Chapter 7: Modernization

The Age of the Auto As dawn began to break over the Hempstead Plains on a frosty October morning, the clustered crowds along Jericho Turnpike watched the great racing cars line up in their starting order. • A Desire Named Streetcar • FAST FORWARD: Discoveries of a Road's Scholars • Legacy: Road Test: It's Still a Hard Drive

Dinner With Typhoid Mary Poor Mary Mallon. Of all the bizarre and melancholy fates that could befall an otherwise ordinary person, hers has to be among the most sad and peculiar.

A Battle Over the Air Waves As the 20th Century was dawning, two pioneers in the birth of electronics -- Guglielmo Marconi and Nikola Tesla -- were locked in an almost neck-and-neck race to develop radio as a ``wireless'' communication system, a revolutionary development destined to radically alter the path of history. • The Medium, the Men, and the Message • The Magic of Radio • Important Dates in Radio History

Let There Be Light From the beginning, Long Islanders haven't had much good to say about the colorful entrepreneurs who labored to light up the countryside. • Legacy: The Island's First Telephones

The General Slocum Disaster As she waited on deck for the excursion steamer General Slocum to leave lower Manhattan for a Long Island picnic grove, Mrs. Philip Straub had a premonition of disaster. Just before the gangway was removed, she rushed ashore. A man she confided her fears to grabbed his wife and five children and followed.

The Manhattan Connection On the frosty morning of Dec. 28, 1892, Pietro Rocco was about to shave the first customer in his Long Island City barber shop when there was a sudden brilliant flash of light and a shattering explosion. • Fast Forward: Grand Entry for LIRR Commuter

Fliers Take Wing Dawn tinged the sky over the Hempstead Plains as dentist Henry Walden, cigar clamped between his teeth, climbed into his homemade airplane and opened the throttle. • A Craving for Speed, Danger • Crowds Look Up To Flying Machines • Pioneers in Motion

From Long Island to Over There In the summer of 1917, the largest city on Long Island was created out of 10,000 acres of mosquito-infested scrub oak and pine in central Brookhaven. Not long after the First World War ended, the city disappeared. • Legacy: A Missile Flies Over the Bay

The Sinking of the San Diego As the armored cruiser San Diego slowly capsized within sight of Long Island, Capt. Harley Christy jumped from the tilting bridge, descended a ladder to the deck, slid down a rope and then walked over the rolling hull as if he were a lumberjack on a • A Teen in the Trenches

The Sound of America John Philip Sousa might not have spent much time on Long Island, but he loved the time he spent. • More About the Composer and His Music

Flying Against the Odds On May 12, 1927, an obscure airmail pilot named Charles Lindbergh taxied a wood-and-aluminum monoplane to a stop on the muddy grass at Curtiss Field in Mineola. • Corrigan Finds a Way to Fame • Wings and a Prayer

Lindy Flies Into History In the sun's glare above the Atlantic, Charles Lindbergh struggled to stay awake. • Aviation's Productive Partnership • The Lindy Hop

F. Scott Fitzgerald Country It was the beginning of a decade of Prohibition and apparent prosperity: a time of jazz bands and petting parties, high-stepping flappers and college boys with hip flasks. • Rumrunners Run Around LI • Oh, Those Flabbergasting Flappers!

His Home Was a Castle Otto Hermann Kahn was a rising figure in the banking industry and a generous patron of the arts. But to his wealthy neighbors in Morristown, N.J., in the early 1900s, Kahn had an overriding fault: He was Jewish. • Special Section: Our Houses

A Body of Evidence on LI She was a lovely corpse.

LI's Rebels With a Cause 'Brace up, my dear. Just pray to God. She will help you.'' That advice, which still might raise eyebrows today, was offered decades ago to a weary suffragette protester by Alva Erskine Smith Vanderbilt Belmont of Long Island, New York and Newport. The recommendation was typical of Vanderbilt Belmont, a dark-haired dynamo who pursued votes for women as vigorously as she had vaulted up the social ladder. • Women Go to the Head of the Class

The Great Pickle Works Wreck Gloom taunted the August night in 1926 even before the train crashed. Torrential lightning and rainstorms had plagued New York since at least the day before. The train was running 17 minutes late. And, if the power of superstition be respected, it was Friday the 13th.

It's a Tall Tail, but True In 1931, when Long Island was mired in the Depression, a Riverhead duck farmer named Martin Maurer had an idea he hoped would promote his business. • Into the 1950s, Business Was Just Ducky

The Master Builder One day in 1926 Robert Moses took several architects and engineers across the bay and onto a deserted sandbar called Jones Beach, where the quiet was broken only by the harsh squeals of the seabirds and the rhythmic pounding of the Atlantic waves. They looked around in disbelief as the animated, 37-year-old Moses spun a magical, futuristic vision of what would be one of the grandest bathing beaches in the world. • A Close-Up View, Warts and All, Of an Arrogant, Endearing Man • Jones Beach, the Marvel by the Sea Robert Moses' Legacy

Too Much Monkey Business There was an ape on the running board. • Frank Buck's Animal Kingdom Of East Massapequa

Waves of Immigrants In 1884 a 44-year-old Polish immigrant farmer named Frank Fafinski stepped ashore in Manhattan from the Ellis Island ferry. • Descendant: The Tastes and Sounds of Poland

The KKK Flares Up on LI On a balmy June evening in 1923, more than 25,000 men and women assembled in a rolling meadow to hear the message of the Ku Klux Klan. The speakers, dressed in their familiar white robes and pointed hoods, warned that Jews and Catholics were a danger to the nation. And a Protestant minister on the rostrum branded the Catholic Church ``a political party in disguise.''

The Mogul of Montauk Carl Fisher was a blustering, cigar-chomping promoter. Above all, he was a dreamer. • Legacy: Works by Fisher Adorn Montauk • LI's Coming-of-Age Party

Surviving the Depression Things were hitting bottom in September, 1933, when Queens resident Albert H. Amend wrote in a small notebook:

Hitler's LI Legion In the summer of 1936, the still-distant threat of Nazism cast an unexpected shadow across the hinterlands of Long Island. • On Streets Paved With Acrimony • Growing Up With Subtle Anti-Semitism

The Great Storm of '38 It came without warning, with a ferocity without equal in modern Long Island history -- the hurricane of Sept. 21, 1938.

A Cop Kills the Mayor Long Beach Mayor Louis F. Edwards had just walked out of his brick and stucco house on West Beech Street with his police officer bodyguard, James Walsh. Officer Alvin Dooley was on duty in a police booth on the corner 200 feet away. He left it and headed toward them. The three men came together on the sidewalk at 10:10 a.m. on Nov. 15, 1939.

Major Airports Take Off Less than 40 years after the Wright brothers got an apparatus that looked like a box kite off the ground at a North Carolina site called Kitty Hawk, New York City opened what was then the world's greatest commercial airport on the marshlands of North Beach in Queens. • LI-MacArthur Airport Grows as an Alternative

A Rosy View of the Future For a fleeting moment, the 1939 New York World's Fair held out the promise of a bright and easy future. • In 1964, a Less Optimistic Mood • When Flushing Welcomed the World • Flushing: Community Profile

Little Peconic Bay and E = mc˛ The most famous summer vacationer in Southold history was the German-born genius who created the world's most famous equation. His name was Albert Einstein. • Einstein's Muscles and Morals

The Wings of War They had fearful and aggressive names like Wildcat and Hellcat, Avenger and Thunderbolt, and they lived up to their deadly image in the skies over Europe and the Pacific. Stamped with the label ``Made on Long Island,'' these winged agents of destruction played a major role in winning World War II. • World War II: The Combatants • Serving on the Home Front • LI's Own Rosie the Riveters

The Little Paper That Could The creator of America's most successful tabloid newspaper, the New York Daily News, warned Alicia Patterson that conservative Long Island readers would never accept a tabloid. That advice came from her father, Joseph Medill Patterson, the man she had always tried to please more than anyone else.

The Nazi 'Invasion' of LI At 8 on the evening of June 12, 1942, the German U-boat Innsbruck completed its 15-day journey across the Atlantic Ocean. As darkness descended, the submarine settled quietly to the sandy bottom a few hundred yards off the Amagansett beach. • Nazi Saboteurs At Amagansett

It's Official: Peace at Last On Sunday, Sept. 2, 1945, Americans commemorated the official end of World War II with the first observance of V-J Day -- ``Victory Over Japan.'' On Long Island, as in many other places throughout the nation, it was a quiet holiday of thanksgiving. • Americans Savor the First Taste of Victory • Long Islanders Remember V-E Day • New Yorkers Remember V-E Day

A Shaggy Dog's War Story By the end of World War II, many Americans sensed that nothing would ever be the same again. But in Glen Cove, there was Butch -- and everyone hoped that Butch would never change.

The World Came to Long Island In the years just after World War II, a series of historic decisions was made at the United Nations. • Charter of the United Nations • Milestones in UN History

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