Looking back

Memories of a simpler time

Rhame Avenue Elementary Class of 1963 student remembers...

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The Rhame Avenue Elementary School Class of 1963 was a post World War II melting pot, and many were first-generation Americans. Most of our parents had moved to East Rockaway from Brooklyn and other city boroughs after the war.

While at Rhame, we saw a growing East Rockaway during a scary Cold War period. Many streets were dug up in 1956 as a sewer system was installed south of Main Street. Atlantic Avenue was opened up to run parallel to Main Street. The “New Development” was built south of North Blvd.

The apartment building boom started and was quickly stopped by the town fathers. Almost every vacant lot was built on during this time. We were the first to move into Rhame Avenue’s new wing for our second grade. The park next to the sewer plant was built, as well as the Mooring. Swift Creek was opened up to ease the annual flooding of East and West boulevards. The Golden Coach Diner was dropped in place in four sections. We saw the rubble after the White Cannon Restaurant burned to the ground one winter night. We started Junior High when that new wing had just been built.

During our elementary school years an old man still came slowly through town collecting junk in his horse drawn wagon, we would follow him and the horse for hours on our bicycles. We had competing ice cream trucks: Good Humor and Judy Ann (“…the garbage can”). We saw the end of the traveling carnival, with Ferris wheel and roller coasters that came to a lot across from the Main Street firehouse each summer, where the post office is now. There was a leftover hitching post on Main Street for most of that time. We earned candy money by collecting discarded soda and beer bottles and turning them in at Lou’s Deli for two cents each.

We were the elementary school kids who experienced regular air raid drills before and after the Cuban Missile crisis, knowing full well that facing the hallway walls would not save us from H Bombs dropped on Manhattan. The fire alarms still sounded from poles throughout town and they even went off at noon and 6 p.m. so kids knew when to get home.

We swam in the streets after hurricanes Diane and Donna. We became teens as The Beatles came to the USA, and we later fought the battles with the school administration to allow us to wear blue jeans and grow our hair over our ears. Our astronauts walked on the moon a month after our high school graduation, and Woodstock happened that same summer between graduation and college. We lived through the assassinations of President John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy — within a few years of this picture.

A good number of this group became teachers; two are physicians, several are business owners, one a lawyer, a principal, banker, firemen, a pastor, some artists — and a few are retired now. Two died soon after this picture was taken: one from childhood illness and the other was hit by a train in Lynbrook during while in Junior High. Others have passed away in adulthood.

It was a simpler time in East Rockaway, when parents sent us out to play in the morning and the only constraint was that we had to be home for dinner. We live all over the country now but we love to get together and recall the East Rockaway in which we grew up.

Comments about this story? Mmalloy@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 202.