We're Not in Kansas, Dorothy

Summers on Long Island tend toward hot and humid with a large dose of sweaty and stifling thrown in for good measure. On one such day in August of 1964, to escape the oppressive atmosphere, my sister Dorothy and I took our 'children to the beach. With her five kids and my two, we had a total of seven children between the ages of four and ten.

            As you may imagine, it became a major production to go anywhere with all the children. We made and packed twelve peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, fruit, and snacks into a Styrofoam cooler. A jug of Kool-Aid™ and another jug of iced tea, paper napkins, towels, blankets, sand chairs, umbrella, beach toys, sun tan lotion, zinc oxide, sun hats and cover-ups made up the remainder of our paraphernalia. At least we had a car to put it all into. I remember lugging all that stuff onto a trolley when Mom took us to Coney Island back in the 1940’s.

We packed it all into Dorothy’s old station wagon and off we drove to Sunken Meadow State Beach on the North Shore where the water remains lake calm and safer for little ones.          

 When we arrived at Sunken Meadow, each child had to carry something so we could get from parking lot to beach in just one trip.  We no sooner set up everything when dark clouds suddenly rolled across Long Island Sound from Connecticut dragging stiff winds with them.

“Hurry up kids. Throw everything onto the blanket and grab an end.” We made a dash for the car, stumbling over our burden, half carrying, half dragging our stuff. By the time we reached the parking lot, fat drops splattered our skin.

Hurry!” We threw everything into the rear of the station wagon, including the kids.   Dorothy and I jumped into the front seats and slammed the doors shut. At that point, the clouds discharged their burden in sheets of deluge.

“No point trying to drive in this downpour . Let’s stay here ‘til it stops,” Dorothy said. We passed sandwiches and waxed paper cups of Kool-Aid™ around.  The kids relished their “car picnic” and settled in for the duration of the cloudburst. The rain simmered down to a shower, but the wind picked up and buffeted the wagon.  Then we heard rat-a-tat-tat on the metal car roof.

“What the….?”

Peering out the front window, we saw hail bouncing off the pavement. It looked like a giant hand had emptied boxes of small moth balls across the macadam.

“Hail? In August? On Long Island?”

After a couple of minutes, the hail, rain and wind stopped; the sun emerged sending steam aloft from the moisture. The children wanted to return to the beach but Dorothy and I put the kibosh on that. “It’s too wet.”

We drove home to a muggier and hotter day than we left that morning. The car radio told us that a small tornado had passed over the area. How about that, Dorothy? We survived a tornado.