As Frank Ebetino prepares to turn 99 — having recently celebrated his 75th wedding anniversary — he is fond of thinking back on his days growing up in Rye.
He lived at 15-17 West Purdy Ave., which is now a parking lot, and spent many happy days at Playland, the Apawamis Club, and Church of the Resurrection.
His story in Rye begins with his grandfather, who arrived here from Bari, Italy, in 1906 to work on the railroad. He left behind his wife, and children, including Frank’s father, but four years later he brought over his family. Multiple generations lived together on West Purdy Avenue in a home bought from Catherine Thompson by Frank’s grandparents in 1926.
Frank can clearly picture that home. “Grandma would attract us to her porch with candy or pennies so that we would sit at her feet and recite the rosary with her in Italian,” he recalled. “My grandparents never spoke English.”
During the Depression, the family put a sign on the house, “Ebetino’s Inn,” and offered rooms to boarders.
Ebetino remembers attending school and church at Church of the Resurrection, where he was baptized and where his teachers were nuns. “I may still have crooked knuckles,” he said, but with fondness. The church was at the center of his family’s life, and he would attend religious lessons there on his way back from classes at Rye High School.
He had jobs all over town. He was hired at Goldberg’s Cigar Store to sweep the floor and at Ralph’s Shoe Repair to polish shoes. And he was a paper boy, delivering The Rye Chronicle and The New York Times on Sunday along with The Herald Tribune. He worked at Westchester Country Club as a “barboy,” and he and his friends made sure to go to the train station and check the pay phones at the station for loose change. With his friends, he caddied at The Apawamis Club, where he found golf balls and turned them in for between a penny and 50 cents apiece. They’d also scour the ground for discarded newspapers so they could collect coupons for Playland.
Ebetino worked at Playland in the summer of 1948, at a clam chowder stand by the water.
But Ebetino waxes eloquent about one memory in Rye in particular: when in 1940 Notre Dame football players drove to Rye and attended Mass at Resurrection. “They arrived in new cars from Detroit,” he said. At a father-son banquet as part of the event, he won a football signed by one of the legendary Four Horsemen of Notre Dame — quarterback Elmer Layden.
Ebetino also remembers a darker time. When he was leaving the Embassy Theater in Port Chester on Dec. 7, 1941, he learned that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. When he graduated from Rye High School in 1944, he enlisted. The Army sent him to Princeton and to Texas A&M for special training. When he was discharged from the Army in 1946, he had $170 in discharge pay and returned to Rye to seek the advice of Fran Walsh, Rye High School’s football coach and a math teacher. The coach advised him to consider attending Ohio University, which is what Frank did, and from there he went on to a long career at Norwich Pharmaceutical, eventually earning a Ph.D. in pharmaceutical chemistry at Tohoku University in Japan.
Ebetino’s wife, Betty, grew up on the East End of Long Island, a descendent of potato farmers. Their son also received a Ph.D. in chemistry, and their daughter earned a bachelor’s degree that included study at a seminary. Frank and Betty have six grandchildren. Sadly, they lost their first grandchild to cancer.
The Ebetinos have lived in Florida for decades now, but Rye remains at the center of Frank’s memory. He thinks back on the family on West Purdy Avenue, the nights spent counting trains and freight cars on the New Haven and Hartford Railway as they rode along the tracks next to his house, his grandfather’s beloved fig tree in the backyard, and even waking one night when he was a child to see a barn ablaze across the street.
Though those memories are from years ago, they still burn brightly in his mind across the years and the miles.
