Each Issue of the Magazine should have a message from the pubisher/editor or from one of our classmates... a message that takes us back to our senior year in Mineola and also to tie that message back to our lives and Mineola friendships today. Looks like I'm doing it again.

This is the Summer Edition to the Magazine... Let's go to the Beach

Jones Beach and summer time on Long Island, aren't they the same thing? Let me start this with an admission; I love water, I love the seaside so by extension I love the beach. Back in '63 I recall many of my classmates frequented Bar Beach on the North Shore. Bar Beach was all right, though there were no waves, the trucked in sand was gritty and didn't do that good a job of concealing the rocky shoreline. I rarely went there. My family was completely devoted to Jones Beach. In fact my parents met at Jones Beach during the summer of 1941. So if it were not for Jones Beach, well there wouldn't be anyone writing this article right now!

I had planned to write about Cars for this article but I can do that another time and The Beach is a much more appropriate subject for this Summer Magazines Issue. I live but a scant fifteen minutes door-to-beach drive to what has recently been named the Nation's Number One Beach; Siesta Village Beach, Sarasota, Florida. Yes, Siesta Village Beach is beautiful with it's powder-like pure white quartz sand... which is always cool on your feet. The Gulf of Mexico is warm and the scene tropical. It's quite crowded on Siesta Key these days with tourists discovering how nice it is. Siesta Village Beach is a gem but it is not the only beach in my life. There are a couple in Hawaii that I love and then there is Cape Cod's quaint seashore which I enjoyed on family vacations as a boy. However, the one that will always be first with me is "The Beach" ... Jones Beach. It is Jones Beach that comes to mind when I think of the beach.

"Jones Beach State Park opened to the public on August 4, 1929. On that day Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, former Governor Alfred E. Smith, and at that time Commission President Robert Moses, were principal speakers. Its success and popularity were immediately apparent. In 1930, the first full year of operation, a million and a half persons visited the park. In July, 1931, the West Bathhouse with swimming and diving pools opened. The Wantagh Causeway soon became overcrowded and serious traffic delay occurred every Sunday..." Newsday

Jones Beach in its stiff institutional granite grandeur never created a beachy feeling but Jones Beach was unique and it was enormous... huge... colossal! I have never seen anything like it scale elsewhere. The pools were huge, The Jones Beach Theater was huge. The boardwalk extended for miles... the beaches extended for miles and miles. It was ten fold bigger and better than Coney Island the tacky commercialized amusement venue close in to the city which was the next best thing. Jones Beach tightly controlled and impectably maintained made it's own unique statement and matched up well with its market which was New York City itself and the fast growing suburbs of Nassau and western Suffolk Counties. It was the Big Apple of Beaches. When I had to make a point of why one lived where we did. Jones Beach was the one reason I needed. Jones Beach... no hype needed, was the real deal. You won't find this on the Jersey shore, New England, Lake Michigan, Virginia Beach or Florida. Not one place in California boasts of a beach like this and Hawaii is a very different place.

My first visit to Jones Beach was in early August 1945... Correct! I hit the Beach when I was three weeks old. I have pictures to prove it! I don't have memories of my first visit as the Beach as we don't remember the first time we saw our mothers or fathers, the Beach was always there, a part of our family's summer life. I remember the beach safari adventure would start the Friday night before with my grandmother making enormous quantities of egg salad sandwiches and cookies for the next day. My father would pack up our car with wooden folding beach chairs, our canvas umbrella secured to the top of the car and the trunk crammed with our huge metal cooler and hot and cold beverage thermoses, our big portable radio which required one of those big nine volt batteries... then several beach bags of toys, books, magazines and the newspaper, towels, the olive green army surplus blankets; everything we'd need to keep all the family occupied for a day of rest and play .

Sometime soon after sunrise my grandfather would arrive and three generations would pack ourselves into the car and head for the Beach with everything and everyone seated in our places. With my father at the wheel of our 1946 Nash we'd slowly head down Holly Avenue to Old Country Road, Then turn left heading east until we turned south onto Wantagh Parkway; later we would shorten our trip when Meadow Brook Parkway opened. It was not a long trip. Soon we'd see the Jones Beach Entrance with all the admission ticket booths. My father would stop and my mother would pass him the book of coupons which he handed to the attendant. We always had a huge book of prepaid coupons. Once at the beach we would turn left and drive past the East and West Bath Houses and the Water Tower and head east to the farthest east end outlook... field 7 or 9 (it's long gone now). Then our family safari would begin hauling everything to a choice spot about twenty feet from the high tide line. This was work... the sand was soft and not easy to navigate through. Importantly, our early arrival would guarantee that the sand was not hot.

Once our beach camp was set-up my older brother Neil and I raced to the surf with little care of what the water temperature was. This was our fun... wading in just enough until one of our parents would make an appearance letting us now go for it all...we'd dive under the next "Big" wave and play in the surf... for hours. Later in the day, with bellies raw from scrapping the broken shells in the surf, my grandmother (my fathers mother lived with us) would take my us for long walks picking up shells and other stuff found on the shore. My grandfather (my mother's father) would spend the day in a beach chair and read the papers and my parents would get some needed time to themselves probably walking the beach in the opposite direction from the one my grandmother took Neil and me. Yes, in deed, these were great days. Listening to the radio, playing in the surf, walking the shore, egg salad sandwiches, cookies and lemonade. By late afternoon we'd head for the car hauling everything back to the car but this trip was over the now "Hot" sand. Yes, back at home... we'd start it all again that evening as we'd be back at the Beach again on Sunday. We loved the Beach.

By the time I'd reached high schoo,l Jones Beach was still front and center in my life. On many summer evenings I'd join my parents and drive to Jones Beach and walk the boardwalk, play shuffleboard, watch softball games, watch the live dance band shows, watch roller skaters. An evening at the Beach was the next best thing to air conditioning. Jones Beach had so much going on now with the addition of the Jones Beach Theater. That time had to be the high point of the Beaches' history... the early 1960's. And I seem to recall Jones Beach was our Senior Day destination as well... where else would we spend an offical day of hooky and celebration that our days in high school were coming to conclussion.

One of the most memorable of those high school days for all of us was the day at Jones Beach after our Senior Prom. For those that recall... I took the young lady that lived on Argyle Road. Tom Mohrman and I double dated for the prom and Tom drove his brother's '62 Pontiac Le Man's convertible... about the coolest car I had ever sat in my life at that time. Jones Beach provided yet another wonderful memory the day after our prom, the evening of our high school graduation, July birthdays, a weekendday at the beach on a weekend pass. The Beach has a big place in my memoriy.

There were still more morememorable visits while we lived on Long Island. However, when our girls were young we built a vacation home in the Mountains and then spent our summers in Vermont with a pond for swimming rather than a sandy beach. Jones Beach will not have the same rich meaning for our girls as it did for us. Perhaps someday our grandson will visit it. Throughout those years Jones Beach was aging gracefully but aging none the less. One of my last visits was to see a Beach Boy's concert at the Jones Beach Theater about a year before we moved south. We enjoyed the concert listening to the sounds opf the Sixties. I occured to me, I had been coming to the Beach for over half a century.

I heard that the Jones Beach Water tower was taken down. What a shame... Times change and Jones Beach has changed as well. Unfortunately as wonderful as it was when I was growing up it could not overcome the competition with two hundred channels on the television, backyard and community pools, suburban shopping malls and central air conditioning. Jones Beach is smaller now, not crowded as it once was on a summer weekend but it's still beautiful, still one of a kind and it's still my first love of my beach memories.

If you have read this far you know I have to make my pitch to attend this fall's class reunion. we gather in the Berkshires where we will enjoy that other dimension of being together for the Harvest Moon” Reunion.  Don’t put it off... sure some of these folks in the class do it every year… I'll go next year. Time is too precious to pass it up. We’ve all tried but it’s hard to explain just how great it is NOW for us when we get together. Our reunions are our time machines. So if you have never been to one of the yearly reunions, give yourself that special gift... the one we give to each other. Join us this fall and experience those special friendships we make a-new and the friendships we had… Back in '63.

Thank you all for the memories and friendship.

Carl Petersen (Webmaster)