On LI, it turned into one big family affair

Having grown up in a middle-class, second-generation Italian family, relocating from Queens Village to Plainview in 1969 was a 12-year-old’s dream come true -- trees, grass and open spaces. I’ll dispense with most of the parochial to public school experience, but I could go on forever about nuns in black-and-white habits who seemingly learned their teaching methods from the Spanish Inquisition, or was it vice versa?

Mother’s Day is an appropriate time to recall the family of my mother, Jennie, the youngest of five sisters. They all lived within six miles of one another, in Plainview, Hicksville, Levittown and Bethpage, after their migration from the city. They never needed friends because they had each other as well as their husbands -- three Joes, a Sal and a Tony. 

Together with my sisters and cousins,12 in all, we spent every holiday together. They were great, be it Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving or July Fourth. We would all be crammed in -- 22 of us in a four-room Levitt ranch.  Somehow, we always ended up in the smallest house, eating at the table or sitting on the stairs or with TV tray tables.  If we were lucky, we’d eat outside on the recently poured concrete patio.

Moms, dads, aunts and uncles all ate too much and sang too much (not to mention drank too much).  I never understood how they managed to get up at the crack of dawn to go to work the next day. They should have been given an award. (After moving to Michigan in 2001 for a job, I appreciated their work ethic even more.)

 Because I had sisters, my mother felt it important to send me each summer to her Levittown sister who had three older sons. All three of these cousins were products of Division Avenue High School. Each summer, I got an education not mentioned in Boys’ Life magazine. We enjoyed the community pools that Arthur Levitt’s crew built.  Yes, I was “one of the boys,” taking part in swimming, football and lacrosse.

The best part, though, was learning to drive.  Levittown Uncle Joe worked as a Sperry-Rand first-shift machine operator for 41 years and had a second job on a hospital laundry night shift for 21 years. That is, when he wasn’t working at polishing off a few shots of Scotch on weekends, sleeping it off in a hammock during the summer or in front of the TV watching a western like “Shane” in the winter.

In the summer of ’74, though, Saturdays were when we learned to drive in Uncle Joe’s 1963 blue Chevrolet Impala. My cousins and I would practice driving and then dine “under the umbrella,” which was code for a Sabrett hot dog cart with a blue-and-yellow umbrella somewhere on the trail, or, if fortunate, at the Jolly Roger restaurant on Hempstead Turnpike.

I am not sure that our mothers knew this protocol. My first time behind the wheel (with a learner’s permit), it came as a surprise when Uncle Joe got into the back seat and told me to drive to Jones Beach. “Go ahead,” he’d say, “you know the way, Jerusalem Avenue south to the Southern State Parkway, and take the Wantagh Parkway south to the beach.”

With that, he shut his eyes and napped, snoring the whole time – a good 20 to 25 minutes -- typically waking up as I drove around the Jones Beach water tower a few times, desperately trying to signal my way back into a lane that would ultimately take us north again to find that Sabrett hot dog cart on Wantagh Avenue.

Reader Joe Cascio now lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.