“LOST MUSKET DIARY” Sunday August 2, 2015
Cloudy then Sunny 86°F/30°C in
Rancho Santa Margarita
Buongiorno,
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| Thomas Wolfe in Action |
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| The Old John Elliot Aldrich House |
“Mike, this was a wonderful
article. I enjoyed reading about your life growing up at the Aldrich house. My
fiancé and I adored that home and had this crazy, but hopeful dream that one
day; we could acquire it and restore it to its original glory. Unfortunately,
it would have cost a staggering amount of money. We drove up there last Sunday
to attend church at Old Steeple and I hate to be the one to tell you this, but
the home was demolished on Saturday, the 19th.” Sara, who lives in my old home town, had read my March blog about the house and dropped a line to let me know the outcome. The Old Aldrich House was a
familiar sight along the Main Road in Aquebogue, the little Long Island hamlet
where I lived when I started grade school. My parents rented it for a few
months back in 1947 right after the war, when veterans coming home from World
War 2 were finding it difficult to find a place to live. It was still occupied
for a number of years after we moved into Riverhead. But, for a dozen years it
had just sat on the side of the road, slowly decaying, like one of a number of
other abandoned 19th century houses on Long Island’s North Fork.
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| Mike at the Aldrich House 1947 |
His legacy, then, lasted 142
years. Aldrich also built the nearby landmark Old Steeple Church and crafted
many of the famous mansions that dotted 19th and early 20th
century Long Island. The property that the house sat on was purchased back in
the 1950s by a neighboring family, the Corwins, who ultimately decided that it would be far
too expensive to restore. Now a younger member of that family plans to build
his new home on the site. What are left for me are a few old family
photographs, some fading memories, and a quote from the Roman Emperor Marcus
Aurelius,
“Time is a sort of river of
passing events, and strong is its current; no sooner is a thing brought to
sight than it is swept by and another takes its place, and this too will be
swept away.”
The nice lady from my home town, Sara Levine, happened upon my blog back
in March, when I first wrote about the old Aldrich place. She and her fiancé,
Stefan Temkey, passed by the location quite frequently, and, like so many of us
from that area, imagined not a decaying relic from the past, but a restored,
revitalized mansion put to a more contemporary use. Now, that vision will never
be realized, and I can finally put closure to that part of my life.
Let me share some of what I wrote back in March of this year as I
described my last drive along
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| Mike and Packy Botula 1947 |
“It’s this stretch of highway that Thomas Wolfe had in mind when he said
what he did, because the Old Aldrich House,
the eleven room mansion that we lived in when my folks first came back to
Riverhead after World War 2 is now a derelict leftover from better times,
abandoned lo, these many years and left to crumble. We pass this splendid ruin
on our way down the road to the Modern Snack Bar. I am shocked by the sight of
it, and a wave of sadness overwhelms me.
This is where we lived when
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| Packy Botula's First Steps 1947 |
My folks faced some tough times during that period. Post-war housing was
extremely scarce. America was being challenged finding jobs and homes for all
those returning veterans and their new families. Dad would often tell how the
family moved five times in eleven months right after the war. During 1946 and
1947 the only places for rent were summer vacation bungalows that weren’t
designed for year round living. No insulation. No central heating or air
conditioning. But somehow we did it. Mattituck, Jamesport, Aquebogue. In
Jamesport we didn’t even have a fridge. The ice man would deliver ice for the
icebox twice a week and Packy and I would get our baths in an old Wheeling
galvanized wash tub with water heated on the stove. We stayed in each place for
a few months at a time. Then, fortune smiled and the house on East Main Street
became our home until our parents died in the 1960s. When we moved from Aquebogue right after the
war the old Aldrich House was already well showing its age.
The last time I was back in Riverhead, in 2013, the old house was
looking positively deplorable.
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| The Magic of Thomas Wolfe - Aug. 19th |
Sara’s note saddened me. It was like hearing the news, long after the
fact, of the passing of a childhood friend or classmate. Our family had
flourished in that old house, and the distant memories from that time in our
lives are happy ones. I would hope that the new family who builds their new
home on that parcel of land also flourishes and I wish them happy memories as
well. For me, Thomas Wolf is right, after all. You can’t go home again!
Ciao,
MikeBo
©Mike
Botula 2015
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