R.O.B.S. - Announcements October 2017

THIS MONTH'S FEATURED HISTORY PROJECT
INTERVIEW:
Maddy Dwyer
Elementary School Teacher
November 4, 1999

     Madeline Diana Lazaro Dwyer retired from the Brentwood School District after 31 years of service in 1995. Her maternal grandmother who she remembered fondly died in 1990 at the age of 94. She knew all of her grandparents. Her mother’s family came to America from Greece. Her grandmother was born in 1900 and came here with parents. Sometime during the voyage or when they arrived at Ellis Island everything they had brought with them including gold jewelry secured in a steamer trunk was stolen. Her father was sent back to Greece. Her mother also had to return and then lost her entire family (nine brothers and sisters) who all died in a kind of epidemic. She was sent back when she was only eight and brought up by an aunt and grandmother. She was married at sixteen in an arranged marriage and raised six children. She was a very strong woman with an old world perspective but who was in many ways quite modern. She had her first baby at seventeen and a child every two years after that; three girls and three boys.      Maddy grew up with a very close extended family who all lived in Franklin Square on the same block. They continue to be close and get together regularly on holidays, and on mother’s and father’s day. The cousins have stepped up now and take turns hosting their visits. She enjoys seeing the family grow through the generations.
     Her dad had one brother. His father (her paternal grandfather) came from either Poland or Russia, she wasn’t sure where. Her paternal grandmother died when Maddy was four, so she doesn’t know as much about them as she knows about her mother’s family. This grandfather lived into his eighties. She remembers them as being in the manufacturing business.
    Her mother was and remained at the time of this interview very family oriented. Being brought up in a Greek family, Maddy saw her mother as old fashioned in that she went from being dependent upon her father to being dependent upon her husband. Though a woman with a mind of her own she was still submissive to male authority. Maddy struggled against that submissive part of herself given her father’s strong paternal nurturing influence and the modeling role in her life.
    She lived in Centereach with her husband Tom who has a son and a daughter and two grandchildren. Scott lived in Babylon and Lynn was in San Diego and San Francisco, California. She was an Environmentalist with the EDF (Environmental Defense Fund) Maddy and Tom visited regularly.
    Born in Bensonhurst which was a very nice neighborhood in Brooklyn in 1942, she moved from there when very young. She spent her early childhood with her brother going between her mother and grandmother’s homes. Her brother was a year and a half her junior. Her earliest memories include walking to her grandmothers with him, and as she said, “you could do that in those days”. “I was five and we were allowed to do that” She remembers going marketing on 86th St with her mother and grandmother in the post-war period prior to the advent of supermarkets. She was the oldest cousin in the family and was given lots of responsibility to keep her eyes on the younger ones.