School Story:
Although Cathy attended grade school at St. Boniface and lived in Sea Cliff and Glenwood in those years, she did not come to Sea Cliff High until her junior year. Her parents, with a family expanding from Cathy to another five children, had to keep moving to have enough space. She was born in Brooklyn and after reaching 5th grade in St. Boniface she moved to Levittown. When she came back to Sea Cliff she found, “I kind of lost touch with the class. Everybody had grown up.” And she had little time to catch up because to help her large family she took a job working at McClellan’s five and dime in Glen Cove after school. She was also doing a lot of at-home babysitting but at least being the oldest child and ‘big sister’ was fun. “Everybody had to follow me.”
On Independence Day the year of our graduation Dotty Gerroir took Cathy to South Hempstead to watch the Fireman Games in which a friend of Dottie’s was participating. After the tournament Dottie and her friend introduced Cathy to fellow fireman Harry New. They married in September 1959. After graduation Cathy had started worked as a teller for First National Bank of Glen Head where she would soon be joined by classmate Ned McAdams starting his fast climb to president. In 1960, however, she became pregnant, and “They had to hide me because you weren’t allowed to be in front of the customers with a pregnant belly showing. When I got too big I had to leave.” Their daughter Donna arrived in ’61, Christine in ’63, Jeffrey in ’64, and Harry in ’65. They became Cathy’s job for the next 12 years. Meanwhile her husband Harry left Grumman Aircraft to work with the Nassau County Police Department. Like her own parents, Cathy and Harry had to move to find needed room for a family. After a short time living in an apartment in his parents’ house, they bought and fixed up a two bedroom bungalow in South Hempstead, but soon had to move to a larger house in Deer Park. They missed their friends in South Hempstead and the volunteer fire department and the community woven into its membership. They moved back, bought a bigger house, fixed it up and stayed.
Cathy found Harry’s shift work easy enough to adapt to since her own father had worked rotating shifts at LILCO. They enjoyed their life together and the social events at the firehouse. They took up line dancing and square dancing. When Harry retired from 25 years with the police department, he was able to fulfill his ambition of becoming fire chief in South Hempstead, still a volunteer job. He also did occasional insurance investigations. In 1977 when Cathy had sent her youngest child to junior high, she began started work driving a small bus for a nursery school and helping tend the children during the day. By that time, she says, “I was good at being with little kids.” A few years and she had had enough time with little kids and through a temp agency she found work with GMAC’s insurance wing.
During those years she and Harry had been visiting her oldest brother and her father who had moved to New Bern, NC, and they liked the climate and the town. In 1990 they decided to sell their house and settle in New Bern, Carolina’s old colonial capital on the Cape Fear River near the coast. As they packed up, Harry began to feel run down. Doctors in New Bern ran many tests and finally, two days before Christmas 1990, they diagnosed him as having a rare blood and liver disease. They gave him 6 months to a year to live. He died in March. Remembering the many fire department dances and other social activities they had enjoyed together, she regrets that the retirement with her husband that she had looked forward to never really started.
Cathy stayed in New Bern because other family members had also settled there. In 2004 she began to take an active part in Republican politics and became the county treasurer. “It’s probably the best thing that ever happened to me meeting all these people,” she says. She is also treasurer of the GOP women’s club and visiting her five grandsons and five granddaughters spread across the state.
