A Short History of Long Beach, Long Island

In My Mother’s House by Stephanie Kaplan Cohen gives an authentic child’s-eye view of a new way of life in America—the suburb. In her description of the idyllic days in Long Beach, Long Island, New York, Stephanie shares the experiences of a small town of the 1930s (population 5,817), when it was America's Healthiest City. Originally designed as a playground for the rich, Long Beach had gone bust and re-emerged as a bedroom community for families from New York City’s neighborhoods. Today, the population has increased sevenfold and the cozy community Stephanie’s stories evoke is a distant memory. Long Island, the biggest island in North America, lies just east of Manhattan. Because of its proximity to the big city, it led the way in American suburbanization. Even before the Civil War, Brooklyn Heights residents commuted to work in Manhattan. (Brooklyn is located at the western end of Long Island.) Twentieth century suburban development began with idealized upper-middle-class communities like Long Beach’s neighbor, Garden City. In 1906, William Reynolds, a 39-year-old former state senator and developer of four Brooklyn neighborhoods (Bedford-Stuyvesant, Borough Park, Bensonhurst and Brownsville) gathered investors in Long Beach. He acquired oceanfront property from private owners and Long Beach’s back streets from the Town of Hempstead so he could build a boardwalk, homes and hotels. To ensure that Long Beach lived up to Reynolds' billing as 'The Riviera of the East', Reynolds required every building to be constructed in a Mediterranean style with white stucco walls and red tile roofs. He stipulated they could be occupied only by white Protestants, though after he went bankrupt in 1918, these restrictions were lifted. The new town attracted wealthy businessmen and entertainers—Jewish, Italian, Irish and African-American. To Stephanie’s mother, reared on the Lower East Side and raising her own child in Queens, Long Beach looked like Nirvana. Although Long Beach, with its remarkable location on the ocean and its excellent schools, was a model of diversity between the wars, New York’s suburbs remained the province of the rich until after World War II. When Augusta Kaplan moved her young family to Long Beach, one of her next door neighbors was Irish, the other was Italian. In 1930, there were only 17,000 Jews on Long Island. Today there are more than 300,000. Stephanie describes riding the LIRR as she goes into the city—to Schrafts!—with her sister, and her father’s crazy driving that took her to Coney Island. Although the Kaplans were no longer in the city, they remained loyal to it all their lives. In Stephanie’s stories we see the car and other mod cons (as modern conveniences were then called) changing daily life: stoves, refrigerators, hot water, lighting, flush toilets and heating for homes. Radio, telephones and movies all opened new worlds to suburbanites and city dwellers alike. Her themes reflect the timeless concerns of childhood while her eagle eye captures a world in which the appliances we take for granted were a source of pride and wonder.

The Doughnut Hole in Memoir Writing

Most memoirs are written or drafted decades before they are polished and published.

Now that Medicare has repaired the doughnut hole in prescription costs, maybe they can figure out a way to fix the doughnut hole in memoir writing. My grandchildren love to hear my husband tell stories. His vignettes are anecdotes from his international business career. The kids—some of them are now adults---love to listen to him. But he almost never talks about his early life and that’s fine with them.

It’s not until your children have children of their own that they become interested in their parents‘childhood. This creates a problem because the memoir must be written before the parent forgets all the details. Thus many memoirs are drafted or written decades before they are polished and published. Even young parents forget that during the first five years the child has no memories of his own. All he has is what his parents tell him. Those early years are busy ones for young parents. But grandparents have no excuse for not writing down that which is worth remembering.

Many of my fellow grandparents are distracted by the many activities that are now available to retired people, from cruises to beach communities, from around-the-world trips to yoga camp. They claim not to have time to write a memoir. No one starts out with time to write. You must make time to write because you owe it to your family

“But I can’t write,” you cry. If you can’t write, instead talk, into a tape recorder while you drive. Keep a diary. Hire a typist to write down your memories each week as you talk for six months. There are many ways to keep a record of your life if you are not a writer. All that is required is that you are serious about keeping a record of what happened to you.

And you should be serious about it.. There is no such thing as an uninteresting life, good or bad.

Writing Your Memoir is an Obligation to Your Grandchildren

I began writing at 63, when my children were grown. My husband had given me a word processor and I was ready, willing and able to use it. I wrote poems, short stories, memoirs and articles.

Naturally, I turned to my own life for material. At first the audience was myself because as a novice I hadn’t realized that each audience has its own demands: As I was published and began to hear from my readers, I started to consider my audience as I told a story or made a poem. When I wrote my memoir I organized it in small pieces so that my young grandchildren could read and enjoy it, along with their parents and other adults.

This memoir, IN MY MOTHER’S HOUSE, was published when I was eighty. My grandchildren, then ranging in age from 4 to 24, were among its most ardent fans.

What surprised me was it was not the content—our family history—that interested them but the fact that their beloved grandmother was writing a book while others grammies were gardening, golfing, watching TV or playing bridge.

They were less interested in me as a kid than they were in who I am now. I have been in their lives all their lives as an adult. They came to me for love and for praise. Like grandchildren everywhere, they could see themselves through my eyes as wonderful people, no matter what the teachers, parents and other kids might have said that day. Their focus stayed on this person they knew as an old lady rather than on the child who had become the mother of their parents and the grandparent of them, their siblings and their cousins.

The precious bond between a child and his grandparents can be revisited and understood in a new light when stories are written down. Take the time to do this, to see your own story as well as sharing with the people you love most, today and tomorrow..