Adolph J. Reylek, and his young son, Thomas Reylek – answered their country’s call and served with distinction.
The photograph you see here was taken about 1928 in front of the Reylek store on Main Street in front of the Grand Central building in Sayville. The father, Adolph Reylek, and his young son, Thomas, standing on the left in the picture. Within months of that image being captured, Adolph would be dead.

Adolph J. Reylek was born in 1893 to Karel Reylek and Frances Mottl, both immigrants from Austria. Karel had arrived in America in 1867, and by 1915 the family had settled in Sayville, where he worked as a gardener on one of the great local estates. Adolph attended grammar school in Brooklyn and went to work early. By age seventeen, he was employed in a local Brooklyn garage. The 1915 census indicates he was driving for a Sayville bakery when the First World War intervened.
In 1917 he answered the call to serve, joining the U.S. Naval Reserve. He took charge of the USS Nemesis and remained in service until his discharge in 1919 at the war’s end. That same year he married Louise and soon welcomed the first of their three children.

After the war, Adolph became a Main Street merchant, operating a candy store before later moving his business to the Grand Central building. In 1922, his son Thomas was born. The 1928 photograph captures a moment of pride – father and son together in front of the family store during a World War I memorial event.

Tragically, that same year Adolph died in his store from gas inhalation. Thomas was only six years old. The reasons behind the death have long been clouded in mystery, the father and son would never truly know one another.

Yet Thomas carried forward his father’s legacy of service. He graduated from Sayville High School in 1940 and went to work for Republic Aircraft in Farmingdale. With the outbreak of the Second World War, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Force. Serving as a sergeant, radio operator, and flight mechanic, he flew missions over Europe and Africa, supplying troops across the battlefields. He was a decorated veteran.

After the war, Thomas returned home and for more than twenty-one years operated the Sayville Town Gulf Service station on Railroad Avenue. In 1953 he married Helen, and together they had a daughter. He retired in 1967, and the couple traveled extensively throughout the United States and abroad, eventually living in Key West, Florida, and later in South Carolina.

Thomas died in 2009 at the age of eighty seven.

The 1928 photograph captures a fleeting moment, showing a father soon to be lost and a son who would grow up mostly without him. They may never have truly known each other, but they shared something enduring – Both answered their country’s call and served with distinction.