Triplets from LI celebrate their 60th birthdays

Happy birthday to you … and you and you!

Wednesday is the Hamsley Sisters' 60th — Ellen, Diane and Lizbeth, identical triplets, originally from East Rockaway. They starred as youths in ads for baby clothing, banking, pizza, toilet paper, makeup, college and other products and services that ran locally or across the United States, from the 1960s through the 1980s.

"The big 60," said second-born Diane Hamsley, who now lives by the Shenandoah Mountains in the town of Front Royal, in northern Virginia.

Due to the pandemic, Diane Hamsley won’t be traveling up to Long Island to join her sisters, who are in East Rockaway and Lynbrook, the eldest triplet Ellen Morrison said, but the three plan on talking on the phone.

"We have, like, a triplet wavelength. You know. We always know when we’re kind of thinking about each other and we’ll just, like, pick up the phone and call. Or we’ll say, ‘oh, my God, I just was gonna text you,’" she said Monday.

The three plan on celebrating together at a later date, perhaps with a big 61st birthday.

When the Hamsley sisters were born the afternoon of Feb. 9, 1962, at what was then Doctors Hospital in Freeport, triplets were quite rare, a time before the advent of modern reproductive technology such as in vitro fertilization, which sometimes causes multiple births.

"It was definitely a different time," Ellen said; the triplets, born premature between 2 and 3 pounds each, were three of Minton and Paula Hamsley's five children.

Between 1960 and 1973, the number of births of triplets (and more) remained fairly constant, according to a 1994 article in the journal of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. But between 1973 and 1990, that rate increased at seven times the rate of singletons, the journal found. The first IVF baby was born in 1978.

But in the 1960s, the Hamsley Sisters were quite a novelty, with childhood milestones documented in Newsday and other newspapers, including one in 1963 in which the triplets were shown in Newsday, in the family home on Center Avenue.

"BIRTHDAY FOR THREE," read the caption. "The Hamsley triplets have a crackling good time going through tissue-wrapped presents during celebration of their first birthday."

The girls soon became child models — gazing up from a basket for Carter’s clothing ("Home, Daddy!"), holding hands as toddlers for Seamen’s Bank life insurance ("One low-cost premium covers father, mother and all the children — both present and future"), and biting into pizza slices ("Now, 3 cheeses make Chef Boy-ar-dee® Pizza Mix 3 times better than ever.").

"I’ve constantly gotten my whole life, ‘I know you!’ I would just say, well, I’m a triplet, and I have two sisters that look just like me.’ I’ve said that a million times my whole entire life," Ellen said.

Teachers couldn’t tell the triplets apart, and the three capitalized on the confusion.

At Molloy College, which the three attended together, graduating with degrees in business management in 1984, their identical looks worked to their advantage a few times when they were able to trick their teachers.

And sometimes one sister would go out with a date — and then bring another sister the next night, "and the man wouldn’t know which one he had seen the night before."

Pranks extended to the family’s home.

"One of my sisters would come down all dressed up beautifully to go out for the evening, and I would tell her how horrible she looked, so she’d go up and change, and then after she left, I’d go up and put on the outfit," Ellen said with a big laugh.

The triplets were so hard to tell apart that even their dad, Minton, who died in 2002, sometimes couldn't, Ellen said.

(Their heights are slightly different, Diane said, as are their noses, Lizbeth said.)

But their mom, Paula, who died in 2013, always could, Ellen said.

Diane Hamsley said their mom considered the triplets "three variations of the same song."

"I think she would be really proud of us," Diane said, "that we’re still very close, and we’re best friends."

By Matthew Chayes

matthew.chayes@newsday.comchayesmatthew

Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.