Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly has often mentioned his boyhood years growing up in the middle class Long Island town of Levittown. The problem is that O'Reilly's mother, in an interview with the Washington Post said that Bill grew up in Westbury. The key piece of evidence for that is that she still lives in that same house, which is in Westbury.
There are variant stories to be found on Wikipedia and the Fox News Web site, as well as from O'Reilly himself who claims that the Post misquoted his mother. The four versions of reality boil down to this:
1. O'Reilly, as reported in the Post article grew up in Westbury, but in housing that was built by the Levitt company.
2. The house was in Levittown when they bought it, but the boundaries changed in 1963, and the location changed to Westbury, because the new Zip Code system demanded it. This is found in Wikipedia.
3. It was Levittown, and that's that. This comes from O'Reilly who bolsters this claim with a mortgage document from the purchase of the house that he published online. That does not explain how his mother lives now in that same house, which is in Westbury.
4. The Fox News Official Biography of O'Reilly, which used to boast that he grew up in the "Westbury section of Levittown." There are still many references online to this preposterous claim - preposterous because Westbury was founded before the revolutionary war, and Levittown came into being after WW2.
To start getting the facts, we simply visited the East Meadow Public Library on Long Island and asked to see the 1958 Nassau County phone book. A link to this can be found at
http://www.terryballard.org/billo2.jpg
This shows that the elder O'Reilly was, in 1958, a resident of Westbury.
The Wikipedia claims about Levittown givingThe information provided above contradicts the "deed" which O'Reilly published that supposedly proves that he lived in Levittown all along. This can be seen at:
http://www.frankenlies.com/lies/levittown.htm. If you examine this document closely, you might notice some peculiarities. The address is (blank) Lane, followed by a comma. Then you drop down three lines into a new paragraph. At the beginning of this, there is a long blank space, another comma, and the name Levittown, New York. This is followed by language that says "hereby to be referred to as the mortgager." A street address is the mortgager? It appears that the long blank at the beginning of that line may be the lending institution that happened to be located in Levittown. The actual town location should have immediately followed "Lane." Furthermore, the information with O'Reilly's parents' names and the end of the street address was done with a typewriter using courier font, and in need of a ribbon. The "Levittown" is in Times New Roman and is noticeably darker - looking like a pre-printed form. In reading through the right wing blogosphere, one can see this document treated as Holy Writ - an absolute slam-dunk that O'Reilly grew up in Levittown.
away large parts of its land to Westbury in 1963 are not born out by census data from those two towns when you compare 1960 to 1970. We have also failed to find any non-Fox or non-right wing history source that supports this story.
If you read everything about this subject written by people with a political agenda, it becomes very complicated. However, as a librarian it is my job to consult objective sources and find out the facts. The truth is what it is. Barring stunning new revelations, Bill O'Reilly grew up in a house in Westbury. [/url]
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