Hugh & Dolores revisit honeymoon sites

Updated 10/3 with more photos

After attending granddaughter Christine's wedding on Cape Cod, Hugh and Dolores jaunted over to Nantucket, where they had celebrated their honeymoon in 1954.

After taking a ferry from Hyannis to the island, they "walked around town a bit and had dinner at The Ship's Inn, where we stayed 65 years ago," Hugh writes.

The Ship's Inn no longer has a hotel, so the couple stayed at the Jared Coffin House. "It's one of the few three-story buildings allowed, been built during the Whaling Days prosperity," Dolores writes.

Jared Coffin House

"Nantucket was lovely and memorable as we remembered - still mostly unspoiled," Dolores said. During their stay, "We had a wonderful all-island tour, and that was the best."

But there have been some changes over the years, Dolores reports: "Traffic! Like Rehoboth Beach in August, with cobblestones!" And the meals, she said, were expensive and pretentious. "We have had meals in Europe, Alaska, Australia and New Zealand, and none of those places were so full of themselves." She added that The Ship's Inn's food was the best of the bunch.

Thankfully, she added, "The scenery is still free!" Here are a few of her photos of the sights.

The oldest house on the island—dated 1659

Sankaty Lighthouse, on the east coast of the island. It was moved back from the land's edge a few years ago due to erosion.

The tip of Nantucket, from the small plane that carried Hugh and Dolores to Boston for their flight home.

The good ship Loridan sails again

A happy development this summer: Loridan is back in the water, stationed at Kathy's dock in Mill Creek.

This week, Dan and Brien spent a quick two days in Noyac and joined Kathy for a sail in the bay. The wind was brisk and boat zipped along.

The venerable vessel does need work: many of the fixtures are showing their age. During this trip, one of the mast stays came loose, adding a bit of adventure!

The Cape Dory Typhoon is, of course, named for Lorraine and Daniel, who bought it some 46 years ago. It has provided many hours of sailing pleasure over the years!

Buyer found for family house in Yonkers

2010 file photo

After serving for 48 years as the family homestead of Daniel & Lorraine and their children, this Yonkers house is about to become another family's home.

With the long process of removing valuables and keepsakes complete, and with a lot of effort by Brien in particular to clean, paint and prepare the house for showing, it was put on the market in mid-April. Today, three weeks later, a buyer signed a contract. The sale is expected to close this month.

Last week, Dan, Kathy, Brien and Kevin met for a last get-together in the house to celebrate the pending sale and our memories of many happy years in the home.



It was on July 7, 1966 - Lorraine's birthday - that she and Daniel received the key to the house from the previous owner. "We were just finishing dinner, and Dad was about to bring out the birthday cake," Dan recalls. "We all jumped up from the table, and without hesitation, we packed the cake, a card table and chairs into the car and drove the few blocks from our apartment to our new home.

"It was one family birthday party we would never forget. In particular, we remember kicking a half-deflated basketball around the empty living room. Mom was encouraging us to run around and make noise -- she was so happy that there was no landlord downstairs to complain!"

This date in family history

Lorraine and Daniel, Sept. 22, 1951

Cicadas and 17 Years: A personal essay by Dan

Christine holds a 2013 cicada

When the cicadas began emerging in our yard this spring, it came as no surprise. Julie and I lived in this same house in 1996, the last time Magicicada Brood II appeared in parts of New Jersey and other states along the Atlantic coast. And while the noise and the mess they make are a nuisance for sure, to me their reappearance after a long interval felt a bit like meeting an old acquaintance, or revisiting a place from my past.

It especially brought me back to one particular moment in 1996.

Christine, with her cousin Shanna, on Memorial Day 1996 - at the same spot where she first discovered a cicada that same spring.

At that point we had lived in our New Jersey house for six years – and had not previously encountered these particular insects. I’m not even sure if we’d heard any advance reports that they were due to appear. One weekend afternoon, my three-year-old daughter Christine and I were in the backyard, and I was clipping a bush or maybe pulling some weeds, when she came up behind me asking, “Daddy, what’s this?”

I turned around and she held up to my face this bizarre, creepy thing -- like an alien creature with two heads and multiple appendages. I had no idea what I was looking at.

If I recall correctly, my reply to my daughter’s question was: “GggyyyyAAAHHH!” But my shock didn’t faze her. She continued to hold the strange thing, examining it and watching it squirm around in her hand.

The thing, of course, was a cicada emerging from the brown shell in which it had crawled up into our yard from several feet below the ground. Soon there were zillions of them around our house and neighborhood, and of course we quickly learned about the life cycle of the periodical cicada. After six weeks or so they were gone, and quickly faded into memory.

This spring, news reports reminded us that they were coming around again, so we were ready when we started seeing cicadas here and there in late May. Still, we saw something this year that we must have missed last time.

The emergence, May 27, 2013

On Memorial Day, as we sat on our patio after burgers on the grill, I noticed Christine looking closely at the lawn and went over to see what she was looking at. It was quite a sight: The grass was crawling with brown-shelled cicadas that had suddenly emerged by the thousands.

As we watched, they moved across the yard toward the trees and fences around the edge, then crawled up the trunks and planks. There they started emerging from their shells – white, wormy things that soon fledged out into their black, winged adult form. Christine picked up various specimens to examine.

Andy and Shannon examine a Magicicada

But this time, she was not a curious three-year-old. This time, she was a 20-year-old woman – still a big fan of nature and all creatures great and small – stepping gingerly, barefoot, across the grass to experience and study this phenomenon. This time, she was showing the critters to her boyfriend. And to her brother, not quite 17, who hadn’t been born the last time these insects came around, and his 17-year-old girlfriend, too young to remember them.

It was a scene guaranteed to make one acutely aware of the passage of time – of how much changes as the years go by and how much does not. Seventeen years ago, Christine and I discovered cicadas together in this same yard, behind this same house. At that time, Julie and I were expecting Andy. We’d been married about seven years; our family, our house, our life together still felt new. I had been married before, and my 18-year-old daughter, Marie, and 15-year-old son, Danny, lived an hour or so away.

Christine and Julie, Memorial Day 1996

Memorial Day 1996: Shanna, Danny, Brien, Marie, Kevin, Christine, Kevin

That Memorial Day, we invited my parents, siblings, nieces and nephews to a little party in our backyard, along with Marie and Danny. I'm not sure if that was just before or just after the cicadas emerged that year; I don't remember them crashing our cookout that time.

A few weeks later, Marie graduated from high school. Not long after the cicadas born that summer began their 17-year stay underground, Andy was born. Soon, Marie and Danny moved with their mother to California.

Dan and Marie in California, 1999

Over the years since, Marie married Brian, moved a couple of times, gave birth to their son, Xander, moved a couple more times and settled in Virginia. Xander is now an astonishing six years old. Dan has remained in California, working and enjoying West Coast life.

Marie, Brian and Xander at home in Virginia

Since 1996, Julie and I have each changed jobs a couple of times, watched our children grow and (hopefully helped them) mature into smart young adults. Christine is half-way through college and Andy is in the college-search phase as he enters his senior year of high school.

Things change; we grow older. I miss my dad, who died two and a half years ago, and my mom, who has faded into late-stage Alzheimer’s. We’re lucky to still have Julie’s parents, going strong in their 80s. Julie and I are doing our best to hold off the effects of age. I am, as people used to say, “pushing 60,” while she can still claim “mid-50s.”

Cicadas of 2013. Photo by Christine

The cicadas that were born this summer will emerge in 2030. Where will any of us be then? At this stage, I can only hope to see one more emergence, and that assumes I live well into my 70s. The three-year-old cicada girl of 1996 and her younger brother will be 30-somethings, well into their lives, careers, possibly marriages, possibly parenthood. My older children will be middle-aged, and my grandson will be a young adult, probably already out of school and working. I can only hope they’ll all be healthy and happy.

Maybe Julie and I will still be in this same house; maybe we’ll be in some retirement community, or roaming the country in a motorhome. Maybe some other family will be watching the cicadas emerge from this backyard after a barbecue in late May, 2030.

If this house, this yard, this town, this world is still here and more or less the same. After all, a lot can happen in 17 years.

Remembered on his birthday

Marie & Brian, July 15, 2002

Happy anniversary!

Discovering family history in print

Webmaster Dan writes: In a roundabout way I discovered a web site that has archives of various newspapers from around New York State, going back to the 1930s. It's a very slow and clunky site, but I managed to turn up some interesting articles from the Yonkers Herald-Statesman. For example: Mom and Dad's (Lorraine and Daniel's) wedding announcement.

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CLICK HERE to see the entire story on the full page from the Sept. 28, 1951 edition of the Herald Statesman.

Here is a link to the site, fultonhistory.com

In loving memory on his birthday

More photos have been added to the In Memory of Daniel page

Waiting for the next step

This editorial by Dan ran in Monday's Star-Ledger.



It seemed like the future had truly arrived when Neil Armstrong’s boot touched the surface of the Moon 40 years ago tonight.

Those of us now of a certain age remember watching, enthralled, as the historic events unfolded in blurry black-and-white images on our 14-inch TV screens.

We knew we were living at the dawn of a new age when space travel would become commonplace and mankind would expand its realm beyond its home planet. It was only a matter of time.

Would be it 10 years, we wondered, or maybe 20, before we were all zipping around in rocket cars, taking weekend jaunts to our moon and vacations to Jupiter’s?

Countless TV shows, books and movies put our dreams into words and images. We imagined space travel as adventurous ("Star Trek"), mind-blowing ("2001: A Space Odyssey") and terrifying ("Alien"). David Bowie sang of it as captivating ("I think my spaceship knows which way to go") and Elton John as mundane ("All this science, I don’t understand/it’s just my job five days a week").

What we could not imagine, back then, was that we’d remain Earthbound. Yet come December, we will mark 37 years since the last time humans ventured to the Moon, or anywhere beyond Earth orbit.

Faced with the enormous costs of human space flight, we have settled for half-measures; we go, but not boldly. U.S. Space Shuttle and Russian Soyuz flights bring astronauts and scientists to the International Space Station for research programs that, however valuable scientifically, don’t inspire the public the way those Moon missions did.

NASA keeps the dreams alive: It has plans for new manned missions to the Moon by 2020, construction of a lunar outpost and research station, and then — someday — missions to Mars. Buzz Aldrin, the New Jersey native who stepped out on the Moon just after Armstrong, thinks we could get to the red planet in another 20 years if we put our minds and energy into it.

But there isn’t that kind of money in NASA’s budget, and at a time of economic recession when we're arguing over how to pay our medical bills, flights to Mars seem almost as fanciful now as they did pre-Apollo.

Meanwhile, technological advances — many of them spurred at least indirectly by the space program — have changed modern life in ways we did not imagine in 1969. We bounce signals off satellites in high orbit so a robot voice can tell us which street to turn on to get to the electronics store. There we can buy a hand-held device with more computing power than NASA mission control had for the Apollo missions.

Those black-and-white TV’s with antennas are now obsolete, replaced by digital high-definition screens on which we can watch . . . Well, a few of us saw last week’s lift off of Shuttle Endeavour, but we’re guessing a lot more people were watching SportsCenter.

The death of Walter Cronkite, for many of us the narrator of the lunar adventure -- which he later called "the most extraordinary story of our time" -- adds poignancy to today's anniversary.

Someday, assuredly, people will gaze at their LED screens (or whatever the latest version of television may be) and watch mankind take another giant leap into the future.

The question is whether it will happen in the lifetime of anyone who watched Armstrong’s one small step.

FLASHBACK: 1972 - Pike's Peak or Bust

Thirty-five years ago. Can it really be that long? The six of us who trekked from Yonkers to Colorado and back again in July 1972 will never forget it. Read Lorraine's summary of that memorable trip. (If that link doesn't work, click here instead.)

FLASHBACK: 1952 - The singer and the soldiers

The passing of Teresa Brewer reminded Hugh of the day she sang for the troops at a USO show in Boston on Thanksgiving, 1952. Read his account.

FLASHBACK-2001: Daniel and Lorraine celebrate 50 years

In August 2001, family members gathered at Long Beach near Sag Harbor to surprise Lorraine and Dan in celebration of their 50th Wedding Anniversary, which was coming up on Sept. 22.

The secret plans went off without a hitch. In this video, the surprise is evident as the guests of honor arrive at the beach. The afternoon at the beach was then followed by a fine dinner in a reserved room at a restaurant in Sag Harbor. It was a wonderful occasion from start to finish.

The cast of characters includes (in alphabetical order) Andy, Annamarie, Brien, Christine, Dan, Dan, Dan, Emory, Genevieve, Julie, Kathy, Kathy, Kevin, Kevin, Lorraine, Marie, Pat, Patrick, Shanna, Ted and Vivien.