Comments:
On snowy mornings in the 1950s Joy set out as usual to walk to school from her home on Club Road near Glen Cove Avenue.. She often walked with neighbors Allyson and Pete Rose, Susan Loftus, and Rose Martone. Another neighbor would come by in her car—Miss Maple the PE teacher—roll down her window and quip “walking is good exercise for you.” On the most bitter days Miss Maple might stop and tell them to hop in. Today Miss Maple lives in the same house and neighbors often see her out walking for exercise, past the school and to Shore Road and back. Joy sees Miss Maple on the bus to Atlantic City, New Jersey where they both enjoy the exercise of pulling the levers on slot machines.
Joy came to Sea Cliff from Bayonne, New Jersey. He father worked as an electrician, her mother at Columbia Carbon and Ribbon in Glen Cove. She entered school in Miss Shelland’s kindergarten class but soon returned to New Jersey. For fifth grade her family was back on Long Island and Joy was attending St. Boniface. In 7th grade she transferred to Sea Cliff School. The family’s Club Road house was recently torn down and rebuilt by one of Joy’s sons.
In high school she enjoyed the relatively unstructured atmosphere of homeroom and home economics. Among her best friends were Lorraine Grote, Faith LaJoy, Jimmy LeFebvre, Brud Neice, Pat Cavanaugh—“all hell raisers.” She also fell in love with Sonny Palumbo, a graduate of Glen Cove High in 1954 who took over the family butcher shop. While he was working she enjoyed the freedom of his convertible, one time packing Jimmy, Faith, Lorraine and a few others into it—“a lot more than I should have”-- to spend the day carousing at Jones Beach. “We had a ball. I always had a ball.”
When Joy graduated Sonny was already in the Army. They married in October 1957 and took up residence at the base in southern Germany’s beautiful Bavarian region. Sonny was then working as a mechanic, but having had his own butcher shop, the US Army decided to make him a cook.
The first of their two sons was born in 1963, the second in 1965. Joy became a “baseball mom,” proud that her pitching son was scouted by the Phillies but decided he wanted to stay near home. The other was her home run hitter.
When the boys were grown Joy got bored at home and went back into the insurance business where she had had a brief experience before becoming a mother. “Always hated math when I was in high school, and here I was in a job that I had to use math all the time.” She did well and stayed with it for 26 years until two knee replacements, then a serious auto accident laid her up. The painful recovery from the accident kept her away from the reunion.
She is still recovering and suffers from continuing pain of nerve damage. But she says “I’m not giving into aches and pains.” She still gets called to fill in for someone absent from the insurance agency, and two or three times a month she visits relatives in New Jersey and the casinos. Against the slot machines, she says, “I have a system. I’m holding my own.” As she has done with life in general.
