At some point in the the early 1950’s Frank (who grew up in a family of woodcutters and farmers, thought he lived in town, too) and Margaret (who lived in the Bronx pre- and post-marriage) decided to move the the new suburb of Levittown. Frank, reading the papers once remarked to Margaret that the cost of homes was going up faster they they could save on his salary as an insurance company representative. They took the plunge to move to the Island, which Grandma Manley thought was the end of the earth. And in some respects it was. Mom went back to the Bronx to have her children.
Some thought went into the site selection as Margaret talked about finding one of the larger parcels, a quarter acre on a corner lot with a southern exposure. Three bedrooms, one for them, and one each for the boys and girls. A bit bigger than a Bronx apartment but smaller that a 250 acre farm. It cost $9,000 with a 4% mortgage, the papers for which were burned in the bathtub when it was fully paid.
Several years after the war (WWII) suburbs were sprouting up all over the place. The 17,500 houses of Levittown were mass produced on former potato farms, with the nearest big town being Hicksville, and the nearest train station being in the what-was-then the village of Wantagh.
In 2023 Michael still lives just 5 doors down from where we grew up and two of his children now live on Long Island as well. One lives in Manhattan where she and her husband work in the schools. The other is in Massapequa, named after a local indian tribe.
Pete on the other hand lives on the coastal plain of South Carolina where the sandy soil is great for Claudia’s horses and for large potato farms (the most recent addition to the neighborhood is an industrial-sized potato farm). Alexx Lives in NJ, but also works in Manhattan.
Gail is a few hours away in the coast of North Carolina. Margaret is a few hours south in Florida, though currently teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) in Morocco. ,
The house came with a small tool shed into which went a wooden tool chest which Pete thinks came form one of the upstate farms, down to the house he grew up in into the Bronx, out to Long Island. Mike has the box, but Pete has the ads now hanging in his tool shed.