There was a classic episode of the 1950's Abbott & Costello T V show, where Lou got a job as a door to door vacuum cleaner salesman. After having no luck in the city, and getting desperate to make a sale, so they can pay Mr. Fields the rent, Bud & Lou opt for the friendly folks out in the sticks. He knocks on the door of a "farmhouse" starts into his spiel and before the flustered lady of the house can object, Lou breaks into his demonstration spreading shovelfuls of fresh dirt all over her rug. Handing her the plug to the appliance he does the famous Costello Double Take Derby Flip when she tells him plug it into what?.....she has no electricity!!!!
Electricity...city folks and most others just took it for granted by the post world war II era. It's one thing to try and sell a $19.95 vacuum cleaner to someone with no electricity, but imagine what it was like to try and sell a homesite or even harder, a finished home (still the biggest investment most families ever make) to a city dweller in 1949 ! In a place where there was no electric service. They would laugh you off the planet.....yet that is just what Walter had to do with the bulk of the 10,000 acres he had in his inventory. Only in Unit 1 on the east side was there power and that was because the citizens of nearby Mastic Beach got them selves electrified before the war.
Thing is this guys enthusiasm could not be curbed...of course he told them Electricity was Coming....but then so was the Smith Point Bridge ...it had been coming for twenty years...it would be another ten before the first car got across it. So with that said...he emphasised the other attributes of the area of what then was really just another vacation destination for the blue collar folks of New York City.
Shirley used about a half dozen differnt contractors to do his home building for him then. But the main one was Erwin Dressel of Yaphank and his company Hillside Builders. Shirley quickly incoporated Dressel into a company called Mastic Homes Inc. and set up "AMERICAS MODEL ACRE VILLAGE" on Montauk Highway just west of Suffolk Boulevard (Now Known As William Floyd Parkway). Here is a brochure courtesy of Ken Vitellaro that has some of Shirley's earliest offerings in homes.
