THE STORY OF RAINBOW RANCH AND WHAT LIFE WAS LIKE IN THE MIDDLE ISLAND AREA

Growing Up in Middle Island in the 1930s

by Anne Ferguson Nauman

Rainbow Ranch

There were three children in the Ferguson family – I was in the middle, Edith was four years older, and Bill was three years younger.

The Ferguson family about 1935. Photo from the collection of Mrs. Anne Ferguson Nauman

Our family moved to Middle Island in 1925, two years before I was born. Our parents, Donald and Eleanor Ferguson, bought a 150-acre farm with an apple orchard and named it Rainbow Ranch. It was on Middle Country Road, right next door to the well-known Long Island historian, Richard Bayles, and his son and daughter-in-law, Thomas and Gertrude Bayles. The original orchard was only 20 acres, and the rest of the property was mostly woods, but my father gradually cleared more land and planted more apple trees, peach trees, pears and raspberries.

The Ferguson family and the Rainbow Ranch. Photo from the collection of Mrs. Anne Ferguson Nauman

They did the clearing by cutting down the trees and then blasting the stumps out with dynamite. This was a method that had been pioneered by my mother’s father, Hal B. Fullerton, when he cleared land for the Long Island Railroad’s two experimental farms in Wading River and Medford. Dynamite got the roots out, loosened the soil, and left it enriched with nitrogen. It was exciting to watch. I remember that even though we were at a safe distance from each blast, we were rained with dirt and pebbles. They cut up the trees for firewood and burned the brush and debris in big bonfires. Then they plowed the land and went over it repeatedly with disc and harrow to level it before planting the new fruit trees. I remember putting potatoes in the bonfires to roast. They came out charcoal on the outside but soft and delicious on the inside.

Rainbow Ranch tractor. Photo from the collection of Mrs. Anne Ferguson Nauman.

My father had a magic touch with fruit trees, and he grew the best apples and peaches that could be found anywhere. He grew 40 different varieties of apples and about a dozen varieties of peaches. My sister and I can still remember the names of most of them. He often grafted new varieties onto the older apple trees. His raspberries were huge, and perfect. He allowed only the most careful pickers to handle the raspberries. Even though he had large hands, he had a delicate touch with his berries.

The Rainbow Ranch Orchard. Photo from the collection of Mrs. Anne Ferguson Nauman

All our fruit was sold at the Rainbow Ranch roadside stand. It had a huge red apple sign hanging in front, a local landmark. There was a large sorting area behind the stand where the fruit was packed. Only perfect fruit was packed in the baskets that went on the stand. They often put the best specimens near the bottom. Some fruit sellers would put inferior specimens on the bottom, with the best on the top, but our customers knew that each of our baskets would contain only perfect fruit. The windfalls and imperfect fruit were available behind the stand, for a lower price, for those who wanted to save a little money or who wanted the fruit just for cooking or canning.

Along with the apples, peaches, pears and raspberries we also sold tomatoes, muskmelons, corn, homemade cider, and my mother’s homemade jellies and jams. People came from all over the Island for our fruit, and asked to be put on our mailing list so that they could be notified when their favorite varieties were ready. A Russian princess always came from New York for her favorite peaches. She would arrive in a big black car with a crown painted on the door, driven by a uniformed chauffeur. I remember being very impressed by the crown on the door.

Our entire living was earned on the stand during the summer and fall, so we had no income at all during the winter and spring months. My parents had to be very careful managers because credit cards didn’t exist. If you wanted to buy something, you had to have the money to pay for it. However, many local merchants would let farmers run up their bills, and pay them when the money started to come in at harvest time. Even our dentist, Dr. Joseph Lifschitz from Patchogue, let us run up a bill for the family’s dental work.

My father spent the winter months pruning the orchard with his long pole saw and loppers. He also did pruning work for other farmers. In the spring, the most important job was spraying. He had a sign on the stand that proclaimed, “Not a worm in a wagonload,” and his careful spraying program made sure that the worms and diseases were kept at bay. It was a frustrating job because the sprayer had a nasty habit of breaking down just as he was heading to the orchard with a full tank. I remember that he always kept a big handkerchief tied around his nose and mouth while he was spraying, and we children were always kept away from the spraying operations.

The weather was a constant concern. A late frost could kill the flower buds. A few days of rain at blossom time could reduce the crop by washing away the pollen and keeping the bees away. A blossoming season with warm, sunny, windless days was cause for rejoicing. My father always lived in dread of a hailstorm after the fruit had set. Ten minutes of hail would wreak havoc on the year’s crop.

Our barn was very old and was put together with wooden pegs. In a section that once was a stable, my father set up the cider press. Its motive power was an old tractor. The windfalls and imperfect apples went into the cider press and the juice went from the press into big wooden barrels. One of our first moneymaking jobs was drawing cider from the barrels into gallon jugs. We would sit on an upturned apple basket on a cold cement floor and draw the cider through a funnel lined with a straining cloth. It was cold and messy work. We got a penny a jug.

There was an old ice house on the property but we never used it. It was built to hold blocks of ice that the old-timers would cut out of the local ponds and store for use in the warm months. They would pack the ice with hay, and it would stay frozen for most of the summer. There was a very old building that we used for a tractor shed. It became completely overgrown with trumpet vines and I’m sure it eventually collapsed. We had a new garage built but it had no doors, and one year it became a nesting place for a family of bats. My parents planted bamboo on the south side of it. Bamboo is beautiful, but it is impossible to get rid of, so there is now a bamboo forest beside the garage.

A protected storage area was needed for the apples, so my father designed a storage cellar that was dug into the side of a hill. It was a large concrete structure that was almost all underground except for the roof and the front wall. It had a wide door for the farm truck to drive in for loading and unloading apple boxes. It kept a fairly constant temperature so it was cool in the summer and never froze in the winter. Each day’s crop went from the orchard into the storage cellar. The fruit that was on the stand, or in the sorting area behind the stand, was always moved to the cellar just before dark and then taken out again in the morning. I remember helping with this after I became strong enough to lift the apple boxes.

We had a small greenhouse where my father started his tomato seedlings. They were good-sized plants when he set them out, so he was able to get the earliest fruit. This gave him an advantage over the other growers at the start of the tomato season. I remember that his favorite variety was Bonny Best. There was a small coal furnace down in a pit in the potting shed that adjoined the greenhouse. It was intended to heat the greenhouse, but I don’t remember it ever being used. I do remember slipping on the ladder that went down into the furnace pit, and getting coal dust in my scraped knee. There’s still a black spot on my knee.

The pump house was behind the greenhouse. The water pump was in a pit about six feet below ground level. It pumped water up into a big storage tank, and I think that it was just gravity from the tank that supplied the house with water. The pump often broke down, especially at spraying time, which caused great consternation. My father had to go to a place in Ronkonkoma to get parts for the repairs. I think it was Zeidler’s.

We had a small cement pool in the back yard and it was a good place to splash around during the summer. In later years, my mother planted water lilies in it, and there was a huge resident bullfrog named Rudolph. He was Bill’s special pet. Bill always had a great affection for frogs. We had a swing on a horizontal branch of the big catalpa tree that still stands by the kitchen door. My sister recalls having an airplane swing, but I don’t remember that.

When my parents bought the farm, it had a very old house that was in such bad condition that they tore down everything except the huge old chimney with its three fireplaces. Then they built a new house around the old chimney. The biggest fireplace was in our living room, and it was enormous. It had an old iron crane for hanging kettles on. The andirons were in the shape of cats with yellow glass eyes that glowed when there was a fire behind them. The fireplace was an important source of heat in the winter. My father built huge fires, with flames roaring up the chimney. I remember that we once had a chimney fire. My father rushed up to the roof and poured something down the chimney. I don’t know what it was, and it made a terrible mess, but it did the job. During the warmer months, the chimney swifts would make nests in the chimney and we could hear the babies twittering.

Andirons in the shape of cats. Photos from the collection

of Mrs. Anne Ferguson Nauman

We had running water, so we were able to have two indoor bathrooms, but we had no electricity until the spring of 1935, when I was seven years old. I don’t remember what powered our water pump before we got electricity. We used kerosene lamps for light. They were smelly and messy. The wicks had to be trimmed and the glass chimneys had to be washed often because they would get coated with soot when the flame was turned too high.

We had a telephone, but it was a party line. Our ring was one long and one short. You always knew when your neighbors had a call. If you were really nosy, you could listen in, but we never did. If you needed to make an important call and a neighbor was on the line, you would ask them to please hang up so you could make your call. The phone sat on a small shelf on the wall. It had a big earpiece hanging on a hook at the side, and you had to stand up to use it. There was no dial – you had to turn a crank to reach the operator. She would say, “Number please,” you would give her the number you wanted to call, and she would make the connection for you. I remember the first time I talked on the telephone. My mother wanted me to say hello to one of her friends, but I couldn’t understand a word that was coming from the other end. Children never used the telephone to chat with their friends, as that would have tied up the line for several families. Cell phones were a thing of the distant future.

The stove in our kitchen was a big coal-burning iron range. A water tank attached to it was our source of hot water. There was no way to adjust the temperature of the cooking surface, so you had to just move the pots around to find the right spot. And of course there was no way to regulate the temperature in the oven, so again it was guesswork. My mother didn’t bake her own bread, but she made the best pies in the world in that oven. She made great baked beans too, and luscious sponge cakes and gingerbread. A coal scuttle sat beside the stove and it had to be filled every day from the coal bin in the cellar. The ashes fell into a metal box and when it was full we would empty it on our dirt driveway. We also had a kerosene stove that we used in the hot weather. However, when we let the big coal stove go out, we had no hot water.

With no electricity, we couldn’t have a refrigerator, but we had an icebox. It was a big wooden box with two compartments, one for ice on the top and one for food on the bottom. It had a drip pan underneath to catch the water from the melting ice, and if you didn’t remember to empty it once a day you had to mop up a flood. An iceman came once a week with a truckful of big blocks of ice, and he would cut the blocks to size with an ice pick. There were no nice neat ice cubes, so if you wanted ice in your lemonade you had to use the ice pick to hack small chunks off the big block.

Of course we didn’t have a washing machine or a dryer, so doing the laundry was a hard day’s work. I often helped with the washing. We had a big soapstone washtub next to the kitchen door. The procedure was to fill the tub with hot water and dirty clothes, rub each piece with a cake of yellow Fels Naphtha soap, and then scrub it on a scrubbing board. This was hard on the knuckles and hard on the clothes. Then you would wring everything out, one piece at a time, putting it through the rollers of the hand-cranked wringer that was clamped to the edge of the tub. Then you refilled the tub with rinse water, and rinsed everything. Once more through the wringer, and then you lugged a heavy basket of wet clothes out to the yard and hung them on the clothesline. In the winter, the clothes would freeze stiff before they dried, so you had to drape them around the house to finish drying. Today’s automatic dryers are a godsend, but nothing smells as fresh and clean as clothes and bed sheets dried in the fresh air and sunshine.

Ironing was another hard day’s work. Girls in the family were expected to help with this chore. The irons were heavy, and had to be heated on top of the coal range. They had removable wooden handles that you could switch from one iron to another as they cooled. Again, it was guesswork as to the temperature. If you licked your finger and touched an iron (quickly) and it sizzled, the temperature might be just right, or it might be too hot. I left quite a few scorch marks when I was learning to iron. Before each piece was ironed, it had to be sprinkled with water and rolled up for an hour or so, until it was evenly damp. Even after we got an electric iron, the clothes still had to be sprinkled and rolled. Steam irons were yet to be invented. There were no wash-and-wear fabrics, so everything needed ironing. Even the sheets got ironed. We always used cloth napkins, which also needed ironing. We each had our own special napkin ring, and each napkin was used for several days.

During the busy season, my mother had to work full-time on the stand, so she would hire a local girl to help with the laundry and cleaning. I think Bertha Nowaski, Eddie and Ann Nowaski’s older sister, was one of her early helpers. I do remember Emily Buniski, Florence and Henry Buniski’s sister. We called her Emmy. Whenever I think of Emmy, I picture her at the ironing board where she cheerfully spent so many hours. I shouldn’t say it, but Emmy did a much better job of it than my mother did.

We heated the house with the living room fireplace, the kitchen range, and a coal furnace in the cellar that was connected to hot-air registers in the floor. Coal was delivered in a truck that would drive right up to the house. A metal chute went from the truck through a small window in the cellar and the coal was shoveled down the chute into the coal bin below. It made quite a racket. My sister recently had the experience of having a hot air balloon fly low over her house, and she said the whooshing sound of the gas jets sounded just like the sound of coal whooshing down the chute into our coal bin. My father had to shovel the coal from the bin into the furnace every morning. Then at night the furnace had to be banked so that it wouldn’t go out, and that left the house pretty cold by morning. Sometimes it was so cold upstairs in the bedrooms that you could see your breath when you woke up in the morning. After we got electricity, we put a small electric space heater in the upstairs bathroom. It got pretty crowded with five of us trying to get washed and dressed. I loved watching my father shave. He lathered his face using a soft, fat brush and then deftly scraped off lather and whiskers with a straight razor. He kept the blade sharp by stroking it on a leather razor strop.

We didn’t have a shower so we had to take tub baths. Our bathtub was the freestanding kind with claw feet. We only used about two inches of water in the tub because the supply of hot water was severely limited. I never felt really clean and I still dislike tub baths. Most people didn’t bathe every day. We had to wash our hair in the sink and we only did that about once a week. We truly appreciate the present day luxury of being able to take a hot shower and wash our hair every day.

Our cellar had a dirt floor and was always cool, so that’s where we kept the potatoes and other root vegetables. It had floor-to-ceiling shelves, and at the end of the growing season the shelves were loaded with jars of home-canned fruits, vegetables, berries, tomatoes, applesauce, jams, jellies, conserves, relishes, pickles, chili sauce, pickled crabapples, fruit compote and tomato juice. Everyone canned enough to feed the family until the next season came around. Women and girls spent a good part of the summer at this hot, messy, time-consuming chore. It was a great day when a family could buy a home freezer, but I think this was not until after World War II. Freezers really streamlined the task of preserving foods for the winter.

Part II - The East Middle Island School

The East Middle Island School

The East Middle Island schoolhouse was built not long after our family moved to the farm. It was modern for that day, with indoor bathrooms and a furnace. There were two classrooms and two teachers, one for first through fourth grades and the other for fifth through eighth. There was no kindergarten, no middle school, no junior high school. We went directly from the Middle Island grade school to high school in Port Jefferson. Everyone walked to school. We lived about two miles away, and were among the few lucky ones who were usually driven to school. The only bus was the one that took high school students to Port Jefferson.

Each classroom had about 20 students. It sounds as if it might have been confusing, having four grades being taught in one room, but it was actually an ideal situation. For instance, if you did well in reading you could join the grade ahead of you for that lesson. If you had trouble with arithmetic, you would be able to join the class behind you for review. And all along, you would be hearing lessons that you had already learned, so you were always reviewing, and you would also be hearing lessons that you wouldn’t have until the next year, so you would have a head start. In between lessons, everyone studied reading, practiced penmanship, studied spelling words or did arithmetic examples. It was a wonderfully flexible system that addressed each child’s special needs and provided for a lot of individual attention.

This system worked very well for me. I couldn’t wait to start school, and was even learning to read, so they let me start first grade a month before I turned five. My first-grade teacher was Florence Stakes, a very lovely Southern lady who married nurseryman Ernie Whitbeck and moved to East Patchogue. She taught me so well that I skipped second grade and started third grade at age five. I was always way ahead in reading, so I was allowed to read anything in the school’s small library instead of the regular textbooks. I was sometimes asked to read aloud from these books. However, I did very badly in arithmetic. I couldn’t even learn to tell time. Numbers were a mystery. In fourth grade I was still getting zeroes in arithmetic, so my parents and my teacher, Mrs. Jones, decided to keep me back for a year. My parents were also concerned that I wasn’t old enough to join the “big kids” in the other classroom, and staying back would put me with students closer to my own age. In my second try at fourth grade arithmetic, I finally got it. I always did well in math from then on, getting high marks on all the math Regents and going as far as analytic geometry in college. Without this special help with fourth grade arithmetic, I probably still wouldn’t know two times two.

My brother Bill also accelerated through elementary school. At the end of seventh grade, he was allowed to take the eighth grade Regents. He passed with flying colors, was allowed to skip the eighth grade, and started high school at the age of 12. Both of us did well academically in high school, but we were at a great social disadvantage, being so much younger than our classmates. I graduated from high school at 16 and Bill at 15. Bill was small in his early teens, so he didn’t even try to participate in any sports, although he did enjoy the job of team manager. He made up for it in his senior year when he gained twelve inches in height in one year, with many nosebleeds and many outgrown pants along the way. He ended up at a lanky six feet four.

I was extremely fortunate to have had Mrs. Ruth Jones as my teacher for most of my years in the Middle Island school. She was a born teacher who truly loved all her pupils, and we all loved her in return. Everyone called her “Miss Jones.” I remember that she taught us about the Greek, Roman and Norse myths and had us draw pictures to illustrate these fascinating stories. I still have one of mine. I wasn’t much of an artist, but some of the students were very talented, especially Stella Godzieba. Her whole family was artistic, including Joey and Lucy, and I remember that their older brother Florian had aspirations of becoming an artist. I think they have changed the pronunciation of their name in recent years, but in those days they used the Polish pronunciation, “Ga-jebba.”

Mrs. Jones taught us to sing in Italian and French. We sang O Sole Mio, Frere Jacques, and the one about Mon Ami Pierrot. She taught us a folk song in Polish – I don’t know how to spell it, but it was something like Koshu Oichechana. She talked about the famous Finnish long-distance runner, Paavo Nurmi, who won nine Olympic gold medals. I remembered him 40 years later when I became a long-distance runner myself.

When I went into the “big kids’” room for fifth grade, my teacher was Mr. Ralph Thomas. He was stern and strict. But he was good in an emergency. When Jimmy Obiedzenski dislocated his thumb playing baseball, Mr. Thomas didn’t try to find a doctor, he just calmly yanked the thumb back into place. Jimmy was tough, and never even winced. Mr. Thomas would sometimes catch me daydreaming instead of paying attention, and he would pounce on me with a question. That was very embarrassing.

I may have had Roy Albin for a year, but I can’t remember for sure. He was a long-time resident of the area, and a friend of the family. I know Edith had him in grade school, and we both had him for high school English at Port Jefferson. He was a good teacher and a cheery, good-natured person, so he was well-liked by his students. I remember that he had a big house in Swezeytown and dog named Honeybee that he was very fond of.

Fortunately for me, Mrs. Jones moved into the upper grades, so I had her for my eighth year, and I think also for the seventh. She prepared us well for high school. She strongly emphasized English grammar. We had to diagram sentences. You can’t do that unless you really understand parts of speech and proper syntax. I remember how she taught us the predicate nominative. We had to chant in unison, “It was I, it was I, it was I; it was he, it was he, it was he…” and so on. We felt so silly that we never forgot it.

My sister remembers that Mr. Thomas tried to drum into them the difference between “its” and “it’s.” But she admits that to this day she is sometimes unsure about which to use. I groan when I see advertisements for “Such-and-such at it’s best.” I guess it’s a losing battle, trying to insist on its proper usage.

My daughter teaches remedial English to college freshmen, and she is constantly amazed and amused at her students’ poor command of the language. Surely a college student should be able to write a grammatically correct sentence. Our present-day schools need to do a much better job of teaching basic English. The ability to write and to speak proper English is so important for success in today’s world. If students spent more time reading good books, and less time with TV and computer games, it would surely improve their English skills. At least the Harry Potter books seem to have done a good job of getting more children to enjoy reading.

Mrs. Jones put together an “Entertainment” at graduation time each June. We would do recitations, songs, dances and a play. My mother often wrote and directed the plays. Mrs. Jones taught us simple folk dances. I can still do an Irish jig. I don’t remember the plays, except that in one cowboy production Jimmy Obiedzenski sang The Dreary Black Hills. We did a lot of memorizing in those days, and we enjoyed it. I remember being able to recite Longfellow’s Paul Revere’s Ride. I can still remember the first 20 lines or so. We were urged to recite “with expression,” but I think we just rattled away as fast as we could. Fortunately, none of us had acting ambitions. We had to memorize all the U.S. presidents, and I can still remember the first 18.

The graduating eighth-grade classes were very small. My class in 1940 consisted of Frances Depta, Frances Szuster, Henry Buniski and me. My sister’s class was even smaller; she and Vera Depta were the only graduates in 1936.

Three future members of the 1940 8th grade class. Frances Szuster, Frances Depta, and Anne Ferguson. Photo from the collection of Mrs. Anne Ferguson Nauman

Edith Ferguson, one of two graduating 8th grade students in 1936. The graduating class in 2006 numbered 836! Photo from the collection of Mrs. Anne Ferguson Nauman

We also did a program for families at Christmas time. We had a Christmas tree, sang carols, did a Nativity pageant, and had Santa Claus hand out small gifts. I remember playing the part of the Christ Child in my first year, because I was the smallest in the school. All I had to do was lie in the hay. In those days, no one thought that a Christmas program at school was inappropriate. Everyone in our small community was Christian, of one denomination or another, so there was no chance of offending or excluding families of other faiths. I’m sure that there is greater diversity now in Middle Island.

We did a lot of running around at recess time and lunch hour. We played red rover, ring-a-levio, kick the can, hide-and-seek, tag, and dodge ball. Sometimes the boys played baseball while the girls played jumprope and double Dutch. We had a lot of singsong rhymes for jumping rope, but I can’t remember them. And there was hopscotch and potsy. Sometimes we all played baseball.I was not good at it, mostly because I couldn’t throw or catch, but I loved to run and could run as fast as the boys. There were no girls’ track teams in those days, or I would have joined one in high school. As it was, I waited until I was 46 to start running again, and then became a competitive age-group racer and marathoner. Better late than never. Girls nowadays who are interested in sports are very fortunate that they have such a wide variety of opportunities.

I remember that Helen and Frances Szuster were outstanding in girls’ sports when we all got to high school. They also excelled academically. Some of the Middle Island boys did very well in high school sports. I remember that Ed Zebrowski was active in many sports and LeRoy Still and Rudy (Kayo) Carrabus were especially good baseball players.

In the spring, we sometimes did something that I am embarrassed to recall. We would go into the woods across the road from the school and pick pink lady’s slipper flowers. We would take them back to school and put them in our ink wells, and all the veins in the flower would turn blue. Of course these spectacular flowers are now on the list of protected species and it is illegal to pick them, but in those days they flourished in great profusion.

The blackboards were messy and the felt erasers accumulated a lot of chalk dust. When they became clogged with dust, a lucky student would be assigned to take them outside and clap them against the cement wall on the south side of the building. Clapping the erasers was a coveted job.

Mrs. Jones never had a discipline problem. If she was displeased with a student, she would put on a very reproachful expression, bite her lower lip, and say gently, “I’m sorry, Johnny,” or whoever. And that would be the end of the problem. She made you feel two inches tall. Maybe kids were just better behaved in those days. I don’t remember anyone ever playing hooky. There was some teasing, but I don’t remember any bullying or fighting. Bad language was rarely heard. Gangs and drugs didn’t exist. We were fortunate to grow up in such an innocent time.

There was one boy who was very “hyper” and couldn’t sit still for a minute. He wasn’t disruptive, but was more like a happy, cheerful little cricket. Thinking back, he probably had ADHD, although nobody had ever heard of it in those days. Another boy had some difficulty learning to read because he seemed to see everything backward. He probably had dyslexia, but nobody had heard of that either. Students now are fortunate that these problems can be recognized and can be helped.

I remember only one African-American family having children in the school during the eight years I was there. The Burwells lived in a small house on Biz Miller’s farm at the top of our hill. Willie Lou was a tall and dignified girl, and Thomas and Catherine were younger. I think they were only there for a year or two. In those days, African-American families were not free to live wherever they chose. In our area, they mostly had to live in Gordon Heights. We had a farm worker, Allen Washington, who lived in Gordon Heights and usually walked back and forth to work. He was in his sixties. My father told him that he thought it would be disrespectful to call him Allen because of his age, but Mr. Washington would be too formal, so what would he think of being called “General” Washington. He happily agreed, and we always called him the General. He was a respected and loved part of our farm family.

Allen “General” Washington. Photo from the collection of Mrs. Anne Ferguson Nauman

There were a lot of nicknames at school. I was always called Bumby. This was a family nickname. Supposedly I looked like a bumblebee when I was small. On the rare occasions that I hear that name nowadays, I know it must be someone from the old days in Middle Island. Left-handed Eddie Nowaski was called Lefty, Florence Buniski was always called Tootsie, and Rudolph Carrabus was Kayo. Joseph Obiedzenski was called Yuzhu which I think was Polish for Joseph. His brother Jimmy (Zygmund) was called Jimmy O. to distinguish him from Jimmy A. (Ashton). And there were my classmates Frances S. (Szuster)and Frances D. (Depta). Jimmy O. was later called Rubberhead. My mother gave him a lift home from school one day, and as he ran across the road to his house he was hit by a car. According to the story, he landed on his head and bounced up unhurt. Needless to say, my mother was horrified and was exceedingly grateful that he was not injured. The name stuck, and it was really affectionate, not at all teasing or mocking. I think that all of us left those nicknames behind when we got to high school.

At one time or another, all the children in school got chickenpox, measles, mumps, and German measles. Some of us got whooping cough. My sister and I got scarlet fever and had to be quarantined for a month in our bedrooms. She had a bead loom and spent the time making beautiful belts and other beaded pieces. I guess I just read books and played with “activity” books and paper dolls. They had to burn everything at the end of the quarantine period and Edith was heartbroken to lose her loom. Scarlet fever could have been treated with penicillin and cured quickly, but penicillin had not yet been discovered.

We were all vaccinated against smallpox, but that was the extent of the immunizations. Polio was the most dreaded of the childhood diseases, and there was no cure or immunization in those days. One of the girls, Lois Ashton, had been a polio victim and had to use special shoes and crutches, which she called her “sticks.” But she was one of the sunniest girls in the school, always smiling, and was determined to do everything her schoolmates could do. She even played jumprope – we would leave the rope on the ground long enough for her and her sticks to hop over it, and I still remember the look of pure joy on her face when she was jumping rope. Thankfully, children nowadays can be immunized against polio and will never have to face such difficult challenges. Lois and her brother Jimmy were always driven to school. I remember admiring their mother, a handsome woman who was always impeccably groomed and smartly dressed.

Part III - Family Life

My family life was very different from that of most of my classmates. Most of them were of Polish descent and their parents had come to this country fairly recently. The fathers could speak English fairly well, but many of the mothers had very limited English, so at home the parents would speak in Polish but the children would answer in English. I envied my classmates the ability to speak two languages. It is surely a great gift to have the opportunity to become bilingual. Their foods were different too. I remember tasting my first potato pancake at the Deptas’ house, and discovering the sweet joys of krushchiki at the Obiedzenskis’ house. I don’t know how to spell it, but it is delectable.

My grandfather, Hal B. Fullerton, lived with us for many years. My memories of him are hazy, because he died when I was only seven. One thing I do remember is his willingness to read to me at any time. I would choose a book, climb into his lap in his big wing chair, and say, “Read me, Grampa.” And he would read for as long as I wanted. He helped me learn to read before I started school. I also remember that he had a terrible cough. He would have to stop reading when he had a coughing spell, and then catch his breath. I’m sure he had emphysema, the result of a lifetime of heavy smoking, but in those days it didn’t have a name. It was so bad that in the winter, when our house got so cold at night, my parents would send him to stay with John and Catherine Morrissey in Patchogue. They had central heating, so he was more comfortable there. He had been John’s scoutmaster many years earlier, when they lived in Medford, so they were old and dear friends.

Hal B. Fullerton reading to his grandson Billy. Photo from the collection of Mrs. Anne Ferguson Nauman

Grampa had a beard for a couple of years, but he had it shaved off when I was about four. That was a traumatic experience for me. When he emerged from the barbershop, I was totally shocked at his newly shaven appearance. I remember hiding my face all the way home in the car, and being unable to look at him for several days. Iwould walk past him with my head turned away. I eventually accepted the fact that this bare-faced person was still my beloved Grampa. He did keep his mustache.

After my grandfather died, my uncle, Loring Fullerton, lived with us for many years. He was my mother’s brother. He had studied landscaping in college and he worked for Hart’s Nursery in Wading River and then the Baier Lustgarten Nursery in Ridge. He wanted to start his own nursery so my parents let him have a ten-acre field at the north end of the farm. We called it the North Forty. He had no money for nursery stock so he started everything from cuttings and seeds. As the trees and shrubs got bigger, he moved them to a smaller lot near the road, next to the stand. This was his retail area, and he called it Rainbow Nursery.

Loring and my mother had always been very close, although they were seven years apart. They had much in common, as she had graduated from a two-year horticultural school and was an expert gardener. She knew the Latin names of everything, as did Loring, so they spoke the same language in more ways than one. He had a droll sense of humor, and kept the family laughing with his nonsense. He once planted a Cotoneaster by our cellar door, and named it Cotoneaster bidacella. (Say it quickly.)

Loring had been captain of his track team, and an outstanding miler, at Michigan State University. He talked a lot about running. He had run a mile in 4:21, and often speculated on who would run the first four-minute mile, which was then considered a near impossibility. He favored Glenn Cunningham to do it, but it was Roger Bannister who finally broke that barrier in 1954. Since then, countless runners have gone under four minutes, with a current record of about 3:43. I remembered these conversations in later years, when I became a runner myself.

My great-grandfather, John Alonzo Jones, built Badger’s Dutch Oven Inn on the east edge of our property, just down the hill from the stand. He had help from Albert Bayles with the framing, but he did most of the work himself, even though he was in his eighties. We always called him Badger. His daughter, Catherine Cowles, would come out from the city to help him at the Inn during the summer. They served simple foods that could be cooked in their Dutch oven, which was modeled after the one in our ancient chimney. They served baked beans, delicious nut bread, apple pie, and clam chowder. I liked to walk down the path through the woods from our house to the Inn. There was usually a catbird’s nest in the briar patch along the way. I loved Badger’s nut bread, and liked to help Aunt Catherine roll her cigarettes. She smoked a lot, and had a little device that rolled the tobacco into the little white cigarette papers. I didn’t do a very neat job of it, but it was fun. I always called her my great-half-aunt because she was the half-sister of my mother’s mother.

This was the time of the Great Depression, so we didn’t have much in the way of material possessions. It didn’t bother us, because everyone else was in the same boat. My mother had a saying, which we heard frequently: “Use it up, Wear it out, Make it do, Do without.” Nothing was wasted. I am still appalled at the amount of stuff that is thrown away in this day of disposable-everything and plastic-everything. In those days, very little was thrown away, and plastics didn’t exist. Leftover bits of soap were put into a mesh holder that you could swish in the dish pan to wash the dishes. Food scraps went into the compost pile or went to the animals. Worn-out sheets were cut down to make pillowcases. Feed bags were cut up to make kitchen towels and girls’ slips. Worn clothes were mended or patched until they were no longer usable, and then they became cleaning rags. Holes in socks were darned. I remember feeling gleeful but guilty the first time I threw away a sock with a hole it, instead of darning it, but that wasn’t until the 1950s. Frayed shirt collars were removed, turned over, and sewn back on. There was always a big pile of clothes to mend and socks to darn.

We had a trash burner behind the greenhouse. This was a chicken wire enclosure where we burned waste paper and anything else that was combustible. Real trash, like broken crockery, glass, leaky pots, rusty hinges, and other such unusable junk, was eventually loaded onto the farm truck and taken to our family dump in the woods at the edge of the orchard. Every farm had a dump like this, in a far corner of the property. There was a town dump, I think on Whiskey Road. Donald Bayles used to go there to shoot rats, but unfortunately we were never able to join him.

Wearable clothes, including shoes, were passed down from older to younger children. It was a lucky younger child who had something new to wear. All my dresses were homemade – and we always had to wear dresses at school. In high school it was skirts and sweaters or blouses. No pants for girls in those days. In grade school we had to wear brown cotton stockings held up with round garters. My sister remembers having to wear underwear with attached garters to hold up the stockings. Shoes were usually “sensible” clunky brown oxfords. No nice comfy sneakers for school, although I think the boys wore high-top Keds. It was a lucky lad who had high-top leather boots in the winter. I still remember the first shoes that I was allowed to pick out myself – a pair of soft red moccasins that I got when I was thirteen. I loved them.

There was no such thing as fast food, or junk food, or pre-packaged food, or frozen food. There were no 7-11’s or convenience stores. We had never even heard of pizza. Everything was made from scratch. And we had to eat everything on our plates. We only had one solid piece of meat each week, usually a roast. Then it was hash, meatloaf, stew, baked beans and the like. But of course we had an endless supply of fresh vegetables and fruit in the summer and fall, and home-canned vegetables and fruit in the winter. Everybody had a big vegetable garden, and what didn’t get eaten fresh got canned for the winter. The vegetables were wonderful. There’s nothing like a tomato picked ripe off the vine, or a pod of freshly picked peas. We always had a big plate of sliced tomatoes with dinner. As for corn, my mother would put a big pot on the stove, and when it was boiling, then we were sent out to pick the corn. The favorite variety was Golden Bantam. It was so good, each of us would eat three or four (or five or six) ears until there was a mountain of empty cobs.

If we wanted a snack, we ate an apple or a peanut butter sandwich, or maybe a few graham crackers. Anna Cattle, the wife of my father’s hired man who lived in a cottage on the farm, always gave us rye bread and butter. She also gave us peppermint Chiclets. And of course there was always Badger’s wonderful nut bread. To my great regret, his recipe is gone forever. We were always free to eat fruit from the sorting area behind the stand. I remember eating about 14 ripe, juicy Bartlett pears one day. One day, Paul Ehmann made a mark on the poplar tree behind the stand every time I ate a pear that day, so there was a permanent record of my pear consumption. We were never allowed to pick any fruit from the trees except for two very old trees, a Red Astrachan and a Yellow Transparent. They were our trees. They were the earliest varieties so we really enjoyed them.

Sometimes we made popcorn. But first we had to grow it. We always had a few popcorn plants in the sweet corn field. We left the ears on the plants until the husks had dried and then removed the dry kernels from the cobs. We popped the kernels in a long-handled popper with a wire basket that we held over the flames in the fireplace, shaking it constantly. We had to take turns, because your hands would get too hot after a couple of minutes. After most of the kernels had popped, we would put them in a bowl with melted butter and salt. It was delicious. We also roasted chestnuts in the fireplace. We would cut X’s into the shells so they wouldn’t explode, and then bury them in the red coals.

There were no supermarkets. When my mother went food shopping, she would first stop at Toth’s butcher shop in Medford. Mrs. Toth was a round, pleasant Hungarian woman with short, stubby fingers and an impressively hefty whack with a meat cleaver. She would bring out a big piece of meat and cut off just what you wanted. If you needed ground beef, she would grind it on the spot. It looked a little like thick red spaghetti coming out of her big grinder. You always knew exactly what went into it. This was a lot more satisfactory than prepackaged meat wrapped in plastic.

Then we would go to Shand’s grocery store on West Main Street in Patchogue. My mother would read off her list, and Harvey or Malcolm Shand would get what she needed from the shelves, sometimes using a long-handled “grabber” for items on the high shelves, and then pack it all in boxes. Shand’s was a wonderful store – they had absolutely everything. Even in the 1980s, if you couldn’t find something elsewhere, you could always find it at Shand’s.

We got our milk from the Rev. William Stewart, the Presbyterian minister, a mile or so down the road. It wasn’t pasteurized, and of course there was no such thing as homogenized milk. It had a heavy layer of cream at the top so you had to shake it up before you poured it. Marjorie Stewart was close to Edith’s age and was a good friend of hers.

We didn’t grow our own potatoes, so we would go up to the Szuster farm on Yaphank Road to buy hundred-pound bags of potatoes. I always liked to go there because I thought Mrs. Szuster was the most beautiful woman in Middle Island. She was very shy and had the sweetest smile.

We got our eggs from Myrtle Ruland on Rocky Point Road. Bread was from the Dugan’s Bakery truck that came around every few days. The driver for many years was John Benarick. We called him Johnny Dugan. There was Mr. Swezey’s fish truck that came around once in a while. My mother didn’t have a way with fish, and it was always full of bones, so I never liked fish until I grew up and discovered the delights of flounder filets and broiled salmon. There was a little man, Mr. Morse, who used to walk around house-to-house carrying two big leather suitcases filled with spices and extracts and other interesting things.

We made our own ice cream in a hand-cranked freezer. It’s still possible to buy them nowadays. We took turns cranking because it was hard work, especially when the ice cream began to solidify. It was always a treat to lick the dasher after it was done. It had to be eaten right away, because there was no way to keep it frozen, but that was never a problem. My mother made the most luscious raspberry sherbet in that freezer.

We got our mail at Pfeiffer’s store and post office on the corner of Middle Country Road and Rocky Point Road. At that time, it cost three cents to mail a letter. Pfeiffer’s store was a little like Shand’s – they had everything, including crackers in barrels, horse collars, and a pot-bellied stove for heat. It was run by Edward Pfeiffer, who had to speak in a husky whisper because of an old throat injury, and his son Everett. Everett Jr. was a good friend of my brother Bill. The Pfeiffers had the only gas pump in town at that time, and a great selection of penny candies.

We went to Rovagna’s store in Coram for the Sunday newspaper. They had an even better selection of penny candies. I remember their young, pretty daughter, Lena, who often waited on us. We always got a quart and a pint of vanilla ice cream at Rovagna’s. It was bulk ice cream, in big tubs, and had to be scooped out with an ice cream spade and packed into cardboard containers by hand. They always packed the containers so full the tops wouldn’t go on. We had the ice cream for Sunday dinner dessert, topped with crushed fresh raspberries or peaches, or chocolate sauce.

We made our own root beer, using Hire’s extract and yeast. We had a bottle capper that sealed the bottles with crimped metal caps. Sometimes it would get a little too fizzy and a few bottles would blow their caps off in a loud and messy explosion. It was a lot of work, but the root beer was wonderful.

Sometimes we would go out for Sunday night supper, often to Joe’s Clam Bar in Selden. I think it was near Wendell Still’s place. My father would sit at the counter eating clams on the half-shell and chatting with the owner, Joe Slechta, and the rest of us would sit at a small table enjoying Joe’s delicious clam chowder with oyster crackers, or hamburgers with tomato slices. My sister remembers them as “out of this world,” and says she has never found a hamburger to compare with Joe’s.I think Joe had been a diplomat at one time, and was an interesting person. I used to enjoy visiting the Slechtas at their home in Patchogue because their four sons (Hamilton, Joseph, Francis and John) had a huge collection of Oz books and they would let us borrow them. We always called Mrs. Slechta “Mrs. Joe.”

We visited Beth Bubb and her mother in their little house down the hill from the historic Ashton house that was then occupied by Minnie Ashton, “Aunt Min.” I liked going there because Beth had the best tire swing in her back yard and her mother made excellent pumpkin pie. Beth was a jolly person with an infectious laugh. She was a practical nurse. She cared for me and Edith when our brother Billy was born. In those days, new mothers had to spend about ten days in the hospital. Beth stayed to help for a while after mother and baby returned home. My earliest memory is of seeing my mother emerge from the hospital with the baby in her arms, and asking, “Is that my Billy?”

We sometimes visited Hunter Sekine in West Yaphank. He was Japanese and spoke little English. I could never understand a word he said, although my parents and grandparents didn’t seem to have a problem communicating with him. I remember him as a small man, always dressed in brown from head to toe, with a padded cotton jacket. He reminded me of a happy little gnome. His little house was surrounded by Japanese flowers – peonies, flowering cherry trees and wisteria. The last time I drove past the site of his old house, all the trees in the surrounding woods had become covered with wisteria vines, a beautiful sight in the spring. He died during World War II. He was found lying on his bed, dressed in his best clothes, and it was sometimes speculated that he may have taken his own life in remorse for the actions of his native country in that war. He was a good friend of my grandparents’ and for a short time they were business partners dealing in Japanese ornamentals. I still have some of the correspondence between them and their suppliers in Japan. I have two antique Japanese vases and a beautiful red silk embroidered piece that Mr. Sekine gave to my grandmother.

We often went to visit Beatrice Ritch at the infirmary in Yaphank. She used to be called Beatie, but we just called her Bea. She was the daughter of Lewis Ritch who lived in an ancient house a short distance west of us. We called him Grampa Ritch. Bea had been crippled by rheumatoid arthritis when she was in her twenties. All her joints were totally frozen so that she could not move at all. When her mother died, her father was unable to care for her, so she spent the rest of her days flat on her back in the infirmary. She could move her head, and had a small amount of movement in her right arm so that if you put a pencil between two fingers she could write, but that was the extent of her ability to move. Her jaws were frozen, so they had to extract all her teeth in order to feed her. But despite her terrible infirmity, she was always cheerful, always interested in the lives of the people around her, always smiling. She had a lively curiosity, loved company, loved reading books, and even learned a language, I think Spanish. They would set up a book holder so she could read, but she had to wait patiently for someone to come and turn the pages. My mother used to sit and read to her, and take her special treats like baked custard and ripe peaches.

Everyone at the infirmary loved her. Sometimes they would transport her in an ambulance to a friend’s house for a couple of days. Ethel Quinn was a dear friend and a nurse, and she would often attend to Bea’s needs while she was visiting friends away from the infirmary. Bea liked to go to Marian Young’s house in Bellport at cherry blossom time. They would set up her stretcher in the yard so that she could enjoy the sunshine and the blossoms. She also enjoyed the salt air at Julia Muirhead’s beach house in Rocky Point. Julia ran a small tearoom in Coram, the Orchard Tearoom, just east of Lester Davis’s place. Bea visited our house a few times, and she always remembered with delight how I would feed her peaches when I was about eight. She was an amazing person. I’m sure that modern-day medications and therapies could have made her life a lot easier.

Medical care in those days was pretty simple. Everyone had one family doctor for all ailments. There were no pediatricians, and very few specialists. And there were no antibiotics. Our family was taken care of by Dr. William Neuss in Yaphank. I liked going to see him because he had a goldfish pond in the front yard. However, I didn’t like his treatments. It seemed as if he prescribed enemas and/or castor oil for everything. No wonder I still hate going to doctors. The castor oil was always mixed with orange juice to mask the taste, but that didn’t really work. Nothing could mask that awful stuff. I couldn’t drink orange juice for years after that. We also had to take cod liver oil, and that was almost as bad. Now you can take it in capsules, but we had to have it in a spoon. Dr. Neuss had a pair of Chinese nodding Mandarin dolls in his office that I loved, and he always told me that he was going to give them to me for a wedding present some day. I remembered it when I was married, many years later, but I never saw the dolls again.

Life was simple and safe in those days. I used to roam around alone in the woods, and it never entered anyone’s mind to consider this unsafe. Crime in Middle Island was virtually unheard-of. Nobody locked their doors. I don’t think anybody knew where the keys to our house were, because they were never used. Friends were free to just walk in. In fact, my mother was annoyed when friends knocked, because she would have to interrupt whatever she was doing to go to the door. There was a day, however, when my mother was out and a hobo came to the door asking for a cup of coffee and something to eat. My sister and I didn’t know how to make coffee so we made him some cocoa and a peanut butter sandwich. He was grateful, but I think our mother was a little upset when she came home and heard about it.

We received a small allowance once a week. I think it was ten cents but eventually went up to a quarter. We could augment this with work. Drawing cider was one source of income. Edith made money in later years by taking over my mother’s jam and jelly business. Once Loring accidentally dropped a pocket watch into a bubbling kettle of peach jam. I don’t remember if it still worked after they fished it out and cleaned it off.

We collected black walnuts from the trees in our yard and spread them on the farm roads so the truck would run over them. That crushed the tough green outer husks. We removed the remains of the husks from the nuts, and this left dark brown stains on our hands for days. Then we sold the nuts on the stand. Black walnuts are delicious but they are a lot of work. To get at them, you need a large flat rock, a heavy hammer or another big rock, a nutpick, and a lot of determination.

We couldn’t work picking fruit in the orchard because that was a very heavy job. But our next-door neighbor, Tom Bayles, paid me to pick strawberries for him. I enjoyed the work and also enjoyed eating the berries. There’s nothing like a soft, ripe, sun-warmed strawberry straight out of the patch – a far cry from those crunchy things we buy in the stores now. He also paid me to pick string beans, but they were not as much fun and the plants were itchy.

The Bayleses were nice neighbors. I remember that “Grandma” Bayles had an enormous Christmas cactus plant that bloomed in great profusion year after year. I liked visiting Mrs. Gertrude Bayles because she would give us bread and peanut butter. She had the best peanut butter in the world. I think it was Beechnut. I admired the hand pump in her kitchen sink and the big organ in her living room. Sometimes she would take me to the hen house to help collect eggs. I liked the smell and the warmth of the house, and it was like hunting Easter eggs to find them in the nests. Their son Donald had a wonderful old car, I think a Model A Ford. He used to drive around the local dirt roads and let us ride in the back. I’m not sure if it was an open back or a rumble seat, but we loved it.It’s a pity that nobody nowadays even knows what a rumble seat is.

We had one year-round hired man who lived in a cottage on the farm. It is still there, on the hill just above the storage cellar. Al Cattle was our hired man for many years, and George Lymber was the last one. George’s daughter Dorothy was my age and was a good friend. At harvest time, my father hired local high school boys as extra help. I can’t remember them all, there were so many through the years, but I do remember that Middle Islanders Willie and Roman Zebrowski and Johnny Szuster picked apples for us. Lino Manzoni came from Coram; Henry Neuss, Will Neuss, Pat Raimond and Frank Mapes from Yaphank; Jack and Paul Ehmann and Nelson Crisler from Patchogue; and Henry House from Port Jefferson Station. Henry House married the boss’s daughter and in 2007 he and my sister Edith celebrated their 65^th year together.

apple picking crew in 1942. George Lymber 2nd from left and Lino Manzoni far right. Right - Frank Mapes and Henry Neuss loading the truck.

Henry and Edith House

Will Neuss

Part IV - What We Did For Fun

I mentioned some of the games we played at school, but the rest of the time we three were on our own. We lived so far away from our schoolmates that there were few opportunities to get together outside of school. Sometimes I would walk home from school with Tootsie (Florence) Buniski or Frances and Lucy Depta, and my mother would pick me up later. Or she would drive one of them to our house after school. One of my friends was Beatrice Hollowell, whose father was the caretaker at the Longwood estate. I remember sleeping on a featherbed for the first time in the Hollowell’s cozy cottage on the estate grounds.

Bill and some of the other boys had BB guns and sometimes Joey and Kayo (Rudy) Carrabus would come to our house for target practice. Bill and I had cap pistols and played cowboy. In those days, most parents didn’t object to their children having toy guns or BB guns. Guns were just a normal part of country living and had not become the menace that they are now.

Most of the time, the three of us had to make our own amusements. We played things like marbles, jackknife, jacks, cat’s cradle, jackstraws and hide-and-seek. I liked paper dolls and coloring books. I got a doll house for Christmas one year, and had fun making things to go in it, and making clothes for the small dolls that inhabited it. Bill enjoyed making airplane models out of balsa wood, and Edith was good at all kinds of handicrafts. I think we all three had stamp collections. I still have my big album. We used to send for stamps “on approval,” and then either send them back or send money to pay for them. Edith used to send for chameleons in the mail. They would often escape and climb the curtains, or get into Grampa’s big wingchair where they would get squashed.

All three of us loved to read, and we had a huge collection of books. We were each given a book for every birthday and every Christmas. My mother liked to read to us, even long after we had all learned to read. She had a real knack for choosing new books that were destined to become classics. She got us The Hobbit right after it was published, so we learned to love Tolkien’s writing long before he wrote The Lord of the Rings. She discovered the Mary Poppins books, and The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White. We loved the Oz books, and had several of them. The Wind in the Willows and Kipling’s Just So Stories were favorites. I liked Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, and The Secret Garden. I still have our first-edition copies of all four Winnie-the-Pooh books.

Joey Carrabus and Billy Ferguson.

Billy and Anne playing Cats Cradle 1941

Photos from the collection of Mrs. Anne Ferguson Nauman

There were no organized activities, no after-school music or dance lessons, no sports programs. I would have enjoyed the Girl Scouts, but there was no opportunity. Edith and I took piano lessons for a while with Mrs. Eva Stewart, the minister’s wife, but we didn’t last long. Both of us have musically talented children, but they surely didn’t get it from us.

Edith was in an older age group and had different friends and different interests, but Bill and I did a lot of fun things together. We would dig a bunch of worms and walk down to Pfeiffer’s Pond to go fishing. If we caught a six-inch perch, it was a big deal. We would take it home, scale and gut it, and cook it. We ended up with two bites of fish, after a lot of work, but it was delicious. Young Everett Pfeiffer would often go fishing with us. Everett was later to become another victim of that dreaded disease, polio.

All three of us had fun riding our bikes around the farm. We had to “save up” for a long time to buy a bike, but they were not terribly expensive then. Bill and I would sometimes ride our bikes down to Artist Lake and cast for small-mouth bass. We never caught any, and always came out of the water with our legs covered with leeches. They are very nasty, disgusting creatures. But the fishing was fun.

Bill and I had fun making forts. Empty apple boxes made nice big forts that you could crawl around in. We used to wear silly hats. I wore my grandfather’s Hollis Fire Department hat, and Bill wore his “smuggler’s hat” from the West Indies. It was a very tall straw hat that had room enough for a bottle in the crown. I loved the Tibetan hat, a heavy felt and fur hat that was given to us by my grandmother.

Billy and Anne Ferguson. Photo from the collection of Mrs. Anne Ferguson Nauman

The three of us collected parsley worms and kept them in jars. When they were disturbed, they would protrude their orange “horns” which had an unpleasant smell. We would feed them parsley leaves and eventually they would spin cocoons. Several weeks later, we would watch them emerge. They would slowly stretch and dry their crumpled wings, and then fly away as beautiful Black Swallowtail butterflies.

In the winter, we would go down to Pfeiffer’s Pond to ice skate. If it was cold enough to freeze the bigger ponds, we went to Bartlett’s Pond. That was a great place to skate. A lot of people got hockey skates that were three sizes too big, and then flopped around complaining of weak ankles. But if they had had properly fitting skates, there would have been no problem. I was lucky that my grandmother gave me a pair of beautiful figure skates, just about the time that my feet stopped growing. That’s when I learned to do backward crossovers and hockey stops. Edith once fell through the ice on Bartlett’s Pond. She was quickly rescued by Elwyn Bayles and was unhurt, but she lost all her enthusiasm for skating.

After a snowstorm, we would make snowmen or go sledding down the hill between the Richard Bayles house and our house. I remember that Donald Bayles had a really fine sled that he could actually steer, and it would slide for a long way. Our smaller sleds didn’t perform nearly as well. Our winter play clothes were heavy wool snowsuits and rubber galoshes with metal fasteners. No fleece or down jackets in those days.

The two smaller Bartlett’s Ponds were interesting. The ancient Bartlett house, which is gone now, was occupied by the Bartlett sisters, Miss Maude and Miss Agnes. They were friends of my mother’s. I liked to visit them because their house smelled wonderful, and they had a parrot. Eugene Swezey used to work for them as a gardener and handyman. They had beautiful flower gardens and often exhibited their flowers at the Bellport flower show, as did my mother. There was a small pond on each side of the Bartlett house, and in the spring Bill and I would do what we called “treading for turtles.” Box turtles would hibernate in the mud on the shores of the ponds, and if we walked barefoot through the mud, we would unearth lots of turtles. I have always been a turtle lover, and even today there are turtles all over my house (painted, carved, molded, etched, stuffed, on earrings or pendants, or just plain empty turtle shells). We had a turtle pen at home where we would put captured turtles and feed them on strawberries, tomatoes or earthworms for a few days, and then let them go. Whenever we saw a turtle crossing the road, we always stopped to carry it across safely or to take it home for a while.

We had fun as a family. My father taught us to play poker, and of course we played for beans and not money. We enjoyed a lot of board games like Chinese checkers, regular checkers and Parcheesi, and card games like go fish, old maid, casino and rummy. We liked doing jigsaw puzzles. My father was a good chess player and taught us the fundamentals, but I didn’t have the patience to learn to play well.

We went to the beach many times each summer. Bathing suits were made of wool in those days. They were heavy and took forever to dry. Nylon and lycra and all the other quick-drying synthetics had not yet been invented. Cedar Beach was our favorite on the North Shore. We loved to go to the ocean. You could drive to Westhampton and park just about anywhere along the beach road, and walk across the dunes to the beach. My father was a very strong swimmer, and he would head straight out to sea. Of course he would turn around and come back, but I think this caused our mother some anxiety. Our uncle Loring was also a strong swimmer, and once he became entangled in the tentacles of a Portuguese man-o’-war. He managed to swim back to shore, but was in great pain from the jellyfish stings. Edith was also an excellent swimmer, much better than Bill or I, and in the 1980s she became a triathlete.

It was fun to go beachcombing at the ocean after a storm, when you could find all kinds of interesting stuff washed up. I once found a mango pit, which I found totally mystifying. I kept it but never knew what it was until 50 years later when I sliced open a fresh mango for the first time and, voila! There was my mystery object. We often found big skimmer clams washed up after a storm, and they made the most delicious clam chowder. My mother made great chowder, always the kind with vegetables and tomatoes, not the milky kind. My father would sometimes go surfcasting. He never caught anything worth eating, but he had fun.

Of course there was no television, no computers, no CDs, not even tapes. We did have a wind-up Victrola and a few scratchy records. But radio was wonderful. The whole family listened to Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, Fibber McGee, and Here’s Morgan. We kids liked the Shadow and the Lone Ranger. During the day, it was Ransome Sherman and Club Matinee. Just before dinner time it was Jack Armstrong, Terry and the Pirates, Little Orphan Annie, and Dick Tracy. We were always sending in cereal boxtops for Jack Armstrong whistling rings, or Dick Tracy decoding rings, or whatever. Of course we always listened to the Hit Parade. There were some wonderful melodies in the late 30s and early 40s. We could buy song sheets with the words to all the popular songs. I’m sometimes startled to hear, 60 or 70 years later, new arrangements of old favorites like Skylark, Stardust, or Tenderly.

We went to the movies in Patchogue or Port Jefferson. My father loved the Marx Brothers and I loved Gene Autry. When we went to the movies in Patchogue, we would stop in the drug store on the southwest corner of Main Street for an ice cream soda. The owner, Jimmy Lephakis, was a friend of my father’s. I remember going to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, the first full-length animated feature. I loved the music and the humor, but the evil witch scared me to death. Movies in those days were not full of graphic violence and gore and sex and bad language, as they are now. The censors at the Hayes Office saw to that – they even had a problem with Clark Gable using the word “damn” in Gone with the Wind. I remember seeing that when it first came out, along with a few of my schoolmates. Mrs. Jones had let us out of school to see it. There were no ratings because all movies at that time would have been rated G or PG. Film makers have a lot more freedom now, so parents need to use a lot more discretion.

My father liked snakes and was always catching snakes in the orchard and bringing them home with him. Fortunately, there are no poisonous snakes native to Long Island. He especially liked blacksnakes and hog-nosed snakes. Hog-noses are sometimes called puff adders because they will puff up their bodies with air when they are disturbed. They also play dead by going completely limp. I learned from my father that snakes aren’t slimy at all, but very smooth and silky feeling. He taught me how to catch them with a forked stick behind the head, and how to pick them up without getting bitten. I even caught a big water snake once, when we were upstate. They are not poisonous but are very nasty. I skinned it and had it made into a belt.

My father used to shoot rabbits in the orchard because they damaged the trees, and I learned to skin them but never quite mastered the art of preserving the skins. I sometimes dissected them because I was curious about their inner anatomy. Sometimes I would bury them and Bill and I would dig them up a year later to study the bones. My mother thought some of this activity was a little gruesome (she called it ghoulish), but I was fascinated.

I liked to climb the apple trees in the orchard, where I would often find robins’ nests and cicada husks. I spent hours rambling around in the woods by myself. My roaming territory covered a huge area, from Pfeiffer’s Pond westward to Biz Miller’s land, and a long way to the north. I learned about the plants and trees in the woods and fields. Wintergreen berries, sour grass and sassafras leaves are good to nibble on, as are huckleberries and wild strawberries. Inkberries look delicious, but are definitely not good nibbles. I knew just where to find May pinks (trailing Arbutus), pink lady’s slippers, prince’s pine and Indian pipes. I knew where to collect ground pine for making Christmas wreaths, but now it is probably on the list of protected species. I collected interestingthings like bones, animal skulls, turtle shells, abandoned birds’ nests, and snakes’ shed skins.

Later in life, when I started running, I returned to the woods. I trained by running alone on forest trails, first in the woods at Brookhaven Lab, then in the magical Prince William Forest in Virginia, and more recently on the high trails through the pine and aspen forests of Mt. Charleston near Las Vegas. In Virginia, I learned orienteering, an exhilarating sport where each individual, running alone through the forest, must find the fastest route to a series of markers using only a topographic map and compass. Prince William Forest encompassed about 18 square miles, so it was ideal for orienteering competitions. Thanks to those early days in Middle Island, I have always felt at home in the woods.

Part V - Special Days

In those days, each holiday was celebrated on the proper day, not on the nearest Monday the way it is done now. Columbus Day was always special for me because that was my birthday. I never had to go to school on my birthday. Lincoln and Washington each had his own birthday holiday instead of the current Presidents’ Day. Some of the holidays have new names now. Memorial Day used to be Decoration Day, and Veterans’ Day used to be Armistice Day in honor of the armistice that ended World War I, the “war to end all wars.” If only that had been so.

One of the big days of the year for our family was Decoration Day, when they had a big parade in Patchogue. My father was a member of the American Legion, and he always marched with them. He wore his dress-white tropical uniform from his days in the Army during World War I. He had been stationed at the Panama Canal. He was tall, lean, erect, and handsome, and I was always proud to see him marching. The parade ended at the cemetery, where they had a memorial ceremony in honor of those who had died in our wars. It ended with the playing of Taps, such a moving and sorrowful sound.

Donald Ferguson in Dress whites.

There was also a parade on the Fourth of July, but that was a happier occasion. We used to get a catalog of fireworks that could be ordered by mail, and we were each allowed to spend a small sum. My favorites were snakes and lady crackers. Bill liked cherry bombs but they scared me. We blew up a lot of empty cans, and luckily we never got hurt. After dark, we had Roman candles and sparklers, and my father and grandfather had great fun putting on a show with pinwheels and rockets. What a show they could have had with some of Grucci’s marvelous pyrotechnics. I still love fireworks. One year, after we had already received our fireworks in the mail, they passed a law making home fireworks illegal. My father was strictly law-abiding, so he insisted that we had to dispose of them. With many protests and tears, we buried them in the orchard.

Easter was fun. My mother would hide eggs and Easter candies around the house, and we would have an egg hunt first thing in the morning. Then in the afternoon, we would get together with our three Tuttle cousins, the children of my mother’s sister, Hope Tuttle, who lived in Bay Shore. We would go down to the Pine Woods (Prosser’s Pines) and have a picnic and another egg hunt among the pine needles and pine cones. That was an enchanted forest in those days.

Children were a lot more rambunctious on Halloween than they are nowadays. They would soap windows of cars and houses (a horrible job to clean up), throw eggs or flour, turn over outhouses, and roam around doing a lot of serious mischief. In Middle Island, we didn’t do that, mostly because we all lived so far apart. We did have a party at school, where we had doughnuts and cider and did things like ducking for apples and apples-on-a-string. One year, I went to Yaphank with a friend, and I remember being surprised at all the mischief that was done. The current custom of dressing up for trick-or-treat, and having good clean fun, is a much more sensible way to spend the holiday.

The County Fair at Riverhead was a big occasion for our parents, especially my father. He saved the most perfect specimens of every variety of fruit for the fair exhibits, and never failed to bring home a lot of blue ribbons. I liked looking at all the exhibits, and especially enjoyed visiting the animals and eating cotton candy.

Christmas was probably the best. We would pore through the Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogs and make wish lists. Then we would put the lists in the little copper kettle by the fireplace. We were lucky that most of our wishes came true. We all went out on Christmas Eve to cut a tree. It was always a native pitch pine. We children always decorated the tree. I still have a few of the old glass ornaments. We hung our stockings in front of the fireplace and left milk and cookies for Santa Claus. As we got older, we all had fun putting things in each other’s stockings. There was always a tangerine in the toe and a candy cane sticking out the top. We filled them with inexpensive toys, candies, jokes and useful things. After breakfast, we opened the gifts under the tree, my father handing them out one at a time so that everyone could see. It took a long time. Then we would all go off to play with our new toys and games, or read our new books.

I remember the presidential campaigns when Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected to an unprecedented four terms as President. When he was running for his second term, in 1936, my father was an ardent supporter of his opponent, Republican Alf Landon of Kansas. I remember making a lot of buttons and signs with Kansas sunflowers. Of course, FDR won that election overwhelmingly. When he ran for a third term, my father was outraged, and was an even more ardent supporter of challenger Wendell Willkie. The slogans were “No Third Term” and “Win With Willkie.” He helped the campaign by embellishing pumpkins with Willkie slogans, and selling them. Then when FDR ran for a fourth term in 1944, while we were at war, the rallying cry was “Don’t Change Horses in Midstream.” He won again, defeating Thomas E. Dewey, but died soon thereafter, making Harry Truman the President. Of course this will never happen again because the Constitution now forbids more than two terms as president.

In January of 1934, we had a huge snowstorm that brought everything to a screeching halt. We were completely isolated for 10 days, until the roads were finally cleared. It was not disastrous for us because we had plenty of food, coal, kerosene, and fireplace wood, and did not have farm animals to feed. I was only six so I don’t remember much about it, but I do remember going out to play after my father had cleared some of the snow from the door, and crying because I was stuck in the snow and couldn’t move. I had to be rescued. Eventually my father and Edith were able to walk down to the Stewarts’ for milk, but it was 10 days before any vehicles got through. We just stayed in the house and amused ourselves with board games, card games, jigsaw puzzles and reading, and generally “hanging out” together, until the roads were cleared. Surprisingly, I don’t recall that any of us felt bored.

The hurricane of 1938 took everyone by surprise. Nobody had ever heard of a hurricane in our part of the world. I remember my mother picking us up at school and then driving home through a nightmare of crashing limbs and falling trees. It was a miracle that we made it safely home. I remember that the wind suddenly stopped, and it became totally still. We were in the eye, but did not have a clue. Weran outside to pick up the black walnuts that had been blown off the big tree beside the house. Then before we knew what was happening, the wind started up again, this time from the opposite direction, and it was a nightmare all over again. My sister remembers being in high school at Port Jefferson during the hurricane, and Mr. Kiessling going around from room to room telling everyone that the barometer was at “hurricane proportions.” The rain was coming through the cement block walls. She said, “We made the 10-mile trip home on the bus during the eye, no idea how the bus made it around all the fallen trees all over the road. I guess we just made it home when it came back from the other direction.” The damage was tremendous, but I don’t remember that our orchard suffered greatly. We were especially sad at the terrible destruction in Prosser’s Pines. I remember that the Szuster boys did a lot of work cleaning it up. It has recovered, but has never felt the same.

Remembering

The early years in Middle Island shaped the later lives of all three of us. I ended up studying biology in college, and spent 20 years working in biology research at Brookhaven National Lab. I also spent many years as a biomedical editor. Edith had an exceptional talent for all types of handicrafts, especially working with textiles and fibers, and she is now a recognized Master Weaver in Vermont. Bill loved to make model airplanes and got his first flying lesson for his sixteenth birthday. He joined the U.S. Air Force where he served with distinction in two wars, Korea and Viet Nam, and retired as a Colonel after thirty years of service. So we each followed a path that was laid out early in our lives back in Middle Island.

Rainbow Ranch is gone now. Our beautiful orchards and my beloved woods have all been devoured by a gravel pit. Badger’s Dutch Oven Inn has vanished without a trace. The old barn burned down years ago. But our house and the storage cellar remain, and are now owned by a church. I can’t think of a better fate for our old home. My sister visited several years ago, and liked the feel of the church’s sanctuary in our old storage cellar. My son Bill visited there a year ago and he noticed that the big catalpa tree by the kitchen door had a horizontal branch that would be perfect for a swing. That was the very same branch where we did indeed have a swing, seventy years ago. So some things endure.

Our parents are gone, and our brother is gone, but my sister and I keep our memories of Middle Island as it was in those simpler and more innocent days. Our grandchildren are growing up in a world that has become a lot more complex and dangerous, but we are confident that they will find ways to make it a better place for their own children and grandchildren.