Nelson DeMille

`We probably had the first TV on the block ... We had TV parties. Families would all watch together.'

By Dan Cryer | Staff Writer

For writer Nelson DeMille, Long Island was the frontier.

As a young boy in the late '40s, the future author of ``Plum Island,'' ``The Gold Coast'' and other best-selling thrillers moved from Jamaica to Elmont. Back then, this wasn't simply a matter of moving to the 'burbs. The 'burbs as such didn't exist yet.

DeMille's father, Huron, was one of the pioneers who helped create a Long Island of affordable housing and small-town amenities. In Elmont, his company built Argo Village, a development of 1,500 brick colonials selling for $8,500 apiece. Huron DeMille also did subcontracting work on Levittown, the suburban granddaddy of them all. So the younger DeMille's childhood memories of Long Island are unusual. ``My father bought Army surplus jeeps and trucks. We would drive around and inspect the building projects. The area was just a patchwork of farms and developments going up - totally chaotic.''

DeMille built the first house for his wife and four sons. As he built others, conditions still remained primitive for a while. ``There were no phone lines yet into the houses,'' Nelson DeMille, 54, says. ``One phone booth for the entire street. So when the phone rang, we had to go out to the street to answer it. The streets were just mud and dust, like a western town. It was a real feeling of the frontier.

``We thought of it as a move to the country. We were surrounded by potato farms, and there was a woods nearby, a dairy farm and an old-fashioned general store. There were no shopping centers. But within five years there were supermarkets, a bowling alley and a strip mall.

``Almost everybody was from Brooklyn or Queens. We were all urban kids. We played stoopball. A very mixed crowd, ethnically diverse - Italian, Polish, Jewish and Irish. When a house was sold and a family would move in, we'd all go over and ask, `Are you from Brooklyn or Queens?'

``We played baseball all summer and swam at the Walcliff Pool. We would sneak in there because our parents were worried about polio. Jones Beach was like wonderland. It was the biggest outing, the biggest thrill. Families would go en masse in three or four cars.

``My mother was unhappy to move out to what she thought was the sticks. It was only 15 minutes from Jamaica by car. But then she didn't drive. Most women didn't. These were urban dwellers used to subways and corner candy stores.

``We probably had the first TV on the block. It was a little Dumont, with a screen about 6 inches across. We had TV parties. Families would all watch TV together.

``People didn't have a lot. Maybe one lawnmower per block, one telephone. It was amazing how people would pull together.''

Growing up on Long Island, DeMille believes, wasn't especially influential in shaping him as a writer, but the Island has proved fertile ground for setting many of his novels. He had always read a lot - feasting on Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck - but at Hofstra University he began to aspire to join their ranks.

These days this extremely successful author lives in Garden City, in a Victorian home far grander than anything his father ever built.