Ex-Amityville trustee takes stock

Joe Slack, who is 77 and retired as an Amityville trustee at the end of March, sat in his kitchen recently, smoking Merits and taking stock.

"I had enough," he said.

In his 15 years on the council, the village built a new village hall and a new commissary at the public beach. It razed some derelict houses on Merrick Road and built a park where they once stood. It traded variances for increased density in three recent condominium projects for new ballfields.

Housing prices rose, and the village once known best as the setting for a series of horror movies began attracting visitors and shoppers to a revitalized downtown.

But the village hall ended up costing $9.5 million, well over the anticipated cost, and people complained about that. Residents even complained about the work done at the beach, which attracted noisy children, Slack said.

A balancing act

He found himself caught between competing demands recently, when residents near Merrick Road came to Slack for help about the lights at the Security Dodge dealership, which they said were too bright.

"You can't move into an industrial area and not expect industry," he said, reasoning that the business had been there before the houses. Eventually the lights were shielded.

It happened also when the village built a Quonset hut for the highway department to do vehicle maintenance but didn't install heating or hydraulics to lift the vehicles. The maintenance is necessary -- a truck engine recently went up in flames -- but money is scarce.

"You're talking a hundred grand for a new [truck]," Slack said. "More affluent villages might throw it out for bid and buy new stuff; we have our guys work on it."

So the mechanics -- guys he knows and respects -- ended up fixing a 25-year-old vehicle in a new Quonset hut without any heat.

Plans for the future

Having made his living variously as a milkman, steelworker, soldier, hunting guide, bay constable, nuisance trapper, wildlife columnist and tree surgeon, Slack will have some free time now.

He and his wife, Marjorie, may visit Louisiana, where his family is from, or go to the hunting lodge he and his sons built upstate, a place with a pond and a good trout stream.

They will not move out of the village, though, or the house at Belmont Court and Oak Street, where they have lived for the past 50 years.

"We've got friends here," he said, though many of them are gone and the place doesn't look much the way it used to.

The backyard barn where Slack used to keep his horse and steer is gone, a pool there in its place. The apple orchard across the street where he used to ride was built over with houses, and the Oak Inn, where he sometimes caught a drink, was turned into a Mediterranean restaurant some years ago.

Once, he said, when that place was still a bar, he thought it'd be a gag to ride in on his Hereford bull, Fred.

Somebody else thought it'd be a gag to give Fred a trash can full of ale. Fred got unruly after awhile and knocked into the pool table, and the bartender got annoyed and kicked them both out.

On the ride back, Fred made a wrong turn down Deauville Boulevard, past a police officer. Today, that would be good for a code violation at least; back then, the officer just asked Slack what in the world he was doing.

"Officer, I'm going to Belmont Court and Oak!" Slack shouted, and rode on home.