I clearly remember sitting next to him in Biology class. We were about 14 years old at the time and he was singing a brand-new Herman's Hermits song while tapping the tune on his desk with the eraser ends of two yellow pencils. He turned to me and proclaimed that he would some day be more famous than Herman was at the time. I smiled and nodded. Even though we were just a couple of suburban kids, anything seemed possible back then.

Billy Joel lived in Levittown, which is right next to Hicksville. Hicksville is right next to Bethpage, which is where I live today. Down the spine of Long Island there is a smear of towns that tumble and fold over each other in a sprawl of stores and little homes that were all built at the same time in the days following World War II. Our fathers returned from the War and moved their young families from New York City to the "country" where they bought or rented these inexpensive homes and set out to live the American Dream. About 10,000 of these cookie-cutter houses were in Levittown and these were the first radiantly heated homes in America. Thousands more of these little dwellings wound up in Hicksville and Bethpage and radiant kept us cozy while we were growing up.

Irwin "Jal" Jalonack, was responsible for all of this. He was the father of radiant heating in America. "Jal" Jalonack made the decision to use hydronic radiant heating in Levittown in 1946. These were the first mass-produced homes in America. Sociologists have written books about Levittown. Everyone who lived there was about the same age. The houses all looked alike. There had never been anything like this place, and it was heated with a new type of system. Levittown introduced the American consumer to radiant.

Recently, Mr. Jalonack's daughter, Carol Blum, wrote to tell me about her father.

"He began his work life as a plumber," she remembered, "He apprenticed to his father in Syracuse during the early 1920's. Later, he became an HVAC engineer and, as William Levitt's Executive Vice President, made the decision to use oil-fired, hot water radiant systems in the houses of Levittown. Both my parents are now deceased, so I can't get the whole story as to why he went with radiant heat. I do know that, at the time, he was considered to be one of the experts in this country in the use of radiant heating, however.

"The idea was to build an inexpensive house that could be run economically. Clearly, building on a slab was the way to go. My father felt that forced air was not good. He made the decision to go with oil heat, and then went looking for an oil-fired boiler that was small enough to fit in the kitchen, right next to the other appliances."

Mr. Jalonack found that little boiler. It was made by York-Shipley and the trade dubbed it the "low-York" because it was just a bit taller than a washing machine. Most of those boilers continue to heat those Levitt homes to this day.

William Levitt followed the methods of Henry Ford when he built his houses. He managed to throw them up at the incredible rate of one every two hours! And since these were America's first radiantly heated homes, much of the engineering was experimental. A lot of what they did in those days they made up as they went along. Things that we consider to be crucial to radiant design nowadays never made it into those Levitt homes. For instance, they used no insulation whatsoever under the slab or at the edges of the slab. As a result, many of my neighbors can grow tulips in February. They think they have green thumbs; I know they have some serious heat loss.