When I was young, my family spent three months every summer on Fire Island, in New York State. Fire Island is a rope of land, a sandbar that parallels the south shore of Long Island, east of New York City. We started summering there from the time I was several weeks old in 1952, until right before I became a teenager in the mid-1960s. Each year we left Manhattan, where we lived, just after the last day of school and didn’t return until the week before classes started again in the fall, for the annual ritual of buying school clothes the next size up.
The Rogow family was part of a large exodus of city-dwellers who fled the furnace of the five boroughs of New York as soon as the brief Mid-Atlantic spring was over. Those who could afford it left in the summer, when heat waves squiggled up from the asphalt and your clothes were dunked in sweat before you even left your apartment in the morning.
The central part of Fire Island that consisted of Ocean Beach and the surrounding communities was a sort of Promised Land for people like my parents, the children of immigrants, who had worked their way out of the ghettos and slums of the New York area. Our family and the others we knew had finally scrambled onto that plateau called the middle class, with a boost from the prosperity that followed World War II in the United States.
“The Island,” as we called Fire Island, was a summer home to many first-generation-to-college professionals. They included certified public accountants, gastroenterologists, entertainment lawyers, manufacturers of children’s outerwear in New York’s Garment District—and quite a few intellectuals and artists.
Our nearby neighbor on The Island was the novelist Herman Wouk, Pulitzer-winning author of The Caine Mutiny and War and Remembrance. Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner developed their hilarious 2000 Year Old Man routine on The Island, clowning around for friends at a party. Martin (“Marty”) Ritt, director of many terrific films, including Hud, Norma Rae, Conrack, Paris Blues, and Cross Creek, also had a vacation home on The Island and socialized with my parents. Another Fire Island regular was Ira Levin, author of Rosemary’s Baby, The Boys from Brazil, and A Kiss Before Dying. More on Ira later.
Ralph Smallberg, a close friend my sister and I grew up with, remembers taking the ferry to Fire Island on a rainy day in the summer of 1955, when he was eight years old. All the adults took refuge from the weather on the lower deck of the ferry, but Ralph didn’t want to miss his favorite ritual of standing at the stern of the boat to gaze at the wake furrowing the ocean. He was mesmerized, staring at the water. “I looked to my left,” Ralph recalled, “and I saw a woman also absorbed in watching the boat’s wake. ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said to me. I wouldn’t have said she was beautiful. No, to my eight-year-old eyes, she just looked dreamy. When I turned to go downstairs, I saw all these men peeking out from the bottom of the stairs, trying to catch a glimpse of that woman I’d been talking to. When I sat back down next to my mother, she said, ‘That woman you were talking to was Marilyn Monroe.’”
My parents were part of the circle of intellectuals and artists on The Island. Not that they were friends with Marilyn Monroe! But my mom got a lot of male attention herself. She was the first on Fire Island to dare to wear a bikini, very shocking in New York in the late 1940s. Always a fashion plate, she designed her own bathing suits and had them custom made by a seamstress.

My mom, Mickey Rogow, in the first Fire Island bikini, with my dad, Lee Rogow

While the moms spent the whole summer with the kids on Fire Island, the dads typically traveled there only on weekends, and they toiled in the urban steam from Monday to Friday. That situation of dads laboring in New York City, and moms at the resort, was the premise of the film The Seven Year Itch, where Marilyn Monroe’s skirt is famously flared by the breeze from the subway.
Even though Fire Island wasn’t far as the crow flies, it was a good three-hour trip from our apartment in Manhattan. The first leg for us was a taxi to Midtown to board the Long Island Railroad at the old Penn Station, more like temple than a train depot, with its Corinthian columns and cathedral-like arches and vaults. By the waters of Babylon, Long Island, we had to descend from the fairly comfortable and modern express train with all our luggage, and then change to a clunky, old local that looked like it had materialized out of the Great Depression. On the local, the blinds didn’t close, the air conditioning didn’t exist, and numerous broken seats were sealed off with tape. Just when the train was finally in motion, we had to get off at the very first stop, Bayshore.
The Long Island Railroad, in its infinite wisdom, had decided to locate its train station in the town of Bayshore far from the only destination that most people ever wanted to go to in that town—the ferry dock for Fire Island. That stretch of about a mile from the station to the dock created a thriving local industry—taxicabs. The cabs’ only route was that five-minute drive from the station to the water. But it was just a bit too far to walk with your suitcases and your kids in tow, so a taxi it was. There were other local businesses that flourished from this traffic, including the little diner by the ferry that sold New England clam chowder with puffy, hexagonal soup crackers.
The ferry to Fire Island was, for me, the highlight of the trip, one of the most memorable events of the whole summer. First there was the anticipation of the ferry’s arrival at dockside. The passengers milled about, straining to get the first glimpse of the boat as it arrived from The Island. The ferry finally came into view as a dot on the water, way in the distance. When it neared the pier, odors of diesel fuel braided with saltwater smells. The engines gurgled as the crew, with their sailors’ tattoos, maneuvered the craft alongside the dock, cast the ropes as thick as their arms onto the horn cleats, and secured the boat to the shore.
The ferries all had names, and we knew each one by their different personalities. There was the Fire Island Flyer, the fastest boat. The Fire Island Belle, the princess of the fleet, had an upper deck open to the elements, a flat stern, and sleek sides meeting at a Gothic ogive at the bow. Lastly there was the Fire Island Queen, pressed into service only during peak seasons like the Fourth of July weekend. That boat was large and bulky, similar to many queens.
The ferry ride lasted less than an hour, but it transformed us. As we stood on the top deck, the wind slapped our hair and the sun coppered our faces. All the tightness of the city unknotted. That passage across the Great South Bay, with nothing under us but liquid, wafted us to another world.
When the ferry arrived at the Fire Island dock on the other side, in Ocean Beach, everything was different. No cars were allowed in the residential areas of The Island. Only a couple of hours from the largest city in the United States, we were suddenly in a Brigadoon secluded from time. This was also America, but we were somehow in our own separate world, an echo of the independent Jewish homeland called Yiddishland ithat the Bund movement of my Grandfather Abe’s youth had imagined carving out of Eastern Europe. Actually, our Fire Island community was a mix of Yiddishland and a Hollywood beach party movie.
When the boat docked in Ocean Beach there was a cacophony of shouts. Twenty kids ages ten to sixteen, each with a red Radio Flyer wagon, screamed at the tops of their lungs, “Wagon, wagon, mister!” “Wagon, twenty-five cents, wagon, here!”
The reason all those kids rushed to meet the ferry was that there were no cars on The Island, so there was no way to transport your luggage and toddlers from the ferry to your vacation house. Hence another local industry—the wagon boys and girls. Kids earned money for ice cream and pinball by pulling wagons for the new arrivals. I did it many times myself when I was eleven and twelve.
When we filed down the gangway off the ferry, the first thing we did was take off our shoes. At Fire Island, for months at a time, we didn’t wear shoes, or even flip flops. It was warm enough day and night to go barefoot, and our soles developed a protective callous.
The paths that served as streets in our community of Ocean Beach were thin concrete walkways set into the sand, with hedges of bee-strewn honeysuckle or fences on either side. In some communities, where the vegetation was more dense, the walkways were composed of horizontal slats of wood raised on two-by-fours. These boardwalks were constantly leaving splinters in the feet of children, so parents needed to be experts with a needle and tweezers.
But we had a greater dread than wood splinters. As my friend Ralph Smallberg recalls, “There was also the danger of glass slivers. Glass slivers and wood splinters constituted two poles of the moral universe. Splinters were inevitable and part of the normal order of things, but glass slivers were evidence of sin. Someone had broken a bottle on the sidewalk, or worse yet, had brought one to the beach, and then left it there buried in the sand.”
Once you navigated the walkways to your house, you paid the wagon boy or girl and entered your home with your baggage. If the house had been closed all fall, winter, and spring, the furniture was draped with sheets, the window shades were drawn tight, and the place smelled like must and mouse droppings. The house was literally in mothballs—little spheres of camphor that sat inside the pockets of jackets stored away on hangers in the closets, and in the chests of linens. It took some cleaning and airing to coax the smell of the ocean back into the rooms.
The first stop for me and my sister was never in question. There was basically only one reason to go to Fire Island: the beach. The whole island was a long sandbar facing the Atlantic Ocean to the south, with white sand beaches extending farther than you could see to the east and west. From our house we immediately dashed up to the top of the street where a wooden stairway lifted us up onto the dunes, with their wisps of sand grass. At the top of the stairs we paused to feel the wind on our faces and looked out over the scratchy line of the surf, and beyond it, the vast distances of the blue-black Atlantic, that boundless horizon. Actually, we were probably looking toward New Jersey, but it was far enough in the distance that we couldn’t see it. Once we had taken in the view, we quickly shuffled down the steps to where the beach buried the stairway, and we dug our feet into the sand.
One shock when we returned to The Island after the winter was that there was sometimes a house missing from the beach front. Hurricanes occasionally swept entire homes into the ocean, leaving a gap in the row of cottages, like a tooth lost by a child. One year there was a house that had only half washed away, and the other half was still teetering on the dunes, with its wallpapers and bathroom oddly exposed, its box springs, mattresses, and bathtub forming a trail down to the waves. Those hurricanes were a yearly reminder that something as solid as a family home could disappear without warning.
That house half lost to the ocean resonates with my own family story. My dad passed away right at the end of one summer vacation at The Island. He was traveling on a work assignment when the plane he was on crashed, killing all those aboard. I was only three years old. The loss of my dad made our annual family vacation all the more important to me and my sister and mother, since it connected us with the period before his untimely death.

Despite those shadows, Fire Island was a sort of paradise for me and my sister and our childhood friends. Because there were no cars, and since there were lifeguards on the beaches, parents could let their kids roam unattended all day long. Meanwhile the grownups sat around sipping afternoon dry martinis with toothpick skewers of miniature white onions, listening to LPs with Frank Sinatra crooning Cole Porter songs, and engaging in who-knows-what romantic antics. In the world of Jewish intellectuals and artists I grew up in, Broadway show tunes were our psalms; their composers and lyricists were our prophets.
On sunny days, the grownups spread their towels together on the beach, playing Scrabble and doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. The pre-teens like me went around barefoot, wearing only bathing suits and t-shirts, prowling around in packs, looking for ways to get into trouble.
There was an annual show that the kids in our community on Fire Island staged called The Teenage Play. Some very talented lyricists actually wrote numbers for the show, including my dad’s best friend, Arnold Horwitt, who authored the lyrics to the famous ballad “Young and Foolish.” One year, The Teenage Play featured a song that went:

This is a festive occasion
And so we are asking you please
To put on your formal bathing suits
And your finest dungarees

Fire Island culture at its finest!
One favorite activity for the kids was to sift through the sand on the beach at the end of the day, looking for cigarette butts. We emptied out the remaining tobacco above the lipstick-stained filters, and gathered it in a jar. I don’t believe we ever figured out what to do with the loose tobacco, but it was a cool thing to hide in your room.
We also liked to take magnets to the beach and run them through the sand. There was a blush of iron at certain spots near the dunes, and we combed the magnet over and over through those mounds, accumulating each time a few bits of iron filings. These we scraped off the magnet and deposited in a plastic medicine container, sometimes dipping the iron-hungry magnet in the pure filings, where it suddenly acquired a metallic buzz cut that we brushed with our fingers. Despite the fact that it was metal, it was oddly soft.
My friend Victor Smallberg, younger brother of Ralph, was usually the ringleader of our gang of boys, and he always came up with new ways to get into mischief. (Victor later became the first head of human resources for Genentech, but that’s another story.) Led by Victor, we straggled down to the bay and threw sheets of newspaper into the water, pelting them with stones till they sank. When we grew tired of that edifying activity, we scrounged up a fishing pole and some bait and angled for blowfish. Blowfish were the junk of the bay, a creature that was poisonous and could not be used for food. Little did we know that halfway around the world, specially licensed sushi chefs were delicately slicing out the bladder of poison and serving raw blowfish sashimi to bars packed with connoisseurs.
For us, the blowfish was a toy to be caught, pulled out of the water, and watched until it inflated into a basketball with eyes and spikes, and then smashed back into the bay until it deflated and swam away. That was great fun for eleven-year-old boys, but I’m proud to say I never did this, though I did watch in fascinated horror.

The boys always dreamed about going on a daylong expedition to The Sunken Forest, legendary among Fire Island kids. It was supposedly an untraversable, mosquito-ridden bog where the ground was so swampy and filled with dangerous snakes that no one dared attempt to walk or wade there. Something like the woods that suddenly entangles the castle of Sleeping Beauty. According to the stories that the kids told each other, the only way to cross The Sunken Forest was on precarious wooden walkways suspended in the air. Woe betide anyone who slipped off—no doubt captured by giant dragonflies and held for ransom.
I heard tales from kids who claimed they had been to the Sunken Forest. They told of amazingly close calls, almost tripping and falling off the high-wire paths. Somehow I never made it there, despite many planned outings.

The community of Ocean Beach had a tiny downtown about three blocks long. An important store from my standpoint was Kline’s, where I could purchase the necessities, toys and candy, including Bazooka bubblegum, paper straws filled with tingly flavored sugar, and my favorite: Chuckles fruit jellies, strangely similar to the kosher-for-Passover candies we bought in springtime. The kids also spent lots of time at John and Ann’s, the local diner, where I often went to get a hamburger and chocolate malted for breakfast when my mother was sleeping off her martinis. John and Anne’s also had one essential item: a pinball machine that the kids fed dimes and quarters and racked till it tilted. Pinball was also a spectator sport, which we watched till it was our turn to play, placing a quarter on the glass to reserve the next game.
Evenings the kids hung out downtown licking ice cream cones, which cost at that time—wait for it!—seventeen cents. I was a vanilla-fudge-with-colored-sprinkles guy. Basically, I wanted it all. Still do.
After dessert, the gang of kids I hung out with attempted to tightrope the low log fence that protected the lawn in the middle of town. Whoever was the first to walk those endless skinny and wobbly logs all the way around the rectangular green was the winner.
On weekends, we went to a movie in the Community House, shown on one projector, so there were intermissions for changing the reels. When there were delays, we all chanted in unison, “We want the movie!” The early show was for kids, who lined up on the stairs outside, armed with candy from Kline’s, waiting to run in first and claim the folding chairs right in front of the screen. The late show was exclusively for grownups.

Most of the houses in Fire Island had names, some given by their new arriviste owners, and some that dated to the time when they were first built. Our house had a wooden sign over the front door with the words Java Head carved into it, probably a name that harked back to the era when local sailors boarded whaling ships for round-the-world expeditions to Sumatra, the Indian Ocean, and other far-flung destinations.
At nights in Java Head, either early or late in the summer, when it would get quite chilly after dark, our family sat around a coal fire in the fireplace. We had to burn coal for warmth, because the summerhouses had no central heating, and there were hardly any trees on the island. The coal came in 50-pound burlap sacks that we transported on our wagon from the dock once every few weeks, and stored in a coal closet in the living room. As it burned, the coal would crack loudly into smaller and smaller chunks, giving off a steady heat. We’d also use the coals to roast potatoes wrapped in tinfoil in the fireplace. Other times we popped popcorn on the coals, or roasted marshmallows.
After bedtime I lay in the upper bunk of my bed, near the angled rafters of the ceiling. I could hear the steady shaking out of the waves, only a couple of stones’ throws away.
Often I had a hard time getting to sleep by myself in my room, scared of repeating nightmares. I listened to my little green plastic transistor radio, with its tiny colander of sound. Sometimes I tuned in to top 40 radio, featuring doo-wop songs by the Four Seasons like “Dawn,” or “Big Girls Don’t Cry;” or ballads crooned by girl groups like the Ronettes, “Be My Baby,” or “My Boyfriend’s Back.”
If there was baseball on the radio I listened avidly to the last few innings of a Yankees night game. The Yankees had an amazing team then. It was the era of Mickey Mantle, the switch-hitting slugger in center field; the aphoristic catcher Yogi Berra; and Whitey Ford on the mound, named for his shock of bright blond hair.
The Yankees also had a great trio of announcers that featured Red Barber, a Southern gentleman with a bowtie who drawled his accounts of the games, bantering with fast-talking Phil Rizzuto, the former Yankees shortstop. Rizzuto, nicknamed “Scooter,” had a strong New York accent and a repertoire of exclamations, especially, “Holy cow!” Mel Allen was the announcer who often did the play-by-play in his snarly voice, with his signature “How about that!” whenever a shortstop made a particularly nice stab at a liner hit up the middle.
We also spent a lot of time collecting baseball cards on The Island, and trading them or flipping for them with friends. I bought a package of Topps baseball cards at Kline’s, ripped it open right outside, hoping for some good players, and when I got home, I added it to my stack. Each pack came with a baseball-card shaped slab of bubblegum, which I collected along with the cards. The only problem was, the slices of gum would stick together, and pretty soon I had a pile of gum that could not be unstuck or consumed, a pink brick of inedible candy.
To acquire new baseball cards, I flipped them with friends. If my card landed face up, and theirs face down, I got both cards. If both cards landed face up or face down, the two cards got added to the kitty for the next round. My friends and I spent endless hours practicing how to flip a baseball card so it landed face up, but I never saw any evidence that those training sessions paid off. On the back side of the card was the player’s lifetime stats, and like many kids, I poured over these endlessly, trying to memorize that Bobbie Richardson hit .252 in 1960 while playing second base for the Yankees, as though my entry into Heaven would one day depend on knowing that.
My friends and I also tried to play our own version of real baseball at Fire Island. The challenge was that the field was composed entirely of sand. When you hit a baseball into sand, it doesn’t roll or bounce, it just wedges itself into the ground and plays dead. That meant that a ground ball was as nonexistent as Tinkerbelle, and any fly ball hit into the outfield that wasn’t caught never went farther than where it plopped. This made for a pretty limited game, but that never stopped us. We were totally oblivious to the fact that the game was designed for grass and turf.

We spent the entire summer at The Island every year of my childhood until I turned twelve. That year, 1964, my mother got wanderlust. She wanted to see something more of the world than just one sandbar off Long Island full of people a lot like her. For my mom to be a single woman on The Island was also complicated, since most of the summer residents who were her age were couples with children. She had boyfriends—the dashing writer Ira Levin was her beau for a while, though a scandalous ten years younger than my mom.

Mickey Rogow and Ira Levin, 1957

Ira proposed to her, but my mother wanted a man who would also be good with my sister and me, and Ira seemed too young to her to fit that bill. Or maybe she just preferred her freedom.
In any case, she had outgrown The Island. I’m not sure my sister and I felt the same way. I was just starting to notice girls, and summer was the best time for socializing, when there was no school or homework. Bathing-suit weather was when kids took the next step.
But my mother was determined that I was going to learn that there was more to Planet Earth than the beach and Yankee Stadium, so we began to travel in the summer, first to Europe, and then to Mexico. My mother sold our house on The Island to finance these excursions.
Whenever I smell honeysuckle, though, I time travel back to The Island in the 1950s. Wherever I journey as an adult, I always go out of my way to visit islands, whether it’s the Isle-aux-Coudres (the Island of the Hazelnuts) in the Saint Lawrence River in Quebec; or foggy Nordenai in the Frisian Islands; or Kauai, where baby albatrosses learn to fly. There is no sound so soothing to me as the smashing of waves, and no artwork as ornate as the marbling of sand when the ocean pulls back the temporary rivers it threaded into the beach.