Sunday Journal: Staking a claim in the promised land

By DAVE SCHEIBER

© St. Petersburg Times,
published September 2, 2001

When I was a kid, walking along Peekskill Hollow Road each summer was my idea of big-league entertainment.

The sun baked the asphalt until tiny tar bubbles popped up in my path. Being a conscientious youth, it was my duty to step on every one.

My destination was the general store at the corner, where I would scour the New York Daily News for late baseball scores before doing what I was sent to do -- bring the paper back to my grandparents.

All this happened in Tompkins Corners, N.Y., a little road-map dot of farms and brooks and woodland in the town of Putnam Valley and the rolling foothills of the Catskill Mountains.

My grandfather and grandmother, as newlyweds, had bought 40 acres on a hillside along Peekskill Hollow in 1920, an hour north of their home in New York City. This is where they spent weekends and summers while raising my dad and his two sisters. And a generation later, I spent my own summers and holidays there with my parents, two sisters and brother. We would drive up from Maryland in our trusty Ford station wagon to join grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and family friends.

In my book, the only thing better than flattening tar bubbles was playing Wiffle ball in the back yard of my grandparents' rebuilt, six-room 1800s farm house, which became known as the Big House, simply because it was bigger than the other three houses on the property.

My cousins and I pretended to be players whose names graced the morning box scores -- Giants sluggers Willie Mays and Willie McCovey, mid-'60s Mets Ed Kranepool and Cleon Jones, or an array of all-star combinations.

Hits into the flower beds were automatic outs; blasts over a tall wood-frame tool shed were home runs. As Harmon Killebrew, I once slammed a shot that didn't clear the shed but did crack a small window pane in it just beneath the roof, though no grown-ups ever seemed to notice.

Of course, the country property was much more than my personal ballpark. Though I didn't realize it then, this was my grandfather's field of dreams.

He had come to this country as an infant. His Jewish mother, escaping persecution in Eastern Europe, carried him across the Polish border wrapped in a rug, reaching America on July 4, 1891. The oldest of nine children, he grew up in the Lower East Side, put himself through New York University's law school, became a successful lawyer, then an in-demand labor arbitrator.

The country property was his investment in a new country, a place to plant lasting family roots. In 1923, the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on a hill near my grandparents' home to send a message to them and other Jewish newcomers from New York City that they were not welcome. My grandfather responded by trying to rid the town of hate and ignorance. He led a movement to combine the town's five little one-room schoolhouses into a new central school, and to improve the town government. He served as president of the central school board for 23 years and as town attorney for 15.

My grandmother was born in New York City a minute after midnight on the first day of the new century. Also from an Eastern European immigrant family, she became a concert pianist and instilled a love of music in all of us. At the country house, she entertained hundreds of friends. She often gave concerts at a camp founded by my grandfather for Lower East Side children, just a mile or so down Peekskill Hollow Road.

In recent decades, my immediate family has spent less and less time at the Big House. Most of us have moved far away from New York and had children of our own. It got harder and harder to spend weekends or summers at the old place. I was last there when my grandmother died in 1993; the time before that was for my grandfather's funeral in '86.

So after much discussion, my father and my aunt agreed to put the place up for sale this year. A buyer emerged, the offer was solid, a closing date was set.

That is why, on a recent weekend, my parents and my two sisters and I made the trip to my grandparents' place in Tompkins Corners. One purpose was to sort through mementos -- books, paintings, photos, furniture -- and distribute them among the family.

Among the discoveries: an old reel-to-reel with boxes of piano recordings my grandmother made over 40 years; a vintage Polaroid Land Camera, which took family photos in the early '60s; albums with faded family shots from the turn of the century; and, in the bottom of a drawer, landmark issues from the New York Times, Daily News and Post with banner headlines of Hitler's invasion of Poland, the start of World War II and the U.S. Supreme Court's desegregation ruling.

But there was another reason for the trip.

We came to say goodbye.

We walked around the property, large parts of it overgrown with weeds and brush. The pond where I learned to swim was covered with plants and algae. An old metal sign my grandfather had once hung greeting visitors on "Grandma Scheiber Lane" was now rusted through and almost unreadable.

Still, on a bright and balmy morning, in the presence of the same centuries-old oak and locust trees, we sat outside for breakfast. We remembered how it felt when my grandfather happily presided as head of the clan, my grandmother hosted gatherings and the place bustled with life.

We thought too of the new inhabitants of the property -- a Korean-American family with a jewelry business in the Bronx. Like my grandparents, the new owners are immigrants. It seemed fitting that another family of new Americans would now take over the land, bringing their own visions for the future. People come and go, but the land remains. Sometimes, the best thing to do is let others have a turn to make it their own.

Besides, we will keep the property -- in memories of times when the place truly was part of our lives.

Before leaving, we took some snapshots and made a last round of mental pictures.

I walked down to the corner store. The asphalt has been paved over so many times in 35 years that the road is three inches higher, the cars whoosh by too fast, and there are no more tar bubbles. At the store, I bought a goofy-looking toy bat and a yellow Wiffle ball -- the last one they had.

Back at the Big House, I eyed the old toolshed from the stone step that was once home plate. The window I cracked as a kid Killebrew was now gone entirely.

A gentle breeze at my back, I tossed up a pitch and swung. The ball soared high over the shed, disappearing amid the sunlight and shadows of another morning on Peekskill Hollow Road.

Dave Scheiber is a Times staff writer.

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