Steve Buczak Saw it All

It has been said that when an old person passes on that it is as though an entire library has burned down. Certainly that was the case last summer with the passing of Steve Buczak; decorated WWII airman, photographer, author of some 30 books, historian, and one of the founding members of the Levittown Historical Society.    

Steve grew up on an East Meadow farm to a family whose contributions to the community include the founding of East Meadow's oldest firehouse and Orthodox Church. In that other world of the 1930's, he hunted small gave in the open meadows south of Hempstead Turnpike in the future Levittown and came to know many of families whose farms would one day become the rows of mass-produced Levitt & Sons houses and the winding streets of our community.

Related: Levittown Historian, WWII Vet Passes Away

As a teenager, he took an interest in photography and a number of his photos of the Jerusalem/Island Trees area prior to WWII grace the museum of the Levittown Historical Society he co-founded in 1997 as well as a number of local history books. In those days, the wind-swept Hempstead Plains, between Bethpage and Garden City, was still horizon-to-horizon farm country dotted with little rural airfields and Steve's future in aviation was foreshadowed when, at three years old, he was at Roosevelt Field when Charles Lindbergh left for Paris.

These fields were oftentimes merely a dirt-strip-and-wooden-hanger operation and Nassau Airport, whose hanger became the first worship space for St. Bernard's Roman Catholic Church in Levittown, was one of those operations. In 1939, Steve took his first flying lesson there in a J3 Piper Cub, as well as a number of aerial photographs and gained the fearless skills he'd need in the skies over Europe as a B-17 bomber's machine-gunner. The Levittown Historical Society is privileged to own snapshots of the dogfights in which he participated; alternating between machine gun and the camera that captured the deadly surrealism of combat thousands of feet above the battlefield.    

Extraordinarily enough, Steve's first mission aboard The Dutchess was at D-Day "softening-up" German positions on the Normandy coast - the first of a statistically improbable thirty-three missions which earned him four Air Medals and the Distinguished Flying Cross. In July of 1944, whilst The Dutchess put in for repairs, Steve's replacement plane experienced mechanical problems and crashed into the North Sea; his quick-thinking prevented some of his comrades from drowning until a British rescue party arrived.    

After the war, Steve married Dorothy Welch and over the next few decades, successfully undertook a number of entrepreneurial ventures but his most noteworthy was in his father's Meadowbrook Window Cleaning service, the elder Buczak hitting a gold mine by contracting with Levitt & Sons. Thus began Steve's fascination with the matchless phenomenon of entire landscapes being transformed, overnight, into mass-produced suburban communities. It ignited in him his great passion for preserving the history of everything he saw rapidly changing around him.

In 1988, he was amongst a group of citizens, led by Tom Carroll, who founded the Levittown Historical Society where he became one of its directors up until 2000 but remained active as a regular at the Museum on  Wednesday afternoons until his health slowed him down.   

 It was on an April evening in 1996, at a reception hosted by the Long Island Forum Magazine where I had been a contributing editor, when I first met Steve and Lynne Matarrese, then the Society's president. We three talked for hours about local history, about the Society's plans to organize a museum, and about Lynne's upcoming book The History of Levittown, New York. It was then, took that I became a member of the Society I've come to serve as vice president.    

The world became a far less interesting place on May 17, 2012 when, for the last time, Steve took off. If anyone exemplified what's come to be called the Greatest Generation - those born in the Jazz Age, reared in the Great Depression, forged by WWII, and living the American Dream of suburbia - it was Steve Buczak.    

Want to learn more about the history of Levittown and the surrounding communities? Visit www.levittownhistoricalsociety.org