Northport Memories: The House on the Knoll

A stroll down Northport's memory lane takes us to the "House on the Knoll." Located on the southeast corner of the infamous "S" turn on Waterside Avenue, it burned down sometime in the 60's and has never been replaced. The photo in this vignette may be the only one in existence to document this fragment of my childhood. It was a wood frame cobbled-up series of random construction attempts that we called home in those days of Captain Video and Hop-a-long Cassidy. At last visit, around the turn of the millennium, a mature stand of woods occupied the foundation footprint.

Back in the day, many auto accidents occurred here on the "S" turn as young adults raced down Waterside, many of whom were coming from the Post Tavern after tipping a few too many. I know because my father replaced that mail box more than once. The address was simply RFD #1, Northport NY, a destination that today would simply be stamped as "insufficient address."

It truly was a time when "everybody knew your name." Our family lived there from 1952 to 1954 and it was the beginning of my innocence lost, and last vision of Santa Claus. Our "neighbor," Marcus (Butch) O'Sullivan was the bearer of reality. He was a free spirit and did not engage in such ridiculous fantasies. Other "neighbors" (this was a rural environment) included the Cadbys, Lincoln Anderson, The Lupones (of Patti Lupone fame), Doug Stone, Leslie McGuire, the Hatfields, the Goshens and the Rucks to name a few.

Our school bus was a green one (bus #1), the only one in Union Free School District #4 that was green at the time, as the standard yellow buses had just come into service and ours would soon go into mothballs. As I recall, it was a REO and it had a real loud transmission (typical of standard shift trucks in the forties). Our bus driver was Ralph Skidmore and he had a very shaky hand due to his Parkinson's disease which he pretty much regarded as an annoyance, at best. He was also a very accomplished wood worker, using dangerous power tools with that shaky hand. When he fired up the table saw in wood shop I looked the other way.  In those days people just did what they had to do and didn't whine about it.

Our next door neighbor to the "House on the Knoll" was a cranky old coot by the name of Mr. Manker who owned the Manker Estate. He was reputed to be a millionaire at the time and had a beautiful mansion on the hill with a large pond in the "bottom land" (where we poor-folk lived), surrounded by barbed wire. He also drove a Ford wooden-bodied Estate Wagon with monogram lettering on the doors. Anyone who could afford such luxury certainly had to be a millionaire.

He was Hell on trespassing and came over to see my mother a time or two regarding the trespass behavior of myself and my brother, making threats and accusations, leaving poor Mom to respond to our boyish geographical curiosity. He later sold the estate to the Cadby's who were much more sociable and we used to visit with Hillary and Sheila Cadby in the beautiful "Mansion." Hillary later changed her last name to Hart, but I never knew why.

It was a youthful time of climbing trees, cowboys and indians, childhood games and discovery. We got our first TV and vacuum cleaner while living there at a place called "Friendly Frost" on Jericho Turnpike in Commack. We always pronounced it Comm-ack. Mom vacuumed the rugs while Steve and I indulged in TV entertainment with the likes of Howdy Doody, Captain Video, The Cisco Kid, Hopalong Cassidy, Superman, Ozzie and Harriet and a curiously inconspicuous little show called "Filbert The Flea." We loved "Filbert the Flea" but were probably the only viewers. I don't think the show lasted very long. Some of the television sponsors of the time were Ovaltine and Kent cigarettes with their revolutionary "Micronite Filter." Those cigarettes were often recommended by doctors! No wonder we all smoked like chimneys! The TV weather forecast quarterback was a man named Tex Antoine who called himself "Uncle Weatherbee." He was a sketch artist who worked with an easel to illustrate the coming weather with smiley suns and frowning clouds.

It was a humble existence during a period of time when Dad took two years off work to write his book "Double Duty Dollars," an instructional piece on how to get the best "bang for the buck" when buying insurance. He had the background for it but the subject matter was dry and certainly Simon & Schuster was repeatedly at the ready with their rejection stamp. The pursuit of his failed dream left the family in fairly spartan surroundings which Mom took in stride and we kids shrugged off with indifference.

We made the best of those two years and Mom had a knack for making things seem better than they really were.  In the winter time, that old shack was cold and drafty. In the summertime, sweltering in that upstairs bedroom "under the eaves" would be an understatement, but we were content in our little "bottom lands" hovel. Mom would announce things like "breakfast is served on the veranda!" and at dinner she would regularly break out our best mismatched family silverware, augmented by fluted candelabras from Fred Wright's Northport 5 & 10, all artifacts that followed me until 2008. There was a valuable life's lesson in those two years at Waterside Avenue. Whether Mom consciously realized it or not, she taught us that life is what you make it. But...

There was a darker side to the "House on the Knoll." Legend had it that a woman drowned in the pond next door (Manker's Pond, behind the barbed wire fence). My mother had always talked about cool "pockets" of air between the house and the car. She said it was a "haunting" feeling and often times felt uneasy when walking from the house to the car (near the pond), though at the time, we didn't take it too seriously. Maybe she had the ability to feel something that we couldn't. In October of 2000, my wife and I made the pilgrimage back to our roots in Northport and in the woods on this very site, I found the old foundation, some charred remains of the fire that destroyed the house and located the original kitchen sink waste pipe where it entered the ground. It was humbling to stand in the very spot where my mother once washed our dishes and prepared our meals and nurtured our family a half century earlier in those modest surroundings that were my beginnings.

I can relate to the lyrics of the song in which the other kids are laughing at Dolly Parton's  "Coat of Many Colors" and she naively says "I couldn't understand it though I felt I was rich...I told them of the love my mama sewed in every stitch. 

Mom passed on in 1999, but much of her I carry with me today in my thoughts and memories of what was once "The "House on the Knoll."