"THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD"

Sorry, Thomas Wolfe, but you can go home again—if you return in reminiscence.

Jul 17

“THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD”

Sorry, Thomas Wolfe, but you can go home again—if you return in reminiscence. Whether we set foot literally in our childhood residences isn’t required. What matters is you have meaningful memories as time marches on.

If you were fortunate, you grew up in a special place. You probably didn’t know it was special back then; you were just a kid. But years later, maybe you realized just how significant the old neighborhood really was.

Mine was Station Park in Harrison, New York, during the 1960s. That was the neighborhood’s official title, but we kids knew it by the street names: Coakley, Emerson, Danner and Hess, where we rode our bikes, played our ball games, explored nearby woodlands and engaged in weekly shenanigans.

I lived at 48 Coakley Avenue from 1962-69, along with my four siblings and some 50-plus other children on that tree-lined sloping street that ran from the town’s main thoroughfare, Harrison Avenue, down to Emerson Street. Now on the edge of 70, I fondly recall my wonder years there. And I’m not alone.

Steve Hargan, a 1974 West Point grad, economic development specialist and Virginia-based entrepreneur, says that if Mark Twain were alive in the 1960s, he would have written our stories while Norman Rockwell illustrated those timeless tales.

Harry McCarthy, whose family lived across the street from ours, found success in Nashville’s music scene. He toured internationally with Bruce Springsteen and other top artists as the world’s #1 drum technician. Harry recalls how the neighborhood was stratified into the “big kids” and “little kids.” The pecking order determined who played in our street games and who tagged along. Kathleen, Harry’s younger sister, is a talented visual artist and educator. She speaks nostalgically of the close relationships that existed between many Station Park families.

The Marotta brothers, Rick and Jerry, grew up in a modest house with a small yard, as did just about all of us. Today, they can afford more expansive homes, considering the two were among the best-known rock drummers in the 1970s through the 90s. Rick also became a composer and music director for TV programs such as “Everybody Loves Raymond.”

Neighbor Brendan Richards left Station Park in the 1970s and went to Los Angeles to transform himself into a world-class bodybuilder and training partner of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He later worked as a corrections officer, returning to live in the old neighborhood until he retired to upstate N.Y. Another high achiever is John “Jack” Smith, who co-founded a company he and his partners subsequently sold to the Davey Tree Corporation, enabling him to live out his golden years comfortably with homes in Georgia and Colorado.

And I became a “profess-ah” at universities in Oregon and Indiana, a freelance writer and book author. I had spent my adolescence on Coakley Avenue dreaming of such accomplishments. And that’s the thread running through so many of our old New York neighborhood’s success stories. We were all middle-class kids. But we had ambition and more talent than we ever realized way back when. Maybe that’s what makes so many of us so proud of where we came from.

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