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When a flood in the Glen Cove low lands found its way into Marilyn’s apartment and wiped out many of albums albums, memorabilia and her yearbook, she cleaned out the mess and went on with her life. No big deal—she had five children, a busy husband, and little time to spare for the past. It wasn’t very far past in any case. As she grew older and the children began leaving home, she had more time to think about “life’s unanswered questions,” and the fact that some of the answers seemed to lie in the past and the people and events that remained so strong. “The memories are always there. Seems like there was never any closure.”
She asked around Sea Cliff where she might find a ’57 yearbook but found nothing. Then her youngest son Mark suggested he browse the web with her computer. When they found our class albums and our web site, “It was like a new door opening up,” she says.
The yearbook she lost says, “Where there’s Cappi and Ginny, you’ll find Marilyn.” It also noted her interest in stock car racing and someone named Tommy. Now Marilyn remembers only that he was Tommy Greenrose “from Glen Head or Glen Cove.” The yearbook did not mention the more important boy in her life, Ronnie Jeacomo who was bussed into school from Locust Valley and who was in the class of ’59 before he dropped out to work at the Record and Pilot and then become a partner with his brothers in Preferred Sand and Gravel.
Marilyn began school in Glen Cove but when the family lost their home, they went to live on the edge of Harlem with an aunt and uncle. Then, as now, the city public schools were loud, overcrowded, run down, and did little educating. When the Fehr’s bought a house on Cromwell Place in Sea Cliff Marilyn should have entered 9th grade with the Class of ’56, but she was too far behind. She says that of course, she was angry that she could be made to repeat a grade as if she had failed, but “It was for my own good that I stayed back because I began picking up what I should have learned in Manhattan.” If going from Glen Cove to Manhattan was a shock, the transfer from city to Sea Cliff was a change of worlds. “I was used to all these rowdy people being around. So I just took a back seat and watched.”
After graduation her father sent her to business school, and when she decided that was not for her, he found her a job at Luyster Motors. “My father did everything,” she says, but even her father could not beat fate. When the beaches opened on Memorial Day in the summer of ’58 her 18 year old brother Bobby and two friends took a homemade boat out into the harbor. On the wake of a big boat the homemade boat flipped and Bobby was struck on the head and drowned. At his funeral Marilyn was surprised and moved to meet one of the most formidable teachers of her time at Sea Cliff, Dorothea Comfort.
The next June Marilyn married Ronnie Jeacoma in St. Boniface Church. A month later she was pregnant. “This was when life started coming in. I had answers for everything except for life.” Life didn’t give her much time to look for answers. A second child came a year later and soon she had five. When a friend took her to Inwood on the border with Queens. “I just fell in love with it. It was just like Sea Cliff. It broke my heart when I saw it.” Marilyn liked the schools and the family stayed there till they had graduated.
When the youngest entered pre-kindergarten, Marilyn went back to work. She started nursing school and began work as a nurse’s aide in St. John’s Nursing Home. She was working with Alzheimer’s patients and loved it. After 8 years she left St. John’s and began work at with the mentally impaired at Dix Hills, then with the vocational training program VOCES. She also worked as a residential counselor in a group home for a few years, then as manager in another house until she retired. But soon she was wondering, “What the heck do people retire for?” She went back to work in Oceanside.
Working with the mentally impaired and Alzheimer’s victims, Marilyn says, “It should have been depressing, but I learned if you are going to be in this business you can’t take on the personal side and say you can’t leave me. You just have to love them and have respect for them. I couldn’t go back to work if I felt sorry for them. I just needed to be there to help them.”
Looking back over the decades of work with family and in nursing, she says, “The things that I have done over the years and the kind of work that I’ve done over the years required giving a lot of myself. I don’t know if I would have picked it. There were heartaches, there was sorrow. As I look back it was good.”
During her marriage she also found that she and Ronny were “drifting apart” and they divorced but remained close, so close that they came back together. He died in 2002, survived by his identical twin brother Ray who would soon accompany Marilyn to her granddaughter’s wedding.
Marilyn says her heart is still in Sea Cliff, still in the house that her father put so much work into. Meanwhile she lives in Massapequa. When she’s not at work, she works out in the gym, bowls, and no matter what the weather is, every day she and friends walk a few miles. Classmates who watch Channel 21’s marketing programs might see her now and then answering the phones. It’s her moment of fame, she says, and she has enjoyed meeting performing artists and writers.
Marilyn is still engaged in looking for the answers to life, the ones that “didn’t come when I needed them. Now there’s something there for me [to find].” Finding old friends from Sea Cliff has helped. She says, “The older I get the things that would have almost destroyed me, I’d let it go and move on. I don’t get stuck in it. I’ve grown a little bit.”
