Grew up here? Strike up the band!

The movie “Apollo 10 ½” is about growing up in Texas during the space race, but my childhood in Old Bethpage was so similar. I lived on Serpentine Lane with a zillion kids who were all about my age. We played kickball, stickball, tackle football (without helmets or pads), tag, hide-and-seek, and just had great fun biking around suburbia. My dad worked for Grumman. During the missions to the moon in the late 1960s, CBS used one of the Grumman plants to do its simulations of the lunar lander on the moon. Dad’s work badge got me into the building with him, and we could peek from behind huge, tall curtains to watch actors in space suits move around the LEM -- Lunar Excursion Module -- spacecraft in slow motion for the cameras while Walter Cronkite narrated from Florida or the Houston mission site.

During that time, the historic Old Bethpage Village Restoration was under construction. From Serpentine Lane, it was only a short hike through the woods to the 200-acre site. As kids, we would line Round Swamp Road to watch the big trucks ferry old houses and barns to the village grounds. The buildings would come from all over Long Island. Crews of men used long poles to raise up electric wires along the road as the trucks slowly moved their huge loads. Before the village was completed, kids on our block would jump the chain-link fence to explore the growing number of old buildings. But we had to watch out for the security detail, which rode around the grounds in little all-terrain vehicles and tried to catch us young trespassers. 

North of Old Bethpage but south of the Long Island Expressway stood a tall communications tower. We’d hike through the undeveloped forest lands to its base and marvel at its size and height. Nearby was a large area of sand and gravel, which was dug out of the ground leaving large, open pits with steeply sloping, sandy sides down to the bottom. It was great for us to slide down, get filthy and burn off energy – as long as we didn’t get caught! 

Old Bethpage also has a strip mall where Round Swamp Road and Old Bethpage Road cross. The buildings are still there, but all the businesses have long since changed. I remember a nice hometown-sized movie theater, A&P and a bank. But the best store for us kids was the Ben Franklin five-and-dime store. For pennies, we could choose from aisles of sweets, candies and gum. They had great little games, toy soldiers and balls of all sizes. We liked the Pensie Pinkie rubber balls by Spalding for stickball. 

Stickball was best played on the Old Bethpage Elementary School grounds. A strike-zone box was spray-painted on a brick wall of the school. One kid would throw our version of fastballs, curves and screwballs for balls and strikes while the other team would try to hit the balls into the school parking lot. We’d play “automatics” where a single was hit into the nearby parking lot, a double into the second parking lot, and a triple or home run fell onto the grass beyond them. We imagined we could become one of the Mets’ pitchers, a Tom Seaver, Tug McGraw or Jerry Koosman when we grew bigger.

Newsday, back then, often had pictures and statistics about the fighting in Vietnam, but this kid's life was pretty carefree and fun.

Reader Mitch Hayne now lives in Eagle, Colorado.