It’s time that we revive Teen House
January 23, 2014 — MERRICK HERALD
By SCOTT BRINTON
Calhoun and Kennedy high schools went head to head, circa 1969.
Sports participation increases over the years
Richard Kessel was Merrick Life intern
By PAUL LAURSEN
Athletic participation in the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District has been booming, Athletic Director Saul Lerner and Kennedy Athletic Director Craig Papach reported recently. Lerner said participation has risen significantly in the 18 years that he has been the athletic director. Sports scholarships have increased in those 18 years, participation is more inclusive, and teams are bigger, especially at the middle school level, he said in an interview last month in his Brookside School office. District teams are competitive in almost every sport, he added. “More kids play,” and many students have played youth sports in outside leagues, club and travel teams, said Papach, joining in the conversation. “Because of youth leagues, kids come in with a wealth of experience, prepared for the next level, which is us,” Lerner said. He added that in middle school, most teams have gone from cutting players to becoming non-cut teams. Junior-varsity teams were added, and girls’ golf and boys’ golf became school teams. Girls’ lacrosse and varsity hockey teams were added, as well. Average football teams are larger than ever before, he added. When he came to Bellmore-Merrick, football teams ranged from 50 to 60 players in 1996. Now they average 60 to 100. High school track teams average 80 members and had about 40 members 18 years ago. Papach noted that the Kennedy boys’ volleyball team won the Long Island championship two years in a row, and won the top spot in the state in 2012. Lerner said, “Baseball at all three [high] schools is outstanding. and boys’ and girls’ soccer at all three schools is played at the highest levels in Nassau County.” Papach said wrestling is one of the district’s top sports. “Last year Mepham had the New York state champion, and Kennedy had the All-New York State wrestler.” The district offers “a very full program for boys and girls, with tremendous opportunities for boys and girls. Equal opportunity is not an issue in high school sports,” Lerner said. “Girls and boys’ sports have both gotten bigger,” Papach added. Lerner said much of the growth is owing to the youth leagues. “Many more college athletes are coming out of Bellmore-Merrick,” Lerner reported. “Eighteen years ago, it was rare. Now it’s a regular occurrence.” Papach said there are “more opportunities to play college sports, with an increase in students who get scholarships for athletics.” Lerner said “Three percent of high school athletes go on to play college sports.”
In thumbing through the original editions of Merrick Life last summer, I was struck by the sixth issue, published on Oct. 27, 1938. The front illustration alerting the community of an upcoming bazaar was a handdrawn picture of couples dancing. Beside it was the headline, “Merrick Life backs revival of youth club: List of sponsors being sought.” The story, which was more of an editorial than an article, pushed for reinstatement of a youth center at the Merrick Grammar School, where children could go at night to congregate –– in today’s parlance, to hang out. At some point, someone had done away with a previous community center, and Merrick Life was pushing to get it back. During the 1960s, Merrick Life highlighted the Friday night Teen House dances, sponsored by the then Youth Council of the Merricks and Bellmores at Calhoun High School. The caption for one black-and-white photograph read, “All high school students of the Merricks and Bellmores welcome at 50 cents each. Interested adults to help as chaperones are welcome and needed.” At some point, the Teen House ended. That was a sad day for the Bellmore-Merrick community. Teens need a place to just be teens. Without one, the woods beside the parkways await, where too many of our young people set bonfires and drink and do drugs. If there were a Teen House today, we might at least keep a percentage of our youth from the call of the woods. I would imagine that, at the height of the ’60s, with parents consumed by worry over the growing youth drug culture, the Teen House was a welcome addition to the community.
Reporting on stories of teen substance abuse over the years at the Merrick Herald, I was inspired in 2004 to join the Bellmore-Merrick Community Wellness Council’s Alcohol Awareness Committee, which Gail Volk, who was then the council’s executive director, formed after reading a Herald series on youth alcohol abuse. Substance abuse was one of those stories that both the Merrick Herald and Merrick Life took seriously and felt an obligation to report on. Gail appointed me chairman of a post-prom party subcommittee, which quickly grew to a dozen members, mostly mothers of high school freshmen, sophomores and juniors who worried about what might happen to their kids on prom might. I often had to explain to people why I joined the committee, as my own children weren’t yet in elementary school. It took three years of planning and lobbying to get the post-prom party off the ground, but in June 2007, Bellmore-Merrick’s first substance-free “Midnight Madness” was held at Sportime in Lynbrook. Fran Licausi, the Wellness Council’s current executive director; Emilio Manzo, its president; and Calhoun PTA leader Phyllis Guttilla have kept the partying going since then. Last year the council teamed up with the Rock Underground, a Bellmore music school, to hold a battle of the bands at the Brookside School in North Merrick that raised more than $5,000 for the 2013 postprom party, which was held at Zachary’s in East Meadow. Local businesses and donors provided the rest. We shouldn’t focus solely on prom night, though. Every Friday night, kids get themselves in trouble because they find themselves with nowhere special to go and nothing special to do. Perhaps we might consider reviving the Teen House.
Wrestling has long been a tradition at Mepham High School.
Papach said “the level of coaching has improved.” He has been a football coach for 23 years at Kennedy, and head coach for seven years. He was a college lacrosse player at the State University of New York at Cortland. Before he came to Bellmore-Merrick, Lerner was an assistant principal in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Before that, he was a dean in East New York. He was a professional basketball player in Israel from 1977-80. Eric Dunetz/Herald Life
With sports participation at an all-time high in the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District today, the girls’ swim team, the Lady Sharks, has become a powerhouse, finishing second at counties in 2013 and placing several swimmers at states. Right, Georgeanne Zimmerman helped the Sharks, a district-wide team, score big this past year.
Richard Kessel remembers, “as if it were yesterday,” bounding up the steps to the old Merrick Life office in the Christy-Wolfe building with sports columns that he wrote as “the Spy” (a nickname coined by Calhoun basketball coach Glen Thurber). Editor Faith Laursen would critique his stories while he waited. “She taught me a lot,” he said, adding, “She said I was a good writer but a bad typist. “I used to type my stories at the kitchen table while my poor mother was trying to fix dinner,” he said. Rich had been an avid reader of The New York Times since sixth grade, when he was in Jay Pitti’s class at Lakeside School. But it was eventually politics, not journalism, that became his passion. When his mother died of cancer in 1972, he felt deeply that the government did not do enough cancer research. He earned a graduate degree at Columbia University in government and then began helping in local campaigns, eventually running against his neighbor, a local icon, New RICHARD KESSEL York State Sen. Norman Levy. He later joined the local consumer movement and met gubernatorial candidate Hugh Carey, who gave him his first fulltime governmental job helping with the transition to the Consumer Protection Board, which he would head for 11 years. He later became a Long Island Power Authority trustee and then chairman. He has also served on the Nassau Interim Finance Authority, the board overseeing the county’s finances, and as head of the New York Power Authority. In all, during his public service, he worked for six governors. At present, he does energy consulting but may want to do “one more gig” in public service at some point. Meanwhile, he is enjoying raising his 5-year-old son, Eli, in the same town where he had such a happy childhood, and where he hopes to live out the rest of his life.
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MERRICK HERALD — January 23, 2014
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Merrick Life photo
Teen House, held at Calhoun High School, was a popular destination for Bellmore-Merrick teenagers during the 1960s.
Keeping Merrick beautiful through the generations BY CHARLES ROSENBLUM
Twenty-seven years ago, I was asked to join the Keep A-Merrick-A Beautiful Committee. At that time, I knew little about this organization, except that there was a rotation of co-chairmen (the politically correct term “chairperson” was not in use back in 1987), and I was nominated to be the successor to one of the co-chairmen, Hal Horowitz. The Hon. Steven Scharoff and the Hon. Jerome Medowar preceded Hal as co-chairmen, and they collectively lobbied for me to take the position. Little did I know that I would join the dynamic duo of Faith Laursen and Ragna Murbach as one-third of a trio that ran the KMB Committee. For me, that was the start of a three-decade commitment to our local students and our community. My understanding is that Faith and Ragna started the Keep A-Merrick-A Beautiful Committee back in the 1960s. As the publisher of the Merrick Life, Faith was committed to enhancing our community, and Ragna, as an active member of the Merrick Garden Club, agreed to work together on this ambitious project. One of the committee’s annual projects was to organize and financially support an essay contest in the Merrick and North Merrick school districts. Over the years, the contest expanded to Merrick Avenue Middle School, the Progressive School and the Sacred Heart School, which recently closed. It
Courtesy Glenn Gebhard
North Merrick Avenue
also grew to include the kindergarten and younger grades with the addition of a poster contest. The committee has always relied on the assistance of the district superintendents. During my tenure, I proudly worked with Dr. June Irvin and Dr. Estelle Kamler in the North Merrick Elementary School District and Dr. Ronald Smith and Dr. Ranier Melucci in the Merrick Elementary School District. I am currently collaborating with David Feller in North Merrick and Dr. Dominick Palma in Merrick, who have given unwavering support to our organization. Each year we recognize at least one student in each grade at each school for their outstanding entries into our contest. The award ceremony is hosted in alternate years in Merrick and North
C E L E B R AT I N G 75 Y E A RS O F L I F E I N T H E M E R R I C K S
Merrick. Our outstanding children’s librarians from the Merrick and North Merrick public libraries select and purchase books for each award recipient. We are so fortunate to have Ilene Leibowitz from North Merrick and Bonnie Markel from Merrick for so many years assisting us. The budget for the purchase of these books has generously come from many of our local merchants, banks and organizations. Without the vision of Faith Laursen, the commitment of the Merrick Life and all those people who have contributed to the KMB committee for all these years, we would never have experienced the wonderful half-century run of this great organization. Thank you Faith and thank you to the Merrick Life for making this dream come true.