"Sound Beach Was Different Then"

In my early teens I remember the beach weather, tide, and fishing reports from the "Channel Sixty" boat owned by Connecticut radio station WICC channel 60.00 AM. One time it got stuck in Mt Sinai Harbor because the tide had gone out and they had to spend twelve hrs waiting for the next high tide.

Every summer-the whole ten weeks, were spent at Sound Beach. We lived in Woodhaven Queens, but I never knew what it was like to spend a summer as a 'city kid' and have to take the train to Rockaway just to go to the beach. I would walk barefooted to Dawn's Pass, trying to stay on the shaded parts of the tar roads that would get so hot that it was soft enough to carve your name into it.

At the beach there were rowboats turned upside down on racks made of galvanized pipe that the teenagers would stay under at the base of the cliff. They had some degree of privacy, 'necking', set back there, because most people tried to be close to the water to lessen the trip across the pebbles for their tender feet. Every summer began with tender feet that by summer's end produced a toughness that permitted running on those same pebbles that a few weeks before had caused limping.

The original lots sold for $89.50 each. My parents bought two. The garage was set back on the property with plans for a future house to be set more forward. Towards the end of the development of the community they had a two-for-the-price-of-one-sale to get rid of the remaining lots. My mother saw some land about two blocks away. It was eight lots-the last parcel between two dead end streets, on Port Washington Drive and Marion Court. Since it was a 'two-for' they only paid for four lots. This, they decided, would be where, eventually they would build their dream home. In 1953 my father began construction with the basement 26'x52'. The first property with the garage/cabin was left as is and used to stay in while working on the dream home. In 1956 my mother developed breast cancer. She had surgery and survived. Four years later it was back with a vengeance and she died in 1960. I was 15 and that was the first summer I missed out there. My father lost interest in the dream house and it was never finished. Years later as an adult I made the garage into a two bedroom cottage.

My mother's father was a bricklayer from England. Their garage was changed into a one-bedroom cottage when he developed lung cancer just before he died in Mather Hospital, before I was born. His widow lived out there for several years with out insulation, or central heat or a well, with four kids. They were so poor that she would wash out and sew together cloth cement bags for blankets. The kids walked the three miles to Rocky Point to school.

My 16th summer I returned again. I fell in love, at Sound Beach, for the first time with a girl that lived the rest of the year in Flushing. It must have been love because it took three buses to see her when the summer was over.

There were no street signs. Everyone nailed signs, with their names, on trees at major intersections.

Sound Beach was very different then, than it is today. In the early days, it was strictly a summer community and the atmosphere was one of relaxed, party time. No one had to get up for work early. There was no TV, or air conditioning. People went for walks in the evenings after supper, sometimes whole families. As we walked down the roads, we could hear the radios and people laughing, playing cards, talking through the open windows under their propped up shutters. There was that something special in the air that said 'this is summer at Sound Beach and there ain't nothing that can beat it"

Robert Dezendorf-now living in a sleepy little Florida town of 800 with the Suwannee River passing through it.

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