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February 01, 2001 - Taking the Depot Lane detourie Suffolk Times • Februaryl , 2001 0 akin the De-pot L detour Suffolk Times photo by Paul Stoutenburgh The Cutchogue railroad station, circa 1940s, where many caught the train until the station was taken down. BACK AT THE CORNER IN CUTCHOGUE, across the street from the bank on the Main Road; Phil Rysko tells us: "My father, Adolph, owned the whole block of stores on the south side of the street. He used the corner that is now the deli and the next building for his Royal Scarlet store, where he was a butcher." Barbara remembers when her sister, Betty, worked for Adolph during summer vacations. The Cutchogue Post Office with Mr. Mohlfeld and then Frank Gagen as postmas- ter was for many years right FOCUS next to Rysko's with its two ON THE glass front doors and its oiled wooden floor where everybody PAST met, even the school kids wait - by Paul ing for the bus, to keep warm and Barbara on cold winter mornings. "At one time the building Where the ice cream store is now was a laundromat run by Ben Roache," Phil told us. Alex Karam ran a "Ladies' and Gents' Furnishings" and "General Merchandise" store in that building earlier on. Mike Hand and his wife, Maggie, ran a general store in the brick - fronted building that now houses a chiro- practic office and an overnight typing office. The 1933 telephone directory listed "M.S. Hand cgrs confectny Main Rd Cutch6gue - Pec -10." Evidently the phone exchange for the Cutchogue area was "Pee" at that time. On the righthand side of the store were stools where you could sit and have an ice cream soda and on the left side you could buy most anything you needed. Mike's brother, Jim Hand, was the local stationmas- ter. This takes us out of town for just a bit, but it was an important part of life in Cutchogue. My dad used lage. She says, "Our school was closed forever at the time I entered sixth grade and we moved to the new, two -story, brick building on Depot Lane. My fondest memories are of the wood- en "school on the hill." When I went to the Depot Lane school I remember Miss Hand, who kept us boys well under control by wielding a leather strap. When it was my turn she took me in this long closet on the top floor and thrashed my legs with the strap but, of course, we boys wore long pants and some of us even k d h" t wasn't too maging, but it di teach us a les- son. In those early days there was no bus except for the high school and then you had to catch it at the Main Road. My sister and I had to walk a mile- and -a- quarter each morning and night to get to grade school and often we'd get into our lunch bags and find the goodies Mom had put there as we cut "cross lots" to school. On weekends in the winter we'd often skate on the bay when it got cold enough to freeze and there was a time when Herman Moeller and I built an ice boat that we took out on the bay and rumbled along on the rough salt ice. We've heard tell that it once froze hard enough to drive a cai across. Our mothers would drive us up to the country club, go across the grass and park so the car lights would shine on the pond where we'd skate. I can remember being there once when my sister fell and got up with a bloody face. In the 1930s when we lived on Fleet's Neck our uncle, Henry Barning, came out summers and ran Barning's General Store on West Avenue, on the left just before what was Boatman's Harbor Marina then. He used to make a great chum pot he sold in his store and I still have one. I mention this because there are many folks who are not "natives" to this area but ire what you might call "summer natives" who have come to our area and had cottages here for as long as many of the rest of us can remember, and it is some of those "summer natives" who well remem- ber what it was like out here many years ago. We thank them for their memories. Barbara tells of some of the summer natives she's known "nce they were 3 and 4 years old, Martha Jane Paul and Howard Meinke among them. Meantime back to the Depot Lane school area. Alex Danowski built the Depot Lane Garage and today there is still a gas station and garage on that corner. Across the street from there was a one - story white stucco house where J. Henry Wolf the bus driver lived. Bob at Cutchogue Hardware tells us, "I offered the old Wolf house to anyone who would move it off the property before I built my hardware store. It was moved across the Main Road, down Depot Lane, across Schoolhouse Lane and then through the fields in the wintertime and can still be seen todav on Alvah's Lane." Suffolk Times photos by Paul Stoutenburgh M __ - 0 love: The familiar Fleet barn, east of Cutchogue village. At ft: Paul's sister, Margaret, skating on the bay in the '30s.