It is currently circulating on Facebook. (No pun intended.)
I actually met Maya Angelou (or attended one of her readings, really) when I was a student at Longwood High School. Our English class took a field trip to Suffolk Community College in New York in … 1988 or 1989, I think. One of my alums piped in on Facebook to say he remembers too.
Rest easy, Charles Bassett Anderson. Even nearly three decades later, his students in New York remember him fondly and are saddened by his loss.
Mr. Anderson passed away on January 16. You can find his obituary at The Long Island Advance, where he was a contributor. (He retired from Longwood High School in 1991, according to the Advance, just a year after I and my friends were fortunate to have him as a teacher. He then became a professor, first at Suffolk Community College and later at Hofstra University).
Mr. Anderson was a superlative educator, and was responsible for some of my best memories of high school. He was a good, kind, temperate man who was easy to interact with, despite teaching a demanding course of study. (His 1989-90 Advanced Placement English class was rigorous, and was designed to fully prepare public high school students for the far greater demands of college.) Mr. Anderson taught me, among other things, that academia could be both challenging and (sometimes bizarrely) fun — and that we could demand a lot from ourselves and enjoy ourselves at the same time.
This was our class picture. It was really making the rounds a couple of months ago when one of my classmates uploaded it to Facebook.
This picture was taken at homecoming game, I think, at Longwood High School in Suffolk County, New York, in the very early 1980’s. This would have been the site of the “old” high school, at the end of Smith Road on Longwood Road, and not the “new” school building to which we moved in the late 80’s.
The furry fella is our school mascot, the Longwood Lion; that off-putting lily-white waif you see is me. (God does not equally bless all children with pleasing appearances.) I think I still remember that gray sweatshirt, and the oversized black digital watch. (In the age before home computers, those cheap little doodads were considered a bit fancy.)
It’s a good thing I wasn’t smiling here. Roughly half my body weight at the time resulted from my oversized teeth and gums, and that was not a pretty thing to look at. My school picture could have redefined the term “Gummi” in a categorically horrible fashion. I looked like somebody had cross-bred a “‘Nilla Wafer” with Ridley Scott’s “Alien.” Or maybe crossbred John Carpenter’s “Village of the Damned” with David Cronenberg’s “The Fly.” I’m serious.
This past Monday marked the 35th Anniversary of MTV. It aired its first music video, ironically The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” on August 1st, 1981.
That’s a cool answer for a trivia question, but it’s not actually a memory for a lot of people. Not everybody had premium cable packages back then. My family didn’t. And if we’d had fancy cable channels like that, I’d have been far more thrilled to get Showtime or the legendary HBO. (We called the latter “Home Box” back in the day.)
The first time I laid eyes on MTV was at a friend’s house, and it seemed weird to a fourth grader. I thought it was an inscrutably dumb idea — why did we need to see the music being played? That seemed like something appropriate only for fanatical music fans. In my child’s mind, I pictured them as the weird, overly nostalgic, long-haired men who purchased those “Hits of the 60’s” cassettes that were so often advertised on non-primetime television.
I only gave it a glance; my friend and I then went on to play in the woods, maybe to build a tree-fort. The 80’s were a different time.
Adults, too, scoffed at “Music Television.” I heard more than one opine, disapprovingly, that “music is meant to be heard, not watched.”
MTV also arrived with little initial fanfare, of course, because nobody knew how big it would be. By the end of the 80’s, even describing it as a cornerstone of popular culture would be an understatement. It was … I dunno … a cultural conduit. It was part of life, if you were a teenager.
By the time I graduated from Longwood High School in the spring of 1990, I was watching it nightly, just like countless other kids. This was arguably MTV’s Golden Age — it would be many years before its inexplicable, universally maligned transition away from music videos to brainless, bread-and circuses”reality shows” and other questionable programming.
The countdown show in the late 80’s was “Dial MTV,” Wikipedia reminds me. (Why do I feel like I remember it being called something else?) I didn’t pay much attention to “120 Minutes,” which focused on alternative music. And that’s weird, because I would go nuts for alternative music when I was bitten by the Depeche Mode bug early in my freshman year of college.
MTV could be found on Channel 25 in my part of Long Island; its sister channel, VH-1, was on Channel 26. I remember thinking of VH-1 as “MTV for old people.” And, by “old people,” I did mean people in their 30’s.
For some reason, I had quite a preoccupation as a teenager with Vee-Jay Martha Quinn. I definitely had Martha on my mind, back then. I’m not sure what was up with that. Looking back, I think she resembled a mild-mannered, nondescript librarian who dressed just slightly cool, maybe because she just got a job at the local high school. Or maybe because she was sneaking up on 30.
This “Throwback Thursday” post is one to which only my longtime fellow Long Islanders might relate. And it’s really more of a bittersweet news item … I signed onto Facebook the night before last only to see this message from a great old friend from the neighborhood:
“They tore down the old T.S.S. today.”
Yes — that’s “T.S.S.,” as in Times Squares Stores, even though nobody ever called it the latter. And “T.S.S.” is an appellation that only the 40-and-up-ish crowd would recognize, I think. Everyone else thinks of it as “the old K-Mart.” But in the late 70’s and early 80’s, it was a sprawling local family discount store.
I and other Longwood High School kids have a hell of a lot of memories from there. I remember accompanying my parents there during their shopping expeditions when I was .. maybe the age from Kindergarten through the third grade?
“Warehouse”-type club stores weren’t really a thing back then. T.S.S.’ immense space was truly impressive to a little boy; it seemed like a world unto itself. We all remember the toy section — that was where I browsed wistfully through the very first Star Wars figures — I’m talking the original toys released in connection with the 1978 and 1980 films. I still remember them arrayed along the racks in their original packaging — Lord only knows how much those racks of unopened original toys would be worth today. I’m also pretty sure that’s where my parents picked up those Micronauts figures I got for Christmas one year. Come to think of it … I’ll bet the majority of my Christmas presents were bought there.
I also vividly remember the bedding department, for some reason. I think it’s because I really took a liking to some Charlie Brown bedsheets I saw displayed there.
But more than anything else, I remember the weird entranceway — they sold concession-style drinks and snacks on both sides, the better to appeal to children to beseech their parents.
There’s a neat little blog entry, complete with the store’s original TV commercials, right here at LongIsland70skid.com:
http://www.longisland70skid.com/tss/
T.S.S. was such a vivid, memorable part of my early childhood that it was pretty damned depressing for me Tuesday to discover its eventual fate. I’m not talking about the sprawling space being razed. I’m talking about the goddam dystopian state of disrepair into which the entire commercial property fell.
After some long intervening years during which the space became a K-Mart, the building just went to hell after that doomed chain went as defunct as T.S.S. Tuesday’s Newsday article, below, should give you the rundown.
And the rundown isn’t pretty. Over the past decade, it seems that the “hulking eyesore” of a building was the site of squatters, drug users, and encroaching wild plantlife. If you have fond childhood memories of the store, then do not perform a Google image search for the location, as I did. It’ll show you a massive, vacant monolith of a building on a vast, overgrown, dangerous looking lot. It looks frikkin’ postapocalyptic. And it’ll make you sad.
And if that weren’t enough, a murder victim was found this past Saturday in the woods just next to the site:
“Middle Island vacant K-Mart demolished days after body found,” by Carl MacGowan, Newsday, 4/5/16
They say you can never go home again, huh?
Today is the Ides of March.
I suppose that Marc Antony’s speech from “Julius Caesar,” below, is the Western World’s definitive treatise on sarcasm?
I haven’t read it in its entirety since 10th grade English at Longwood High School. In doing so now, I’m surprised at how many pop cultural references to it spring to mind:
A couple of Facebook posts last night cheerfully proclaimed the 30th Anniversary of The Beastie Boys’ “Licensed to Ill.” That’s mostly right, I guess … the album was released in 1986, although it came out on November 15, not the end of February.
I remember “Licensed to Ill” being a phenomenon when I was a freshman at Longwood High School — reverence for it transcended a lot of high school subcultures. (And at Longwood, I think those subcultures overlapped considerably more than your typical John Hughes film would suggest.) The preppie kids loved the album, the jocks loved it, and a lot of the honors kids were into it too — not to mention just mainstream kids and random weirdos like me. My favorite song was “Brass Monkey;” I was thrilled whenever it was played at parties. (I can’t feature it here, as there are no authorized videos of it online.)
This album had what I remember as a unique vibe to it in 1986. People online call the Beastie Boys “the first white rappers.” I don’t know if that’s true. (Some people said the same thing about Vanilla Ice only four years later). And I’m guessing such a distinction shouldn’t be important. But the Beastie Boys were different.
Previously, rap was perceived only as a kind of counterculture art form for disaffected, young, urban African-Americans. The Beastie Boys were a rap group specifically with which suburban white kids could identify. I hope I’m not saying anything politically incorrect here — of course we all realize that any music can be appreciated by anyone, according to their tastes. (People are occasionally surprised when I myself can recite the Geto Boys as easily as W. H. Auden’s poetry.) And all sorts of kids in the mid-80’s liked Run-D.M.C. and The Fat Boys — they just didn’t have the huge, visible mainstream appeal that the Beastie Boys had.
The Beastie Boys had a wider appeal. Their music was irreverent — they sang about “Girls,” liquor, and the “Right to Party,” in a manner suggesting that they’d probably never been altar boys. They were drunken, pot-smoking malcontents, and expressed some not terribly progressive attitudes toward women. Yet it was perfectly natural, or culturally expected, to hear them blasted at a parentally approved, non-alcoholic party for young teenagers at a suburban, middle class home. The same preps who wore “Ocean Pacific” and played with hacky sacks also played the Beastie Boys. So did some kids in Key Club and the honors classes. A couple of cheerleaders I knew had crushes on Mike D. And it never seemed unusual or ironic, like that time when a nearly all white, suburban crowd chanted along to Boogie Down Productions’ “South Bronx” at a Longwood Junior High School dance.
For some reason, the Beastie Boys’ broad fan base was never really evident among the student body at Mary Washington College — although The Jerky Boys and the Geto Boys both had their share of fans there. I don’t remember them being played once. I think maybe it was because that small southern college subculture leaned so heavily on classic rock and the new “alternative,” with new wave and punk having strong, visible minorities of fans. (Man … if I had a dime for every time time I heard The Allman Brothers in college, I could have paid off my student loans a day after graduation.)
Strangely, I wound up listening to “Licensed to lll” the most often about two decades later, when I was in my mid-30’s. I was going through two weird phases in my life. The first was a newfound love of hip-hop and rap, because I am a weird guy, and I’m always late to the party with these things. The second was a bizarre, temporary sense of financial responsibility. I was constantly saving money. (I think maybe I wasn’t eating right or something. It didn’t last.) But I was constantly listening to old or cheap secondhand CD’s, instead of buying new ones or one of those newfangled mp3 players. (At the time, the iPod’s antecedents seemed just too high-tech and opulent to me.) So there was always a leather case of 80’s and 90’s music CD’s riding shotgun with me in my 1992 Ford Taurus.
I was driving frequently between Whitestone, Queens and my girlfriend’s apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, rocketing up and down “the 278,” the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. The Beastie Boys were my miscreant co-pilots; “No Sleep till Brooklyn” was both a kick-ass song and situationally apropos. I played the album constantly, along with L.L. Cool J.’s “Mama Said Knock You Out,” and the “MTV Party To Go Volume 2.” Then I’d swap those out with Toad the Wet Sprocket’s more mellow, sensitive “Fear,” just to remind myself that I really was just a softspoken college boy who’d grown into a nerdy thirtysomething (“nerdysomething?”).
I found out recently that Adam Yauch (the Beastie Boys’ member “MCA”) died of cancer. This happened four years ago, I just hadn’t heard. For some reason, it was especially unsettling to learn that a rebellious entertainment figure from my teen years had died from an illness that I usually associate with people older than me. I never loved the Beastie Boys as much as I loved U2, Depeche Mode or Tori Amos, but I found it more troubling than I would have expected. I’m not sure why, but I’ve decided not to dwell on it.
At any rate, if you still love Ad-Rock, Mike D. and MCA, you can play the embedded videos below. But you absolutely should pull up “Brass Monkey” on Youtube to get your full 80’s vibe on.
Here are a few more pictures from my fellow Longwood High School Alumnus, James Dentel.
James is an outstanding events and fashion photographer. Check out his Facebook page here: Photos by JD. (Many of them are easy on they eyes, guys.) The photos are below are just shots taken on his way to work, but James tells me that it’s funny how people really respond to them. (I don’t know why I dig them so much, but I do.)
Any New Yorker will know that most of these are of the George Washington Bridge (or “the GW.”) The exception is the photo second to last — that’s the Verrazanno-Narrows Bridge, one that I myself have traversed too many times to count.
Click to enlarge.
If you’re looking for an outstanding fashion, glamour or events photographer in the New York area, then peruse the work of my Longwood High School Alumnus, James Dentel. James has a terrific eye, and his work is absolutely beautiful.
You can see from that from the shots below. They were taken at the recent “Three Nights of Horror” Halloween weekend event at the Lava Nightclub and Exit 33 in Verona, NY.
You can find more samples of James’ work at the “Photos by JD” Facebook page, and at his website:
https://www.facebook.com/PhotosByJamesD/info/
Nice work, James.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 