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It Came From Levittown

Kristine O'Malley's "Planning the Future"

Kristine O'Malley's darkly nostalgic view of Levittown comes forth in her haunting pastel paintings of the community and its people based on computer graphics and photographs. After growing up in Levittown copying Norman Rockwell calendars, she cursed her home as a cultural wasteland and left to study art in New York City. Later, she moved back to raise her kids and today Levittown remains her leitmotiv. The work above is entitled "Planning the Future." (© 1996 Kristine O'Malley)

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In 1951 John A. Gambling, his wife, Sally, and their 1-year-old son, John R., moved into the Cape Cod at 7 Sugar Maple Rd., Levittown, a house they rented for $60 a month while looking to buy a home somewhere else. The popular father and son hosts of WOR radio's ``Rambling With Gambling'' wound up living there for more than two decades.

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Ellie Greenwich was 6 and musically inclined when her family moved from Brooklyn to their Levitt ranch house in 1951. Learning piano and the accordion, she began writing songs at 13, graduated from Levittown Memorial High School, got married and left for New York City in 1962 to become one of the legendary ``Brill Building'' pop composers. Levittown life help inspire Greenwich, whose hits dominated America's 1960s sound track, including ``Be My Baby,'' ``Leader of the Pack,'' ``Chapel of Love,'' ``And Then He Kissed Me'' and ``Da Doo Ron Ron.''

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Inspired by mass housing developments across the country, Malvina Reynolds' catchy 1962 folk song, ``Little Boxes,'' stuck to Levittown by popularizing the view that Levitt houses were ``all made of ticky tacky. And they all looked just the same.'' That same year, novelist Anne Estock wrote ``Christmas in August - The Story of a Prostitute,'' a potboiler that portrayed a troubled young woman who falls in with a man selling books that have been banned by the Levittown School Board. The woman winds up working as a call girl in Manhattan.

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Also in 1962, singing comedian Allan Sherman (famous for his novelty hit of life at summer camp, ``Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah'') poked fun in his album ``My Son, the Folk Singer'' with a parody of Harry Belafonte's ``Jamaica Farewell'': ``I'm upside down. My head is turning around. 'Cause I've got to sell the house, in Levittown.'' ``The Lockhorns of Levittown'' - later shortened to simply ``The Lockhorns'' - sprang from the pen of cartoonist Bill Hoest onto the newspaper funny pages in 1968. A graduate of Cooper Union in Manhattan, Hoest was born in New Jersey and late in the 1940s moved to Long Island, where he created the childless suburban couple Leroy, tippling girl watcher, and Loretta, wisecracking roast burner, who have been in their 40s for nearly 30 years. The strip lived on when John Reiner and Hoest's widow, Bunny, took over after Hoest's death in 1988. In the lyrics of his song ``Captain Jack,'' piano player Billy Joel, who grew up in the Hicksville section of Levittown, captured the 1960s scene of alienated teenagers hanging out at the Village Green drinking. Yet in Stuart Bird's documentary ``Building the American Dream,'' Joel said he strained to write a song specifically about his home. Unable to think of what to say, he gave up and changed ``Levittown'' to ``Allentown,'' producing yet another hit.

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The original Levittown houses didn't have garages, but beginning about two decades ago, several garage bands broke on tothe national charts, including Levittowner Eddie Money with 1977's ``Baby Hold on to Me.''

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Former high school teacher Gene Horowitz' bodice-ripping 1980 novel, ``The Ladies of Levittown,'' featured a titillating account of America's most famous suburb, scandalizing many residents, who recognized their own lives depicted in the pages. The saga - taking place between 1947 and 1978 - pushes back the drapes, offering insight into the passions and disappointments of middle-class women as they struggle to reconcile their relationships with husbands, lovers and children.

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In 1983, dancer-choreographer D.J. McDonald symbolized the suburban experience in his 50-minute multimedia dance-play ``Levittown and the American Dream.'' The revue ran briefly in Greenwich Village and at Brown University. One character created by McDonald, whose family moved from Levittown to Westchester when he turned 10, was a 14-year-old boy just starting the advanced men's class at the School of American Ballet. Another is a young woman who recites:

One night one summer and you are there a spin in the yard lie down, the grass in your hair the sky turns under your feet a day at the beach that is love in the sand by the sea sunset takes me away radiant heat There you are, in Levittown

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W.D. Wetherell's offbeat and unsettling 1985 short story ``The Man Who Loved Levittown'' is built around the yowlings of the prototypical post-World War II angry white man, who rails against the crowded roads, high taxes, rising costs, polluted waterways and subsequent waves of suburbia that changed Long Island. His wife dead, his dog run over, and feeling abandoned by Bill Levitt as well as his buddies who sell out and move to Florida, the protagonist moves to destroy the life he so lovingly created.

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Nora Silk, a strong, passionate and mysterious single mother, tosses an unnamed community a lot like Levittown into an uproar in Alice Hoffman's lyric 1990 best-seller ``Seventh Heaven,'' which features scenes of children falling asleep to the comforting hum of parkway traffic.

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A Levittown upbringing fueled cartoonist Bill Griffith's bizarre and disturbing imagination, which manifests itself in his ``Zippy the Pinhead'' cartoon series. A subversive parody of the darker side of suburbia, Griffith's comic strip offers a rebellious view of the nuclear family. He commemorated his hometown's 50th anniversary by visiting it in the strip.

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Film student John O'Hagan's campy sendup of Levittown in his 1997 documentary, ``Wonderland,'' drew bitter reaction from locals who felt the people interviewed were made to look bizarre and foolish. Critics said O'Hagan, a Marylander who never set foot in Levittown before filming, depicted Levittowners as a strange yet endearing lot, given to flag-burning ceremonies, exorcisms, bowling, block parties and downing Scotch with parakeets. ``I was always fascinated with suburban culture. I'm also a real fanatic about Americana, and Levittown struck me as being a fascinating American phenomenon,'' O'Hagan said.

The Lockhorns of Levittown" -- later simply "The Lockhorns" -- sprang from the pen of cartoonist Bill Hoest on newspaper funny pages in 1968. A graduate of Cooper Union in Manhattan, Hoest moved to Long Island, where he created the suburban couple Leroy, tippling girl watcher, and Lorretta, wisecracking roast burner. The strip lived on when John Reiner and Hoest's widow, Bunny, took over after Hoest's death in 1988.

-- Charlie Zehren

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