GWL-1940s

World War II brought gas rationing and an opening of the social order.  Through the war years and into the mid 1950’s the summer was populated with families in cottages for vacation while dad spent the week at work, and Friday night buses from New York which disgorged bus after bus of young people leaving the strictures and supervision of home for a weekend in Greenwood Lake with its reputed 128 bars.  For the vast population of New York and urban New Jersey Greenwood Lake was a wide open destination and the entire local population gave a collective sigh of relief as the last buses on Labor Day faced south and NY.  A day later Greenwood Lake was once again the quiet small town.  It was also the years of the growth of community: the ambulance corps, boy scouts, drum and bugle corps, American Legion, Elks, the resurgence of the Buzzer newspaper.  These were the years of my growing up with the bipolar community of summer and “off season.”