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The Colgans moved to Sea Cliff from Franklin Square in 1944, into a small but bigger-than-before house on DuBois Ave. Sally started first grade at St. Boniface and is grateful for the quality of the teaching by the Sisters of Mercy. She also remembers how her classmate Ruth Ahearn responded to the class bully Wuzzy Britt by decking him. Her older brother Billy went on to Shamanade, the Catholic high school, and Sally came to Sea Cliff as a freshman.
Sally says she was and still is very shy and her opportunities to develop ties in the class were limited by her mother who demanded she come home right after school. “My mother was very controlling.” More important, she says, “Sports was my life saver. “It gave me something to do other than studying and sticking around the house.” She particularly appreciated Miss Maple’s approach—“she let you do your own thing. She was there to tell you to try this or that.” She also loved bookkeeping and band where she played bass clarinet. Sally had always been a sports fan, and when she would see the soccer team passing her house on its way to a game in Clifton Park, she would often follow. Shy Sally didn’t know then that she had been noticed and noted by a Glen Cover player ten years older than her.
After graduation she began work in a small Glen Cove printing shop doing bookkeeping and typing. Brother Billy commandeered the family car and her mom took her to work and picked her up. She had tried Driver Ed with Miss Tibbets, but the manual shift stymied her. “Miss Tibbets hated to get in the car with me.” At the print shop and later at Helena Rubinstein’s she saved her money, and in 1963 enrolled in Ryder College in Lawrenceville, NJ. Meanwhile she continued to follow local sports.
One afternoon a soccer player came over to talk to her. He was Dan McKinney, the Glen Cover player who had noticed her before. He was working at a Glen Cove grocery and they started dating and going to movies when he got off work. In 1964 they married. Dan taught Sally to drive and they bought a VW bug that took her 180,000 miles before she gave it up with a broken axle and regrets. She and Dan had moved to Coppaigue and had been making the long commute to their jobs in Nassau.
Their son Daniel was born in 65, Charlie in 67 and Sally in 68. Sally stayed home while the kids were growing, but her husband, “a workaholic” was hospitalized for two weeks with what doctors first thought was heart trouble, but that turned out to be fatigue from overwork. Sally took charge. “I said we’re moving.” And even without jobs in sight, they moved to Roanoke, Virginia where Dan had been born and where they had honeymooned. Soon Dan had a job in a supermarket, Sally in the main office of the 7-11 chain. When one of the boys got into trouble in the public school, they moved all three to a nearby Catholic school where Sally knew discipline would be stronger. The kids all graduated and went to college and have professional careers.
In the late 80s Sally accepted the offer to work with a firm that was computerizing their bookkeeping in their catalog and marketing business. Health problems sidelined her in ’93 and her husband Dan died the next year. Sally went back to work part time while she decided what she wanted to do. One day her daughter, now a physician’s assistant, called from New Hampshire and suggested she move up there. “I had decided it’s retirement time. I said sure, when do you want me to come?”
For the last few years she has been an increasingly busy and happy baby sitter for first one, then two, and in 2008 three grandchildren. Although she suffers from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease she says, “I love to walk except in the ice and when the wind chill is below 0.” The cold is hard on her at times but she says, “I refuse to move south. I’m not leaving my kids.”
