When I was not yet 4 years old, my parents bought their first house and we came from Levittown, NY to Glen Cove. We moved into a brand-new, single level, three-bedroom two-bath home, near the bent end of a cul-de-sac called Leuce Place. Our house was on the right side of the street as you approached the dead end. Beyond the bulb and also behind our side of the street, there was still farm land. It was soon subdivided and developed; the new homes would contain not only several of my schoolmates but also the half-staircases that defined the new and silly split level design.

The town’s old movie theater was called The Glen. It had closed or would by the time I was old enough to sit through a film. By then the new Cove had opened its doors.

If you went out the open end of our street and proceeded kind of straight, you came to what we called the Bohacks hill. It was a steep drop to a main drag on which you’d then turn your car left and left again, into the parking area for the big Bohacks supermarket. That mini-mall also had a liquor/sundry store and I remember a cigar-box ballot container near its cash register, in which one could vote for Miss Rheingold. Rheingold was then the beer that was “extra dry.” Their ads used The Bridge on the River Kwai – Colonel Bogey March (Rheingold, the beer that’s ex-tra dry) the same way Malt-O-Meal (Winners… warm up with Malt-O-Meal) used it a few years later.

If you weren’t in a car, you didn’t have to go all the way to the main drag to make the left. You could cut through the patch of berries, a vacant lot between the road downhill and the mini-mall. The blackberries were tasty in the summer; the brambles were obnoxious the rest of the year. Or you could turn left even before the berries. Parker Doctor (Dr. Parker) had his converted-house office just off the downhill street and about halfway there; you could cut through his parking lot and plow downhill to the liquor store end of the shopping area.

At least one winter, I remember sledding down the Bohacks hill with Dad and Steve. Triple decker. That may have been the same season it was so icy we could skate on the sidewalks (but they were slow, cracked, uneven). And it was probably that winter when a neighbor’s car, warming up in his driveway, escaped its parking brake and rammed our 1953 dark green Buick. We called our car Betsy. Not only was Betsy repaired, she moved with us to California in 1958.