……………………It was July of 1954 when this photo of my brother John and I was taken in front of our house in Elmont Long Island……..I had just become 6 years old! John was 11……I was a pretty scrawny kid, and some what shy. I was introverted, and preferred to draw and color than almost anything else…..I did have a group of neighborhood friends, and we did all the thinks kids did in the 50s…..We were out all day until we were called in for dinner. I sometimes got into trouble for starting fires in empty lots. I loved starting “camp fires”, but always came home smelling of smoke!…..”Were you playing with fire again”….my Mom would always say… “Louis, I really don’t want you playing with fire, you can get really hurt!”….That was the extent of my punishment…I was the BABY so I got away with a lot…..My brothers would be the first to say that was true!….We rode our bikes everywhere without a care in the world……IT WAS A VERY DIFFERENT WORLD…..It’s gone all down hill from then……..We used to bike to the local dairy farm. It was called “Gauz Farm”. I went to elementary school with one of the children so we were allowed to play in the barn and climb all over the hay stacks. They sold most of their land off, but still had enough to keep cows from which they sold bottles of milk. People used to come from all over to buy their fresh milk, and eggs from their chickens……I had “HAY FEVER”, but I didn’t care….it was great fun….Eventually, they sold all of the land for a lot of money and moved away….Things were always changing……We also loved to play in the “SAND PIT”. It was a natural sand pit that was about 1/2 mile long, and at the end a lake fed by natural springs. There were houses all along backing up to the pit, but they were all fenced off. Of course we kids found a way to get in through a whole in the fence that the older kids made…..My brothers played there too, and didn’t like me being there, but I loved sliding down the steep sand slopes to the bottom on cardboard, and then climbing back up. There were also wild berry bushes that were delicious….It was a little bit like “Huckleberry Fin”…….It all ended when one winter day when three children drowned in the lake. They slid off of an icy plank that they were standing on into the dark water….It was a horrible story! It happened in the early evening about 5pm, Feb 1953, a year before this picture was taken. I used to play with one of the boys who was my age, Ronald Ruggerio also 6, who lived four doors down from me….The other two were brother and sister, Pamela 6, and Robert Helenick 11……It was in all the newspapers. One of the neighbors who got there first, Mr Rudi, dove into the freezing water to try to find them, but the water was too deep and dark……I was young but I’ll never forget it. The older boy was my brother Mauro’s friend. My brother still has the article……Something changed in the neighborhood after that. A bit of my innocence died with my friend…..He was the first person I knew that died…….We were absolutely forbidden to go down there again, and honestly none of us really wanted to………They filled the lake in, and years latter the entire area had been transformed into a park. When I visited my parents I would bring my nephews and nieces down to the park to play, but it was always a little haunting for me….There is a baseball field where the lake once was……..I am sure there are few who remember those three children…….but I will never forget them.
