My memories of Islip are... that I have grown up here and in front of town hall, my friends and I play soccer and have lots of fun. I am always walking through town with my friends and I love this town.

5/26/08 - Memories of Papa Poro's East Islip Theater - Justine Vallee

My cousin Alice and I were to begin our teens, and suddenly, we were at a giggly age. Anything would set us off into gales of laughter. Alice's brother, Bill, a high school student, worked evenings and week-ends at the East Islip Theater. He helped rewind reels, repair and splice film - was the general gofer. Mr. James Poro was the proprieter, and later, of the Sayville Playhouse. The theater was packed on Tuesday's, free dish night, and Thursday's, when lotto was featured. We generally spent Sunday afternoons at my grandparents home on Moffitt Blvd.; always filled to the seams with family and friends. Alice and I were usually given a quarter for the Sunday matinee. One afternoon, we tried to smother our laughter all through a very romantic South Sea epic, and how we howled when the leading man crooned, "The Moon of Manacura" to a sultry beauty swinging in a rope hammock. The usher, Ralph Kessler, had a crush on Alice, and was sent down the aisle to flick his flashlight, as a warning....we left quickly. In 1934, I accompanied an older cousin to the afternoon show of "The Little Minister", such a sad tale. It featured Katherine Hepburn and John Beale and I snuffled quietly throughout. I decided to stay for the next showing. In a very short while, a hand shook my shoulder and I came out of my reverie, to be escorted out of the theater by a very worried Papa, for night had set in, but Mama was a bit more understanding when she saw my red eyes. Some Sundays, the LaSalle Academy's bus, the 'Blue Beetle', would pull up, and in came a group of cadets in their snappy uniforms. This particular afternoon, they pushed down the aisle and, glory be, one sat next to me. The movie wore on and suddenly, I felt something drop onto the top of my shoe. I thought it could be a coin from my purse that I had hurriedly jammed between the seats when he sat down - for protection, of course. I moved my foot ever so gently and the object remained in place. I glanced down and saw a glint of metal. As I began to reach down, so did the cadet, and we bumped heads, but I was the winner. As I lifted the metal object, I realized it was attached to something, that was stretching and stretching - black elastic - the cadet's garter had become undone. I handed it to him and we both slunk down in our seats for the rest of the show. The balcony - where I finally accepted one of Lawrence's proposals. He would be off to Camp Upton in a short while and I promised to wait, and wait I did, for three long years. Reading the latest issue of the Grit publication, I smiled when I recalled that I never revealed a childhood secret that involved the paper, and had made me a Seven Day Wonder to the kids in the neighborhood. At the start of the thirties, my cousin, Bobby, became a delivery boy for the Grit newspaper. Neither he, nor I, was blessed with siblings, and he was just a month older than I. He lived in my Grandparent's neighborhood in Islip, so when I stayed at their home, he would show me the wonders of the area. To prepare for his paper route, his Dad welded together a large basket for the bike, and Aunt Em fashioned a canvas bag to shield the papers. The contents of the paper had a homespun quality - Will Rogers would have loved it. They appealed to my Grandfather, who, on his arrival to this country, had a dream to push westward, and homestead. He treasured his set of Zane Grey western books and beside his favorite chair was a pile of the current nickel, pulp magazines, all westerns. From one of them he taught me the song, "A Cowboy's Dream".... 'and the graceful white swan, goes gliding along, like a maid in a heavenly dream', was the last line, and all I can recall. Delivery date for the Grit was on Saturday and the bundles of newspapers were tossed off at the Islip RR Station on Thursday afternoons. It was a treat for me to be trundled along in the bike's big basket to the depot. They considered it a lucky day if the big locomotive had a shield on its front, emblazoned with the name "Baldwin". The paper also offered a small supplemental magazine that was dropped off on Islip's Main St., at the Masonic Temple. It offered numerous ads, Cloverine Salve, etc., short stories, and black and white comics, which I devoured. It wasn't too long before I realized that those exact comics would appear in color in our Sunday issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which Edwin Klecan delivered daily to our home. Should I return home to Bohemia before Sunday, I would tell classmates and the neighborhood kids the plot of each comic to be found in the coming Sunday's funny papers...oh, I was so smug and superior with my secret, 'tho they asked over and again how I knew. I never told..... At the station each week, was a boy with a homemade wagon, with three neat piles of magazines - The Saturday Evening Post, Liberty and Colliers...each a nickel. He would hurry to each commuter with his wares and I could feel his disappointment when they refused him. We met some ten years later and, in 1946, I promised to be his wife with an "I do". I still subscribe to the Grit, a shadow of that long-ago publication.
 

2/5/08 - Ray T. Smith

I think my family settled in Islip ca. 1832 or earlier. I grew up at 54 Grant Avenue. The home was purchased by my grandfather ca. 1897. He had a large barn out back where he kept about 10 cows which used the old Islip High School yard as a pasture. He had a livery stable just to the east of the east driveway of the former Islip High School and a blacksmith shop about 50 yards east of that driveway. I believe Smith Avenue was named after his great grandfather, Josiah Rogers Smith, who lived in the immediate vicinity. Mr. Allen's house was on the east side of Allen's point with a creek alongside, but that may have been put in later. Just north of that was the EZ Fish Company, owned by my grandfather, Egbert Zephaniah Smith, later owner of the livery stable. EZ's nets were destroyed in a hurricane. From my grandfather's fish company on Degnon Blvd., north came Doxsee, Henrickson, Schapper, a Dutch family from Sayville. It was they who caught the 32 ft. whaleshark. Somewhere north of there was Puslusney (?); their brother owned a tailor shop on Nassau Ave. across the street and a little north of the American Legion. The American Legion has a calendar of about 1919 which I sent them with the list of veterans of Islip village (my Dad's and Uncle's, Dan Curran, names are on the monument in Islip Memorial Park). Sometime around the mid-30's, the Puslusney brothers found outside (ocean outside Fire Island) a large piece of something about the size of a large bushel basket which they thought was ambergris (worth thousands to make perfume). They sat up all night in their shack, guarding it with a shotgun. The next day someone from NY came out, identified it as whale manure!!! Such a sad story!!!! I believe it was Josiah Rogers Smith (whose father, Henry Smith, Jr. came from Huntington and whose father, Henry Smith, whose house still stands on Park Ave. in Huntington, owned by the Huntington Historical Society, lived. Henry Smith, Jr.'s son, Josiah Rogers Smith, lived on Main St. about where Smith hits Main St. and I believe was the reason Smith Ave. has its name. About 2 or 3 houses down from Raymond St. on the right side of the street, was a house where my great grandmother, Mrs. Andrew Jackson Smith lived, and where the two sheds at 54 Grand Ave. in the back of the house came from. She had originally lived on the SE corner of Main St. and Ocean Ave. East of B Nailey's lumber yard and where an ice cream stand stood was the home of the Wendler's an old Islip family. Next to it is Overton's funeral home. I well remember the schooner, Hannah H, tied up just south of the Raymond St. dock. My Great-great grandfather, Andrew Jackson Smith, born 1832, tied up his ocean going schooner near there. He made frequent trips to the Caribbean.