From The Island Now - Williston Park - Williston Times
Looking back at a lost Williston Park RICHARD TEDESCO |
Ron Baumbach started writing “The Last Walk on Our Block,” his nostalgic memoir about growing up in Williston Park, halfway around the world while flying to Singapore seven years ago.
The genesis of the idea occurred to him during a long, reflective stroll he and his three siblings took down Houston Street, the street where they were raised, the day they closed up the house their mother had been renting before she died in 2000.
The street is Memory Lane in the book, and he had been taking a mental walk through the same terrain in the intervening years.
“I always wanted to write. I had very fond memories of growing up there,” he recalled. “I got my laptop out and I started writing. I just closed my mind to what was around me and visualized what it was like being a kid again.”
The self-published book, which began to be distributed in January, grew from a pamphlet-sized recollection of times past in the old neighborhood to the 340 pages it evolved into, as Baumbach consulted his brothers, Dick and Jerry, and his sister, Deb, along with friends.
While it is organized into small chapters recalling neighbors who lived in the 43 houses on the street, it’s peppered with intensely personal remembrances about himself and his family, and philosophical asides.
Baumbach, 62, recalls the operation he had for scoliosis at age 15 and the protracted recuperation period that followed. He remembers how his father masqueraded as Santa Claus for the kids in his neighborhood, and ultimately nudged the village board to start what is now Operation Santa Claus in 1964. And he added an emotional chapter in honor of his Aunt Estelle, the “grandmother type” he said “that everyone needed growing up.”
“It was more of a family memoir. My original thought was to write things down about my feelings of growing up,” Baumbach said. “It made me thing about genuineness. On a block like we were, it was one united team.”
The book presents a picture of an idyllic community almost too perfect to be believed. The street Baumbach grew up on numbered neighbors who took an active interest in one another’s lives and routinely helped one another out, with little hint of acrimony - and nothing resembling ethnic or religious bias.
“Back then we didn’t know that there were many different religions. We thought of it simply as follows: Catholic, Protestant and Jewish,” he writes. Later in the same section of the book, he notes, “None of us ever thought of race as being an issue...We saw no difference in the color of one’s skin.”
Baumbach and his siblings all attended St. Aidan School, and later St. Mary’s High School in Manhasset. He graduated from Marist College with a degree in business as a prelude to a career in sales.
He works in the health care division of DB Schenker, a German company that took over Bax Global, where he started working in 1989.
In the book, only two real names of neighbor’s families are used - with their permission. They are actor Brian Dennehy, “our neighborhood celebrity” who grew up nearby, and former Williston Park Mayor Roger Fay, who Baumbach recalls as “the kind of man who got things done.”
Each family portrait concludes with a quality of character the family taught him. In Fay’s case, it was civic pride.
Originally, Baumbach said, he used names from his beloved New York Mets in place of his neighbors’ names. But his eldest brother Dick, who is promoting the book through his Florida public relations firm, discouraged it. So Baumbach took another stroll, this time while visiting his parent’s grave down the row where his parents were buried, and recorded the names chiseled on the gravestones.
“It was almost a fitting way to get names for my parents where they are now,” Baumbach said.
The Mets still figure prominently in the book, as Baumbach recalls how he danced on the Shea Stadium turf after they won the World Series in 1969. His family arranged for his favorite Mets pitcher, Larry Bearnarth, to visit him in the hospital when he was recovering from back surgery. On one trip home from the hospital, the Williston Park Fire Department diverted to the village pool, where another favorite, second baseman Ron Hunt, was making a publicity appearance.
There’s funny section of remembrances about different characters and incidents Baumbach recalls from his years attending St. Aidan. There’s a jubilant recollection of participating in a parade for presidential nominee John Kennedy. And there’s a somber section devoted to a young neighbor dubbed Billy Burke who died in a car crash.
But the book is consistently upbeat, right down to the lineup of 1960s TV shows he catalogues.
“I tried to make it good news, more pleasant,” he said.
Baumbach said a scriptwriter friend in Hollywood has proposed writing a short screenplay about his dad as Santa or about an elderly stroke victim he struck up a friendship with while in the hospital.
Meanwhile, Baumbach said he’s working on two books. One of them, with youngest son, Ryan, is about Old and New Testament sales. The other is a fictionalization about growing up in Blissville - near Long Island City in the ‘40s, based on childhood memories of a friend.
Baumbach, who lives in Bethpage now, will be returning to his childhood stomping ground on March 29 for a book signing at the Williston Park Public Library.
Reach reporter Richard Tedesco by e-mail at rtedesco@theislandnow.com or by phone at 516.307.1045 x204 Posted: Thursday, March 1, 2012 11:01 am