whose daring feats helped inspire a nation to fly -- from the dusty runways of Roosevelt Field all the way to the moon.

We hope you've enjoyed reading these stories and more. We hope you've learned a little. We hope you've gotten an appreciation for how yesterday influences today, and for just how much of the past is still around us on Long Island, even amid the timeless stretches of shopping centers and parkways.

In telling Long Island's story, we've learned some lessons ourselves. One thing that struck home was the importance of writing stories and telling them to our children. The Algonquians lived and thrived on Long Island for nearly 500 generations but left not one written record behind. It is one of the great tragedies of Long Island history.

It is a tragedy none of us are immune from today. As one of the hundreds of letter-writers who responded to our series noted, "It's amazing to me how little I really know about the place I love and live in."

We also learned that history is not some dry record of long-gone events. We are making and living history every day. It is a continuum in all of our lives.

This was dramatically underscored on an afternoon last March when three astronauts who had spent their childhoods on Long Island came home to address a gathering of high school students at the launch of Newsday's History-in-Motion traveling museum. The leader of the astronauts was Commander Kevin Kregel of Amityville, who talked about the excitement of viewing his hometown from 170 miles above the surface of the Earth. He said that the first American to journey to Mars was likely to be somewhere in high school at the moment.

Sitting in front of Kregel in the front row that day was another Long Islander, 85-year-old George Dade of Glen Head. As a teenager, Dade helped Charles Lindbergh prepare for his historic transatlantic flight from Roosevelt Field in 1927. Now, stooped and ill, he asked if he could be introduced to the astronauts. He rose and approached Kregel, who immediately held out his hand.

"You helped pave the way for me," Kregel said.

Dade smiled and appeared to blink back tears.

George Dade died on May 27. He and countless others did pave the way. We at Newsday hope that in some way "Long Island: Our Story" has helped pave the way as we enter a new century. "You don't know where you're going if you don't know where you're from," is the way Kregel puts it.

Even though "Long Island: Our Story" is ending as a daily series, there will be plenty more history. "Time Machine," a weekly photo page, will continue. George DeWan, one of the two lead writers on this project, will continue as Long Island history writer, and Newsday will publish a weekly history page this fall.

If you have any suggestions, or any final comments about the series, please let us know. Write to Long Island History, Newsday, 235 Pinelawn Rd., Melville, N.Y. 11747-4250 or e-mail us at history@newsday.com. In addition, the "Treasures of Long Island," a four-month museum show, devoted to the Island's past, will open at the Museums at Stony Brook on Sept.19. A hard-cover book version of "Long Island: Our Story" can be ordered now and will be available this September. And Newsday's History-in-Motion museum, which was destroyed by fire, is being rebuilt and will be back visiting schools this fall.

Finally, we want to thank the hundreds of people who have shared in this project -- the readers who have written to us, the historians and museum directors and librarians who have helped us, our colleagues at News12 and the teachers who have taught "Long Island: Our Story" in more than 1,000 classrooms.

Here at Newsday, a core of a dozen reporters, photographers and editors have worked full time on this project for nearly two years. Their work has been supplemented by nearly 100 other editorial colleagues and has been supported by staff members from seven other departments.

But even as the "Long Island: Our Story" team breaks camp with the past, another group is at work about the future. About our history to come.

Goodbye, for now.

--The Editors