The Memento Of My Father’s Bigotry — And What Could Have Been

By Diane K. Martin

Although he was a doctor who could assuredly afford to pay his way most places, my father dearly liked getting something for nothing. Maybe this was because his father had worked in a kosher butcher’s, plucking chickens. Maybe it was because Dad’s generation endured the Depression. Maybe it was just that he was cheap.

He and my mother, for their honeymoon, spent two weeks in a summer camp before he went off to war — free room and board in exchange for salving poison ivy and bandaging scraped knees. Then sometime in the ’50s or early ‘60s — before the building of the Robert Moses Causeway in 1964, when the only way to get to Fire Island (the barrier island off Long Island) was by ferry — Dad announced plans to take mom and the four of us, kit and caboodle, to Fire Island.

We would live over the firehouse, spend our days at the beach, and he would be the island’s doctor for the summer.

Preparations to go to the beach were always a big deal in our family, even for just an afternoon excursion. Up at dawn, Mom would bake blueberry nut bars or brownies or both and make sandwich after sandwich — presumably the fresh salt air would induce each of us to eat at least three.