We lived on a quiet street in Croton-on-Hudson, New York, until 1953 when we moved to Mahopac to follow my father’s dream of having a farm. While I loved growing up on that farm, it is also true that we left behind a very sweet neighborhood. Nordica Drive was a dead-end road, so it was safe for kids to play on the street. On one side of the street was a series of houses and on the other side was a steep bank leading down to the Croton River, which for my eldest brother Fred, provided a terrific setting for his boyhood. He had friends in the area with whom he could wander down the the river, but more interesting to Fred was building rockets and bombs, and setting them off on Nordica Drive. I was too young to know about any of this, but heard great stories later.

Looking back, it seems like a storybook American neighborhood from Normal Rockwell: on our street was a lovely old retired couple, Captain Miller and his wife, the friendly Rondthaler family, and best of all we were next door to the Rowleys, with two sons, and their mother who was known as Bunny, Bunny Rowley. From all I know Bunny was as sweet and loving as her nickname. And we were close enough with all these neighbors that after we moved to the farm, my mother brought me back for some visits to Nordica Drive.

It was very exciting when we did move to the farm in Mahopac: I can still remember brother Dan and I excited about all the fields and forest and big lawns on both sides of the farm house, and I distinctly remember exclaiming aloud that this was going to be a great place to play cowboys and Indians. Which it was.

But it was very isolated. I was always proud that “we could not see another house from our house”. But that isolation was difficult, particularly for my mother. No more Bunny Rowley next door, no more friendly older neighbors. Essentially, no neighbors at all.

There were others living our street, oddly named Mexico Lane, but the woman at the top of the road used to get get right wing hate newsletters, which we knew about because we would occasionally get one by mistake.

Croton-on-Hudson had been a very left-wing, artistic, socialist, and even communist haven for decades. But that didn’t mean that my very old-left parents were necessarily comfortable there. For one thing, my eldest brother once mentioned to me that Bunny Rowley’s husband, a Navy man, had remarked that perhaps the US had joined the wrong side in World War Two, not a comforting thought for a Jewish family; even though we were severely non-religious we were culturally very Jewish.

And beyond that, 1953 was right in the middle of the Joseph McCarthy era, where people were being dragged in front of the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been executed one month before my 4th birthday. I have come to see my parent’s lives in those years as waiting in fear for a big government car to drive up and arrest them. Since Croton-on-Hudson had a deep reputation as a center of Communist activity, I suspect my parents decision to to move to farm farther upstate was partly to get away from a place with a red reputation.

So Nordica Drive became a kind of rosy memory, if y0u could ignore the political issues.

Once my mother brought me back to Croton-on-Hudson to go swimming at Silver Lake, which I recall was really a side pond of the Croton River. And on that little excursion to the beach at Silver Lake I got stung by a mud-dauber, an odd little wasp that makes a home in mud near water. It was painful enough that I am sure I cried up a storm, and perhaps that began my life-long lack of enthusiasm for going to beaches and swimming pretty much anywhere.

By the way, our neighbor Ed Rondthaler made a great little video and put it on YouTube, shown below. I am very sorry that during the years that I started looking back at my family history that I never went back to Nordica Drive to visit Ed, who was clearly a great guy. So, again, moving the the farm was magical, but we gave up a lot when we left Nordia Drive.