Comments:
Tina much preferred enjoying life outside of school to the routines inside. So it was that she looks back with gratitude toward Mrs. French who “was always so good to me even when I used to cut classes in the spring time and go to the Russian deli to get loaves of hot bread. Pete [Muttee] used to wear army pants and put Pepsi in the pockets. And we used to go down and swing on the ropes on the 18 Trails.” (The 18 Trails was the heavily wooded bluff above the shore between Tilley’s boat house and Shore Road.) She was such an avid ice skater that she once skated so long and late on a bitterly cold night that she could not untie her skates and had to walk home in them.
As the ’57 yearbook went to press it noted “future plans lead her to an office or the altar.” Easter vacation changed that. “I was up at Cozy Corner . . . and everyone was talking about going to college, and I was so insecure and unsure of myself, I didn’t want to go away from home. But I was getting so jealous that I decided I wanted to go to college.”
Mrs. McCormack, the new guidance counselor, told her she was very late to apply but with her help Tina found a place in a junior college. Her surprised father asked, “Where am I going to get the money?” Her very pleased mother said, “Don’t worry about it.”
Two years later while working for the athletic department at C.W. Post College she took advantage of free courses for employees. She also met her husband, baseball and football standout Joe Stone. In August 1960 he reported to the Giants football camp to train with greats like Rosie Greer and Sam Hough, but he returned to Long Island, married Tina and took a teaching and coaching job at East Meadow. From there he went to coaching at Post, then to Comack as a biology teacher, and finally to Windsor, Vermont where they saw a better environment for their children. After 11 years of marriage their hopes crashed when Joe took his own life. Tina learned later that his family had a four generation history of suicides.
In the hard years that followed she focused intensely on her children. “I was so afraid after losing someone so close that I might lose one of them, and I wanted to be there for them.” She and Joe had both become Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Tina found support from her friends and remarried. Tragedy, however, struck again when her daughter died in 1996. Tina also continued to suffer bouts of pneumonia. Then in her new house she fell down stairs, landed on one heel, drove the lower leg bones into the knee and shattered it into 40 pieces.
She now has a new knee and her old determination to carry on. That means continuing her active life in religion and raising her granddaughter, now almost 17, the owner of a mini-horse and an aspiring poet.
Tina remembers her own struggles with writing poetry for Norman Ross: “It’s tadum and then reverse, not even Keats could write much worse.” She believed she couldn’t write poetry. But today she writes and recently penned a poem about the cutting of an ancient apple tree for a new Jehovah’s Witness hall.
