Introduction
What were high school students thinking about when they returned from winter break at the start of 1964? No doubt, some were preparing for the next school show, or practicing their driving for a road test, or finishing work on the upcoming yearbook. Seniors were thinking about careers, and worrying about finding full-time jobs, or applying to college.
In Hicksville, there also was something else on the minds of its students - and on those of its faculty and school employees. At any time during any school day, two loud, sharp percussive noises from the Public Address system - the sound of an assistant principal's fingernail tapping on a microphone in the Office - might set everyone in the building in motion.
Like automatons in a choreographed sci-fi ballet, students would instantly rise from their seats, gather their things, walk to their hall lockers, and unlock them. From the lockers the students would remove and don their winter coats and footwear, as if it were the end of the day, but they would leave their lockers open for inspection. They then would head to the nearest exits, and proceed out through the cold to designated rendezvous points (e.g., the athletic field, or - in my case - the then "student parking lot" on Division Avenue). As they gathered in these spots, police cars would already be parked at the school's main entrance, and the first of the fire trucks would be arriving.
All of this happened with a certain precision, for it had been done many times - too many times - before. It was the routine response when some unidentified caller left word that a bomb had been planted in the high school.
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A Worrisome Tradition
None of us who were alive on September 11, 2001 will forget the terrible events of that day. They changed our world forever, and in their aftermath, our everyday vocabulary grew to include words like terrorist, and phrases like Improvised Explosive Device.
It is tempting for us to think that before that day, back in our childhood, life was far more innocent. Although that belief is true in many ways, greater New York has a long history of terrorist incidents and IEDs. For example, in the late 19th century, communists and anarchists were active in western Queens. Both sides believed in the use of violence, including the hiding of bombs in crowded places, to achieve their aims.
Daily Eagle, April 11, 1893
Thus, in the early 1890s, anarchists planted multiple bombs underneath a factory in Maspeth, Queens. Due to strife within the group - not surprising; the idea of organized anarchists seems at best a paradox - the plans were leaked to the police, and a date for detonating the bombs was never set.
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In 1898, a waterlogged, unexploded pipe bomb was discovered on a beach in Westhampton. Was it related to the Spanish-American War? Was it a failed test bomb for some unknown plot? No one knew.
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It is surprising to learn that Hicksville once played a small but crucial part in a terrorist incident of national, even international, significance. In July 1915, Erich Meunter, believed to have been a German agent, put a time-bomb in the foyer of the U.S. Senate. Before it exploded, he was on his way back to New York, where he concealed another bomb on a munitions ship bound for England. For good measure, he made a surprise dinnertime visit to a Long Island estate and shot J.P. Morgan, but the wounded man managed to overpower his would-be assassin.
Wife Murderer, Former Professor, and Terrorist: Erich Meunter, alias Frank Holt
Syracuse Journal, July 15, 1915
After the suicide of the spy / terrorist, officials learned that he had constructed his bombs, and practiced his shooting, at a cottage in Hicksville. It is likely that he gained access to the property by making connections with members of the hospitable local German-American community.
Brooklyn Daily Standard, July 7, 1915
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In September 1920, 38 people died, and hundreds more were injured, when a bomb concealed in a horse-drawn wagon exploded at noon, across from the offices of J.P. Morgan & Company at 23 Wall Street. At the time, it was the worst terrorist attack in the nation's history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wallstreetbmb.jpg
Although the perpetrators were never discovered, it is believed to have been the work of a known cell of anarchists, responsible for exploding bombs elsewhere around that time.
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A decade later, an unexploded live pipe bomb, filled with shrapnel, was found near the intersection of New South and Plainview Roads, possibly dumped there when someone had second thoughts about using it in an attack.
Huntington Long-Islander, July 25, 1930
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Bombings were infrequent and unpredictable, but they never really went away. Criminal organizations would occasionally use bombs. One especially notorious criminal bombing occurred in Queens in 1931. It targeted neither a mobster nor his criminal enterprise, but his family while they were at home. Three young children were killed by the explosion.
At the 1940 New York World's Fair, a time-bomb exploded, killing two people. The person(s) responsible remain unknown. This was the "last straw" for Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia: he directed the NYPD to establish a permanent Bomb Squad, and to use expert knowledge to devise vehicles in which live IEDs could be transported safely.
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Older readers will recall, and their children may remember being told about, New York's prolific letter-writing Mad Bomber. George Metesky, a quiet, clever, meticulous, and disturbed man, dedicated his adult life to terrorizing New Yorkers, in hopes of wreaking revenge upon Consolidated Edison. He began placing bombs in public places in 1940, but he soon took a hiatus - a letter to the public explained that it would be unpatriotic for him to continue to plant bombs in wartime! Nonetheless, he still wrote letters during World War II, in hopes that that they would be published. He resumed his "work" in 1951.
Plea for the Public's Assistance
Excerpts from New York Daily News, December 12, 1956
Thanks to what likely was the first instance of criminal profiling, Metesky finally was arrested at his Connecticut home in 1957. By then, he had planted 33 bombs in public places. Some were duds, some were found and disarmed, but 22 of them exploded, injuring 15 innocent people.
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Dumb and Dumber, 1950s Style
Given this history, and given that a madman was planting real bombs in New York City until the mid-1950s, there were excellent reasons to take any bomb threat seriously, not matter how preposterous it might seem - which is precisely what post-war adolescent pranksters counted on.
Before the Call Display era, schools sometimes were victims of telephoned-in "bomb threats." The callers might be anyone: terrorists (unlikely), cranks, mentally unstable adults, even students hoping to postpone exams - but the questionable character of the callers did not mean that there were no IEDs. Although the public took to calling the threats "bomb scares" and dismissed them, authorities could never risk taking the threats lightly. In the event of such threats, schools would be evacuated, and local police and fire departments called in to inspect the vacated premises thoroughly.
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Early in 1954, a spate of such events occurred in Nassau County. Schools in Port Washington, Amityville, Hicksville, and Roslyn all were threatened, and in some cases, explosive devices were discovered. In consequence, sixty-five Long Island school superintendents met as a body with police to establish more open communications. Three Port Washington students were arrested in one case; one Hicksville student was arrested in another.
"I thought it was a good idea," he told the Judge.
Long-Island Star-Journal, March 26, 1954
The situation in Roslyn, however, proved more worrisome. A homemade bomb exploded in a hall locker, and the following day, another one was discovered before it could explode. More bomb scares hit Hicksville High during the winter of 1954-1955. There was no option but to continue to evacuate and inspect.
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A Lull, and Then...
Almost 10 years later, Hicksville High School became the target of a long series of bomb threats. They received no publicity at first, but as 1964 began, members of the Board of Education and Nassau County Police spoke to the press about what the school had had to endure as 1963 waned.
Newsday, January 2, 1964
As the previous year wound down, fifteen separate incidents had caused evacuations and inspections. On at least one occasion, two threats had been made on the same day, each triggering an evacuation. The President of the School Board (probably assuming that each incident cost students an hour of class time) stated that two full days of class work had been lost.
Based on my personal recollection, that estimate was too optimistic. It likely did not take into account, for example, that students often left one class after about 15 minutes, missed a second class completely, and upon returning to the school had to wait to be told how the schedule for the rest of the day was being adjusted. Even in the shortest evacuations, at least one full class and nearly half of another class was lost. Moreover, the inspections sometimes took longer - for example, absent students were not in school to unlock their lockers for inspection, and police/fire respondents had to determine what might be in those lockers.
The bomb threats ceased after Newsday printed the story, but not immediately. Three more were called in, bringing the total to eighteen. By my own unofficial calculation, together all of that year's evacuations cost me (and many others) a full week of class time.
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Who was the perpetrator? Rumors abounded. I was told by a friend that newspapers had identified "a woman in Huntington" as the person responsible, but I could never find the article which reported that. Other students blamed a lonely old lady (no one I knew ever saw her or was told her name) who liked to give snacks to the students. I was told by someone else that a certain high school senior was found to have called in the single threat made to the Junior High, but again, no one else knew anything about it.
As suddenly as they had begun, the bomb threats of 1963-1964 ceased. I have searched the Newsday and the Daily News archives, but I have found no report of anyone's being apprehended for making them.
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A Mathematics Problem
If nearly 3,000 high school students are evacuated to the high school's grounds 18 times from November through January, for as long as 2 hours per evacuation, how do they pass the time?
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Looking back after 56 years, I remember some - not all - things about the evacuations quite vividly. Wondering what others might recall, last November I posted a question to the "You Know You're From Hicksville" group on Facebook. I thank the many former HHS students who replied.
It came as no surprise that the novelty of being extricated from class wore thin quickly, especially if the alternative was standing around in cold weather. Regardless, though, people tried to cope.
Had a sociologist interviewed all of us at the time, s/he might have found enough fodder for a Masters thesis. Our evacuation points were based on our locker locations, which were determined by our homeroom locations, which in turn were determined by the combination of our class (Senior, Junior, or Sophomore) and the alphabetic order of our surnames. Thus, during a bomb scare, although we were free to socialize with the other students at our designated location, many of them were unknown to us. The routine's repetitions gave us a chance to form new social groups ("bomb scare acquaintances"), which tended to gather at the same spot in each evacuation.
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One thing mentioned by a number of people on Facebook was the cold. Evacuations on cold days were especially trying for some people, because of their personal routines. For example, it normally took me only two minutes to walk from 188 7th St. to the high school - which meant that I rarely wore a warm coat, even in winter. And so, I got to spend eighteen evacuations wearing a light wind-breaker, shivering and gazing at the rooftop of my warm house. In a similar circumstance were students whose parents drove them to/from school, and those who drove themselves to school (there were not very many) and also happened to be evacuated to the lot in which they had parked their cars.
Because I was always cold, and because I eventually had nothing else to do, after several bomb evacuations I decided to dance while I waited to go back inside. Well, not quite. One day, with the little student parking lot full of shivering people, someone had the bright idea of breaking out in song - specifically, Hava Nagila. Immediately, a ring of male and female students formed, singing together and dancing. Of course, I had heard the song, but I knew neither the words nor the steps (alas, I could never find it in the hymnals at Holy Family parish). I watched. Steps? Not a problem. I tentatively wedged myself into the circle, and began dancing with people whom I did not know.
As time went by, the weather got still colder, the bomb scares continued, and I danced in a lot of horas. By the time the final bomb threat evacuated us, I could sing all of Hava Nagila phonetically.
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Conclusion
Bombings continued in New York. In the 1970s, as I walking back to my workplace in downtown Manhattan, I saw the unique NYPD bomb disposal truck parked in front of my building. I was told "There's another bomb threat at that Federal office on the 4th floor - they get them all the time, but there's never any bomb. It's somebody's idea of a game."
NYPD Bomb Disposal Carrier, 1965 version
http://www.policeny.com/bomb1.html
Months later, a bomb exploded only a few blocks away, at historic Fraunces Tavern. Later the same year, another bomb blew through a locker at La Guardia, making shrapnel that penetrated whatever was in its way. Between the two blasts - perpetrated by different political terrorist groups - fifteen people died, and more than one hundred were seriously injured. It is unlikely that any of the victims were enemies of those who planted the bombs.
Alas, there is more to life than dancing in the cold to mock a bomb that you know does not exist, and much of it is grim. Still, I sometimes look back at those eighteen bomb scares, shake my head at the troubled minds responsible for them, and - despite myself - I smile when I think of my first hora. Life goes on.
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