Seven decades of LI headlines

 The '40s: Growing up in wartime

The Depression was waning, and Long Island was growing.

In 1940 the population of Nassau was 406,748; Suffolk's was 197,355. People were pouring into these formerly rural counties by the tens of thousands, drawn to jobs in Long Island's booming defense industry. Both Grumman in Bethpage and Republic in East Farmingdale grew exponentially as the wars in Europe and the Pacific raged.

Eyes were glued overseas, but there were local tragedies, too. In September 1941, a fighter plane crashed at Jerusalem and Florence avenues in Hempstead, killing three children. Two months later, the LIRR's growing pains turned fatal, when a train-truck collision in Mineola killed seven.

Political bosses in both counties were amassing power. J. Russel Sprague, Nassau's first county executive, won a third term. In Suffolk, W. Kingsland Macy, who in 1946 would win a congressional seat, had reigned as leader of the county's Republican majority since 1926.

With the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, every life on Long Island changed. Men enlisted in droves. Many women began to work outside the home for the first time, on assembly lines or in aircraft factories, and tended to their victory gardens out back.

In 1945, the euphoria of the war's end gave way to the sobering realization that Long Island lacked sufficient housing for the returning heroes. The workers who flooded the region for more than 100,000 jobs in the aircraft industry had filled the Island's housing stock to near capacity. But Abe, William and Arthur Levitt had a solution.

The Levitts bought hundreds of acres of potato lands in Island Trees with a big plan - to build 2,000 homes, nearly by assembly line, over a radiant-heat slab instead of a cellar. The houses were ready to rent to veterans for $60 a month in 1947, with a snag - a Town of Hempstead zoning law against houses without cellars. Newsday helped to marshal veterans, who stormed a hearing to get the rule overturned. It was, and the project known as Levittown grew to nearly 100,000-people strong.

But when it came to a population explosion, Long Island hadn't seen anything yet.

The '50s: The age of suburbia

In the postwar years, the march onto Long Island became a stampede. The success of Levittown prompted other areas to ease their building codes, and cramped city dwellers yearning for backyards and bedrooms flooded in. By the end of the 1950s, Nassau's population doubled to 1.3 million; Suffolk's rose 150 percent, to nearly 667,000. The era of the suburbs had begun.

Transportation for all these new residents became the next challenge. The LIRR, bankrupt and mismanaged, was careening toward disaster. Two train collisions within nine months in 1950 killed 107 people, injuring 203. The disasters horrified the nation, eventually prompting the overdue modernization of the railroad and its incorporation into the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The roads, too, required an overhaul to accommodate the new suburbanites. Under the stewardship of the seemingly all-powerful state official Robert Moses, the Meadowbrook and Northern State parkways were extended. The Long Island Expressway, which had opened in Queens in 1940, began a massive extension to the East End, and its first Nassau section opened in 1958.

Now Long Islanders needed places to go, and shopping centers and schools sprouted rapidly. Roosevelt Field Shopping Center, one of the first in the nation, opened on a former airfield in 1956. C.W. Post College opened in Brookville in 1955, and philanthropist Ward Melville donated the land that would become Stony Brook University a few years later.

The growth had its dark side: a rise in crime. The nation was riveted by the kidnapping of 4-week-old Peter Weinberger, grabbed from his family's porch in Westbury on July 4, 1956, and left to die nearby. Five years earlier, 12-year-old Lyde Kitchner was found strangled in the woods near his home in Smithtown's Village of the Branch. The Island was again captivated in 1957, when 7-year-old Benny Hooper fell into a 21-foot well. But that story had a happy ending, when Benny was rescued just 10 minutes before his air would have run out.

The world beyond beckoned. Less than a decade after World War II's end, more men were called to serve in Korea as the Cold War flared. Familiar faces flickered on new television screens: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, Marilyn Monroe and, increasingly, a young and dashing politician named John F. Kennedy.

Nobody realized it yet, but this was the calm before the storm.

The '60s: Hope, shock and awe

John F. Kennedy swept into office in 1961 with the promise of a "New Frontier." Despite that optimism, the nation would soon be beset by challenges - challenges no less present on prosperous Long Island, where Richard Nixon beat Kennedy by more than 100,000 votes.

As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. rose to prominence and civil rights unrest was fomented down South, Long Island saw its own racial turbulence. A local group challenged integration in Malverne in court, while pro-integration marchers picketed at other schools. The new Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) won a groundbreaking agreement to place nonwhites in nonmenial jobs at the Franklin National Bank, though discrimination was still widespread.

The Vietnam War escalated, ensnaring more and more local men. By decade's end, 527 Long Islanders would die there.

The region's ties to world events were powerful: In 1962, Grumman won a contract to build the $1.5-billion Lunar Excursion Module. It added 5,000 jobs, and an infusion of local pride when Americans walked on the moon seven years later.

On Nov. 22, 1963, daily life paused as Long Islanders staggered under the shock of the president's assassination.

Locally, Suffolk was exploding, with potato farms giving way to housing developments. Though Nassau's population leveled off, Suffolk's nearly doubled, to 1.1 million. A Suffolk County police force was established. A 1963 Newsday series about the costs of Suffolk's runaway growth built support for a master plan and a regional planning group, which began in 1965. And the unprecedented growth, as well as some long-entrenched political bosses, led to startling corruption.

In Nassau County a Democrat, Eugene Nickerson, won the county executive's post for the first time. During his tenure, Nassau Community College grew from a few hundred students to 16,500, and the acreage of public parks quadrupled.

The year 1968 saw the assassinations of King and presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. The death toll in Vietnam was still rising. As elsewhere, local youths were burning draft cards, protesting the war and, in growing numbers, using drugs. As Long Island's aircraft industry declined, joblessness was growing.

In 1968, Nixon again carried Long Island by more than 100,000 votes. This time he won, and Newsday reported after his inauguration that the average American "stopped to catch his breath."

That pause wouldn't last for long.

The '70s: Days of soul searching

Long Island finally stopped growing.

And when the housing boom ended, thousands of jobs ended with it. Long Islanders were infuriated by rising energy rates and rising taxes. For the first time, people began leaving the region to seek the good life somewhere else.

In 1972, the LIE was finally completed, 11 years behind schedule and $80 million over budget estimates.

Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon hit home here, where Nixon had enjoyed some of his largest pluralities in the nation. It led to historic Democratic gains in local elections that generally saw Republican victories, as well as ethics reforms.

Yet scandals still abounded. Newsday reported in 1972 that the Nassau Republican Party was forcing town and county workers to kick back 1 percent of their salaries to the party. The Southwest Sewer District was found to be awash in corruption, with a raft of politicos and contractors accused of bribery and huge cost overruns. And in 1976, Nassau District Attorney William Cahn was convicted of 45 counts of mail fraud and making false statements for double billing travel expenses.

Long Island got a reputation for horror with the release of "Jaws," based on a fictional East End town, and "The "Amityville Horror," a fictionalized tale that drew on the real-life slaying of six members of an Amityville family by Ronald DeFeo, a son, in 1974.

In what came to be known as the Levittown Case, a State Supreme Court judge deemed New York's school-aid formula unconstitutional, as it favored students in districts with a larger tax base. Meanwhile, an appeals court in 1979 upheld the Island Trees School Board's 1976 banning of 11 books, including works by Kurt Vonnegut and Langston Hughes.

LILCO spent $2.2 billion on a nuclear plant at Shoreham, where safety concerns inspired the largest protest Long Island had ever seen. Elsewhere, the costs of pollution became palpable, though the dawning of environmentalism also inspired efforts to clean up some of the Island's harbors and bays.

The news wasn't all bad: The Vietnam War ended. The civil rights struggles of the 1960s had led to more rights. Sit-ins and protests gave way to roller-discos and Little League. Yet Long Islanders grappled with what seemed like the end of its easy prosperity, and that period of soul-searching was far from over.

The '80s: Any port in a storm

The Cold War was still grinding on, the economy was in recession and fighting in the Middle East continued to flare. Across the border in New York City, crime was soaring.

On Long Island, it was an era of reckoning for previous decades of growth. The continued decline of the local defense industry was taking its toll. Residents were plagued by traffic, taxes and energy costs, and environmental issues.

Even the weather seemed to be on the attack. Hurricane Gloria, a Category 3 storm that made landfall near Long Beach in September 1985, battered the shoreline and left 750,000 households without power, some for days. LILCO's inability to quickly resolve the crisis sparked an uproar.

In another blow for LILCO, the Shoreham Nuclear Power Station, for years the target of virulent public opposition, closed in 1989 without ever generating commercial power. Environmental concerns, poor management and delays in federal regulation made Shoreham's lofty goal of providing cheap, abundant power impossible.

But if Long Islanders were disgusted with their public utilities, they were jubilant about their sports teams. In 1986, the long-suffering Mets won the World Series; in 1980 the Islanders won the first of four consecutive Stanley Cups.

It may have been more peaceful than the city, but Long Island had its share of lurid crime. In 1984, 17-year-old Gary Lauwers of Northport was murdered in what appeared to be a drug-fueled satanic ritual. Two years later Cheryl Pierson, 16, of Selden, was accused of hiring a classmate to kill her father because he sexually abused her.

On Oct. 11, 1983, the infant known to the world as Baby Jane Doe was born with severe birth defects at St. Charles Hospital in Port Jefferson. Her parents were demonized - and sued - for declining surgery for their daughter. The case became a flash point for a national controversy about the rights of parents, and the role of government. in deciding treatments for the severely disabled.

Elsewhere, President Ronald Reagan took a hard line against communism. International conflicts bled across borders. The 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killed 270 people - 11 of them from Long Island - in a brutal wake-up call, and a kind of foreshadowing, that terrorism could happen anywhere and anytime, to anyone.

The '90s: Heroes rise and fall

At the start of the '90s, few used the Internet regularly, or could imagine the words "sex scandal" paired with "Oval Office."It was a time of transformation, as technology began changing lives at a breakneck pace.

Long Island evolved and diversified, both in its economy and its demographics. A sustained economic boom brought the good life back within reach.

It was an era of what Alan Greenspan called "irrational exuberance" as the economy expanded for its longest stretch in history. In 1999, the Dow topped 10,000 for the first time.

The Yankees began dominating baseball. New manager Joe Torre and a core of talented young players - Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettitte and Mariano Rivera - led the once-struggling team to World Series titles in 1996, 1998 and 1999.

The Cold War finally ended, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the celebrated crumbling of the Berlin Wall. Meanwhile the defense industry left Long Island for good, as Grumman Aerospace merged with Northrop Corp. of Los Angeles in 1994.

At the start of the 1990s, whites made up 84 percent of Long Islanders; by decade's end, that number had dropped to 76 percent. Adjustment to the new diversity wasn't always smooth. Tensions erupted, particularly when it came to the mostly Hispanic seasonal workers, some of whom crowded into cramped apartments that violated town codes.

Along with the rest of the nation, Long Islanders were mesmerized by the scandal unfolding in the White House, as President Bill Clinton faced impeachment after lying about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Long Island had a made-for-tabloids scandal all its own, when Amy Fisher, then 17, shot Mary Jo Buttafuoco, the wife of her lover, Joey Buttafuoco. Fisher, notoriously dubbed the Long Island Lolita, served seven years in prison for the shooting.

In 1996, catastrophe blazed out of the night sky when TWA Flight 800 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near East Moriches. The explosion and crash, which many Long Islanders watched in horror from their windows, killed all 230 people aboard. Long Islanders rallied to aid in the massive recovery.

As attention turned to the eve of the millennium, anxiety over Y2K highlighted the nation's growing dependence on technology. Yet, despite that unease, there were few reasons to think the good times would end anytime soon.

The '2000s: Heartbreak and hope

The new millennium dawned on an age of wealth and optimism. The dot-com bubble was still buoyant, and Y2K had failed to wreak disaster.

Disaster arrived a year later, with the devastating 9/11 attack that killed 2,976 people - a heartbreaking 455 of them from Long Island - and ushered out an entire way of life.

The age of terror was here to stay, with new, stringent security procedures and thousands of local men and women sent abroad to serve in Iraq or Afghanistan. The economy, however, bounced back in a big way, as real estate soared to unprecedented values that filled wallets, bank accounts and even county coffers.

Long Island's latest growing pains took the form of anti-immigrant tension, aimed at the Latinos who had poured into the region to work as laborers. The decade started with a brutal, premeditated attack on two laborers lured to an abandoned house in Farmingville; it ended with the killing of an Ecuadorean man attacked in Patchogue by a group of teens who, police say, made sport of beating Hispanics.

In a region where Catholics represented more than half of Long Island's 2.8 million residents, the priest sex-abuse scandal hit hard. A report issued by Suffolk District Attorney Thomas Spota in 2003 made scathing allegations, charging that children were raped, molested and psychologically abused by priests that the church then protected.

The LIRR kept making headlines. In 2006, a young woman visiting from Minnesota fell through a gap between an LIRR train and the track and was hit by an oncoming train. Her death sparked a Newsday series on gap problems and an MTA campaign to educate the public and repair the problem.

With the rest of the nation, Long Islanders learned that what goes up must come down, as real estate prices crashed down to earth and the economy plunged into the worst downturn since the Great Depression. The region suffered further with the unraveling of Bernard Madoff's $64-billion Ponzi scheme, with nearly a quarter of his victims hailing from Long Island.

Dissatisfaction with the economy and two lingering wars helped Barack Obama become the nation's first black president. On Long Island, where property values were down and unemployment up, families watched closely to see if Obama would deliver on his ringing promises of hope and change, eager to learn what the future would bring.