Newsletter for the Alumni and Friends of
Hicksville High School Hicksville, New York

The Editors:
Buffalo Bob Casale '61	Linda (Piccerelli) Hayden '60
Pat (Koziuk) Driscoll '56	Bob (Gleason) Wesley '61

Contributing Editors: Bob Gillette & Walter Schmidt

Webmaster: Roger Whitaker

To contact the editors, email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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HICKSVILLE VIETNAM WAR ERA MEMORIAL - PROJECT UPDATE

Our full Update for December appears in the Honoring Our Veterans section of this newsletter. It is actually a repeat of the November Update, with a note at the top stating there was no new activity during December.

Given the surge in virus cases with colder weather and now a new mutation coming from England that is more contagious, we expect this will remain the case for a number of future months, but hope the effect of the new vaccines will give us momentum again sometime during the spring of the new year ahead.
We are pleased to again report that our core action team is safe from the virus. We are thankful for this and hope the same is true for all our readers and alumni.

While the Dedication Ceremony remains on hold, please remember that the Memorial is complete and can be viewed by anyone visiting the Memorial Gardens located on the south side of the Jerusalem Avenue Middle School.

The project will be officially complete once we are able to conduct the Dedication Ceremony at the Memorial.

Wishing All of You a Very Happy Holiday Season and may 2021 be a much better year for us all!!

On behalf of the Project Team,
Joe Carfora, HHS 1962

CLASS OF 1980 CLASS REUNION

August 7, 2021 7:30-11:30 pm
Oak Room at the Heritage Club at Bethpage. 
Cost $125 includes food and drink. 
Payment info will be released soon.
Nearby Hotels include: (Book sooner rather than later)
Hilton Garden Inn Round Swamp Road
Homewood Suites Round Swamp Road
Holiday Inn, Plainview on Sunny Side Blvd
Four Points by Sheraton in Melville, Plainview on South Service Road
Any questions? Contact Sue at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The Newsletter

Photo Gallery

25 Poignant Photos with Important Stories Behind Them

Birthdays & Anniversaries

Memory Lane

For all my friends who gave their son a baseball...

This is for all my friends who gave their son a baseball. This is so true. I must share with all the baseball families out there.

If you give a boy a baseball, he will want a bat to go with it. You'll buy him the best bat you can find, and then he will probably want a bucket of balls and a glove and some cleats too. Then, he will probably spend hours begging you to go out in the yard to play with him, even though you may want to sit on the couch and watch TV. He will insist. And his insistence will win.

And when a boy gets a jersey, he will need pants and socks and a belt to go with it. And a Team. And then life as you know it will end. There will be no more lazy weekends watching TV. You will see more sunrises than you ever thought possible. Every spare minute of your time will be spent hauling buckets and bags and stinky cleats and crazy boys all over tarnation for hours to practice for a game, "the game".

And your house will be a mess. And your car will be dirty. All because you gave a boy a baseball. Your weekends will be spent freezing or burning to death on a fold up chair. And his weekends will be spent gaining confidence and friends and learning new skills and having fun and getting dirty. So dirty in fact that you will have to learn how to do laundry in a whole new way, like maybe at a carwash using the pressure washer.

And you will be there the day he hits his first home run, gets his first strikeout, and his first double play. And he will make you SO proud. The other moms will congratulate you. But you feel weird saying thank you because it's not you at bat or on the mound. It's everything him. He did this.

And right before your eyes, your little boy will be transformed from the baby who spun around with his head on the bat, (because he loves attention), into a pitcher. Because he loves attention still.

When you give a boy a baseball, you give him more than just a ball. You give him a sport, and a talent, and hope, and dreams, and friends, a new family, a place to learn about life, room to grow as a person where he can push his limits, and bravery, and courage and LIFE, and memories. And he will have "ALL" these things, simply because you gave a boy a baseball.

Because you gave a boy a baseball, you too will develop new/lifelong friendships, developed solely from the same passion for the game and love of your team. You will root together. And spew PG-13 things out of your mouths together. Because you gave a boy a baseball.

Then one day, many years from today, he will be in his room and a baseball will roll out from an old dusty bat bag underneath his bed. And he will pick it up and realize instantly that when you gave that boy a baseball, you also gave him a childhood that he would never forget. And then he will hug you, and your eyes may leak - because you realize that everything YOU gave up along the way was worth it!

All because you gave a boy a baseball ⚾️.

1950-2013 Around HHS

1950 Teachers (I recognize Miss Clark, Mr. Horne & Mr. Ellsworth from 1961)

1951 Gloria Franke

1980 Miss Franke

 1964 Jets & Sharks

1969 Valedictorian and Salutatorian

1965 We Made It!!!

 1979 Basketball

1979 - 1980 Our Cheerleaders

1980 Football Pep Rally

1986 Around the School

1997 Boces

 2006 Around the School

2013 Valedictorian & Salutatorian

Casale's Corner

Casale's Corner January 2021

Rachel Reilich

An artist's primary challenge is to make the invisible, visible, to give shape to the abstract: our emotions, our innermost thoughts and fears. Take, for example, the following sentence: Every nine minutes, 300,000 pounds of plastic is dumped into the ocean. How would an artist express that information? Not just the fact of it, but the feeling?

Chances are, for most of us, the magnitude of those words, once read, drifts away easily, like a plastic bag in an ocean current. It's up to the artist to anchor it: in our hearts, in our minds, in our conscience.

San Francisco Bay Area artists Joel Dean Stockdill and Yustina Salnikova found a way to do that. Commissioned by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, they used roughly 5,000 pounds of recycled plastic and steel to create a life-sized, 82-foot long sculpture of a blue whale

They named the sculpture, "Ethyl," a nod to polyethylene, the most popular plastic in the world. The piece was initially installed on the Golden Gate National Recreation area, flanked by palm trees that shot into the air like waterspouts. It was then sold to Meow Wolf, a public benefit arts and entertainment group based in Santa Fe , New Mexico , and transported to the campus of Santa Fe Community College .

The shift in context only heightened its power: The Southern third of New Mexico used to be underwater.

Being as blue whales make their home in the ocean, Ethyl's metaphorical impact is profound. Water bottles, yogurt cups, casually discarded plastic-shell casings on new cases of batteries or dental floss, even our blue recycling bins, will eventually find its way to the sea. That is the equivalent of nearly 60 of these plastic blue whales dumped into the ocean every nine minutes. And that number is increasing."A really interesting and timely thing happened when we were building the whale [in 2018]," says Shannon Riley, one of the founding partners of Building 180, a full-service art production and consulting agency that helped propel Ethyl from concept to reality. " China stopped accepting recycled trash [from the US ]. The recology centers that donated to us said it was the first time they'd shipped a bale within the United States ."

In the same way most Americans insulate themselves from the daily processes that bring us our food, we are disconnected from the reality of our trash. We are as likely to understand the origin stories of each ingredient inside our to-go sandwiches as we are the destination of the plastic clamshells in which they are packaged.

We toss the plastic clamshell, perhaps smeared with dressing, littered with crumbs, into a recycling bin. And then we do not think about it.

Ethyl asks us to think about it.

"We went on a five month, really a six-month journey, creating and building this whale," Riley confides. "Both artists have a huge philosophy around what they do: if we learn to look at our waste as something we've created, and we create a relationship with that waste, then we can transform it into something else."

Laundry detergent bottles, old recycling bins, plastic milk jugs, and discarded toys: all this "waste" was painstakingly washed, broken down into small pieces, melted down and shaped into diamond-shaped tiles, each one resembling a miniature abstract painting itself - plastic meets Pollack.

Pieced together and mounted to a steel skeleton, these tiles formed the bulk of sculpture. Due to its staggering size, the majestic blue whale can only be seen in its entirety from a distance. Up close, it is a puzzle to ponder, a question echoing through time, waiting, patiently, for our response.

Shannon Riley