In Memory of Bill Adorno - NYC Life

I grew up with Bill Adorno in the town of Bayside, a suburban area of New York City. We went to Sacred Heart Grammar School together, beginning in 1938 and graduating in 1946. Since Bill was the tallest and oldest student in the class and I the youngest and near to being the smallest, it was a natural thing for him to take me under his wing and show me how life was meant to be lived.

 Living well for Bill involved going out in the woods with his 22 rifle or bow n’ arrow, or off to Little Neck Bay (or one of many lakes) to fish and camp. The furthest lake, Lake Success, was 6 or 7 miles away --- a long distance for young boys to go. But Bill had a homemade backpack to carry his gear in, looked older than he was, and could sweet-talk my mother into letting me go with him by telling her the lake was close by, and that we didn’t have to cross any busy streets to get there.

There were some projects Bill thought we should undertake to make our camping excursions more adventurous. One of these involved building a boat to take out on the bay. For this we first had to raise 15 cents to send off for the boat plans. But once the plans came there was no money left to build the boat. Bill thought we should get paper routes to raise the money. But at age 8 or 9 we were really too young to be delivering papers.

Some time after this Bill built a raft on his own. I didn’t know he was doing this because he didn’t talk to me about it either before or afterwards. But another classmate was down at the Yacht Club the day Bill assembled the raft and launched it into Little Neck Bay. At first every thing went well with Bill paddling off towards the far shore about a mile away. But then the raft began to disintegrate with the logs moving off on their own. So Bill had to abandon ship and swim into shore.

A great story of Bill's younger days from John McIntryre