Sayville, NY

So, for some reason that I can’t remember anymore, I decided to put my hometown into good old google and see what came up. I eventually ended up on this site. (sorry – view this site in Firefox if possible – it’s a geocities site with lots of popups)

This site is has some of the funniest, one sided, sensationalist stories I’ve ever seen reported. Most of the stuff reported here is true, but some stories get slanted as if this writer worked for the Enquirer.

At any rate, I did learn a few things (and found other websites to back some of this stuff up)

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1) The Telefunken Wireless Station. Growing up, I always saw these large radio towers (North of the train tracks, West of Cherry Ave. in West Sayville). I was always curious about them. Turns out these towers played an important role in World War 1. They were built and run by the Germans before the US entered the war. That is until the Army intercepted and decoded a transmission coming from that tower, sent to Mexico to try to get Mexico to invade the US. The other infamous message sent from that tower was the instructions and coordinates to sink the Lusitania. Then we sent in the Marines. (more info is here)

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2) High School Gun Shootings Violence in the 90s set off by Kid in Sayville! That’s the actual title of the page. In the article it goes on to state how a student, Kevin, brought a gun to school to shoot another student. Now, I was there that day and Kevin was a friend of mine. (It was in Chemistry class when he was called out of class) What the article doesn’t state is that there were no bullets. The gun was not loaded and he wasn’t going to shoot anyone. He was threatened by bullies with a knife the day before and was just going to brandish the gun for intimidation.

The article does get one thing right, Kevin was a good kid. He was expelled for the rest of the school year and I brought him his homework from time to time. The rest of the article tries to connect this incident with all the other gun toting kids and school shootings. I don’t know about that, but the author really tries to make more out of the incident than what really happened.

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3) Pirates buried treasure in Sayville. Ok, so here the author takes some extreme liberties in trying to assert that there is buried treasure in Sayville. While Pirates probably did run around the bay and ocean around good old LI, whether or not any actual treasure is buried in the hamlet of Sayville remains to be seen. (Still cool to say that I traveresed the same grounds as some infamous pirates)

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4) Father Divine lived in Sayville for a while. Now this is an interesting story that I had no idea about. This Father Divine character was a cult leader who told his followers to give them all their money and had to call him god. (more here) Jim Jones of Jonestown was apparently a follower and modeled his own cult off of Father Divine. He even tried to overtake the Divine’s cult and assests after Father Divine died.

All I know is that the next time I’m back in Sayville, I’m definately going to drive by 72 Macon Street.

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5) There is a lot of information about Melissa Joan Hart, aka Sabrina the Teenage Witch. This is where I just rolled my eyes. Meilssa is a year younger than I and since I went to private school from K-8, I never met her. She left for acting school in NY before she entered High School. But the site does mention some of her friends who I knew.

Now, I’m not trying to assert that I’m cool because I’m like 3 degrees from her, cause really, knowing a D-Grade actress really isn’t that big of deal. And there’s no way I’d ever be cool.

But what riles me is that the site tries to portray Sayville as a bunch of really mean, snobby kids that all they do is pick on others. There certainly were plenty of those types of kids, but it’s also high school. I’m sure you could get stories like those out of nearly every school.

The fact is, I had a great high school experience. I have nothing but good memories (well mostly) So again, the author took a couple of students who had bad experiences and tries to sterotype the whole school.

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So, there is some fun history from my home town. And there is still a ton of other loose ties and stories listed on the site. I never knew Sayville was as interesting as all that. And here I always thought my town was dull.

Actually, it probably still isn’t interesting, it’s just that the author uses a lot of sensationalism to make our town sound a lot more exciting than it really is. Just more proof that you can’t always beleive what you read on the internet.