If you work with young people long enough, you get to experience the strange feeling when their kids start becoming your clients.
"We like it when they go on to college and come back to settle down in Levittown," said Nassau Police Officer John Hofmann, leader of the Police Activity League unit on Division Avenue. "They are now coming back and coaching, bringing their kids into a program that they belonged to years ago. Sometimes it's scary; to me, they're still kids."
Next year, the Levittown PAL will celebrate its 40th anniversary. Hofmann has been on the local scene for 18 of those years, helping the organization continue its mission of providing healthy recreational and educational activities for young people.
Year-round, the PAL serves 2,500 kids ages 5 to 18 in 15 programs -- archery, baseball, basketball, bowling, cheerleading, golf, ice hockey, karate, lacrosse, roller hockey, softball, tennis, track, twirling and wrestling. (Bowling, which runs from September to the first week in April, itself serves 280 youngsters.)
The options are there not only to build up youngsters, but keep them from the negative influences in society. They're also geared to keep up with young people's changing needs, especially since the prevalence of latchkey children, with both mom and dad out of the house.
Are the problems young Levittowners face any worse than they were two decades ago? "If anything, they're magnified (by the press) more," Officer Hofmann said. "It's becoming more prominent, drinking, drugs, than gotten worse. Then, it was not talked about as much."
Hofmann -- who came to Levittown from Oyster Bay,where he had worked for five years -- works with the other PAL volunteers to emphasize education as the number-one priority. "We're getting into some scholastic programs," said Hofmann, who said the Levittown PAL will inaugurate computer classes sometime next year.
The Levittown PAL also offers karate training, as well as a program called "Victims No More," which aims to provide a streetwise approach to self-defense for women and teenage girls. The program combines an hour and a half lecture and an hour and a half of self-defense techniques.
"We've been doing this for two years," Hofmann said. "We've done a couple of hospitals with the nurses, teenage programs, adult programs." Victims No More is free, and all that organizations wishing to take part have to do is provide a site. "If they have a facility, fine," Hofmann said. "If not, we'll come and get one."
Officer Hofmann gives credit to his PAL board for helping build the programs up, especially during the last three years. The officers include president Ed Lloyd, vice president Bill Cascarella, treasurer Ronnie Cascarella, secretary Kathy Lloyd, liaison trustee Mike Lamhut (who interacts with the Nassau County PAL), and fellow board members Charles Milone, Alice and Dolph Queripel and Linda Giannico.
"It's amazing what they've done here," Hofmann said. "They're the business end of it. They really are the backbone of this whole organization."
In addition to unit meetings, Hofmann and the officers from the other Nassau PAL units meet every two weeks at St. Brigid's School in Westbury to share information. Hofmann added that the National PAL meets yearly to share information. (The next national conference is set for late May/early June in San Francisco.)
If there's anything that Officer Hofmann would like to see for the PAL movement, it would be for the organizations to have a facility in which they could hold countywide championships, as opposed to the local PAL buildings with their individual gyms. "I think that would draw all the PALs a little closer, too," he said.
