DeBeaumont, Muriel
From Central Park Historical Society Encyclopedia
"I Remember When" I came to Bethpage from Oyster Bay in 1949, and there were acres of fields along the South Oyster Bay Road, mostly potato fields. My first fall in Bethpage, after the potatoes were harvested, I joined my neighbors in gleaning the smaller potatoes left behind (and didn't they taste delicious).
I remember filling buckets of wild strwberries from the fields where the Bethpage High School now stands, and the Bethpage Community Park.
In 1951 when our son Peter was born, I remember dashing out to get him in, screaming from the noise of the jet planes Grumman was testing.
At one time I was nervous at an unusual noise and sent my husband to investigate - turned out to be Borrella's goats loose turning over our garbage cans. Another time my neighbor, Helen Rafenski, was waving her apron at something in her garden. When I asked what she was doing, she was shooing Anselmi's pigs out of her newly planted lettuce patch.
Information from CPHS NEWSLETTER, December 2000.
