"Sound Beach Was Different Then"
Robert Dezendorf

In 1929 my parents were married and in their early 20's. They each had siblings that were young kids. All three families -my parents, my father's parents, and my mother's parents took a ride one Sunday to look at Sound Beach, which they had read about in the newspaper.

They all bought adjacent property - my parents in the middle - on Malverne Road, a dead end street on the far east side of the community a few blocks from the clubhouse. My sister was born in 1938 and I followed in 1945. They originally camped in tents on the properties until they were able to build something more substantial. In those days garages were usually detached from the houses. Many times this was the first structure built because it was small enough to be built in a summer and then offered a place to store tools etc all year. This is what my father did and my mother's parents. My father's parents bought a pre-cut house that was shipped by train to Rocky Point. All the boards were stenciled with his name on them and numbered.

The garages became rustic cabins that were a step up from the tents. There was no electricity so everything was done by hand. There were outhouses called "privies" on every lot. While they had their disadvantages, they had some advantages over our more modern facilities-they never splashed back, and no one ever spent too much time in them, so waiting was rarely a problem. Spiders were a 'protected' insect and valued highly-they trapped and ate the flies. Powdered lime was kept in a covered can with a scoop whenever it got too ripe.

My dad mixed cement by hand for the garage floor and made curved blocks for a 600-gallon cistern buried in the ground to store rainwater. The water was caught in gutters on the roof then went through the downspouts into a barrel with charcoal and rocks then a pipe underground to the cistern. A pitcher pump above was used to bring up the water. I still have that pump. This water was not used for drinking but for washing (baths were done standing in a galvanized tub, soaping up then rinsing off. Water was heated on the wood stove for this as well as for dishes. My mother had two kettles- one for cistern hot water, and one for drinking hot water that we got from the town.

In the mid 40's SBPOA membership included beach tags to be fastened to the swimsuits,(these were cloth but I've seen older ones that were round metal), a garbage pick up card, to be prominently displayed in a front window of the house, and a water pick up card, to be placed on the car visor that allowed members to fill empty bottles at the town pumps. There were two locations for this. One was in the square at the community house that had several spigots, and at the Clubhouse that had two. Most everyone used glass gallon bleach bottles. There was a danger of them clanking together in the car during transport and breaking either empty or worse when full. This problem was greatly alleviated by cutting sections of old inner tube tires and stretching them to slip over the bottles creating a protecting cushion that would absorb shock. As time went by and the bottles would build up some mineral deposits on the inside, some beach sand and water swirled around a few times would scour them clean again I remember waking up in the morning to the sounds of the kerosene stove going 'blipp, blipp, blipp' as my mother would light it for breakfast and the fuel would travel out of the spring loaded glass reservoir to the burners. We also had a huge cast iron stove with double ovens that burned both wood and coal that we used for heat on cool evenings.

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