I Remember Levittown . . .

She lives in the same Levitt ranch she moved into with her husband in 1951.

`The first thing that happened when we moved here was the milkmen. There were two milkmen waiting for us the day we took occupancy on Oct. 31, 1951. And my husband flipped a coin to pick out which of the two men would get the milk contract. And Merrick Dairy got it . . . I still have the milk box. It's right outside ...

``And that was the great milk that was delivered in the bottles, with the cream that came up to the top in the freezing-cold weather, and it was like having your own natural ice cream. Then followed by the Duggan Man. The Duggan Man was indispensable. This man provided us with eggs, bacon, cakes, you know, and all kinds of great breads, butter, so that was our lifeline.

``Because you know here in those days there was no such thing as getting out to a supermarket in two or three minutes. First of all, very many of the women didn't have cars. The women that had cars were the women that drove their husbands to the Long Island Rail Road station at five o'clock in the morning for them to pick up their trains. And they were the fortunate ones, that ended up with a car for the day. They were very sought after, these women that had cars. The rest of us, that didn't have cars, were really in bad shape. I didn't have a car for eight years.''

She was the reporter who chronicled the birth of Levittown for Newsday, including the crucial May 27, 1947, meeting of the Hempstead Town Board packed by veterans and their families.

`My eyes popped when I got to town hall because the lobby and the stairs leading up to the hearing room were loaded with people. The upstairs hallway was jammed and the room was packed. People were standing along the walls. I remember there were a lot of children, toddlers -- some in strollers -- and many babies held by men and women. We expected there would be quite a turnout. But the extent of the crowd was a big surprise to me . . . The meeting itself was rather brief. There were some speeches. No screaming and yelling the way people do at town meetings today. Everyone was quiet, anxious. I remember one guy in uniform, holding a baby, made a strong statement. These people were desperate. It was very moving. When the decision was announced, the crowd broke into applause.''

Then, despite her skepticism about Levitt's plans and oft-stated dislike of the proposal for ``thousands of little boxes,'' Wheeler and her husband wound up buying a Levittown ranch house in 1958.

``Levittown was the last place on the planet I thought I would be living. But, as it turned out, we moved there because the house was such a good buy, even though it was one of three lemons on the block. We loved living there. I came into work and told [managing editor Alan] Hathway I would be eating crow for the rest of my days.''

Robert W. Greene

A journalism professor at Hofstra University, Greene is a retired Newsday reporter and editor. He was 22 with a wife, two kids, a new job, and nearly no money when he scraped together the $500 down payment to buy a Levittown cape. He lived there from 1951 to 1957.

`My next-door neighbor was Leo O'Connell, who had come down from Canada, originally from Liverpool. Like us, I would say he was poor. Every morning Leo would go out ahead of me to work. And he would call me and tell me if he saw any good sofas or bureaus put out in anyone else's garbage. I would hustle out with the car, pick it up quick, and put it in the back yard. Then on Saturdays, after the wives learned how to sew slipcovers and Leo and I learned how to tie things with twine and work with springs, we repaired everything, and literally furnished our houses -- for the first couple of years until we got more money -- with stuff we picked up from the trash ...

``We had wonderful parties. Everyone would chip in for a keg of beer on the Fourth of July or whatever. We would choose a back yard; no one had fences then so it didn't really matter. . . . All of the women and all of the men made stuff. The party starts about ten in the morning and winds up about five o'clock the next morning! Everyone would be wandering, lurching through each others' backyards to get home ... Everyone took care of each other. It was just a wonderful community ... We still exchange Christmas cards, what is it, more than 40 years ago now? Good God, that's a long time.''

Moved into Levittown in 1951.

`People were interested to see how it would work out. There were dire predictions that it would turn into a slum. In fact, it turned out to be one of the best communities in the state . . . They said it would be all made of ticky tacky and they were all just the same. If you look at it now, all the houses are different now . . . I think the word `Levittown' became like the postwar substitution for the word `Brooklyn' or `Texas.' You just said Brooklyn or Texas and everyone would laugh.''

The Wantagh resident served on the board of Levittown School District 5 from 1963-1969. `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. ``If you go back to that period in time, you also had a fellow named [U.S. Sen.] Joseph McCarthy, who was polarizing the country. And if you didn't sympathize with what he was hollering and screaming about every day, well then automatically, of course, you were a communist. And some people believed in what McCarthy was doing, of course, and it carried over in the local community.

``Budgets, until maybe into the late 1950s, were considered at a meeting, generally in Levittown Memorial High School, the gym or otherwise, and it was not unusual for a budget meeting to carry over and be adjourned at five o'clock in the morning, to be reconvened at, say, 8 o'clock that same night to be completed.''

The funeral director of Thomas Dalton Funeral Homes, she grew up in a Levitt ranch in the late 1950s and the 1960s.

`There was a huge amount of children. You stepped out the door, there was always someone to play with. There was always someone to do things with. We did a lot of playing in the street, games and such.

``I think the world that I grew up in, those years on the block, they taught me that the world was a very friendly place, that your family belonged to an extended neighborhood that became like family in many ways. And when I was three I used to go knocking on doors asking for cookies. I got cookies . . . But that was the kind of world that I was growing up in. And the world was a big friendly place. You learned how to fit in, socialize and work in groups.''

The singer and composer grew up on Meeting Lane in the Hicksville part of Levittown.

`When we got older, my friends and I would take the train into the city. We'd go to movies, museums, we'd just walk around. We were getting away, and we thought the city was where things were great. It was a place to go . . .

``As kids, we'd hang out at the Carvel. Then there was the Levittown pool, where a lot of kids went. There were different places we'd go and hang out and not do much. We'd hang out at the Parkway Village Green. We'd listen to rock and roll. In '64, we started a band, the Echoes. We played at Holy Family Church, teen nights in different places.

``The first gig I remember getting paid for was at Holy Family. I had a crush on a girl named Virginia. I was on stage, and she was looking at me. It was great -- it was the coolest thing I could have done.''

He is chief executive officer of the Yours, Ours, Mine Community Center in Levittown.

`It's more diverse than when I came here, surely. You have a larger Indian population. You have a larger Latino population ... In terms of socioeconomic levels, there are more educated people with college backgrounds. Like I was told when I first got here, for every 10 blocks, at least one policeman lives on it, or a fireman, or a santitation worker, or a government worker. Or they work at Grumman or Fairchild or Republic. That's gone. And what's moving in now is people who are just more educated. Times have changed. That's what the original Levittowners did. They wanted their children to have a better life, and some of them have. What you find is many more coming back to live in the same house and turning it into a two-family home.''

An artist, she moved back to Levittown after growing up there in the 1960s.

`I think actually, people have done some really strange things to the houses. I think it would be better if they stuck to the quaint and cottage-type look they had . . . People put pillars on the front of the houses, which I never understood. It's like trying to be something you're not.

``It's almost like you go into the store and buy a kit -- country look, or regal mansion look, or modern look -- it's almost like a kit that you assemble on the front of your house.

``And I don't like the fences. Everybody has a fence now. When I was growing up, nobody had fences.''