Valentine's Day

Villagers celebrate love

Posted

Two local couples who will celebrate Valentine’s Day on Sunday each chose Valley Stream as the place they wanted to live their lives together and raise their families. For the Rosenthals, the village has always been a tight-knit community with unbeatable proximity to New York City. For James and Marie Walsh, it offers their kids what it provided them as children: a great place to grow up.

Larry and Gloria Rosenthal met on a blind date in 1948 — “which neither of us wanted to go to,” said Gloria, 88. Larry was two years out of the Air Corps, in which he served as a radar technician in Italy during World War II. He was playing the field, dating a number of people, as was Gloria, but a married couple that were mutual friends of both wanted them to meet. The couple invited each of them over, and while Larry refused to break a different date on a Saturday night, he agreed to go the next day.

When he arrived at his friends’ home, he saw Gloria holding the couple’s baby. He was smitten. “It was the whole picture,” said Larry, 90. “She was beautiful; the baby was cute.”

The 21-year-old Larry went home that night and told his mother that had he met the girl he was probably going to marry. He asked Gloria if she would go out with him and she agreed. They were married 14 months later.

“He proposed to me in the subway while we were waiting for a train,” Gloria said.

“I told her I had nothing else to talk about,” Larry said. “So will you marry me?”

To present her with an engagement ring, he got creative. He had used his technical knowledge from the military to build a television set from a kit that he bought — he had the only one in the neighborhood — and the couple would watch Milton Berle together. One day Larry passed Gloria a Cracker Jack box, and she found the ring inside.

The Rosenthals had a son, Edward, in 1953 and a daughter, Amy, in 1956. The family moved to Valley Stream in 1964 from a small home in Laurelton. They found a much larger house on Catalpa Lane in Mill Brook, where they still live. They loved being close to the city and having the Green Acres Mall and the train station within walking distance. Their children attended the Forest Road School and South High School.

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