Elizabeth, Rich and a Boat Ride to Rye

I had a first person essay in the Journal News, the major daily serving Westchester County, NY, June 29 about my grandparents first meeting on a boat trip to this exotic future-world known as Rye Playland. They set foot in Westchester a full 73 years before my family and I arrived in the Land of the High Taxes.

I interviewed my father and my aunt to get some details on how my grandfather and grandmother met, and imagined the rest.

It's neat to have a piece of my family's history now on record, and it's fun to get some people who were alive during World War I--both grandparents are deceased--into the Google world and internet bloodstream. For instance, googling "Richard Malone" and "firefighter" has my grandfather in the Top 10 today.

It was Assumption Day – Aug. 15, 1933 – and Richard Malone, a 19-year-old factory worker in Elizabeth, N.J., was on a Rye Playland-bound excursion with his pals, a rickety steamship pushing off from Port Elizabeth, crawling through the inky Arthur Kill, into New York Harbor, up the East River and, finally, onto the expansive Long Island Sound. How Playland, five years young at the time, must've looked to the sweaty castaways, an Emerald City off in the shrinking distance.

Stocky and sincere, Rich approached a shy teen girl – also from Elizabeth, and sharing a name with the blue-collar city. Elizabeth saw some good under Rich's gruff exterior, and agreed to spend the day with him.

I had originally intended for the essay to run on the back page of Westchester Magazine, for a new department the mag calls "My Westchester." Alas, they had already greenlighted an essay about a couple falling in love at Rye Playland. But I was able to get it onto the Journal News' Opinion pages. For the record, I don't get paid for the essay. But once in a blue moon, some things are more important than payment.