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“I got caught in the toilet smoking so many times by Miss Kittelburger I should have a flat head.” Mary Ann looks back and sees that she and a few other girls settled into their own niche in school—the rebel niche. “I was just full of life,” she says, and her niche was how she told the world she was somebody worth noticing. The niche was part image, part fact. The fact began even before she came to Sea Cliff from a stay at St. Boniface. “They got tired of locking me up in the closet and I came back to Sea Cliff in 4th grade.” In high school being a rebel also meant dressing in tight skirts and wearing black leather jackets.
Her father was a Czech immigrant who worked at the A&P days and at a deli at nights, but the family had little money. “Most of my clothes came from the Salvation Army.” She flirted with boys she found attractive or lively. “I went for the guys with the rolled up sleeves and leather jackets,” but when two guys sandwiched her between them in a movie and started fumbling she got up and called her father to come get her. She was a tease but she also believed, “A girl should save herself for the man she loved.” Why she chose the sexy rebel way to express herself? She says, “Who the heck knows? If you’d have asked me ten years afterward, I might have said to get attention, and ten years after that I might have said some psychological problem. And ten years later something else. As you become older you become more aware of your errors in life.”
When her father suggested that he knew the right man for her, she was sure “If your father knows someone it’s got to be a nerd.” Not long after when she gladly accepted a ride from a friend she found herself sitting next to a good looking guy who she thought was a “fast cookie.” She told her father, “This pervert is going to ask me out.” He did, but he turned out to be what his friend Chet Katoski described—“a nice quiet guy”. He was also the president of a youth group and a recent Roslyn High graduate. Mary Ann was 15. They were engaged. The day after she graduated she married her fiancé, Raymond Salavec. He came from a Czech immigrant family and delighted her father who had emigrated from Czechoslovakia.
Mary Ann had begun working before she was of legal age. After school she worked at the phone company. When her first of three children came in 1959, she and Raymond agreed she would stay home and be a mother. Her third child was deaf and Mary Ann learned sign language. He’s now a machinist on Long Island.
When she began working as a North Shore High ‘matron’ in the 1970s, monitoring halls and other spaces, she knew she had made the right decision to stay home with her children while they were growing up. Nevertheless, At North Shore she felt many of the kids’ parents were both working and paid too little attention to where they were and what they were doing. She kept busy “dodging smoke bombs, rounding up rowdy kids, and “sniffing out drugs.” Her own experience, she feels, allowed her to stay one guess ahead of the kids.
Eight years later Mary Ann next opened her own store, A Touch of Fantasy, in Glen Head where she sold wicker furniture. The business had been going some 8 years when doctors diagnosed Raymond with a fatal case of lung cancer. She took a big loss on the business, “but what’s important--money or the man you love?” Raymond was dead within a year. For three more years, “I was in the Land of Limbo.”
Then her doorbell rang and on the stoop stood an old friend of Raymond’s from the Sea Cliff Fire Department, Frank Remacle. She invited him in. “When you trust somebody you have known for years, strange things happen.” They moved to his place near Hot Springs Village, Arkansas. Soon “I was dying of terminable boredom and was taking to the fish and they were talking to me.” They were both happy to find The Villages, a lively, new community near Ocala, Florida. Mary Ann is busy fund raising for children’s charities and working with battered women. Having grown up in a time when few women would talk about the problem or leave their husbands, she says, “I have great respect for anyone who can take off and try to save themselves and their kids.”
She also belongs to a Red Hat group. “We do nothing. We go out, we party, and enjoy each other’s company.” She enjoys country dancing and has been belly dancing. It’s not for skinny women, she says. And she’s proudly not skinny. “You want to make love to a woman, you need something to hold onto. At least I can bend over and put my shoes on.”
Maryann makes her own jewelry and enjoys her flamboyant and bright costumes. She also stays close to her children and grandchildren--a much loved, no-nonsense, full-of-joy grandma. Life is for living and she lets them know she expects the best out of them whether in manners or merry-making.
Why did she have 17 Christmas trees inside her house in 2008? Because she likes parties and is still very much her own person and very much full of life and nobody is going to lock her up in a closet.
