My Turn: When Roosevelt Field and I were young

My friends and I went to Roosevelt Field mall when we were in high school, in the years between 1960 and 1964. Back then, it was an open-air mall — a series of stores grouped around courtyards, subject to the whims of weather.

We had certain rituals, observed on every visit. We aways shopped at Teepee Town, which, despite its name, did not sell tents or teepees. Instead, it featured the kind of “ethnic” jewelry that was becoming popular. I don’t know what happened to the little silver dog with a turquoise eye, but I still have a few of the pairs of earrings I bought there with my babysitting money.

We went to Woolworth’s to try out lipsticks, like Tangee, a bright orange color that looked good on none of us. There, we browsed the aisles of things we had no interest in buying, and sometimes sat at the lunch counter for sandwiches or ice cream.

Was it Woolworth’s that had the instant photo booth? That photo booth was also a prescribed stop. We posed in pairs, one shot smiling, the next three mugging, making funny or mock sexy faces.

If no parent was available to drive us, we took the bus, which went from the corner of I.U. Willets and Roslyn roads in Roslyn Heights almost directly to a final stop at the mall. One time, my brother Peter and I got tired of waiting for the bus (we never had a schedule, instead just showed up on the corner and hoped) and decided to hitchhike. After all, we knew that during World War II our parents had taken a vacation by hitchhiking from the base where Dad was stationed in Texas all the way to California.

After a short time, an older man stopped and asked where we were going. “To the mall,” we told him. “Get in,” he said, and took us there. But all the way he berated us — and especially my brother who, though he was two years younger than I, needed to take better care of his sister — about the dangers of hitchhiking. We never tried that again.

Do people remember that there was an outdoor ice-skating rink there, too? I was not fond of ice skating, since I always seemed to end up on my bottom, but I did skate there a few times. The movie theater was separate from the mall proper, set amidst the parking lots. Peter and my cousin Richard and I saw “Dr. No” there, and emerged vibrating to the music, but then had to wait for whoever’s mother was coming to get us.

Then I finally got my driver’s license! My little brother Michael (eight years younger than I) wanted to shop for Christmas gifts, so I took him to the mall. As we browsed the shops, thinking strategically about what his carefully hoarded coins could buy, we encountered a Santa Claus. Michael remembers that trip with gratitude, but what I chiefly recall is the whiskey breath of “Santa” and his over-done ho-ho-ho-ness.

Today, Roosevelt Field is an enclosed wonderland of upscale shops, with a fancy food court and shiny floors, but I’ll always remember its grittier first incarnation, and giggling through its courtyards with my friends.

Ellen Solow Holzman

Mattituck