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Growing Pains

By Geoffrey Mohan | Staff Writer

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The two brick buildings sit shoulder to shoulder on Old Jerusalem Road, bookends to the war of words that tore through Levittown in its adolescence. One, completed in 1957, honors Jonas E. Salk, the doctor and microbiologist who developed a polio vaccine in 1953. It was named when the liberal faction controlled the school board.

The other, opened four years later, is named for Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the defiant war hero, a decision made when conservatives dominated the board.

Beginning in the 1950s and through the next two decades, Levittown's school board wrestled with conflicting visions of a community fixed in the national spotlight.

Levittowners still shared and helped each other out in the middle years. Kids still roamed back yards playing war or ring-a-levio. But when their parents went to school-board meetings, the gloves came off.

Levittowners would cut and paste their proposed school budgets in line-by-line votes during board meetings that often went on past midnight. Several lasted until dawn. Tempers flared among young idealists who had callused their hands in the battlefields of World War II.

``You talk about a pioneer era,'' said Clare Worthing, who moved into a Levitt ranch in 1951 with her husband, Jerry, a veteran. ``We came into potato fields, so there weren't the elder citizens traditionally here. So we were constantly finding new ground.''

From the outside, Levittown looked like a monolith: all white, young and married with at least two children. Inside, the differences were starting to show.

Two-thirds of Levittown had lived in New York City, where the Board of Education was appointed and its budgets written in back rooms of City Hall. Levittowners faced the prospect of floating bonds, levying taxes and building 17 schools in 20 years.

``Suddenly you could decide whether you were going to have a school building and where you were going to put it,'' said Herb Kalisman, who was one of the last of the original Levittowners to move in. ``We could get things done. That was a nice feeling. That's how most of us became friends. We made friendships that lasted 40, 50 years.''

They also cultivated enmities that lasted almost as long.

``People came in who were homogeneous in age group, homogeneous as far as starting families, homogeneous as far as educational kind of background, but not homogeneous as far as educational philosophy,'' Clare Worthing said.

``And you had, for want of better words, the liberals and the conservatives,'' Worthing said. ``The liberals were represented by Jewish and liberal Catholics predominantly. Conservatives were represented by conservative Catholics and conservative Episcopalians.''

In the 1950s, about half of Levittown was Roman Catholic, many of the adults had been educated in parochial schools with 40 students held in obedience by one nun, and not accustomed to educational extras.

Another 20 percent was Jewish, and the rest mostly Protestant.

Money also divided Levittowners. Zero-down pioneers lived blocks from those who paid stiffer down payments for pricier houses -- tight monetary policies during the Korean War raised the required down payment on a Levitt house to $1,000. At the end of the decade, families with incomes of $6,000 to $7,999 accounted for more than a third of the population, but there also were some 16 percent making $10,000 to $14,999, a hefty salary by standards of the time.

Meanwhile, defense plants, where many Levittowners worked by the mid-1950s, cut back overtime after the Korean War ended. The Long Island Rail Road raised fares in 1954 to $28.51 for a monthly ticket, a hard blow to the half of Levittown that still commuted to New York City. With no industry to tax, property owners footed everincreasing proportions of the school bill. Those holding onto newly acquired middle-class status worried about sliding back.

Reading Between the Lines

THESE TENSIONS first erupted over a song.

``The Lonesome Train'' was a song about Abraham Lincoln's funeral played occasionally for kindergarten through third-grade students.

It seemed innocent enough until the Scarsdale School Board in 1954 deconstructed its lyrics, penned by Millard Lampell, and decided it had communist undertones. It also found Lampell cited in Congressional investigations into communist influences in the media.