There wasn't very much along that strip of Old Country Road back on that day in the late 1930s when a tornado came roaring by an old farmhouse where Antun's catering hall is today - just the Plainlawn Cemetery across the street, which had opened in 1860 and some potato fields. Indeed, back then one had a largely unobstructed view from Old Country Road clear to the railroad tracks and the locomotives could be seen chugging in from Westbury.

As I sat on the bench in front of the Hicksville Gregory Museum on a sunny June morning a few years ago, vivid images of a rural Hicksville flooded my mind. It was 2001, the dawn of the new century, and my guide to the past was Bill Clark who had lived in the farmhouse as a boy. Bill's memory was extraordinary in its detail and his anecdotes were delivered as though the event had been only yesterday. He knew whose farm was where, where what shop had once stood and whatever became of so and so. His vast and incomparable memory was matched with an unquenchable desire, from early in life, to record his surroundings with photographs, documents and memorabilia which, when combined, made for Bill's popular "Jottings from Yesteryear" newspaper column. Anyone living in Hicksville in the 1990s will fondly recall this feature's intriguing before and after photographs.

Who else but Bill Clark would own an unopened stick of gum from the 1939 World's Fair, shopping bags from department store chains long defunct and Christmas tree ornaments from the 1920s? Who else but Bill Clark would have a 1923 photograph of the grassy meadows of Hicksville and the camera that took the picture?

Bill was a different kind of historian; the historian concerned not with great men and great events, but rather the flavor of ordinary life in bygone days. What sort of advertisement was popular in bygone days? What kind of confections and brand names were popular in the early 20th Century? How did the community celebrate Memorial Day and Labor Day and Christmas? Bill knew and collected samples, but unlike others who collect memorabilia, Bill's were not generic. They pertained, in some way, to Hicksville and life here decades ago. Indeed, long before it became fashionable among historians and archeologists, Bill understood that, - if as Plutarch said "all history is biography" - then the prosaic and the ubiquitous were more important to comprehension of human events than the monumental and exceptional.

I had the good fortune to work with Bill at the Hicksville Gregory Museum. It was his home away from home and his dedication to this institution harks back to the days when Dr. Gardiner Gregory first organized local residents and community leaders to save the historic 1895 courthouse that houses the museum's collections. As well stocked with antiques, memorabilia, rock, mineral and butterfly collections, fossils, dinosaur relics and historical artifacts as the museum is, it does little justice to the great human endeavor that makes our understanding of human events and the progression of life on this planet possible. That understanding comes from people and Bill Clark's passing on March 7, 2005 greatly affects us all.

Goodbye Bill. You will be missed.

Paul Manton,

Board of Advisors, Hicksville Gregory Museum