'Spy Who Came In From The Cold' The Lynbrook life of the key witness in the 'Trial of the Century'

      Communist, editor of Time magazine, crucial witness in the landmark spy-trial against Alger Hiss, Chambers was an influential part of American history who, as Mattson explains, lived the formative years of his life in Lynbrook, at 228 Earle Avenue, where the house still stands.
      As the Christmas holiday approaches, enjoy this gift to be published in a series over the final four weeks of the year. Todays part one deals with Chambers position in American history, and his introduction to life in Lynbrook. Part two portrays Chambers unsettling childhood, the suicide of his brother during the years of prohibition, and a young college students move toward communism. In part three, Mattson relates how Chambers grew disillusioned with the communist party and believing he was being manipulated by the Soviet spy network broke from the group and bought a farm in Maryland. And in part four, Chambers, now editor of Time magazine, is called on to be a witness in the Hiss trials, a personally agonizing event for Chambers.
      The Herald hopes its readers enjoy this enlightening series, as we believe it is not only informational, but helps give shape to the communities we live in.
      
Part 1
WHITTAKER CHAMBERS
HOME IN LYNBROOK

By Arthur S. Mattson
Historian of the Village of Lynbrook
INTRODUCTION:
      Whittaker Chambers was born in Philadelphia on April 1, 1901. When he was three years old, Chambers and his family (father Jay, mother Laha and younger brother Richard) moved to Lynbrook, New York, on Long Island. Chambers grew to manhood in Lynbrook, where he lived off and on for 40 of his 60 years in a house which still stands at 228 Earle Avenue.
      Chambers is one of the most recognizable and controversial figures of the 20th Century. In 1949-50 he was the chief witness in the perjury and spying case against Alger Hiss, in what has been called the Trial of the Century. After Hiss conviction, Chambers presented himself to the nation as a sinner and a savior a former Communist and betrayer of his friends now come to save the country from the Communist peril. He remains one of the most praised yet condemned persons of our time. Certainly he is among the most understood.
      This article will try to add to the understanding of Whittaker Chambers by looking at his difficult life in Lynbrook. Throughout the incredible twists and turns of his life, Chambers saw the importance Lynbrook had on the various stages of his development. As Chambers said of Lynbrook, No land ever again has such power over him as that in which a man was once a child.
      Two years after the trial of Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers published his autobiography, Witness. Chambers had such intensely bittersweet memories of Lynbrook that he devoted a 100-page chapter, The Story of a Middle-Class Family, to his formative years there.
      This chapter, despite its brevity, is among the finest and most frightening of American autobiographies. In it, Chambers mentions his boyhood home at 228 Earle Avenue dozens of times, spending whole paragraphs even whole pages on each room, where he describes the pathos, the horror, and the occasional joy he experienced there.
      The best and worst memories of Chambers life were of growing up in Lynbrook. Even as an adult he often returned to the family home. From 1938, when he broke from the Communist Party, until 1950, when the Hiss trial concluded, he spent as much time in Lynbrook as at Pipe Creek, his Maryland farm.
      As a young man Chambers rejected Lynbrooks religious and social middle class values largely because of his unhappy experiences growing up there. As one biographer put it, Chamberss earliest commitment to Communism apparently represented an effort to extricate himself from Lynbrook and from a family melodrama that had become unbearable.
      The residents of Lynbrook have had an equally unfriendly relationship with Chambers. For almost 100 years they have at best ignored Chambers, and at worst rejected him that is until now, when his boyhood home at 228 Earle Avenue is being considered for listing on both the National and New York State Registers of Historical Places.
      In 1984 Whittaker Chambers was posthumously given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nations highest civilian award, by then President Ronald Reagan. Four years later his home in Maryland, Pipe Creek Farm site of the famous Pumpkin Papers incident was placed on the National Register of Historical Places. Yet despite the recognition, the two best selling biographies of his life, the wide influence on a generation of political conservatives from William F. Buckley, Jr. to Ronald Reagan, and the persistent, half-century-long national debate about his role in the Alger Hiss Trial, few people in Lynbrook today realize there is any connection between Whittaker Chambers and this Long Island village.
      Lynbrook has had other notable persons in its history. For 30 years, beginning in 1906, the internationally famous French chef, Henri Charpentier, creator of the crepe suzette, called the gourmet worlds attention to his Lynbrook restaurant. Early last century, Texas Guinan the dance-hall queen and Diamond Jim Brady were attractions in local night clubs. And Jack Douglas, the widely read author and humorist, was raised here.
      But none of these had the historical impact as did Whittaker Chambers. Nor did they experience the incredible personal drama of Lynbrooks own Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

Chambers Lynbrook
      On the southeast corner of Peninsula Boulevard and Earle Avenue, just across the street from the Lynbrook Baptist Church, sits a charming turn-of-the-century frame house, number 228. It has elegant columns and large front windows reaching low to the porch floor. The shutters are blue, as they were when Jay Vivian (Whittaker) Chambers lived there from the age of three in 1904 until his early 30s, when he would marry and join the Communist underground.
      Chambers autobiography, Witness, tells how his experiences in Lynbrook shaped the course of his life. The book also provides a snapshot of this Long Island village as it was at the turn of the last century.
      Chambers wrote about the rough, working class people, the immigrants, the peddlers, and the rare sophisticates; about the horse-drawn wagons, the railroad and the trolley; about the wooden schoolhouse, the shacks of Tigertown and the speakeasies. He mourned the continuing loss of so many trees, fields, woods and streams to progress. When Chambers first lived In Lynbrook, there was a meadow running for miles beyond his house. Soon it became a four-lane highway, Peninsula Boulevard.
      Chambers loved the sights and sounds of the slow-paced country village with its unpaved sand roadways and overarching silver maples. He recalled the musical creak and groan of axles, the slow clop-clop of horses as they pulled heavy wagonloads down nearby Merrick Road then Long Islands great southern highway. He also loved the flanking double line of 40-year-old flowering cherry trees which he described as domes of whiteness.
      He was a poet and a master of the English language. His descriptions of Lynbrook in the early 1900s as recorded in Witness are lyrically beautiful, yet frank:
      Lynbrook was then a village of . . . chiefly workingmen, shopkeepers, farmers and baymen men who owned or worked oyster beds in the tidal creeks and salt marshes. The south shore of Long Island was a landscape of unselfconscious beauty. Everything was small little farms, little orchards, little unplanned villages, little white houses master-built in exquisite, functional proportions. Birch and swamp-maple woods followed the course of little streams that slid silently over glinting sand. It was all saved from paltriness by the tremendous presence at its edge of the ocean, with its separating miles of salt marsh and sweeps of sky across which fleets of clouds rode to and from the sea.
      Into this idyllic scene stepped three-year-old Chambers and his family...

Read Part II, Chambers troubled childhood,
in next weeks Herald.