CHAPTER TWO—NEW HOUSE, NEW NEIGHBORS, NEW NEIGHBORHOOD

Art Palmer's home at No. 253 Sprout Brook Road, Continental Village, with new white picket fence. 1936 Ford coupe in driveway. Year, 1950.

     Subways and buses were not seen in Continental Village. Tall buildings stretching to the sky were not seen either. My family and I had new surroundings. Before Stanley Esposito's family opened a store at the lower level of the Clubhouse several years after we arrived, the closest grocery store was 3 miles away in Peekskill. My family and I had to adjust to country living. It wasn't easy.

     I remember that the front entrance of the new house opened to the living room with fireplace and chimney facing the driveway, and bay window facing the street. It also led to a stairway to the unfinished attic. There were only floor boards in the attic at that time and my brother John and I would sleep there. Downstairs an the main floor the living room led to the kitchen and hallway. Off the kitchen was a breezeway which connected to the garage and provided a doorway to the backyard. Off the hallway was the bathroom and two bedrooms and the door to the finished cellar. The cellar had a furnace and hot water heater, washer and dryer. A few years later master plumber Al Lazar and my step-father Art Palmer, Sr., Master Chief Boilermaker, USN, installed a hot water radiator system to heat our house. These two men were the first officers elected to the Continental Village volunteer fire department when it was established. 

     When we had moved into our new house, there was no running water. Water pipes were installed and connected from the street to the three model homes. A working water pump at the wellhead wasn’t installed yet. The few older homes in the community had their own wells. All of the homes in CV had septic tanks buried underground.

     Water was an immediate priority. My stepfather found a spring on Gallows Hill near the Steagles' (the name may not be spelled correctly) house, less than 500 feet away from our house, and my brother and I were commissioned to fetch water. We had a ten gallon heavy glass jug which we filled by dipping in the downhill stream created by the spring not far from the road. Before the first snow came, we used a small wagon to transport the water jug. With the advent of snow, we used a sled. The wagon and the sled were purchased second-hand from local people who were our neighbors. Our neighbors, the Zeliph family, Croft family, Holmes family, younger Zeliph family--all lived in a cluster of homes about a thousand feet south of our home between Sprout Brook Road and Putnam Road.

     South of the midgets' home and located between Putnam and Sprout Brook roads, roughly delineated by the two entrances to Tryon Circle from Putnam Road, stood an old apple orchard which later was devastated by hurricane Hazel in 1954. In September 1947 my brother and I picked and ate apples from these trees. We found other fruit trees nearby, such as pear, pink mulberry and cherry, and various nut trees in other areas, such as hickory, black walnut and hazelnut. Climbing as high as necessary, we helped ourselves to the goodies. 

     My brother John and I had plenty of practice climbing trees in New York City's Riverside Park in Manhattan and Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx.

     I can remember when John and I went to Van Cortlandt Park to fly John's home-made glider about one month before we moved to CV. John worked on that model plane for two weeks--balsam wood, glue, pins, liquid dope on white tissue paper. It was painted bright blue. The next day we took a subway (ducked under turnstile, didn't pay) and used a ball of kite-string to tow it high into the sky in the park. We also watched another boy who was flying a fast, motorized model airplane. That boy lost control of his orange-colored plane beyond the field and in the trees, and he spent hours looking for it but never found it. We waited until he gave up and left the park. Then John and I entered the woods to look for the boy's lost plane.

     John climbed a large tree and quickly spotted the plane. He pointed and instructed me to stand beneath his position, and to point in the same direction. "Don't move," he said. He climbed down, very excited. "It looks like a broken orange box," he said. He followed the direction of my pointing arm, walked into the woods until he found the plane and returned with it. The frame of the plane was broken but the motor was in good condition. We took it home with us on the subway. It was a day of triumph and excitement. (We didn't pay subway fare on the return trip either.)

     In Continental Village John and I continued our close companionship, despite the age difference, until he found schoolmates and boys in the neighborhood who were his own age. Our relationship was based on his age, his size and his aggression. He led, I followed. He was five years older than I, bigger, stronger, and faster. He didn't push me around too often but when he did I had to submit and do things his way. He enjoyed teasing me. I thought he was impulsive, often initiating an action and much later thinking about it. I was the opposite when considering any action new or different. I usually thought about it, then acted or refrained from acting based on foreseeable consequences. Often I refrained or tried to.  We were type A and type B, unequal cords on a rope, woven together by our genetics.

     In the first months of our new life in the country, we explored the nearby woods, fields, lake and hills. We found old farming roads and trails, dude ranch horse trails, and what we thought were old Indian trails. During warm weather we saw and avoided large black snakes, copperheads, and rattlesnakes. There were some close calls, especially with copperheads warming themselves in the autumn sunlight on top of fallen logs. Chicken hawks flew overhead, especially in the spring, most likely eyeing the chickens on the Zeliph's property.

     The old iron mines near the Clubhouse were not yet filled in or covered or fenced. Water rose to ground level in them, and they were treacherous to approach or explore. Steep sides to these old cinnabar iron mines and the water made them inaccessible. We viewed them from a distance. We saw no sign of the old narrow gauge railroad that connected these mines to the depot at Annsville.

     First we smelled it—then John and I saw our first skunk. It tried unsuccessfully to get inside our household garbage can, but the lid stayed on the can when the skunk knocked the garbage can down. We threw stones from a distance until the skunk went away.

     I remember the state police on horseback trying to capture a runaway one-eyed old horse which had escaped from Cimarron Dude Ranch in Putnam Valley. There may have been a ranch hand with them. They didn’t capture the horse until the next day, when it went back to the ranch by itself and mixed in with the other horses. I guess it missed the company of the other horses.

     Riding the public school bus brought us into contact with the kids in our neighborhood. As I recall, the bus route from the public grade school ran from Oregon Road to Shrub Oak and beyond, returning to Gallows Hill Road, over the hill to Sprout Brook Road, to Annsville and then Dogwood Road to Oregon Road. The bus dropped off the public school students at their school and then went to Assumption school in Peekskill. Most of the students were enrolled at the Town of Cortlandt public grade school. The bus route was reversed in the afternoon, as we rode the bus home. On the bus we talked to the neighborhood kids and made arrangements to visit them and their families.

     This is how John and I met the Zeliphs, Holmes and other families who had lived in Continental Village before we moved there. Cliff Holmes became my close friend. He was my age, eight, the oldest of several children. His father worked at  Fleischmann's Yeast Company in Peekskill. His mother's name was Beatrice Zeliph Holmes, but all the relatives called her "Sis." Cliff's grandfather, Al Zeliph, Sr., worked as handyman for the Winston Development Company, garbage collector and soon-to-be one man water department for the housing development. Al Zeliph and his wife lived in a two-story farm house with adjacent barn on Putnam Road near the south entrance of Tryon Circle. They owned a cow, two dogs and two cats, and they had several free range chickens on the property laying eggs. The Zeliphs had eleven children, one boy, the rest girls. The youngest girl, Winifred, was actually Cliff Holmes' aunt. She was eight years old, too.