Dr Lewis A W Alleman - One More on Morton Manor

In the previous post, we mentioned that a large parcel of land that came to be known as Morton Manor was the sole remnant of an estate that remained intact during the development that occurred on the Willets Farm in the 1920s and 1930s. It is also the reason why Oak St. is a dead-end road that does not run through to Maplewood St. The estate once belonged to one of the most prominent opthamologists in the country, Dr. Lewis Arthur Welles Alleman (left).

Dr. Alleman a native of Geneva, NY in Seneca County, was born in 1862 during the Civil War to the son of a Union army surgeon. In 1888 he received a medical degree from Jefferson Medical College (now part of Thomas Jefferson University) in Philadelphia and soon after moved to Brooklyn and opened up a practice that specialized in opthamology.

He then went on to publish numerous articles in medical journals and wrote a book entitled Optics as Related to Evolution (D. Appleton, 1891). Among his many achievments, he refined and patented a medical instument called an opthalmo-dynamometer (below) that measures the strength and behavior of eye muscles during convergence.

That same year he married Miss Frances Dudley, a descendant of Thomas Dudley, co-founder of Harvard College and former Governor of the Massachussetts Bay Colony. In 1892 he became chairman of the eye dept. at Long Island Medical College in Brooklyn (now part of SUNY Downstate).

Though his primary residence was in Brooklyn and he retained a summer residence in Seneca County, as can be seen from the 1906 E. Belcher Hyde map (below), he purchased a house and a parcel of land on Maple Ave. (now Maplewood Ave), just south of Hempstead Turnpike. Though it is unclear how extensively Alleman and his family lived at their country place in Hempstead, given the fact that his two daughters, Marion and Elizabeth, attended St. Mary's School for Girls in nearby Garden City, they must have spent some time there.

According to the Nassau County property records, their home (below) was built in 1888.
















Then, in 1908, we find the following notice below in the July 2 edition of the Hempstead Sentinel:

Dr. Alleman eventually moved back to Geneva and, after suffering from an illness, died at the young age of 56. His only son, Dudley (d. 1966), was a WWI veteran who was an ambulance driver and was injured in combat. He eventually married and moved to Massachussetts. Dudley had a daughter, Frances D. A. Luce (d. 2001), who became a prominent child psychologist in Boston. Her son, Jim Luce, is founder and president of Orphans International Worldwide.

The new owner of the property on Maple Ave, Henry Rickmeyer, moved the home just to the north to its present location, and by that fall, moved in with the rest of his family. It wasn't until the early 1950s that the rear of their property was subdivided and the homes built around the Oak St. cul-de-sac.

The Hill Sisters - Basketball Phenoms

Long before the passage of Title IX, girls on LI who wanted to participate in competitive sports in the '30s and '40s had little recourse. According to Paul Luchter who maintains a website of odd sports lists and other data, most public and private schools of LI had no varsity sports programs for girls, so those who wanted to play basketball competitively belonged to private clubs. Perhaps one of the most unique and successful of these clubs was the Hill Sisters - Marjorie, Isabel, Ruth, Betty, Helene & Kathleen, based out of West Hempstead. By 1940 it was reported that the Hill Sisters had won 80 out of 84 games.

Their success got to a point that they signed an ad deal with the Liggett & Myers Tobacco Co. to advertise Chesterfield Cigarettes (seen below), a deal that's almost comical to imagine today. Like so many other cigarette ads of that era, this one aimed to soften the rough-edged perception of smokers and at the same time target the valuable female demographic. This clever ad feeds the perception that 1) cool, sporty women smoke Chesterfields; 2) cigarettes aren't bad for you since, after all, this group of healthy, young, successful girls smokes them. The ad ran in many newpapers throughout NY, including the Brooklyn Eagle.
At least the ad execs had the sense to leave out from the ad the youngest sister, Kathleen, who at the time was a mere 16 year-old attending Hempstead High.

The Hill Sisters were coached by their father Lawrence Wallace Hill, who worked as a foreman for the NY Telephone Company and played basketball in his high school days. His family consisted of a total of 9 children, two of whom, John Lawrence and Thomas, were the babies of the family and were probably spoiled silly by their older sisters [Update - Thanks to blogger comments, I learned that the Hill's later had a tenth child, Cynthia, who was actually the baby of the family]. Their mother Lillian, at one time was president of the Ladies Auxiliary of the WH Fire Dept., where the barn dances she organized no doubt served the dual purpose of raising money for the department and while helping to find suitors for her seven daughters.

So, where in WH did this burgeoning brood live? In a two-story dwelling built for them in 1913 as part of the Fairlawn Park tract at 35 (now 80) Walnut St., (photo shown below, taken from the Nassau County property survey. An addition was later built on the house in the '60s). Given the location, it's pretty fair to assume that the Hill Sisters practised and played many of their games at the George Washington Middle School gymnasium, right down the block.