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Newsday (New York)
July 4, 2004 Sunday
NASSAU AND SUFFOLK EDITION
BY STEPHANIE MCCRUMMEN. STAFF WRITER
On Sundays, Josephine and Richard Cawley would often trade their
everyday worries for long drives east, with no particular destination
in mind.
They'd leave their house in Williston Park and head toward the end of
the expressway, beyond houses and traffic and loud things, and when
time came to fork north or south, they usually picked north.
Soon, they were speeding past open fields and the quiet gray of the
Long Island Sound.
They felt an affinity for it. They made the drive again and again.
Then one day Richard Cawley saw that a motel they often passed was
for sale, a one-story strip of 15 rooms along North Road, facing the
water. He decided to take early retirement from the phone company,
and at the end of June 1994, he and Josephine bought the place.
During summer months, they moved into one of the rooms while they ran
the motel, and soon, a novel feeling settled over Josephine.
"Strangely enough - you wouldn't understand ... " she began,
apologetically. "I'm from England and my husband's from Ireland.
We've been here 40 years, but up until 10 years ago, I never felt at
home on Long Island. I never felt at home until I came here. For the
first time, I felt settled."
What Josephine Cawley found was what generations of Greek and
Armenian families have found at the unassuming motel they book solid
summer after summer: the paradox of a temporary place that feels
familiar, like home.
"They come here because it reminds them of where they came from,"
Josephine said of her guests, and herself.
Since the Cawleys' Sunday drives, the North Fork increasingly has
become like the tonier South Fork: real estate prices have
skyrocketed as people from Manhattan have bought summer homes.
Wineries have flourished and some art galleries, and now Greenport
has a boutique hotel that offers reflexology and herbal bath
treatments. Billy Joel bought a place.
But Cawley's Southold Beach Motel is much as it has been since the
1950s. It is all yellow siding and 15 screen doors that open to a
deck with chairs facing the water. And if its blue is not as bright
as the Aegean in Greece or Lake Sevan in Armenia, if the green does
not roll over hills as in Josephine's England, North Fork summers at
Cawley's are pleasingly pale and unfold like a ritual.
The Armenians, mostly from New Jersey, come starting this weekend,
and August belongs to the Greeks, mostly from Astoria and elsewhere
in the city. The Cawleys estimate that at least 75 percent of their
guests are regulars.
Soon, there will be Nick, who books the same room the same three days
of the week, every week, summer after summer. There will be the
painters and diamond dealers and the man Josephine knows as the
red-headed Greek. They will sit all day under an umbrella on the
coarse sand of Southold Town beach, play cards and fish for smelts
with nets cast into the Sound.
At night, as cars brush past on North Road, they will get dressed up
and cook the catch in the yard behind the motel. They will offer some
to the Cawleys, and the Cawleys will politely refuse, and the sky
will turn orange.
"We've got beautiful sunsets," Josephine said. "They've been written
about."
Last week, she and Richard, who met 37 years ago at a dance hall in
Queens, were getting things ready for another season. Josephine
walked around to the backyard, where white lawn chairs were still
tilted against tables, and where she had planted a garden of
marigolds and impatiens and a pink tea rose she had transplanted from
her house in Williston Park.
Richard gave it to her in 1971, she was saying, just after a long
strike at the phone company that had left him out of work. "He said,
'If they survive, we'll survive,'" Josephine said.
This August, the Cawleys will have paid off their mortgage on the
motel. Richard Cawley says that Josephine always wanted a home by the
water, and now she has one, at least during summer.
GRAPHIC: Photo by Howard Schnapp-Richard and Josephine Cawley at
their motel, where Josephine said she finally "felt settled."
July 4, 2004 Sunday
NASSAU AND SUFFOLK EDITION
BY STEPHANIE MCCRUMMEN. STAFF WRITER
On Sundays, Josephine and Richard Cawley would often trade their
everyday worries for long drives east, with no particular destination
in mind.
They'd leave their house in Williston Park and head toward the end of
the expressway, beyond houses and traffic and loud things, and when
time came to fork north or south, they usually picked north.
Soon, they were speeding past open fields and the quiet gray of the
Long Island Sound.
They felt an affinity for it. They made the drive again and again.
Then one day Richard Cawley saw that a motel they often passed was
for sale, a one-story strip of 15 rooms along North Road, facing the
water. He decided to take early retirement from the phone company,
and at the end of June 1994, he and Josephine bought the place.
During summer months, they moved into one of the rooms while they ran
the motel, and soon, a novel feeling settled over Josephine.
"Strangely enough - you wouldn't understand ... " she began,
apologetically. "I'm from England and my husband's from Ireland.
We've been here 40 years, but up until 10 years ago, I never felt at
home on Long Island. I never felt at home until I came here. For the
first time, I felt settled."
What Josephine Cawley found was what generations of Greek and
Armenian families have found at the unassuming motel they book solid
summer after summer: the paradox of a temporary place that feels
familiar, like home.
"They come here because it reminds them of where they came from,"
Josephine said of her guests, and herself.
Since the Cawleys' Sunday drives, the North Fork increasingly has
become like the tonier South Fork: real estate prices have
skyrocketed as people from Manhattan have bought summer homes.
Wineries have flourished and some art galleries, and now Greenport
has a boutique hotel that offers reflexology and herbal bath
treatments. Billy Joel bought a place.
But Cawley's Southold Beach Motel is much as it has been since the
1950s. It is all yellow siding and 15 screen doors that open to a
deck with chairs facing the water. And if its blue is not as bright
as the Aegean in Greece or Lake Sevan in Armenia, if the green does
not roll over hills as in Josephine's England, North Fork summers at
Cawley's are pleasingly pale and unfold like a ritual.
The Armenians, mostly from New Jersey, come starting this weekend,
and August belongs to the Greeks, mostly from Astoria and elsewhere
in the city. The Cawleys estimate that at least 75 percent of their
guests are regulars.
Soon, there will be Nick, who books the same room the same three days
of the week, every week, summer after summer. There will be the
painters and diamond dealers and the man Josephine knows as the
red-headed Greek. They will sit all day under an umbrella on the
coarse sand of Southold Town beach, play cards and fish for smelts
with nets cast into the Sound.
At night, as cars brush past on North Road, they will get dressed up
and cook the catch in the yard behind the motel. They will offer some
to the Cawleys, and the Cawleys will politely refuse, and the sky
will turn orange.
"We've got beautiful sunsets," Josephine said. "They've been written
about."
Last week, she and Richard, who met 37 years ago at a dance hall in
Queens, were getting things ready for another season. Josephine
walked around to the backyard, where white lawn chairs were still
tilted against tables, and where she had planted a garden of
marigolds and impatiens and a pink tea rose she had transplanted from
her house in Williston Park.
Richard gave it to her in 1971, she was saying, just after a long
strike at the phone company that had left him out of work. "He said,
'If they survive, we'll survive,'" Josephine said.
This August, the Cawleys will have paid off their mortgage on the
motel. Richard Cawley says that Josephine always wanted a home by the
water, and now she has one, at least during summer.
GRAPHIC: Photo by Howard Schnapp-Richard and Josephine Cawley at
their motel, where Josephine said she finally "felt settled."