- Congratulations to the Hicksville High School Marching Band! They took 1st place again in the Large School category for the 3rd year in a row! When they arrived back at the high school, they were escorted by the Hicksville Fire Department! If you have Facebook, you can follow this link: Facebook Link to Fire Dept Escorting HHS Band Here is a link to the story that was on News 12 Hicksville's Winning Band Returns.
- The Hicksville Fire Department will have its annual Popcorn Day on Sunday, November 26th. The December issue of HixNews will have an article about this exciting event over the years.
- A Reader Reached Out...and the correction was made: Hi all, Thank you for doing this for our beloved hometown. I've been unofficially keeping track of the Class of 1975 In Memoriam page, and notice that Loreen Zahn is listed as passed. She contacted me a couple of years ago, thinking I might be able to change the list and to confirm that she is indeed alive! Can someone please remove her name from the In Memoriam list for class of '75? Thanks! Diane Harvey HHS Class of 1975
- Follow-up to Wavy Lines Article... Submitted by Ronald Wencer (Class of 1964)
An article published in October’s Hixnews unexpectedly led to two 1950s Hicksville grads getting reconnected.
In his article “Wavey Lines,” Pete Foster discussed the early days of broadcast television in Hicksville, including a question that they must have posed for many inquiring minds: Why is there no Channel 1? The article’s title, incidentally, refers to the particular TV interference that afflicted some Hicksville neighborhoods. It was caused by the West John Street operations of Press Wireless Corporation, which then were vital for national and global news media.
After reading Pete’s article, I emailed him to ask if he had personally known my late sister Marilyn, who also was a 1957 HHS grad (he had not). In the same email, I mentioned that a 1958 HHS grad, Vicky Penner Whitaker, once had mentioned Press Wireless to me. When Pete responded, I learned that when Vicky was growing up, her family was close to that of Pete’s late wife, Alice Davidson Foster – even though their respective homes were separated by the vast acreage owned by that same Press Wireless.
Comet Yearbook photos of Vicky Penner and Alice Davidson
Pete and Vicky (who is married to Roger Whitaker, webmaster for the old Hixnews) have since started catching up. She has shared the photo below, which may be of special interest to readers who are descended from any of the children shown. Note that this group includes both Vicky Penner and Alice Davidson.
KINDERGARTEN PHOTO 1946, NICHOLAI STREET SCHOOL, HICKSVILLE, LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK. IDS (FROM LEFT, BACK ROW) Alice Davidson, Arlene Gilbert, Marie (Corky) Strong, Nancy Ann Crosby, Vicky Penner, Karen (last name unknown), Marilyn Zeier. (FRONT ROW FROM LEFT) Harold Kasten, Charles (last name unknown), Alan Schlicting, Michael Moscow, George Rinney, David Van Wart.
The old school on Nicholai Street was demolished decades ago. Information about the 1898 building (shown above, in a photo Vicky also provided) can be found in Hixnews at https://hixnews.com/features/hixtory/may-2021 in an article that focuses on the Victorian Era approach that still was in vogue when the school first opened.
The building was well-designed and modern for its time. Had the construction of the East River railroad tunnels in the early 1900s not opened the village to suburban growth, the school would have met most of Hicksville’s needs for many years. As it turned out, by the 1910s, the school’s size literally had been doubled, but thanks to the children of all the new commuters, there still was not enough room to provide desks for all the students. Nicholai Street School would soldier on until after World War II, when a flotilla of new brick suburban-style schools opened (and even those schools would eventually need to be supplemented with temporary classrooms).
Another Hicksville landmark that directly affected Vicky’s and Alice’s families was Cantiague Park, which eventually replaced the Press Wireless installation that had separated their homes during the girls’ childhoods. Consider the two maps below. The first is a 1939 Dolph & Stewart map.
It highlights the original 20-acre Press Wireless Hicksville site, which in the 1940s expanded into the large adjacent fields to handle far-reaching radio transmissions, increasing PW’s presence in the village to 185 acres. Note that when this map was made, Northern State Parkway was still “proposed,” so all the open space shown represented undeveloped fields.
In contrast, below is a contemporary map of the identical area:
What HASN’T changed since 1939?
Northern State Parkway is now real, and – aside from Cantiague Park -- residential streets have replaced the farmland. An exception is the former site of St. John’s Protectory, which has given way to retail space and parking lot asphalt galore. An interesting sidelight is that the streets immediately to the east of the park, which were numbered on the 1939 map, are now shown with their names.
Those of us who get to return to Hicksville only occasionally always notice how it keeps changing, and we may be tempted to shake our heads. But looking back at its past in this context, I think it probably was changing at least as much when we were growing up.
