Doris Lentini's photos show how Long Island lived

Her children and postwar suburbia were growing together, right before Doris Lentini's eyes. It was 1950s Huntington, where stay-at-home moms like Lentini kept busy with young families.

Doris Lentini also kept busy with an Eastman Kodak Brownie camera.

Over a period of three decades, Lentini snapped thousands of black-and-white photographs of her four children, their playmates and their neighborhood scenes, first on Hemlock Avenue and then on Bay Avenue.

"I look in her albums and can see photographs of every month of my life," said her son, Paul Lentini, 61, a Huntington financial adviser.

And also photos of Charlie "Cigar" Fuller, the Pine Wood Dairy milkman. Or the 1960 Huntington Memorial Day parade on Main Street. Or a trip to Jahn's Ice Cream Parlor and Restaurant for a gargantuan sundae called The Kitchen Sink.

Lentini, whose collection of nearly 10,000 images shows Long Island as a slice of "Leave It To Beaver" Americana, died Aug. 22 of cancer at her Huntington home. She was 92.

The images she left behind put family, friends and neighborhood on display. They also revisit a Long Island in its suburban infancy, a region that after World War II sprouted new families, simple Cape- and ranch-type homes and mom-and-pop businesses.

"My mother and father lived suburbia," said Lorna Lentini, 56, a Manhattan filmmaker and photographer. "They moved into this great neighborhood of the working class, of middle-class families moving away from the city. . . . Everything was so wide open then, and there were kids all over the neighborhood."

But Doris Lentini was more than an amateur photographer/stay-at-home mom. She was a child of the Great Depression, who left her native Minnesota with a nursing degree for a career as a stewardess in a burgeoning airline industry. Then, in 1968, widowed with her children nearly grown, she showed an independent side, returning to work as a nurse.

Her daughter said her mother also traveled to Greece and Africa after her husband, John, died of cancer in 1968. Of course, she took photos of her global adventures.

"After my father died, what was important to her changed," Lorna Lentini said. "The children were almost all grown and she wanted to make her own way."

And that way always seemed to include a camera. Ever since her husband had returned from a business trip to Germany with a Konica camera, Doris Lentini found herself lured to the lens, her daughter said. "She saw him with this fancy Konica and just took to it."

On Sept. 12, at a memorial service in her Bay Avenue home, friends and former neighborhood residents pored over 40 or 50 albums, between 4,000 and 5,000 of her photographs. Some 4,000 to 5,000 more remain stored in boxes, family members said.

Among the visitors was Mary Harmon Persson, 58, whose family - with nine children - had lived across the street from the Lentinis.

"It was a walk back in time," said Persson, now of Newmarket, N.H., who found herself stunned by the detail in the photos. She marveled at young, innocent faces and the simple gatherings of her childhood. "An incredible documentary of our lives."

Paul Lentini said neighborhood kids called his mother "Shutterbug" because she always was getting them to line up for photos. When it came to family, she could be aggressive, swooping in on subjects like a paparazza.

In the fourth grade, when he took up the clarinet, Paul Lentini wanted to make sure he got in all the practice he could. "So I was on the 'john' practicing," he said. "She heard this, and the first thing I know the door flies open and a flash bulb goes off."

Toward her final days, Doris Lentini shared with her daughter just how important her photographs were.

"The subject just came up," Lorna Lentini said. "She said, 'This is what I'd like to take with me, the albums. In a big pillow case.'

"I said, 'Just one pillow case?' and she said, 'Well, maybe two.' "