When Richard W. Lewis was a child growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s in New Hyde Park, the area was still new. Much of the village was undeveloped, particularly south of Hillside Avenue.
It was a simpler time, black & white TV reigned, and neighbors and neighborhoods were tight-knit. Lewis said that when he was a child life was spent in the front yard, outdoors and in the open. People knew each other and even liked one another, or were at least tolerant of one another, Lewis said.
This was the world Lewis explores and retells in his new book, “1063 Cedar Drive South: One Boy’s Memories.” 1063 was his street address.
Lewis, 68, lives in Westchester, but will always be a Long Island boy. The book focuses on the time when he was 6 to 12 years old.
He writes of his family and friends. Denton Avenue Elementary School. Roosevelt Field. The World’s Fair. And how the larger outside world — the Bomb, Cuba, JFK, the moon landing— affected young Lewis.
A Herricks graduate, he said he possesses a very sharp memory and wit: “Doesn’t everyone?”
In high school, he even briefly wrote columns for the New Hyde Park Herald Courier for his journalism class.
Initially, he had begun writing the memoir for his family and closest friends until his daughter Amanda, a working journalist in California, urged him to take it seriously.
“It’s not like I’m ready to kick the bucket,” Lewis said, but he would love for his “imaginary grandson” to be able to read his grandfather’s story one day. To Lewis, this book was an inquiry into what made him the man he is today.
One impactful memory he spoke of was about the time he was sent to the principal’s office as a fourth-grader at Denton Avenue School in New Hyde Park. Lewis said he was a troublemaker and wanted to “shrink in the chair” while being chastised as a young child.
“I admit it: I continued to have periodic behavior problems deep into elementary school.” Lewis was not a “hair-puller, a spitter, or a puncher,” but he did occasionally take and hide candy and insult classmates. He remembers vividly how his principal, Rose Carvlin, dressed entirely in black, with a red rose pinned to her chest. “Perhaps she attended many funerals,” he said.
Carvlin got through to the ‘Leave It to Beaver’ trouble maker in Lewis, frightening him about his “permanent record,” which Lewis called “a scare tactic of its time.” Lewis believes it helped shape him for the rest of his life, adding, “But life isn’t a straight line. It improved in spurts.”
When asked what makes such a memory last so long, Lewis said it’s a “collection of the senses.” As you get older, he said, you get farther and farther away from home — one block at a time.
Writing has always been at the core of Lewis’ career. He worked in advertising for most of his career, like his father. He even wrote about his 15 years being part of the advertising campaign behind Absolut Vodka in his book, “Absolut Book: The Absolut Vodka Advertising Story.” Although he was initially interested in psychology during high school and tried to stay away from his father’s line of work, he eventually fell into it.
The New Hyde Park Lewis writes about has changed.
“I don’t have friends who live there anymore,” he said. Lewis said that the outward appearance is much the same. But the cultural makeup of the community is much different, he said. “Our neighborhood was very uniform,” Lewis said compared with the more multiethnic makeup of modern-day New Hyde Park and Herricks.
A part of this year’s Herricks High School commencement ceremony was students of all backgrounds saying hello in various different world languages. This is done during the ceremonies to represent the diverse backgrounds of the students.
The main goal of his book is to help “people, particularly baby boomers, remember that time,” he said. While the book focuses on his childhood, he hopes readers his age will think about their early years. To Lewis, his book “reflects a time where everyone rowed in the same direction.”
Lewis said that when he was a boy he knew the names of all his neighbors but today nobody knows their neighbors quite as well.
Richard Lewis’ “1063 Cedar Drive South: One Boy’s Memories” is available to purchase on Amazon.
