1880s–1930

Two Brothers from Midtown

Frank Kleever was born in the early 1880s and his younger brother George in the early 1890s, both to German immigrant parents, both raised in east midtown Manhattan. Nothing in their early lives pointed toward Long Island, let alone toward a Czech settlement fifty miles east of the city.

They worked with their hands. Census records and family memory place them variously as truck drivers, chauffeurs, plumbers and steamfitters — the ordinary trades of second-generation German New York. Frank would stay a steamfitter for most of his working life.

What changed everything was a pair of marriages. In the 1910s, both brothers married daughters of the Kubovec family: Frank married Josie, George married Annie. The sisters were Czech, and with them came a connection to Bohemia that would reshape both families.

Their father-in-law, Frank Kubovec, was a Czech immigrant who had built a successful shoe business in Manhattan. In the 1920s he sold it, retired, and moved out to Bohemia — following a path that thousands of Czech New Yorkers had traced since the hamlet’s founding in 1855. Bohemia in the 1920s was still small, still substantially Czech-speaking, still close enough to its cigar-making origins that the M. Foster factory would not shut down until the following decade.

The pattern that followed is a familiar one in Bohemia’s history. First the older generation retires out. Then the children come as summer visitors. Then they stay. Frank Kleever and his family moved out in the early 1920s; George and his family followed around 1930.

The Kubovec name would run deep in the community. Rosie Kubovec, sister-in-law to the Kleever brothers, became a leader in Bohemia’s social and charitable societies and married Winnie Benedict of the Benedict Lumber Company, at the corner of Ocean Avenue and Church Street. A nephew, Emil, served as a well-known captain of the Bohemia Fire Department. The Kleevers married into a family that was, in the small-town sense, everywhere.

Summers at the Lake

“You Called George Kleever”

The two stories that best capture George as an officer both come from Lake Ronkonkoma, and both are about a reputation rather than an arrest.

In the 1930s, 40s and 50s the lake was a major tourist attraction and summer residence for many thousands of people — dozens of bars and grills, night clubs, hotels and beach clubs, and an annual explosion of out-of-towners that reliably produced work for whichever officer drew the summer shift. In one incident, a group of city toughs came out to raise a ruckus with a drinking party, announcing that the local “hick cops” were nothing to worry about. George appeared and sent them packing.

The second reference is in print. George Holzapfel, who ran the little used-book store on the east shore of the lake for many years, put it plainly in his 2001 memoir:

That is an unusual sentence to find in a published book about a patrolman, and it says more than a citation would.

1950s–1960

Frank: The Late Beginning

Frank Kleever came to police work the long way around, and late.

He did not enter the ranks until the 1950s, after retiring from his career as a professional steamfitter. His post was the uniformed school crossing guard at the intersection of Smithtown Avenue and Church Street — the sort of assignment that puts a man in front of nearly every child in the hamlet, twice a day, for years.

That is how many people remembered him. Readers who attended John Pearl Elementary School in the 1950s may still picture him at that corner.

He died suddenly in 1960, struck by a fatal heart attack in the parking lot of the police precinct, then located on Montauk Highway at Windsor Boulevard in Brightwaters. He is buried in the family plot in Union Cemetery.

1960–1982

The County Takes Over

In 1958, state legislation established a county executive form of government in Suffolk and set up a referendum on a unified county police force. The five western towns — Babylon, Huntington, Islip, Smithtown and Brookhaven — voted in favor. The five eastern towns declined and kept their own arrangements.

The Suffolk County Police Department began operations on January 1, 1960 with 619 sworn members absorbed from existing town and village departments. Town police chiefs were generally appointed as inspectors or deputy chiefs. The new agency committed to providing what the town forces never could: a Detective Bureau, a Communications Bureau, an Identification Bureau, a Central Records Bureau, and a police academy to train recruits.

Both surviving Kleevers were carried across. George retired from the new county department in 1961, having begun in a sixteen-officer town. Richard’s career ran on into the new organization.

By the late 1950s a great number of baby boomers were entering adolescence, and the result was a marked rise in teen-related offenses: underage drinking, vandalism, petty theft, assault and disorderly conduct. To address it, the department created the Juvenile Aid Division in 1962. Richard was appointed to it and promoted to detective.

From that point the paper trail thins. The local newspapers of the 1960s and 70s did not publish the volume or detail of police activity the Suffolk County News had once carried about George — partly because the number of incidents had grown beyond any paper’s capacity to list them, partly because investigative practice had tightened, and partly because these communities were expanding dramatically. Bohemia had roughly 3,000 residents at its 1955 centennial. It has something near 10,000 today.

Richard retired in 1982, thirty-five years after that first day with a uniform, a badge and no academy. He was instrumental in establishing the Suffolk County Police Historical Society and its museum at Police Headquarters in Yaphank — an act of preservation by a man who had watched his own profession change past recognition. He married, raised a family, and died in 2007 at his residence in Florida. He is interred in Union Cemetery, next to his father.

Three Careers at a Glance