Growing Pains

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.

``A Kansas farmer, a Brooklyn sailor, an Irish policeman, a Jewish tailor . . . They were his people, he was their man,'' Lampell wrote of the mourners at Lincoln's funeral.

Lampell described Lincoln's detractors: ``A New York politician who didn't like Lincoln . . . An Ohio businessman who didn't like Negroes . . . A Chicago newspaper editor who didn't like people . . .''

These words, according to the Scarsdale Citizen, a privately published anticommunist newsletter, were ``so patently loaded with Communist propaganda that even a tyro in Communist lore could detect it.'' ``The Lonesome Train'' portrayed Lincoln as friend of the ``masses'' and promoted the notion of class conflict, the Citizen contended. Levittown readers quickly picked up the fight when the Catholic World, a monthly magazine published by the Paulist priests, highlighted the controversy in October, 1954. Copies of the Citizen, whose motto was ``Communism is contrary to the laws of God and the rights of man,'' also showed up in town.

From 1954 to 1957, the song was quietly banned and quietly reinstated, then publicly banned and publicly reinstated. Two elections were decided around the issue in the meantime.

But there was much more to the argument.

Kalisman, who a few years earlier cast doubt on anyone crazy enough to build houses in potato fields, had moved onto Tardy Lane, the last street William Levitt built. Kalisman found himself in the center of the controversy as a member of the District 5 Educational Association, a nominally independent advocacy group that was formed in 1950 but tended to side with the liberal faction.

``There were some people who said, `All we want is the old-fashioned Three R's,''' the 76-year-old Kalisman said. ``We don't need a dental technician to look at teeth; we don't need music; we don't need art. And then there were other people who didn't think those were frills at all . . .

``These were issues that were going on all over Long Island.''

In anger, Levittowners picked up the mud of the times and slung it. Liberals open to ``The Lonesome Train'' were communists. Conservatives opposed to it were fascists.

``There might have been those words tossed around,'' said Frank Callmeyer, a member of the conservative side. ``Nobody thought we were a member of the Fascist Party and nobody thought they were members of the Communist Party.''

Across the country, fears of Soviet infiltration of American society played out in even the smallest forums -- from Scarsdale's move against ``The Lonesome Train'' to Freeport's quick response to a 1949 state Regents order to perform ``loyalty checks'' for all employees.

Callmeyer, now 80 and retired to Florida, blames much of the extremism on the Soviet Union's Sputnik space program, which put a satellite into orbit in 1957 and outpaced American efforts into the early 1960s.

Kalisman blames it on McCarthyism.

``You had McCarthy in Washington, and the same thing was going on in the community,'' he said.

But under the scrutiny that still dogged the town Bill Levitt built with such fanfare, passions always seemed to burn brighter.

Topics of the time bled into each other. One of the fiscal conservatives in favor of banning the song became angered over the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith holding a ``Human Relations'' forum in Levittown Memorial High School.

``I don't like the title `Human Relations' -- I'd like to ask them if they'll let their daughter marry a colored fellow and see what they'll say,'' board member Harry Phieffer complained during a board hearing in 1955.

In the midst of the controversy, a principal sent home a letter urging parents to see to it that children attended church. Those who complained were tagged as loose on morality.

One side girded against the ``Catholic bloc,'' while the other spoke of ``Jew liberals.'' There were nasty late-night telephone calls and campaign literature that bordered on libel.

The ideology of the board swung with each election, and each time, the sides became more organized. When a school-construction bond issue arose soon after ``The Lonesome Train'' controversy, the Information and Education Committee formed among like-minded conservatives.

Callmeyer, who moved into a Cape Cod at 1 Midway Lane in 1948, got involved with the conservative faction in 1957, when he opposed that bond proposal. He rode the issue onto the school board in 1959, but stayed only a year before voters swung the other way -- apparently alarmed at the class sizes his low-build plan engendered.

Farther south, Clare Worthing became a block captain, and could muster the troops to support what was known as the liberal side. It took on the name of the Better Education League in late 1959.

``It was easy to get publicity on money,'' Callmeyer said. ``But in my view, I think the other issues were more important.''

Muriel Kane, who sparred in the early 1950s over whether to expand Levittown's tiny storefront library or scrap it and move the books into the schools, saw it the same way.

``It certainly was not about money,'' Kane said. ``It was about watching what people read. These were generally the McCarthy years.

``My favorite story is about the school board member whose child brought home a biology text,'' Muriel Kane said. ``I think it was in junior high school. There were stick figures illustrating human reproduction. He was horrified by that. In those days each school board member had a key to the textbook room. So, he went in there and ripped out the pages that had to do with human reproduction.'' Conservatives promoted morality, discipline and civics, and blasted John Dewey's liberal educational theories.

Things got so bad, Worthing recalled, that the District 5 Education Association set up meetings in private homes to teach residents about the different cultural approaches to education.

``They called in the leaders of the conservative group and the liberal group, and I was part of that,'' Worthing said. ``I think I was the token Protestant.

``I remember one time someone came in and gave a whole story of the different educational philosophies,'' she said, ``the Protestant ethic, the Catholic school, the Dewey methodology, and did it in such a way that I know the differences today.''

If a few people understood each other better, that didn't pave over the differences.

By the spring of 1960, the Levittown Teacher Association was taking out ads in the Sunday New York Times, advertising its members as available for hire. It petitioned the National Education Association, a professional group for educators that later evolved into a union, to study the district and broker a peace.

As the NEA worked on its report, the board on Dec. 11, 1961, voted 4-1 to reject a text that mentioned the Puritan practice of ``bundling,'' a courtship ritual in which fully clad teens slept together in a test of compatibility and self-control.

When it issued its report in 1962, the NEA found the houses Levitt built were not enough. The rest did not follow.

``The construction of houses in a mass-produced community is a relatively simple matter, but the creation of community traditions and accepted leadership is not something that can happen overnight,'' the report said. It cited an ``absence of an accepted set of values,'' and ``no long-standing traditions on which to rely for stability.''

Levittown not only struggled to create a community, but did it under a microscope, a legacy of Levitt's intense publicity campaign.

``I'm not going out on a limb when I say that Levittown might very well be the model for housing projects all over the nation,'' remarked a Senate committee staffer after a Levittown tour in 1951. Residents knew they were special, and the media responded.

``Since Levittown was, first of all, a sexy name in the news, anything that happened here was of national interest,'' Kalisman said. ``And all the papers would pick up what we were doing here.''

There was no other forum for Levittown either, the NEA noted. Levittown was its schools -- public ones, at least until St. Bernard's parish school opened in the 1960s.

The fights continued unabated.

Angered by a Supreme Court decision throwing out prayer in public schools in 1962, the Levittown School board taunted the court by insisting each teacher begin the day with the Pledge of Allegiance, then choose between a Bible passage, the fourth stanza of ``America'' or any historical document ``significant both to our national and spiritual heritage.''

Levittown's defiance lasted only a few months before the state, citing the Supreme Court decision, threw out the practice in October, 1962.

Six months later, an obscure backup textbook on India was hauled onto the censorship block. Its author, Emil Lengyel, according to the conservative bloc of the board, had communist affiliations in the prewar years.

Lengyel, a Fairleigh Dickinson University professor, admitted joining some organizations out of liberal naivete, and had quit them by the time the controversy erupted. Led by board member Joseph Waldvogel, an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve, and Robert Hoshino, the board president, the trustees refused to approve the text, which was already in stock.

Hoshino, an open admirer of Joseph McCarthy and his anticommunism hearings, demanded an ``absolute repudiation'' from the author, whose earlier affiliations had not prevented him from getting a security clearance in World War II to lecture in military camps. A shaken and shocked Lengyel, who attended the board meeting in April, 1963, did not comply.

``My husband was a pretty staunch conservative -- not crazy,'' said Alice Hoshino, who remains a McCarthy defender.

The issue backfired, and the following election brought Waldvogel's defeat and the victory of three liberal-faction members.

Eli Mellan, who cut his teeth by fighting for a post office for the southern swath of Levittown, giving it a Wantagh address, started as the solitary liberal voice in this era and came to spearhead a majority. He would go on to become a District Court judge until his retirement in 1985.

The Lengyel book-banning still baffles him.

``I couldn't explain it then and I couldn't explain it now,'' said Mellan, now 80 and living in Tucson, Ariz. ``In my opinion, it's idiotic reasoning. It's perverse reasoning. They made accusations based on faulty reasoning.''

Victor Eugene Buck, elected in May, 1963, still has a long flow chart he sketched while Waldvogel presented his evidence against Lengyel in a two-hour speech during a board meeting in 1963.

The 75-year-old retired engineer still can't figure out the details but understands the background.

``Levittown school district and community were a very vibrant place then. All of us were World War II veterans for the most part -- same age, roughly, very interested in getting our homes started, getting a community started -- and with that, a lot of bonding together,'' Buck said. ``There was a ferment in Levittown that you can only create in a new community. You can't make it persist over a long period of time.''

Waldvogel, who still lives in Levittown, declined to be interviewed. ``I'd rather not talk about it,'' he said. ``I don't want to dredge that up.''

Born to be Square

LEVITTOWN simmered down and settled into the rest of the 1960s, a decade whose color and conflict were more muted in the new suburbia.

Alfred and Carol Thomson admit they were kind of square as kids in the '60s.

For them, ``bad'' meant getting caught listening to the Beatles or Motown, said Al Thomson, 46. Entertainment meant Lawrence Welk on TV. Provocative dress meant pointed boots and bellbottoms.

Their memories are on a small scale -- the swimming-pool tags that stopped the circulation on their ankles, the air-raid drills at school, their mother donning a helmet, making sure everyone had taken cover.

Al recalled school lessons on communism that so instilled him with a fear of what lurked behind the Iron Curtain that he was scared of what he might encounter when he finally visited East Berlin in the 1970s, well into his adulthood.

Slowly, however, the children of Levittown tugged at the veneer of conformity.

Homes sprouted family rooms and dens to house their restless teens, who nonetheless cast their eyes around the fenceless, picture-window enclave looking for a place to escape.

They found clean fun at the Levittown Roller Rink and Jahn's Ice Cream Parlor on Hempstead Turnpike.

They found less savory pastimes in the weed-tangled sump pits and the village greens, which already were showing the ill effects of competition from strip malls and department stores on Hempstead Turnpike. Stores were closing, grafitti marred the walls and one village green gave way to garden apartments.

``We view with alarm the rising count of: Nuisances committed, illegal loitering, petty thievery, housebreaking and entry, robbery, vandalism, malicious mischief, drag racing on residential streets,'' the Wantagh-Levittown Civic Association newsletter lamented in July, 1963.

``Did we not have seventeen young chumps arrested from our street corner this past summer for loitering and littering?'' the newsletter continued. ``Did we not have others arrested for throwing broken glass into our community swimming pools? Did we not see boys in their very early teens sitting in our park areas at twilight sipping beer and puffing cigarettes purchased at a local store by one of their older confederates?

``Did we not witness a Good Humor driver being assaulted and having his truck driven up on the grounds of the Slate Lane Pool by a small gang with nothing better to do? Did we not hear of `rumbles' throughout the year that involved children of our not-too-distant neighbors?''

Eugene Trimboli went through Levittown schools oblivious to all this. ``When you read today about the Sixties and the wild times -- they weren't,'' Trimboli said.

``Put it this way, if your hair went over your ears, the assistant principal took you to the barber and they had your hair cut, sent the bill home and it was paid,'' Trimboli said. ``This is the wild Sixties. By today's standards it was ultra, ultraconservative . . . I think it was the whole Island.''

At home, Trimboli would stand with his hand over his heart, all alone in front the television as the last show signed off to the strains of the national anthem, and fantasize about being a Marine. He got his chance when the war broke out in Vietnam.

``That was my dream, and the war was on,'' said Trimboli, now 50 and a teacher in Great Neck. ``It was really going. That's what I wanted. And I thought the communists were going to get us.''

Levittown was ``the easiest place, probably in the country,'' to make its draft quota, said Dennis Dunne, a volunteer who was wounded in Vietnam and now is a county legislator for Levittown. Like many others, Dunne signed up at a recruitment booth in front of the Mays department store on Hempstead Turnpike.

Fathers took sons, and sons went alone. They did it because they wanted to. They did it because they were expected to. Trimboli studied hard at the State College at Cortland. Not to make the dean's list but to make the grades for platoon-leader's school in Quantico, Va., where he went instead of going on to his senior year.

By his account, Trimboli was a model soldier-to-be. He could take apart and reassemble his M-16 in the dark. He was the guy the drill sergeant set up as an example of how to dress sharp.

But one day a gung-ho captain told the candidates, ``Make no mistake. You're not here to save the world. I am going to make you professional killers.'' Sickened, Trimboli dropped out, and his view of what he'd seen as a holy war began to shift.

Trimboli had been teaching at Levittown Memorial High School for about a year when, on Nov. 25, 1969, he watched a soldier on television recount the massacre of civilians at My Lai.

The next day, Trimboli -- 22 years old and without tenure -- showed up with a black armband with the word ``Vietnam'' on his sleeve. That's when his trouble began.

The American Legion did not take it lying down and demanded that the school board suspend Trimboli and investigate whether his teaching was biased.

To this day, there are members who grow angry at his name. And when Trimboli tells the story, he is close to tears.

``I just sat on my couch,'' Trimboli said. ``It's funny to think about it. I still, I get affected by it. Because I felt so helpless. I felt like, `What are we doing? Why are we doing this? And I can't just sit by and say nothing. If I say nothing, I'm supporting a policy of genocide.'''

Several hundred people, many of them students, crowded the Dec. 15, 1969, board meeting. Thirty-seven people spoke, including a handful of Legionnaires. Trimboli sat with his attorney, silent, despite a microphone placed in front of him.

Some veterans still seethe at the event. Joseph Kavanagh, one of the founding members of the Legion Post on Jerusalem Road, recounted the story without prompting.

``And of course, the school board being the school board -- gutless wonders -- took a step backwards and did nothing,'' Kavanagh said.

Dennis Dunne had already come home to Levittown from Vietnam, where he had served 19 days before he fell with an accidental gunshot wound to the leg while patroling the bush.

``Half of the people were against the war, half were for it,'' Dunne said. ``I thought we were doing the right thing. The French helped us in the Revolution, and I thought we should help in Vietnam . . . We didn't lose. We left because it was not a winnable war.''

On the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, the names of 29 Levittowners are etched in the black marble.

Levittown started out being about veterans. Now their sons were dying, and the war at home began.

At the Daniels house on Hook Lane, there were arguments between Edgar Sr. and Edgar Jr. over the war.

``My father was a Marine, and he enlisted,'' the younger Daniels said. ``We didn't see things quite the same way in terms of Vietnam. I saw it a little differently than he did. So there were lots of arguments and lots of nights that I left the house angry, or he had to leave the house because we were both angry.''

The same scene was carried out all across America. At house parties, there were groups split along the issue. In school, there was talk in the halls.

``You're talking about two generations coming into conflict,'' Daniels said. ``Really, that was what the Vietnam War exposed . . . The generation before was the last command generation that you could tell what to do without having too many problems. The last generation where government heroes were in fact government heroes, where generals were heroes and things.''

Daniels, who lives a few blocks from the home of his boyhood, can remember his draft number, 148. It could go either way, he thought at the time. It went against him, and he was drafted.

``I got my notice and of course I wasn't happy about it, but I wasn't going to break the law, wasn't going to do something I shouldn't do. But I fell in the bathtub, God's honest truth, I fell in the bathtub, my knee popped out of my socket and ripped a bit of cartilage or something.''

Daniels' family doctor was on vacation. So he went to a backup physician, who launched into a tirade about the obligations of the draft. Eventually, a specialist declared him unfit.

``That day, I called my draft board, and they said you still have to show up; we'll examine you. So I didn't know if I was going to go or not.

``So, my father is driving me to Freeport -- that's where the train was -- to take the train from Freeport to Fort Hamilton,'' Daniels said. ``As we're driving along I notice he's crying as he's driving. I said, `Dad, what's the matter?' He said, `I fought in the war so you wouldn't have to fight.' I'd never seen the guy cry before in my life.

``It was quite a revelation for me. Of course now I understand perfectly. As the father of two children, I understand this perfectly.''

'70s Attitudes

THE MID-TO-LATE 1970s proved the end of a painful adolescence for Levittown. While it would have its final conflagration in 1978 when the schools exploded again, the community would first confront landmine issues of race, gender and politics.

Conceived in segregation, Levittown struggled to deal with the smattering of blacks in its midst. Birthed in a staunchly Republican county by what had been working-class Democrats, it gravitated toward the GOP column even as a president resigned in disgrace. Nurtured by stay-at-home moms, the Levitts' model village emptied in the daytime as both parents headed to work to battle the effects of an oil crisis, inflation and economic decline.

When James Edmondson started work at the four-year-old youth center on Center Lane in 1968, on paper he hardly seemed like a controversial hire. The 27-year-old Hempstead resident already had a wealth of experience, opening similar centers in Freeport and Hempstead. But he also was black.

``They didn't want me in there,'' Edmondson said. ``But I knew I had to be in there, because I was working with their children.''

When Edmondson went to the Westbury-Levittown Memorial football game, and headed for the all-white stands of Levittown Memorial, a ticket-taker called after him, thinking he was lost. ``They're over there,'' she told him.

``Long before Sidney Poitier did `Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,' I was at dinner,'' Edmondson said.

``I had the words written on it, `Nigger Go Home,' all over this building,'' he said. ``But each time, those same kids had to paint it off. And we became friends that way.''

On the day his wife went into labor with his daughter, Jill, 28 years ago, Edmondson went outside of the center to find his Volvo 544 vandalized.

``They put my car up on two cinderblocks,'' he said, ``and I couldn't take my wife to Mercy Hospital. But right across the street there was a lady who lived there with her son, who was a Nassau County policeman. He took me to Hempstead. That's fate. The way it is.''

Fate dealt Joseph Mondello a challenge. Now the Nassau County Republican chairman, Mondello took over as the party's man in Levittown at one of the worst times in history, rode the positon into office and witnessed Levittown's shift to the center of the GOP's core constituency. You don't win Nassau County these days without Levittown, Mondello warned.

``We worked it,'' said Mondello, who has lived in Levittown since 1969. ``We worked this area. I worked this area. I became the leader in 1974. I'm going to tell you like it is. It was an all-time low. I became leader on August the ninth, 1974. That was the day that Nixon resigned, and that's the day that I became the leader here. I said, `Oh, Mondello, you did it again.'''

Things were no more stable on the home front. By the 1970 census, 12 percent of Levittown families with children of pre-elementary-school age got by on two incomes, up from 9 percent a decade earlier. By 1980, it would rise to 31 percent, and stands now at 43 percent.

Connie Nisito went back to work as a clerk in the late '70s, some 25 years after she moved to Levittown.

``I remember the prospective employer saying to me, `Mrs. Nisito, you haven't worked in 25 years.' I said to him, `What's the difference? I've been helping my husband in his business; I've been a housewife; I worked for R.H. Macy's for a few years. Anyone who's worked for R.H. Macy's can work anywhere.' So, I said, `Look, give me a try. And if I don't work out, you can fire me.''' She got the job.

A Hard Lesson

A YEAR AFTER it turned 30, Levittown groped for adulthood with one last growing pain. Teachers walked out of the Levittown School District and staged a Long Island-record strike from Sept. 5 to Oct. 30, 1978.

It had been a long time coming.

``The overall tone and atmosphere within the educational community in Levittown has been strained over a period of time. This strike did not happen overnight,'' wrote Beth Harrigan, an English teacher at MacArthur High School, in an open letter handed out during the strike.

Like many other families struggling through the '70s on two incomes, Camille Costanzo watched in anger as the school board gave the teachers raises and perks. ``I used to hear the teachers brag about their trips to Europe, the new jewelry they were buying,'' Costanzo said.

``The teachers had asked for, if I recall right, 110 demands. It was all up there on the bulletin board. They got almost every one of them. And our school taxes went up sky-high. The following election, we swore we were going to get that school board out.''

Facing school taxes that were 32 percent higher than the county average, the conservative-dominated board began cutting back in 1976. It enacted five-day furloughs to save money, and fired 70 teachers. It proposed ``unlimited'' class sizes, a two-year pay freeze and large cuts in medical and insurance benefits.

Without a contract as school began in 1978, Levittown teachers walked.

They insisted it wasn't just about money, but had a hard time running from that charge. It so angered them they published all their salaries -- then among the lowest in the county -- in a two-page ad in the Levittown Tribune.

``You have to remember '78 was right afer that `tax-PAC' wave struck that started out in California with Proposition 13,'' said Charles Kemnitzer, current president of Levittown United Teachers union, and a Levittown Memorial High School social-studies teacher at the time. ``And there was a feeling in Levittown, amongst some, that the previous contract that the teachers had prior to '78 had been a very good one. In fact, it was a fair contract, that's all.''

Costanzo joined a group of parents who lashed out at the striking teachers, picketing the picketers.

``We were on one side of Shelter Lane,'' Costanzo said. ``The teachers were picketing in front of Wisdom Lane [Elementary School]. We had the police there, they set up patrol. They brought in scabs. People were so desperate for jobs, they were coming in from all over the country, because the strike was going on. They wanted to be hired to fill the places of these teachers who were picketing.''

Albert Shanker, then head of the American Federation of Teachers, lent his support. The strike went national.

``We were being threatened,'' Costanzo said. ``I'll never forget, Halloween night, Angelo and his sons next door stayed up all night with baseball bats. My husband and son stayed up all night, because we heard our houses -- people on this block, a lot of us women were on the picket line, opposite the teachers, protesting the teachers' strike -- we had heard that our houses were going to be hit. So, no one slept that night . . .

``It was a horrendous time. We were on national television, we were in Time magazine, they heard about us out in California, all over the place. And it lasted, I think, seven weeks.''

Kemnitzer, 33 at the time, walked in front of Levittown Memorial, at the administration offices at Wisdom Lane Elementary School, and in front of board members' houses.

``None of the teachers felt good about going on strike,'' he said. ``. . . Many teachers suffered financial hardships. People almost lost their homes. I know there were probably divorces that happened as a result.''

Parents formed a group called PEACE (Parents Emergency Action Committee for Education) to force the respective sides to negotiate.

Like Costanzo, Greta Malings moved into Levittown in the 1960s. She became active in PEACE. Sixteen days into the strike, she was among a group of 30 parents that took over the superintendent's office to demand more concerted negotiations.

``We just went into the conference room and locked the door and sat in there until the wee hours of the morning,'' Malings said, laughing. ``Mommy was a protester. My son brought us a bag of food and stuff to the window, the back window.''

By the time the strike was over, a union president was jailed for eight days, a replacement teacher accidentally ran over a striker, four students and a teacher were arrested after minor scuffles, students held a sleep-in at a high school, and the teachers capitulated on almost everything.

Herman Sirois had to pick up the pieces just three years after the dispute ended -- first as assistant superintendent, then as superintendent.

``It divided the community along many lines,'' Sirois said. ``It was the last issue that created the division up and down the community.''

It also was the last time the national spotlight seared Levittown. Relieved, the school district turned inward. Students had fared poorly in rankings against the rest of the county, Sirois said. The district laid plans for change.

``I get the sense that what that [strike] did in Levittown was just let everything come up to the surface, and everyone fought it out, and after that was done, we said, let's try to do something decent here.''

Maybe cooler heads prevailed. Maybe people got too old to raise a commotion. But as Levittown entered the 1980s, the battles were over.

One by one, Levittown began closing the schools whose construction fed so much controversy in the growing years. Enrollment declined from a peak of more than 18,000 in 1968 to a nadir of 6,500 by the end of the 1980s.

From the late 1970s through the 1980s, the dynamics of Levittown changed as economic currents crossed. The real-estate market boomed, and the pioneers reached retirement age in time to cash out of houses that had been transformed into golden nest eggs by sweat and inflation.

But you needed a nest egg to buy one, too.

It had taken 20 years -- until 1967 -- for Levitt's $7,000 capes and ranches to double in value. But they quadrupled again in the next 20 years and then skyrocketed to $162,600 by the end of the decade.

Still, some of the old verities refused to budge. Levittown was a town for raising children when Dwight Eisenhower was president, and was still that way when the nation voted in 1992 for its first child of the Baby Boom, Bill Clinton.

``There's a constant regeneration of a hope and faith in education,'' Sirois said of the demographic changes. ``Especially young parents want a good education for their kids. So, every time a house is sold, the likelihood that it's sold to a family with a newborn is very high.

``The belief in the schools, the faith in education, the hope that education will make my kid's life better, that's one of the driving forces in this community.''

What's different is who's asking for an education, and in what language they ask for it.

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