Magee Bros Plumbing Long Island

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HEMPSTEAD SENTINEL

- Thursday, June 8th, 1939 -

The destinction of being the youngest person to work in undersea craft rests with a Hempstead man, T.J. Magee of 76 Thorne avenue, plumbing and heating contractor.

Much has recently been written about submarines because of the disaster to the United States Navy Submarine Squalus off Portsmouth, New Hampshire, that is a huge modern craft compared to the small 67-foot subs on which Terry Magee, then 15 years old, worked under the direction of J.P. Holland, inventor.

Terry Magee is a native Eastern Long Islander; was born at New Suffolk, now associated in most people's minds today as the headquarters for Peconic Bay weak fishing. He was one of nine children. Father Magee had charge of Robins Island that is in Peconic Bay off New Suffolk and which was stocked with all kinds of game. Now and again little Terry would go across to the island to help his father, from whom he has inherited a love for nature.

As a youth he attended the little school in town, and later went on to the Mattituck High School. He had a great interest in machinery and tools, and as there weren't any garages for motor cars, he hung around the shipyards into which motor boats came for repairs. They didn't need any boy helpers so he got a job in a general store, doing everything from sweeping out, weighing out sugar to measuring a yard of calico and delivering orders.

Some time later he got a job driving the horse drawn stage coach that plied between the village of New Suffolk and the railroad station at Cutchogue. He recollects getting "lost" in a blizzard on one of those trips.

One day the little village was all agog as down to the waterfront came six of the strangest looking craft anyone had ever seen. The curious looking fleet was submarines recently completed in a New Jersey shipyard and had come into Peconic Bay for testing in the deep waters. And J.P. Holland, the submarine inventor, became a near neighbor of the Magee family. It finally led to young Terry securing a job with the submarine fleet, first in the shops and later on the craft.

Terry recalls the discouragement of Inventor Holland in trying to interest his own government in the undersea craft; the Russians were interested and so were the Japanese but took a long while before the American naval officials finally came out to even have a look.

Terry's job was one of the oilers on the submarine, on which most everything was manually operated; there have been changes in submarine operation but Terry Magee maintains that he manually operated equipment is still the best. "We didn't have a serious accident on any of the six submarines in the more than a year I was with them," he says in support of his contention. Troubles that did occur were mechanical, or from the gases produced by the batteries.

He had a lot of experience that year with the submarines, and looks back with pride as having one of the pioneer crews. Today he is a bit hard of hearing which he attributes to the terrific noise of the engines in those underseas craft.

Sometime after he left the submarine service he decided to go in for plumbing; went to New York City and learned his trade as a helper, then journeyman and finally as a master plumber.

There weren't many jobs that T.J. hasn't worked on or contracted for in the years' since; from repairing a leaky spigot to all of the heating and plumbing in a twenty-story building.

Before he came to Hempstead 22 years ago he had his own plumbing business in Brooklyn. He had a notion he wanted to live in the country, get married and bring up a family. He and his brother formed a partnership under the firm name of Magee Bros., which was dissolved two years ago when brother Peter was appointed as Village Plumbing Inspector.

Terry is fond of music, as a young man he sang in many concerts, and he continued that fondness until very recently as a member of the Nassau County Glee Club. He likes to read and stays home a lot as he likes to be with his family. The yard at the back of the Magee homestead is a veritable paradise for youth with it's play-yard equipment, while the cellar of the house is now being made over into a playroom and with headquarters for the Boy Scouts.

Mr. Magee also plays the guitar and banjo, likes nothing better than to act as end man in a family minstrel. The Magees have followed the Theodore Rooseveltian principle of large families; there are seven girls and five boys.

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