In the afternoon that I was born, and 30 or so miles east of the place where I was born, men were leveling Long Island potato fields and laying out the building plots of what was to be our future neighborhood.

They built our house and the one across the street first. These were the model homes. Young families would drive out from New York City on the weekends to see if this town they called Bethpage would be a good fit for them. A mile away sprawled Grumman, where thousands of workers had built war planes, and where other workers would someday build the Apollo lunar module. Jobs were plentiful in Bethpage.